Open rate is a vanity number for outreach

Open rate is a vanity number for outreach

Popular advice: "Track open rates to see which messages land." Myth, and a costly one since Apple Mail Privacy started auto-firing open pixels. Half your "opens" are a privacy proxy that never saw a human. You optimize toward a ghost metric and reward the baitiest subject lines. It's not opens that pay, it's replies and booked calls. Track reply rate and positive-reply rate only. Everything upstream of a human typing back is noise dressed as data.