A counterintuitive email marketing test is to have no preheader text. This creates visual whitespace in the recipient's inbox, making the email stand out from the clutter and potentially boosting open rates by up to 15%. A simple code snippet, which can be sourced from ChatGPT, is needed to prevent clients from auto-filling the space.

Don't fear that AI summaries in Gmail and Apple Mail will kill your open rates. If your content is genuinely valuable, people will still open it to get the full experience, just as they'd watch a favorite show instead of reading a synopsis. AI simply helps users filter out the noise.

Be cautious with the "resend to unopens" feature. Tests show it often fails to meaningfully increase overall open rates. Worse, it can annoy subscribers and lead to spam complaints, especially since open-tracking pixels are not foolproof and may misidentify readers as non-openers.

Open rates are unreliable due to automated actions, particularly Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (iOS 15+) which pre-fetches content and marks emails as opened without user interaction. Focus on metrics that reflect true intent, like clicks or conversions influenced by the subject line alone.

Marketers often judge an email's quality on visuals alone, ignoring the user action that triggered it or technical constraints like image blocking in certain clients (e.g., Outlook), which can render a beautifully designed email blank.

Email Service Providers (ESPs) use proprietary algorithms to filter bot activity, leading to inconsistent and often inflated open/click metrics. Comparing performance across newsletters using different ESPs is like comparing apples to oranges, making the data misleading for marketers.

Due to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection automatically loading tracking pixels, open rates are inflated and no longer accurately reflect individual actions. However, these auto-opens don't fire if an email lands in spam. Therefore, use open rates to monitor trends and detect deliverability problems.

Tracking pixels used for open rates harm email deliverability and can get your domain flagged as spam. While useful for marketing A/B tests, sales teams focused on getting replies should disable tracking entirely. This maximizes the chance of landing in the primary inbox and appears more authentic to both filters and recipients.

Despite claims that Apple's privacy changes and bots have made them irrelevant, open rates remain a valuable leading indicator for email performance. Marketers who dismiss them are ignoring a crucial signal of audience engagement and list health. These metrics are provided by platforms and should be monitored.