- Across 4 consumable brands and 2,897 campaigns, click rate tracked email revenue about twice as closely as open rate did (0.65 vs 0.32).
- For one brand in that sample, higher open rates lined up with lower revenue.
- Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads emails in the background, which pushed open rates past 85% on some segments in our data.
- Judge every email by clicks first, then by revenue per recipient. Treat opens as a rough signal at best.
What's the difference between open rate and click rate?
Open rate is the share of people who received your email that your platform thinks opened it. Click rate is the share who clicked a link in it.
The word "thinks" is doing a lot of work there. An open is recorded when a tiny invisible image in the email loads. A click is recorded when a person taps a link. One of those can happen without a human. The other mostly can't.
That's the whole argument in two sentences. The rest of this post is the proof and what to do about it.
Open rate vs click rate: what our numbers show
I took 2,897 campaigns from 4 consumable brands, about $17.7M in email revenue, and checked how closely each metric moved with the money each campaign made.
Here's the plain-English version of the scores:
- A score of 1 would mean the metric and revenue move in lockstep. Every time one goes up, the other goes up by the same amount.
- A score of 0 would mean no relationship at all. Knowing the metric tells you nothing about revenue.
- A negative score means they move in opposite directions.
Click rate scored 0.65. That's a real, useful relationship. When clicks go up, revenue usually goes up too.
Open rate scored 0.32. That's weak. Opens and revenue sometimes move together, but often they don't, and you can't plan around it.
And for one brand, open rate came out negative. Their highest-open campaigns tended to make less money. If that founder had been picking "winners" by open rate, they'd have been picking losers.
One honest note: this is 4 brands. It's directional, not a law of physics. But it's a lot more than a hunch, and it lines up with how Apple changed what an "open" even means.
Why open rates stopped telling the truth
The short answer is Apple.
Apple's Mail app has a setting called Protect Mail Activity. Apple says that when it's on, "your IP address is hidden from senders" and "remote content is privately downloaded in the background when you receive a message." That background download includes the tracking pixel your email platform uses to count an open.
So a lot of "opens" are really just Apple's servers fetching the email. Nobody looked at it. In our data, those auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments. No real audience opens 85% of what you send.
It also touches your revenue reporting. Klaviyo's help center says its conversion tracking counts a conversion if someone opens or clicks, including when Apple Mail Privacy Protection automatically opens the email, unless you change that setting. So an auto-open can earn an email credit for a sale.
Opens can also climb for good reasons. One wellness brand I work with saw open rate go from 22% to 44% after we tightened who got each send. That was a real improvement in targeting, but I still treat the number as directional, because some share of it is Apple.
How I judge every email instead
I judge every email by clicks. Here's the order I look at things:
- Click rate. Did people care enough to tap? This is the closest thing to a real human reaction you'll get from a dashboard.
- Revenue per recipient. Of everyone who got it, how much did each person bring in? This is the actual score. I wrote a full breakdown of revenue per recipient and how to find it in Klaviyo.
- Placed orders. A sanity check on the revenue number.
- Open rate. Last, and only to spot something weird, like a sudden crash across every send.
Same goes for subject line tests. My starting rule is to pick the winner by clicks, never opens. If Apple is opening the email for half your list, an open-rate test is mostly measuring Apple.
Clicks aren't the finish line either
Clicks beat opens. They don't beat revenue.
One fitness tech brand sent 12 educational campaigns in one month. Some of them got 6 to 10% click rates, which is great. Together they made $547. People were interested. Nobody was asked to buy.
That's why I pair every content send with a reason to buy. Content warms people up, but somebody has to ask for the sale.
The other trap runs the opposite way: clicks with no sales. A fitness gear brand sent a restock email that got a 0.40% click rate, double its other sends, and made $0. When clicks show up and money doesn't, something broke. A link, a product page, a checkout, a discount code. Click every link before you hit send.
When open rate is still worth a glance
I don't ignore opens completely. I just stopped trusting them for decisions.
A few times opens are still useful:
- A sudden drop across every send. If open rate falls off a cliff on all your emails at once, check deliverability. That pattern can mean you're landing in spam. I cover how to triage that in why Klaviyo emails go to spam.
- Comparing the same audience to itself over time. Trends inside one segment are more useful than one-off numbers.
- Opens with zero clicks. Across my portfolio, about 20 sends showed opens and revenue but zero clicks. That doesn't happen with real people. It meant click tracking was broken.
Where these numbers come from
The 0.32 and 0.65 scores come from 4 consumable brands I work with, 2,897 campaigns and about $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so treat it as directional. The single-brand examples are from individual client accounts and aren't meant to stand for every brand. You'll find the full set in our CPG email marketing benchmarks.
FAQ
Is a high open rate good or bad?
It's not much of either anymore. A high open rate can mean people love your emails, or it can mean Apple is opening them in the background. In our data, auto-opens pushed some segments past 85%, which isn't a real human number.
What's a good click rate for ecommerce email?
It depends on the send and the list, so I'd rather you compare against yourself. Pull your last 90 days, find your median click rate for campaigns and for each flow, and try to beat that. Then check that the clicks turned into revenue per recipient.
Should I turn off open tracking?
I wouldn't. Opens still help you spot problems, like a sudden drop across every send. Just don't use them to pick winners or decide who's "engaged" on their own.
Why does my email have clicks but no sales?
Something between the click and the checkout usually broke. Check every link, the product page, stock, and any discount code. If an offer is missing, that matters too: people need a reason to buy.
Does Apple Mail Privacy Protection affect revenue reporting?
It can. Klaviyo's help center says conversions are tracked when someone opens or clicks, and that MPP auto-opens count by default unless you change the setting. So some revenue can get credited to emails nobody read.
Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.