Apple Mail Privacy Protection landed in 2021. Gmail has been auto-downloading images since 2014. Between them, they likely account for a majority of your database. Your open rate has been meaningless for years.

Let’s start with the mechanics. Email open tracking works by embedding a tiny invisible pixel in the email. When the pixel downloads, the ESP records an open event. The problem is that both Apple MPP and Gmail’s image auto-download trigger that pixel automatically, regardless of whether anyone actually read the email.

Based on 2024 email client market share, at least 80% of most databases use one of those two clients. Which likely means at least 80% of your recorded opens may have nothing to do with actual human engagement.

The real problem is that open rate became a KPI at all

Open rate is a delivery signal. It tells you whether your emails are landing in inboxes and broadly whether your subject lines are doing their job – but in B2B any company with even basic security software will auto-open these to screen threats, so you could be getting 100% ORs with some organisations.

And for everyone, whether B2B or B2C, not every recipient needs to open an email for it to be an effective nudge. So it can be useful diagnostic information, it’s just not a commercial performance metric.

And yet I’ve sat in more marketing meetings than I can count where open rate was presented as the headline number, where campaigns were judged winners or losers based on it. And often these numbers were presented by individuals not directly involved in CRM… because a 60% open rate or thousands of unique opens sounds good.

CRM performance summarised, by people and for people who don’t get CRM, in slides that led with opens and clicks and said nothing about revenue, pipeline, or customer behaviour.

What to measure instead

The shift is straightforward in principle, even if it takes work to implement. You want metrics that connect CRM activity to commercial results.

For B2C, that means attributed revenue per campaign, conversion rate from communication to purchase, repeat purchase rate by segment, and reactivation rate from lapsed customer programmes.

For B2B, it means MQLs generated, lead-to-pipeline conversion, CRM-influenced deal progression, and account engagement scores that reflect actual intent signals rather than email opens.

Across both, you want to understand incrementality. Not just what happened after someone received a communication, but what would have happened anyway. Holdout groups are the cleanest way to measure this, and they are underused in most CRM programmes.

The reporting structure that earns budget

Lead with the numbers: what was expected, what came back. Then clear explanations as to why, backed by data. Don’t hide behind ORs because they look good, especially if commercial targets were off.

That’s the structure that builds credibility with senior stakeholders and that earns the budget to do more. It also forces honesty. You can’t dress up a poor result as a success by shifting the goalposts of what you’re measuring.

CRM reporting that connects activity to commercial outcomes is consistently one of the highest-value changes a CRM function can make.

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