Your Open Rate Is Lying to You: What to Track Instead
It is the number every email marketer brags about. The one I used to brag about too. And it is not telling you the truth anymore. Not because your email tool is broken, but because the thing your open rate measures stopped meaning what it used to mean.
For years a high open rate was the gold star. You sent, people opened, and that felt like proof you were doing it right. In the AI inbox that chain is coming apart. A great open rate can now sit right on top of a list of people who would not even notice if you stopped showing up.
I know how that sounds coming from me. My HobbyScool list opens at 56 percent, my Creator's MBA list sits around 51 percent, and that is across 38,000 people. While other creators watched their numbers slide and panicked about AI, mine held steady, and I even wrote about it back in March.
So why would I tell you the number I am proudest of is fooling me? Because of where the whole inbox is headed.
The inbox is becoming your podcast app
Dan Oshinsky runs Inbox Collective and used to lead newsletters at The New Yorker, and something he said recently has stuck with me. The inbox, he says, is starting to work like your podcast app. Think about your own for a second. You are subscribed to a whole pile of shows, but how many do you actually press play on? A few. The rest just sit there week after week, unplayed. Being subscribed was never really the point. Pressing play is.
Email is heading in that same direction. AI is moving in as the bouncer at the door, sorting your mail, summarizing it, and deciding what you even see when you log in. It learns who you want to let into the room and who gets turned away. Landing in the inbox used to be the win. Pretty soon it is just the bare minimum, the thing that gets you considered, not the thing that gets you read.
Why your open rate is turning into a vanity metric
A vanity metric is a number that looks good but does not tell you much. It climbs, you feel great, and nothing about your actual business has changed. Open rate is sliding into that category for two reasons.
The first is AI summaries. Your reader can get the gist of your email now without ever opening it, so a skip is not always a rejection. Sometimes they read the summary, got what they needed, and moved on, which means the number gets noisier and harder to trust than it used to be.
The second reason is the one nobody likes to say out loud, and that is list cleaning. When you remove the people who stopped opening, your open rate goes up, but nobody actually started caring more. You just changed the math by shrinking the bottom number. I clean my lists and you should too, because it helps you land in the inbox. Mailbox providers reward senders whose lists are full of people who open and click, so cleaning genuinely protects your spot in the room. But let's be honest about what it does and does not do. Cleaning fixes the math. It does not fix the relationship.
It is not "did they open it." It is "would they miss it if it stopped showing up." Those are two completely different questions, and only one of them predicts whether your business survives the AI inbox.
Loyalty is the metric that actually matters now
Here is the catch with loyalty. You cannot run a loyalty campaign. There is no button to push, no subject line trick, no magic Tuesday send time that makes someone love your newsletter. You can only build the thing that earns it.
The good news is that the thing has parts, and those parts have names. They live in the back half of my Creator Growth Flywheel, which is just the path a reader travels with you: Attract, Engage, Nurture, Retain, and Advocate. The first three stages get people in the door, but loyalty lives in the last two, and it comes down to three levers.
Be impossible to summarize
If an AI can capture your whole email in two lines, there is nothing left to be loyal to. The summary becomes the product and you become skippable. The fix is depth. Write things that lose too much when they get squeezed into a couple of sentences: your real opinion, the story behind the advice, the part only you would say.
Let people reply to a real human
Email is the one channel where a reader can write back and actually reach you. Most creators broadcast and never open that door. The ones who build loyalty treat it like a conversation. They ask real questions, read the replies, and write back. AI will happily auto-reply to a brand. It will not auto-reply to a friend. Your job is to be the friend.
Give them somewhere to belong and something to become
This is the strongest one. When a reader stops being a subscriber and becomes part of something, a community, a path toward a goal they care about, they do not drift away. They would notice if you went quiet. They are watching themselves get better because of you, and that is hard to walk away from. This is the Retain and Advocate end of the Flywheel doing its job.
Why this feels harder than chasing opens
Loyalty is slower, and that is the honest part. You clean your list and the open rate jumps next week, so you feel the win right away. Build loyalty and nothing jumps tomorrow. There is no number that lights up to tell you it worked.
But it compounds in a way the quick wins never do. A loyal reader opens, replies, buys, and tells a friend. They forgive the off week and make space for you even when the inbox gets choosier about who it lets through. That is the kind of edge no Gmail update can take away from you overnight.
"Open rate told me the mail got delivered. It never told me the one thing that matters now: would they miss me if I disappeared?"
— Dr. Destini CoppThe new scoreboard: how to actually measure loyalty
If open rate is fading, you need numbers that show whether people care. Here are the three I trust.
1. Reply rate
How many people write back when you invite it? Replies are the clearest sign a reader treats your email like a relationship and not a billboard. They also help your inbox placement, because mailbox providers read replies as a strong trust signal.
2. The disappointment survey
Once or twice a year, ask your readers one simple question: how would you feel if you could no longer get this newsletter? Give them three choices, very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, or not disappointed. If 40 percent or more land on very disappointed, you have something real, and that number makes a far better headline than any open rate because it measures attachment instead of delivery.
3. Conversion to paid
At the end of the day, loyalty shows up in the bank. A reader who buys from you trusted you enough to pull out a card, so if your list is growing but nobody buys, a high open rate is just hiding a weak relationship. None of these three numbers care whether the server delivered your email. They care whether the human on the other end did anything about it, and that is the whole shift.
The fix for the AI inbox is not a better subject line
It is tempting to think you can tweak your way out of this with a punchier subject line, a cleaner list, or a cleverer send time. Those things help you get into the room, but they do nothing to make people glad you walked in.
The real answer is a system that makes you worth making time for: content an AI cannot replace, a real two-way relationship, and a reason to belong. Stack those together and you stop depending on the open, because your readers come looking for you instead. That system is exactly what we build inside the Newsletter Profit Club. The goal was never to send more email. It is to build a newsletter your readers would miss if it stopped showing up.
Build a newsletter people actually miss
The AI inbox rewards loyalty, not volume. In this free workshop, I will show you the system I use to turn a list into readers who open, reply, and buy.
Watch the Free Workshop →Frequently Asked Questions
It is still worth watching, but it means less than it used to. AI now summarizes emails inside the inbox, so people can get the gist without opening. That makes a non-open less of a clear rejection. Open rate now tells you the email was delivered and seen, not whether anyone cared about it.
Two reasons. AI inbox summaries let readers skip the open and still get the message, so the number gets noisier. And list cleaning raises your open rate by removing people who stopped engaging, which improves the math without improving the relationship. A high open rate can hide a list that does not actually look forward to hearing from you.
Yes, but for a specific reason. Cleaning your list helps you reach the inbox, because mailbox providers reward senders whose lists are full of people who open and click. It protects your placement. What it cannot do is create loyalty. It removes the people who already left. It does not make the people who stayed care more.
Track signals that show whether people care. Reply rate tells you if readers treat your email like a conversation. A reader survey that asks how disappointed they would be if your newsletter went away tells you if you are a must-read. And conversion to paid tells you if the relationship is strong enough to buy. Those measure attachment, not delivery.
You build it by being worth making time for. That comes down to three things. Write content an AI summary cannot replace. Open the door so readers can reply and reach a real person. And give people somewhere to belong and something to work toward. Those map to the Retain and Advocate stages of the Creator Growth Flywheel, and they are what keep readers from drifting away.
