Inbox Providers Don't Care About Your Open Rates Anymore

The new definition of engagement in 2026 is actually simple actions and intent and affects future visibility.

Don't obsess or worship a single attribution model. Use like that triangle method where you focus on platform attribution, last-click analytics, and incrementality tests. The more engagement that you get, the more visibility you get, and so on and so forth. And it really becomes this flywheel. Inbox providers care about user behavior now. They want to see that people actually want your emails.

heatmap or like tap map signals basically on your email. Where did they click? What blocks got attention? Because this is something that will give you an identification of what actually mattered on your email. Yo, Chase, I got a question for you. How many times a week do you hear someone say our engagement is down?

I would say probably at least 4 or 5 times a week. And when I ask them in return, what do you mean by engagement? They specifically say, Open rates have dropped.

And that's the problem here today. So, you know, in 2026, engagement is just not opens and clicks anymore. Let's talk about this. You ready? 3.

Yeah. Let's do it.

2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah. You know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What's up everyone? Welcome back to Send It where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

All right, listen. All right, so kind of what I was kind of starting off here, but the reality of things is this, open rates are noisy, super noisy these days. Apple Mail privacy protection preloads these images. You're really getting a bunch of fake opens and I don't care what ESPs are doing in the end of the day. These things are causing all sorts of confusing bots that are clicking links, inboxes that are now AI sorted with the Gmail update. And then of course there's attribution. So if you're still measuring success by open rates, I think that people are optimizing for the wrong thing. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think that's spot on, dude. I think if you're making decisions based on this data that doesn't really reflect reality, You're going to find yourself in a tough spot.

Yeah. So today, I want to shoot this pod here today. We're going to redefine engagement, what it really means in 2026, what metrics you should track, what you should ignore, and how to prove retention impact even with all these privacy and AI changes. So, you know, I want this pod to be the one that you bring to your team and say, here's our new metric stack. Here's what we optimize for. Here's what we're obsessing over. Because if you don't update these engagements, Or the definitions of these engagements today, you're going to be— you're going to continue making bad decisions confidently. So let's get into it. All right. So let's start with the fundamental shift. Why do you think the definition of engagement changed so far?

I think it's 2 primary reasons. I think the first is inbox providers have changed how they work. And then the second being that tracking has completely changed and been disrupted.

All right, well, let's start with the privacy thing. What do you think happened?

So this is going back a little bit in time, but in 2021, Apple Mail, they launched like their kind of privacy protection, um, and it just completely broke how people do open rate tracking.

Yeah, so let's break that down just a little bit more.

Sure. So essentially, Apple started preloading all images in an email before the actual end user even sees them. So essentially your ESP, your Omnisend, your Klaviyo, doesn't matter who you're using, they think that someone, you know, AKA quote unquote opens, uh, when it really was just Apple servers downloading the image.

Yeah, essentially the layman's term is that you— these inflated open rates just don't mean anything.

Yeah, that's correct. And it's not just Apple, right? Gmail has been testing similar features. So, you know, if you're list is 40 to 60% Apple Mail, for example, your open rates are basically fiction.

Yeah. And I don't think this is going away.

Yeah, unfortunately it's not. I think privacy, as we're seeing, is only getting stricter. You know, everything from like iOS to your browsers to the email clients, etc. Everyone's really moving, I mean, kind of aggressively towards more privacy protection.

Yeah. So the reality is, if your entire strategy is built on open rates, I think you're in a lot of trouble these days.

Exactly. And alongside that, like the second big change was Google and Yahoo. They now also kind of dropped new requirements in 2024 that really changed the whole email marketing game and landscape.

Yeah. Let's remind the audience real quick. What were those requirements that changed?

Yeah. So really simply, there's 3 of them, right? Number one is authentication. So you need SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly. Number 2 is you need the ability to allow people to easily in one click unsubscribe from your email. And then the 3rd primary one would be you have to keep your spam complaints, and this is very strict, under 0.3.

Yeah.

And what happens if someone or a marketer or business does not meet these requirements?

The, the, the fact of the matter is your emails are not gonna get delivered.

Yeah. So what they're basically saying is optimize for real engagement or you lose access to the inbox, basically.

Yeah, exactly right. You know, inbox providers care about user behavior now. They want to see that people actually want your emails. Yeah.

And then of course, something we just talked about in November, but there was this whole algorithm change happening in Gmail, right?

Yeah. Gmail especially is leaning really hard into AI lately.

Yeah, I was reading about it and seeing it happen in real time, but Gmail's basically using AI to decide what emails are getting shown prominently. What are getting auto-summarized and basically what gets buried in different parts of your tabs, like the promotions tab. So, you know, not only are you competing with other brands now, you're competing with the algorithm interpreting what's relevant for that end user. And this algorithm looks past the engagement. It's someone's constantly opening, clicking your email, you do get prioritized, but if they never open, well then they put you at the bottom. So engagement history affects future visibility.

Yeah, that's right. And I think the best way to think about this is just how we think about social media algorithms, right? The more engagement that you get, the more visibility you get, and, and so on and so forth. And it really becomes this flywheel. Hey, it's Chase. Got 30 quick seconds? We built something specifically for you. Jimmy and I together have over 20 years of combined experience in email marketing, and we finally put everything together in one place. And it's called Ecom Email Certified. I know it's fancy, but it's going to be great whether you're brand new or running campaigns for 7, 8, 9-figure brands. It covers it all— deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, SMS— literally everything. Has over 175 total modules totaling 25+ hours of content. Even has quizzes, a community, and you're going to get a real certification. It's way better than college, right? Don't tell your professor that, but it is. And we've designed it to take you from beginner to certified expert. We're talking about the kind of marketer who actually moves the needle and drives real revenue. Check it out at ecomemailcertified.com. And now back to the pod. Yeah.

So if you're sending to unengaged people constantly, you're training the algorithm that your emails just don't matter.

Yeah, exactly right. And then even your engaged subscribers are gonna unfortunately stop seeing you over time, you know?

Yeah, that makes sense. So all right, let's address the elephant in the room. Are open rates completely useless now?

No, I don't think I'd say they're completely useless, right? But they're less important of a metric at best. Definitely not in the top 3 or top 5.

What do you mean by that?

So essentially, I think the way that you can think about this is that It means that you can use opens for like directional questions. You know, is this list broadly alive or broadly engaged, or is this campaign performing better or worse than usual or typical?

Yeah.

And you can't use opens to measure creative quality or subject performance anymore, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's right. Because too much of your open rate is just gonna be fake, inaccurate data.

Yeah. So when I think about this, I think about what the open rate can tell me basically, right? So there's a few things, like you said, the list health direction. If your open rate drops from like 30 to 15% over 3 months, there's probably something wrong happening there. And it's not just performance-oriented. It could be deliverability issues. It can be all sorts of things. There's also the relative performance. Campaign A got 25%. Campaign B got 15%. Campaign A probably did better, but you need to check the clicks and revenue to be sure there. And then of course, I think another thing that's really important that it tells you is how your segmentation is doing, right? So if your VIP segment gets like a 45% and your general list gets like a 30% or 20%, Well, that is really segmentation working. So it's a signal, just not a signal. Like it's, it's hard to say that, right? It's a signal, but it's not a signal.

Yeah. And I think the problem is we've spent so many years as marketers just worshiping kind of open rates as like the end-all be-all. Don't worship it anymore. Right. But obviously don't go and ignore it entirely.

So what do you think the danger is if teams are still treating open rates like a gospel basically?

Yeah, I think quite frankly, they just make bad decisions. So a real example that we've seen recently, so I'm just gonna say Brand A. So they send, let's say, 2 subject lines. Subject line 1 gets a 35% open rate and subject line 2 gets a 28% open rate.

Yeah. And then of course they take subject line 1 and say, that's the winner.

Yeah, that's right. And then they don't dive into clicks or conversions. So You know, the reality is when you check, you know, revenue, subject line 2 may have drove 40% more sales and revenue.

Yeah. Because open rates don't equal revenue.

Yeah, that's right. You know, subject line 1 might've just won because it was more clickbaity and it got opens, but it didn't actually drive any intent or action.

So look, if you're optimizing for opens, you're probably optimizing for curiosity, but that doesn't ultimately mean conversions.

Yeah, right. I mean, we see it on social virality and curiosity doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get paid.

Yeah, that's very true. And you know, one thing you did was, and you mentioned it earlier, I think we want to double tap on this, but inboxes are becoming like social feeds. Break that down for us.

Yeah. So Gmail's promotions tab right now kind of has like this most relevant sorting that's going to push, you know, frequently engaged brands, to the top of that sort. So if I always open an email from brand X, right, they're likely gonna show up first at the top. And if I don't open emails from brand Y, they're gonna get pushed and buried towards the bottom or potentially even not exist entirely. Yeah.

So engagement becomes almost a visibility lever.

Yeah. And that's a huge, huge mindset shift for email marketers. All right. The goal is no longer send more emails. The goal is to now generate signals that tell the inbox algorithm that this sender matters.

Yeah. Which means that we're making a shift into quality over quantity. All right. So if open rates isn't the answer anymore, what are we, what should we be tracking? What do you think about this?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think we need like to focus on like a real engagement stack. Um, and there's kind of 4 layers here. And if your team tracks these 4 layers, you're gonna be ahead of almost all, if not all marketers. Right. So, and if you're not, you're gonna be behind.

Yeah. So I've got the list here that we're gonna talk about. So we got layer 1, which is deliverability health. I think that this is the, can we even play this game layer, right?

Yeah, that's right. Like if your deliverability is broken, literally nothing else matters.

Yeah. And you know, I think you mentioned it earlier, but obviously the spam complaints are really important, keeping 'em under 0.3, even ideally under 0.1 if possible. You've got your unsubscribe rate. I think this is something people don't pay enough attention to. Should be under 0.5% percent. You want to make sure it's going to happen, but you want to have it low, right? There's also the hard bounce. This is when the email is bad or it's getting rejected, right? It should be under about 2%. Don't ever have that thing spike because then there's a real big problem. And then of course you've got the entire authentication complaint, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. You got to have that thing set up and make sure that the one-click unsubscribe is all set up too. And if any of these are out of range, the reality is you're probably getting filtered or blocked entirely. Gmail and Yahoo will literally stop sending your emails for you. And so this is really the foundation, in my opinion.

Yeah. And a quick kind of hot take I was thinking about here, I'd say your deliverability health is the leading indicator of your future revenue.

Ooh, I like that. Why do you say that?

Well, like you kind of just said, like if your emails aren't getting delivered, Like you, you, you have zero chances to make any sales or revenue, right? So your revenue's gonna tank. And by the time that you actually notice the revenue drop, unfortunately your revenue's gonna have been taking a hit for quite a week cuz your deliverability has been broken for weeks or maybe even months. So you need to monitor these metrics, you know, ongoing, especially before they become, you know, in crisis mode. Okay.

I like that. That's a, that's a good hot take. All right, let's go to layer 2. It's behavioral engagement. This is where we replace opens and actions.

Right. You know, essentially we want to know, you know, what did this subscriber actually do?

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I think we should break this down by maybe email and SMS. I can start with email. Yeah. So for email, I think number 1 is click rate. So essentially the raw percentage of people who clicked. Number 2 would be kind of the click-to-open ratio. Again, use this a little bit cautiously because opens are noisy. Number 3 would be like the reply rate. So especially for plain text or kind of conversational sends. 4 could be something like maybe like the forward or share rate, if and when kind of applicable. And then number 5 would maybe be like the time to the first click. I guess so essentially how fast people act after you send. That's for email.

Okay. That's solid. And let's talk about SMS.

So I think SMS is actually a bit cleaner because there's no fake open rate problem. And the 4 here would be like, number 1, click-through rate. So did they click/tap the link? Reply rate is, did they respond? Opt-out rate is like, are people opting out? Are they unsubscribing? And what was the delivery rate? So are Are messages being filtered by carriers or are they getting delivered?

Yeah. And you know, I, I have put some pretty deep history in SMS, but carriers like AT&T and Verizon are super strict about filtering.

Yeah. And I think rightfully so. And again, if your SMS compliance is bad, you're gonna get blocked so fast.

Yeah. And it's a big problem when it happens. So, all right, let's go to layer 3, intent signals. This is where you graduate from the channel metrics to the customer behavior, right?

Yeah, that's right. Essentially what we're asking here is what happened after someone clicked?

Okay. So if you're tracking this, you're really thinking about like the site sessions within xSense, right? Like, did they visit your site? Like, you got to coordinate that. You've got things like your product views and your add to cart messaging. Did they browse and add carts? Return visitors. This is really important. How many times did they come back? And, you know, one thing that I really like is like heat map or like tap map signals. Basically, On your email, where did they click? What blocks got attention? Because this is something that will give you an identification of what actually mattered on your email. And I believe most ESPs show you this, right?

Yeah. I'd say Omnisend, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, et cetera. Most platforms kind of have this heat map showing you, you know, what parts of your emails are getting clicked, et cetera.

And, and really that just tells you what content is actually working.

Yeah. And if everyone's clicking the hero image but ignoring your product grid, Kind of gives you some areas of focus.

Yeah. So these are like the, I did something metric, not the, I might have opened. I feel like that's really important here.

Yeah. The intent signal shows the actual behavior, not more of kind of what we call like the passive exposure.

Okay.

So now we got layer 4, which is the business outcomes. This is the layer executives really care about, the founders and the head of departments and so forth.

Yeah. So if you're an email marketer, an agency, a freelancer, this is where really where you're gonna prove kind of the value of the work that you're doing on the email and retention side.

So what are some of the key metrics that you think about here?

Uh, revenue per recipient is definitely an important one. So essentially answering how much revenue per person you emailed, uh, revenue per click. So how valuable is each click? Uh, the conversion rate from the click. So what percentage of clicks turn into actually purchasers. And then the contribution margin percent. So if you're advanced and kind of factoring in product costs, this is a good one for you.

Okay. And those are good. But you know, one of the things that I think is really important is the negative outcomes too. I think that's something we should be talking about too, right?

Yeah, you're right. I guess those were more positive. Like you want those to be focused and high and optimized, whereas then the negative ones, right, are things like complaint rate spikes or people marking you as spam after certain campaigns. Are unsubscribe rates, you know, increasing? Like, do people, you know, opt out because you said something insensitive or wrong or just it's not relevant? And then what does your refund or kind of cancel correlation look like? So are aggressive promos leading to maybe even more returns?

Yeah, that's a really one, a good one because the reality is with good retention, it's all about long-term trust, not short-term revenue spikes that people are chasing basically.

Yeah. Look, if you want to drive a bunch of sales, but half of them refund and unsubscribe, there's just, there's no point, right? Like don't optimize for the wrong thing.

Yeah. So I think about this and I feel like there's a dashboard that people could create out of this thing, right? What, what do you think should be on this magical dashboard these days?

Yeah, I think like the 4 boxes that matter would be box number 1, deliverability. So complaint rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate. Number 2 would be like the behavioral engagement. So the click rate, the reply rate, and maybe the time to click. Box 3 would be focused on the intent signal. So site sessions, product views, add to cart, et cetera. And then the last one is box 4, which would be that business outcomes, revenue per recipient, conversion rate, and then revenue per click.

I didn't hear anything about open rate here.

Yeah, that was intentional. So I'd say maybe put that in as like a Diagnostic kind of metric section at the bottom. Look at it if you need to, but don't focus on it and obsess over it. Don't optimize for it overly. Yeah.

So there's the, so it's there, but it's not driving decisions ultimately. All right. Let's talk about attribution because even with all these great metrics, attribution is really still messy right now.

Oh boy. Attribution even in 2026 is still such a nightmare, dude. You obviously know that as well as anyone. Multi-touch behavior, privacy changes, cross-device journeys, dark social, the list goes on, right? Someone might see your email on their phone, they might click it on their laptop, they might buy 3 days later after seeing a retargeting ad.

And then you go, what channel gets the credit?

And then every marketer says, well, it depends. It depends on your attribution model and every model Has its flaws.

Well, there's a couple of ways that in email and retention that you look at attribution models. So there's the last click, right? Which is my favorite one because it's really a direct correlation. Whenever that click is right before getting the last purchase, usually gets the credit. And then there's the first click. What was the first thing that he interacted with, which could get the credit? And then there's a linear one. I believe like this is what like every ESP and everyone does out there in the market, which is like every touchpoint gets the credit. And then of course, Time decay, which is really the recent touchpoints get more credit. It's kind of like a slope based around how far away it has. And then of course, you think about the platform attribution too, right? Everybody's going to make credit behind it. And these are the problems. All you have is an incomplete picture many times.

Yeah, exactly. And if you use last click, right, email looks terrible because people often click through paid ads or organic search right before buying.

100%. But an email might have never gotten to them interested in the first place, right? Like if it never got to them already, they might not even be interested.

Yeah. And if you're only looking at platform attribution, right, you know, you're trusting Omnisend, Klaviyo, Attentive, like again, doesn't matter who to tell you how valuable you are, it's gonna have some bias.

So how do you think people should solve this bias?

Yeah, it's, it's hard. I think the simple way to think about it would be like the triangle method, um, where you have to have 3 different sources of truth.

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Yeah, sure. Just keep it quite simple. So number one would be like platform attribution. So whatever ESP or SMS platform reports, the next click might, or the next part might be focused on last click in Google Analytics. So what GA4 says drove the conversion. And then the last one would be like kind of incrementality proxies. So holdout tests, geo splits, and time-based tests.

Okay. Those are like very simple. It's triangulating, I guess. Right.

Yep. And the point here is not perfect attribution. The point is like directionally correct decision-making.

Give me an example of that. I feel like the listeners would enjoy this.

Sure. Okay. So let's say Omnisend says email drove $100,000, but Google Analytics says, you know, email drove maybe $50K. And let's say you do a holdout test where you don't need to send 10% off to your list and that 10%, you know, generates 20% or less revenue, right?

Yeah. And that's how a holdout test proves email is driving meaningful incremental revenue basically, right?

Yeah. You know how email works, even if the exact number is a little bit kind of fuzzy.

So you're building confidence in the channel, but not really chasing a perfect attribution.

Yeah, that's correct. Right? I don't think, and again, this is just my opinion, I don't think perfect attribution exists, at least not in the present. But I do think you can be confident in your strategy when you take an approach like this.

That's good. I like that. All right, let's, let's get into some action points because I think those will be helpful.

Sure. So 3 kind of immediate actions for you to take. I'd say number one is first, you know, rebuilding your KPI dashboard.

Okay. Tell, tell us, tell everyone how.

So again, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but moving like the open rate to more of like the diagnostic only section at the bottom and bringing up and really focusing on like the complaint rate, the unsubscribe rate, the click rate, site sessions after send, and then revenue per recipient.

Yeah. These are the metrics we talked about earlier that are actually driving business outcomes that are getting moved to the top, right?

Yeah.

And if you start measuring it, that allows your team to start actually optimizing for what's important and what matters.

Okay.

And then now we've got the second So this is going to be optimizing for like the inbox algorithms because again, Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, et cetera, they're all focused on prioritizing this engagement now.

So how, what are you thinking here? What do you think people should do?

Number one is segment harder. So stop batching and blasting. Again, we've been talking about this for a long time, more important than ever to stop that and really focusing on sending relevant messages to the right relevant people. And then from there, you also want to cut dead weight. So stop sending to 90-day-plus non-openers. And then you want to send fewer but better messages. So really focusing on quality over just quantity.

Yeah, because these new requirements around that one-click unsubscribe and low complaint tolerance really are really focused on focusing on— focused on delivering quality, right?

Yeah. Not that we ever were proponents of spam, but especially today, you cannot spam your way to success anymore. You do really have to earn inbox placement.

Okay. Well, tell us about the third one now.

Yeah, the third one would be focusing on like, um, adding like intent kind of instrumentation to your campaigns.

Okay. What does that mean?

So essentially making sure that you can track what actually happens after a click. So, um, keeping things like your UTMs very consistent. So every link has proper UTMs. And they don't change from campaign to campaign, right? Like you can tell what your links are about. The next one would be like post-click behavior tracking. So connecting your ESP to GA4 or whatever analytics tool you're using. And then the next one would be focusing on like micro conversion goals. So tracking product page views, added to cart, started checkout, not just solely purchase-based stuff.

Oh, I like that. So you're really looking at that like full funnel and not just a click anymore, right?

Yeah. And, and, and this is really gonna help you see like which campaigns drive like real intent versus maybe more like curiosity-based clicks.

Yeah, that makes sense. So the quick recap, the new definition of engagement in 2026 is actually simple actions and intent and not quite much vanity metrics.

Exactly. And track 4 different layers. So deliverability health, behavioral engagement, intent signals, and then business outcomes. And you're gonna wanna do that by replacing your KPI dashboard, moving open rate to something that you look at, but moving towards the bottom as a lesser important thing, promoting metrics that actually drive business decisions. That's gonna make everyone in the business very happy. And don't obsess or worship a single attribution model. Use like that triangle method that we kind of briefly talked about where you focus on platform attribution, last-click analytics, and incrementality tests.

Well, I love that. That's a good wrap-up. That's a wrap for today. This is really the new definition of engagement. So if you heard anything on this pod that is helpful or you want to share it to your retention team, I do highly recommend it because I promise, I promise someone is still celebrating open rate improvements out there. And that is really the wrong way to think about it. With that, that's a wrap here today. If you enjoyed today's pod, again, as always, please subscribe, follow, like, leave us a rating on whatever favorite podcast listening platform. We like YouTube the most, but you can follow the show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok, et cetera. And of course, there's a few ways to connect with us. Obviously, we've got them all in the show notes below. You can subscribe and be on our list at Ecom Email Marketer. We've got a course, we've got in-books, we've got so many things we have. We produce a show every Tuesday, so bookmark us, subscribe, and we hope to see you soon. Thanks, Chase.

Cheers.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.