When Apple rolled out Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in 2021, it changed email marketing forever. For B2B sales and lead generation teams across the UK, open rates — once the go-to performance metric — became unreliable overnight.
What used to look like a healthy 25% open rate could now be mostly artificial activity triggered by Apple’s privacy features. The result? Marketers are optimising campaigns against phantom data and missing the real signals of prospect intent.
The good news: moving beyond open rates forces us to track the engagement that actually matters.
Why Open Rates No Longer Count
Apple’s MPP automatically preloads email content, making it appear as though messages were opened even when they weren’t. That means your open rates are inflated and distorted, giving a false picture of interest.
And it doesn’t stop with Apple. As privacy-first policies spread across other providers, open rate accuracy will only decline further. If your campaign measurement still leans heavily on opens, you’re flying blind.
What to Measure Instead
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Clicks are now the clearest sign of real engagement. A prospect who clicks through to your website or resource is taking intentional action.
Reply Rates
A reply — whether positive, negative, or neutral — proves your message resonated enough to spark a response. In B2B prospecting, reply rates are one of the most valuable signals you can track.
Website Visitor Identification
Tools that reveal which companies visited your site after receiving an email bridge the gap between email outreach and pipeline activity. You’ll know which campaigns are driving prospects to learn more.
Engagement Over Time
Look at how prospects interact across an entire sequence — not just one email. Consistent clicks, replies, or website visits indicate buying intent far better than any single open ever did.
Building Campaigns for Real Engagement
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Subject lines with substance – Forget clickbait. Focus on clarity and value. The people who open will be genuinely interested.
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Calls-to-action that matter – Every email should ask for a specific next step: a reply, a resource download, a quick call.
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Multi-channel touchpoints – Blend email with LinkedIn, calls, and even direct mail. This gives you multiple ways to measure interest and reduces dependence on email-only metrics.
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A/B test for outcomes, not opens – Test variations based on reply rates, click-throughs, and conversions. That’s where the ROI lives.
Smarter Tracking in 2025
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Engagement scoring – Assign points to actions: replies and clicks at the top, site visits in the middle, phantom opens at the bottom. This builds a truer picture of lead quality.
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Cross-channel integration – Layer email results with LinkedIn and cold calling data. When a prospect engages across multiple channels, you’ve struck gold.
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Long-term view – One campaign doesn’t make or break a relationship. Look at trends over weeks and months to spot the prospects most likely to convert.
Moving Forward
The decline of open rates isn’t bad news — it’s progress. It forces B2B teams to focus on metrics that actually signal intent: clicks, replies, website engagement, and cross-channel behaviour.
At SendIQ, we help UK businesses build outreach strategies designed for this new reality, integrating email with LinkedIn automation, cold calling, and website visitor intelligence.
Open rates may be fading into history, but engagement-led prospecting is thriving — and those who adapt will win bigger, better deals.
