I realized something was wrong with my email marketing metrics the day my dashboard told me I had a 93% open rate on an email sent at 6:12 a.m. on a Tuesday. 

There is no universe where 93% of anyone’s list voluntarily opens anything at sunrise. I remember staring at my analytics thinking, “Oh. Oh no. Something is deeply unwell here.”

Every email suddenly had similarly inflated open rates. It didn't matter if the subject line was “Big News!” or “I Found a Sandwich in My Purse.” There were no peaks, no dips, no trends – nothing I could actually use.

That was my first real, painful encounter with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, also known as MPP — the feature that politely takes your email analytics, puts them in a blender, hits purée, and hands them back to you with a smile.

So what is MPP?

In 2021, Apple decided that email tracking pixels were a little too nosy – kind of like when someone says “I’m not stalking you,” but they definitely know what restaurant you ate at last night.

So Apple changed the rules. The short version: When an email lands in someone’s Apple Mail inbox, Apple automatically loads the tracking pixel on their behalf, whether or not the human being actually opened the email.

This means that your email could sit there untouched, but Apple says, “Yep, they opened it! Pinky promise.”

The intention was to increase privacy for their consumers – and, hey, I’m sure it did that. For marketers and creators, though, the outcome was pure chaos.

Short version – MPP made open rates:

It’s not that your audience suddenly became obsessed with your newsletter. It’s that Apple started “opening” emails for them like an overenthusiastic assistant.

This is how I ended up on a Tuesday morning with Beyoncé-level open rates despite being disappointingly not Beyoncé.

We keep pretending open rates still mean something, but they don’t – not in the era of MPP.

Real engagement lives in the things people choose to do:

Those are the metrics that matter, and, thankfully, those are the metrics beehiiv was built to track – while simultaneously adjusting for Apple's MPP, to give you the real data.

More on beehiiv in a bit – but first, let’s talk about the metrics that do matter: the ones that actually tell you who’s reading, who’s connecting, and who’s quietly forwarding your content to their entire company Slack channel.

Why Trust Me: I’m the founding ADHD coach and managing editor at Shimmer, where I grew our newsletter past 10,000 subscribers in its first year. I’m also a content editor at beehiiv, where I help write and edit content for creators who want to design and scale their brands with ease.

Email engagement metrics are the signals that tell you whether your audience is actually interacting with your content — not just whether their email client auto-loaded a tracking pixel out of politeness.

Think of it this way:

This is the hierarchy of real email engagement.

Opens require zero effort. Readers don’t have to care, click, think, or even notice you for an open to register, especially now that MPP is a thing.

So while many creators still obsess over open rates, those numbers tell you less about engagement and more about which percentage of your list owns an Apple device.

It just goes to show that not all engagement is equally meaningful or important. What actually matters are the behaviors that require intention.

Here’s a simple, creator-friendly breakdown of the most meaningful signals in Email Engagement Metrics:

This ladder is what creators should be optimizing around –  not opens, list size, or the popular yet uselessly-vague “reach.”

Real email engagement lives in behavior, not impressions.

Benchmarks are fine for context — but only if they’re based on meaningful metrics.

Most email marketing metrics benchmarks floating around the internet still emphasize the following:

But if you compare yourself to those benchmarks, you’re basically measuring your performance against numbers that stopped being reliable in 2021. (In marketing years, that’s basically the Dark Ages.)

What matters more than comparing your newsletter to someone else’s is comparing this week’s engagement to last week’s.

Your Email Engagement Rate (made up of a cluster of metrics like clicks, replies, forwards, and retention) is the only thing that actually tells you whether you’re creating content your readers care about.

The beauty of Email Engagement Metrics is that each one tells you something different about your readers:

This is actionable insight. This is the intel that helps you write better emails, with content your audience will actually come back for.

Email used to be judged by numbers that only looked impressive; now, it’s judged by numbers that actually mean something.

There’s no single industry-standard formula because “engagement” varies by content, audience, and business model. But for those of you who really like to crunch the numbers yourself, and want a super general overview of engagement, you can measure email engagement rate by looking at the total number of meaningful interactions divided by the total number of delivered emails.

Here’s a simple proxy formula:

But honestly…why would you spend the time doing the math yourself when beehiiv can do it for you? Not only is it quicker – it’s automatically calculated and updated in real time. But beehiiv’s metrics weight the strongest interactions (clicks, replies, forwards) higher, so creators can see engagement in context; not in isolation.

beehiiv gives you a truer Email Engagement Score than traditional email service providers (ESPs).

Here’s the annoying truth about email engagement metrics: there is no universal “good” number – not because benchmarks don’t exist, but because benchmarks are based on metrics that… well… don’t matter anymore.

A “good” Email Engagement Rate depends on the following variables:

So instead of chasing someone else’s benchmarks, look at something far more important: Are your engagement metrics improving over time? That’s the real marker of success.

If your last five issues show these metrics:

…then your engagement rate is good.

If readers are consistently:

…your newsletter is working.

Directional trends > arbitrary industry averages.

Most creators feel pressure to match whatever Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark they found on a blog written in 2019, but here’s what real success looks like:

If your readers keep coming back, congratulations. Your engagement rate is better than good: it’s real.

Let’s get into the metrics that actually tell you something about your audience — the ones that help you improve your content, not just for you to admire your dashboard.

There are six core Email Engagement Metrics creators should be tracking:

These are the behaviors that require effort, curiosity, and emotion. These are the metrics that separate “looks successful” from “is successful.”

Let’s break them down.

CTR is the strongest, most reliable Email Engagement Metric we have left. A click requires a real human to perform the following actions:

That’s what shows intent and interest. And even more importantly, it’s not something a tracking pixel can fake.

I once spent an embarrassing amount of time crafting the perfect CTA button. I agonized over microcopy, tweaking spacing with the same level of stress I experienced playing Operation as a kid (am I aging myself here?).

And after all that, the link CTA button turned out to be pretty…meh. Instead, a tiny text hyperlink buried mid-paragraph where I joked about my dog looking like Dobby from Harry Potter got three times more clicks.

And that’s the proof in the pudding, as they say. CTR reveals what your audience actually cares about. It will also deprioritize your entire sales funnel in favor of canine chaos with zero remorse. Be warned.

What CTR Tells You

How To Improve CTR (realistically)

Need a little more detail? Learn more about How To Increase Click Rate in Email Marketing.

What Creators Misunderstand About CTR

There’s really no “good” or “bad” here. It’s all about pattern recognition. If your CTR:

Ah, replies…the love language of the inbox.

If clicks show interest, replies show connection. I mean, if a reader goes through the effort to hit reply, type actual words, and send those words at the risk of sounding unhinged or worrying that they’re bothering you (seriously, it’s crazy how often people apologize for bothering me when I was literally asking them to reply), they must have REALLY cared…and that’s rare.

Why Replies Matter

How To Get More Replies

Creators undervalue replies. Inbox providers do not. Email platforms see replies as the ultimate “real human” signal.

Most newsletters grow in two ways: slow, steady SEO, or explosive moments where the right person forwards the right issue. Forwards and shares are mini-virality.

What Forwards Signal

But…you can’t control whether people share or forward your emails, right? 

Wrong! 

Well, kind of. Unless you’re Professor X, you can’t reach out and telepathically tell them to share your email. (If you are Professor X, though – dude, why aren’t you returning my calls?)

What you can do, though, is craft content that just begs to be shared because it’s that good.

Types of Content People Forward:

How To Increase Forward Behavior

Reading time is underrated because it’s not flashy, but it is useful.

If someone spends one to three minutes reading your email, that’s not passive engagement; that’s rapt attention.

What Reading Time Reveals

How Reading Time Helps Creators

When reading time drops, here’s what it tells me:

Reading time doesn’t just show “engagement.” It shows how your writing feels to consume.

Scroll depth is basically ethical mind-reading.

Here’s what it can tell you:

If you haven’t caught this already, my newsletter is about ADHD. When I see everyone dropping off at ~42% scroll depth, I know that the email was too long, too boring, or not funny enough. Those are the things that matter to my readers.

If you really want to get to know your audience, to really understand them, scroll down to the point where you see a bunch of people dropping off. Examine everything you did up to that point, and you’ll discover the problem. It may be as simple as formatting, or it may be about the content. Either way, it’s incredibly useful information because it tells you what to do better.

How Creators Can Use Scroll Depth

This metric alone can improve your Email Engagement Score dramatically.

Retention is the god-tier Email Engagement Metric. If people stay subscribed for months, you know the following:

And retention matters WAY more than list size. Think about it: A list of 3,000 deeply engaged readers is more powerful than a list of 30,000 ghosts.

Learn more here about How To Build a Loyal Audience

And, hey, don’t take those unsubscribes too hard. 

One of the things I tell every client on day one: we learn WAY more from failure than we do from success, so don’t skip your coaching session just because you couldn’t complete your goal. 

The same goes here. If your audience stays, you’re doing something right. If they leave, they’re helping you prune.

How To Improve Retention

There are a few email metrics that look shiny, authoritative, and Very Important™ — and yet, they provide the same amount of insight as a paper fortune teller. They’re just not worth obsessing over. 

Open rates used to tell you something before Apple introduced MPP and suddenly every newsletter looked like a smash hit.

MPP loads your tracking pixel the moment an email lands in an Apple inbox, meaning your subscriber could be asleep, in the shower, at Target, six months behind on emails, or actively ignoring you…and Apple Mail is still like:

“Yeah, they opened it. They loved it. They tattooed your subject line on their arm.”

Why This Metric Is Now Useless

Even worse, relying on open rates can lead you to the following missteps:

In short, open rates are now like your friend who says they’re “almost there” when they just got in the shower – nice sentiment, zero truth value.

beehiiv does a much better job filtering out MPP-inflated activity. But even then, opens should be treated as vibes, not data. “Cute if true,” but not actionable.

CTOR compares clicks to opens, which, of course, assumes opens are real. But again, since Apple’s MPP, they are not real. The CTOR cake is a lie.

These days, CTOR is basically:

“What percentage of fake opens produced real clicks?”

This is useless outside of a philosophy class.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking soft bounces or hard bounces. 

Bounce rate is useful if you’re diagnosing deliverability issues, sure, but it’s not useful as a primary engagement metric.

A normal newsletter will always have a few soft bounces here, occasional hard bounces there. It’s completely normal, and the most likely explanations are unavoidable and unimportant. Here are some examples:

So bounce rates only matter when:

Otherwise, they’re background noise.

People brag about list size, but a big list without engagement is just a very expensive group chat with no messages. It’s the email version of yelling into the void.

List size is a multiplier of value – not the source of it.

Why Creators Cling to List Size

Social media trains us to obsess over follower counts. And, yeah, it’s a nice easy number to brag about. It’s super visible. And as it grows, it really feels like progress. 

But follower counts are also easy to misunderstand. I mean, how many of the newsletters you’ve signed up for just to get that extra 10% discount on your first order do you actually read? Maybe 1 in 100? 

Revenue doesn’t come from the size of your list; it comes from the behavior of your audience.

Growth rate tells you how fast your list is expanding, which is another number that can look really exciting – but it doesn’t always tell you anything. It’s only actually useful when paired with other metrics, like retention. After all, fast growth is meaningless if everyone leaves after three issues.

Slow growth is fine if retention is high.

Most ESP dashboards feel like they were designed by someone who has never sent an email in their life. beehiiv’s analytics, on the other hand, feel like they were built by someone who has personally cried over open rates at 1 a.m.

Everything you need is in one place. Everything you don’t need is either pushed aside or quietly removed from your eyesight like a loving friend saying, “Sweetie, don’t look at that number. It’s not good for you.”

Seriously, check out this video demo:

Let’s break down the parts that actually matter.

To me, this is where beehiiv shines.

Other ESPs drown you in meaningless metrics — opens, deliverability charts written in Klingon, random percentages with no context.

beehiiv gives you behavior.

Here’s what the dashboard shows you:

Most newsletters blast the same content to everyone – usually, because they don’t know how to segment or their ESP makes segmentation feel like programming a microwave from 1997.

But segmentation ensures that your Email Engagement Metrics stay healthy long-term because you’re meeting people where they actually are.

beehiiv makes segmentation painless. (I literally never bothered with it until I switched to beehiiv because it was just too much work.)

You have a ton of flexibility and freedom here. You can build segments like:

1. Super Readers

These are the people who:

What to do with them:

2. The Consistent-But-Chill Readers

They open most emails, click occasionally, and vibe respectfully from a distance.

What to do with them:

3. The “Half-Asleep But Still Here” Group

They open some emails, usually skim, and rarely click.

What to do with them:

4. Dormant Readers

This is where all those, “I swear I signed up for your newsletter in 2022 and now I have no memory of this” folks live.

What to do with them:

Find more ideas on How To Approach Email List Segmentation.

Automations are where your segmentation goes from useful to vital. They can literally save you hours of time. 

And with beehiiv, you can automate re-engagement emails, so you don’t even have to worry about constantly combing your list to find the quiet folks and poke them. 

Re-engagement is, honestly, a win-win. Engaged readers stay and may become more active because they feel like you notice them. Disengaged readers leave, which also helps your engagement metrics.

Re-Engagement flows help in the following ways:

When you combine:

…you get the clearest picture of your Email Engagement Metrics you’ll ever have.

This is how you grow a newsletter that:

And best of all?

You get to stop obsessing over open rates and start obsessing over the stuff that actually improves your writing, your connection, and your community.

My prediction: email is about to get way more qualitative.

Creators who win won’t have the biggest lists; they’ll have the deepest relationships.

Here’s what will make people subscribe:

Metrics like clicks, replies, scroll behavior, and retention will matter more than ever because those are the signals that show that your readers are still with you — not just “opening” your emails while half-asleep and unaware.

Inboxes have always rewarded one thing: human connection.

Now, the data will finally reflect it.

If you’re ready to track real engagement — the kind that actually grows your newsletter and your community — switch to beehiiv today.