Opens don’t count anymore — Stripo.email

For years, open rates and click-through rates (CTR) were the go-to metrics for email marketers. If the open rate looked good, the campaign was considered successful. If people clicked, even better.

However, in 2025, that model no longer works. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), Gmail’s image caching, and bot-triggered activity have inflated open rates far beyond what’s meaningful. At the same time, CTR has become less trustworthy. Not every click reflects genuine interest — some are accidental, others are from curiosity, and a few are just people trying to unsubscribe.

These soft metrics still offer useful signals, but they can’t be your only indicators of performance. They tell you what happened in a single moment but not what it means in the bigger picture.

If you really want to understand what’s working, it’s time to shift your focus. Today, it’s not just about what someone does in an email. It’s about how that person moves through your entire journey. In short, you need customer-centric measurement.

From our guide on email marketing and design trends 2025:

Where traditional metrics fall short

Open rates are no longer reliable

Let’s start with the obvious: Open rates can’t be trusted anymore.

Ever since Apple rolled out Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), the way we track email opens has changed completely. MPP preloads emails in the background, whether or not a real person actually opens them. Gmail does something similar by caching images, which removes key tracking signals. And security scanners from anti-spam systems often trigger open pixels during routine email checks.

All of this creates artificial “opens” that don’t come from human engagement.

According to Beehiiv, many marketers have seen sudden spikes in open rates that don’t line up with other metrics, such as clicks or conversions. While these inflated opens might look good in a report, they paint a misleading picture of performance.

Eksido notes that open rates are no longer an absolute metric. They’re now better used as directional indicators — useful for spotting general trends over time but not for evaluating campaign success.

So, while the open rate might still be part of your reporting stack, it shouldn’t drive your decisions. It’s not an engagement metric anymore — it’s just a data point with too many caveats.

CTR doesn’t always mean interest

Click-through rate (CTR) used to be the gold standard for email engagement. If someone clicked, it was assumed to be a sign of interest. However, over time, it’s become clear that CTR isn’t always a reliable indicator of intent.

Some clicks happen by accident, especially on mobile devices. Others come from simple curiosity — someone tapping a link just to see what’s behind it, with no real commitment. People often click links such as “unsubscribe” or “manage preferences,” which are part of the user experience, but don’t necessarily reflect positive engagement.

CTR tells you that something happened but not why it happened or whether it actually matters.

Soft metrics don’t map to business impact

Metrics such as click-to-open rate (CTOR), scroll depth, and engagement time can give you clues about content quality, but without broader behavioral data, they only tell part of the story.

Yes, it’s good to know that someone scrolled through an email. But did they visit your site? Sign up for something? Make a purchase? These soft metrics don’t answer these questions. They’re tied to a single campaign, not to a customer’s full experience.

That’s the problem: Traditional email metrics are campaign-centric. They’re designed to measure performance in isolation. But in 2025, your audience doesn’t think in terms of campaigns — they move across channels, devices, and stages of the journey.

If you’re not connecting email data to the bigger picture, you’re missing what really matters.

The true meaning of the numbers

Even though traditional metrics have their flaws, they’re not completely useless. They still provide helpful signals — if you know how to interpret them. Let’s look at some of the most common metrics in 2025 to see what they actually tell us.

 

What do these numbers mean?

They show that email still performs well, especially in terms of ROI, compared to other channels. But they also confirm that traditional metrics are increasingly difficult to interpret in isolation. They’re helpful as indicators, but they don’t provide final answers.

Why customer-centric measurement is the future

The way we measure email success needs to evolve — not because email is unimportant but because customer behavior has changed. People interact with brands across more channels than ever before, and their actions go far beyond what’s captured in a single campaign.

To keep up, marketers need to shift from tracking isolated email events to understanding the full customer experience.

Omnichannel engagement is the norm

Today’s customer journey is rarely linear. People don’t just see an email, click, and buy, and they certainly don’t stay in a single channel.

Instead, they bounce between your emails, push-ups, notifications in messengers, texts, website, mobile app, paid ads, and even social media — sometimes all on the same day. A customer might read your email on Monday, Google your product on Tuesday, and convert from a retargeting ad on Friday. During that journey, the email was essential, but it didn’t “close the deal.”

That’s why campaign-based metrics, such as opens and clicks, don’t tell the full story anymore. They only capture isolated interactions. Real engagement spans channels, platforms, and time.

If you’re measuring performance only in email, you’re missing where your customers actually make decisions.

To stay relevant in 2025, your measurement strategy has to follow the customer, not the channel.

Focus on outcomes, not events

Opens and clicks are just moments — they show that something happened. But businesses don’t grow from moments. They grow from outcomes.

You don’t measure success by how many people open an email. You measure it by what happens next: Do they buy something? Start a free trial? Book a demo? Renew their subscription?

These are the results that matter.

The problem with relying on traditional email metrics is that they reflect only single-message engagement. They give you a snapshot, not the full story. Just because someone clicked a link doesn’t mean they found value or took meaningful action.

To really understand your success, you need to step back and look at the entire journey. This means connecting your email activity to bigger outcomes across channels and over time.

What to track instead: Customer-level outcomes

If traditional email metrics show activity, customer-level metrics show impact. They help you understand not just what people do but how that behavior connects to long-term value for your business.

Here are the key metrics worth focusing on:

 

These metrics reflect how someone moves through their full journey, not just how they responded to a single email. It’s about seeing the whole picture, from first contact to long-term loyalty.

You don’t need to build an enterprise-level analytics stack to start thinking this way. Even basic connections between your email platform and tools such as CRM or GA4 can help you get closer to real customer insight.

The shift here isn’t about the tools. It’s about the mindset: Start measuring relationships, not just reactions.

How to balance campaign and customer analytics

Campaign metrics still matter. Click-to-open rate (CTOR), scroll maps, heatmaps, and A/B tests help you improve things such as subject lines, layout, and call-to-action placement. They’re great for optimizing the email itself.

But they won’t tell you why someone actually converted — or why they didn’t.

To understand that, you need to look at customer behavior beyond the inbox. What happened after the customer opened the email? Did they visit your site, start a free trial, come back three days later and buy? Or did they disappear?

That’s where customer analytics comes in — tracking the full journey across channels and time.

Which is the most effective strategy? Use both.

Start with campaign metrics to fine-tune your content. Then, use customer-level insights to shape your broader strategy, messaging, and timing. Together, they give you a complete view — from individual interaction to long-term relationship.

Best practices for moving beyond the inbox

If you want to truly understand and influence customer behavior, you need to go beyond traditional email tactics. Here are five ways to start building a measurement strategy that reflects how people actually engage in 2025:

• test with clicks, not opens: Open rates are no longer reliable for testing — privacy tools and bot activity skew the numbers. Clicks aren’t perfect either, but they’re a more stable signal for campaign-level A/B tests. Use them to compare subject lines, CTAs, or content layout. Just keep in mind that click data still has noise, so treat results as directional. Run multiple tests before making decisions; one campaign isn’t enough to define a trend;

• automate by behavior, not just response: Don’t just trigger flows based on opens or clicks. Build automation around meaningful behavior, such as visiting a product page or abandoning a cart. That’s what tells you that someone is active and interested — or not;
• build journeys, not just campaigns: One-off campaigns have a limited impact. Use lifecycle stages — such as new subscriber, engaged user, or churn risk — to shape how and when you reach out;
• link to analytics tools: Add UTM parameters to your links, and track events in GA4 or other analytics platforms. This helps you follow the customer across channels and understand what happens after the email;
• map outcomes to personas: Every customer type defines success differently. For one, it might be signing up for a webinar. For another, it’s making a second purchase. Tie your messaging and KPIs to what matters most for each audience.

Wrapping up

Opens and clicks still have a place in your email reports, but they’re no longer the full story. In 2025, measuring success means looking beyond isolated interactions and focusing on what truly matters: the customer.

Your emails might start the customer’s journey, but the real value comes from what happens next — across sessions, channels, and time. When you shift from campaign metrics to customer-level insights, you stop chasing numbers and start building relationships.

It’s not about abandoning traditional metrics. It’s about evolving them — and your strategy — to match the way people actually engage today.