Angela MondorClickUp Verified Consultant, ClickUp · Operations consultant & ClickUp Verified Consultant for neurodivergent entrepreneurs

Why Email Open Rates Lie To You 📧 #Shorts

4 May 2026 · 1 min

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0:57

In this short video, the speaker explains that email open rates are unreliable because various software layers distort the data, making the exact percentage meaningless. Instead, marketers should focus on trends over time—monitoring whether open rates stay steady, dip suddenly, or gradually decline—to gauge audience engagement. The speaker also notes that click rates are a more trustworthy metric than open rates, though they are still not perfect and should not be taken as absolute. The overall advice is to interpret email performance cautiously, using trend analysis rather than raw percentages.

Chapters

aren't very accurate now. So what you're looking at with open rates is not, oh look, it's 50% or something like that. It's, you're looking at trends. So, you know, the real, you won't ever know what the real number is because you'll have various bits of software in between that are messing up your data and you can't really avoid that. But what you can do is you can look and think, okay, well my open rates stayed roughly the same over 3 months. Therefore people are opening it and reading it and I must be doing something right. If you have a sudden dip down, you're like, okay, they didn't like that. That's a problem. Or if it just goes down on a slope, sorry, I'm using my hands to explain this. If it just slopes downwards over time, then you've got less people opening over a long period of time. So that's something you need to look into. So you need to be a little cautious with open rates. And also click rates are, they're more reliable than open rates, but even those are not, you can't take them as 100%.