WELCOME
Hello👋, it’s Chris Fernandez, the CEO of Letter Operators.
Welcome to Smarter By Friday, where we unpack what’s actually happening in the newsletter world and what it means for your business.
This week, I want to talk about a number we all watch closely: your open rate. I've spent enough time around this industry to know that number rarely means what people assume it means, and once you understand what's actually behind it, you'll read your own reports differently.
Your Open Rate Isn't Telling You The Truth
I want to talk about a number almost every one of you checks first thing in the morning: your open rate.
Here's the part most people never think about. That number comes from a single tracking pixel, an invisible image that loads when an email displays.
The math is simple: opens divided by recipients, nothing more.
That would be fine if every open meant a real person read something. It doesn't.
Here's what's actually padding the count:
Security scanners: Corporate email gateways click links and load images before anyone reads the message.
Privacy proxies: Apple and similar tools preload images automatically for privacy reasons.
Spam filters: Many filters open a message just to inspect it for threats.
Forwards and previews: A forwarded email or even a quick glance in a preview pane can register as a fresh open. There are more than a dozen of these situations.
Blocked images: A real reader with images turned off never registers an open at all, so the number undercounts, too.
Security scanners built into corporate email systems open your message and click every link inside it before a human ever sees it, hunting for malware.
One analysis found a single campaign generating over a hundred automated visits in fifteen minutes, almost none of them real. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection does something similar for consumer inboxes, loading your tracking pixel on its own servers first.
Why should you care? If you judge a subject line or a send time against a number partly made of scanners and proxies, you are optimizing for machines, not customers.
None of this makes open rate worthless. It just means treating it as a rough signal, not a scoreboard.
Clicks, replies, and whether someone comes back for your next issue tell you far more about whether you're actually being read.
TACTICAL TAKEAWAYS
• I'd start weighing click through rate and reply rate alongside your open rate, since both require an actual action from a real person and can't be padded by scanners or privacy tools.
• If your open rate suddenly jumps and nothing else in your business has changed, I wouldn't celebrate right away. Check whether clicks and replies moved too before crediting a new subject line or send time.
• I'd watch whether the same subscribers keep opening or clicking issue after issue, because that kind of repeat readership tells you more about your newsletter's health than any single open rate ever will.
AI Made Email Marketing Easier. It Needs Us to Make It Better.
AI can produce a competent looking email campaign before your coffee gets cold, and that speed is exactly the problem: when every competitor's tool spits out the same safe, polished copy, your inbox stops standing out from anyone else's. The real edge now belongs to marketers willing to push their AI drafts past fine and into something only their brand could have written.
The Audience-Building Strategy That AI Search Can't Disrupt
Organic search traffic fell 42% by the end of 2025 as AI answers swallow more clicks before searchers ever reach a website, and PostcardMania's founder lays out the alternative that has worked for her business for 27 years: building direct mail and email lists you control instead of renting attention from an algorithm.
Your Holiday Emails Start Now: A Summer Deliverability Prep Guide
Black Friday feels far away in the middle of summer, but mailbox providers already reward the senders who start holiday prep now instead of scrambling in November: cleaning out inactive addresses, verifying your sending setup, and easing into higher volume gradually so emails are still landing in the inbox once Q4 competition peaks.
Industry benchmarks put the average newsletter open rate at 40% to 45%, according to Logical Position, but that range hides a lot of noise
Phillips Data Solutions traced one campaign where 154 of 164 recorded visits arrived within fifteen minutes of send, almost all from security scanners rather than subscribers, and beehiiv has documented newsletters jumping from a genuine 28% open rate to a reported 55% once Apple's Mail Privacy Protection gets involved.
Until Next Time
This newsletter is proudly written by AI, edited by humans. That's not just a feature, that's the point.
Want us to run your newsletter?
We’ll source the stories, write every issue, manage your ads, and publish consistently on Beehiiv. You keep 100% of your ad revenue.
— Chris & The Letter Operators Team