Some friends marketing were unhappy to hear that Apple would be “breaking” email open tracking. But my belief had been that, at least in the B2B realm, lots of “email security” services were already doing that: reading contents, spidering links, etc., and that open rates have been borked for a while. Was I mistaken?
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Most folks I know doing outbound sales or recruiting now look at reply rate as the main metric and have started to move off open rates.
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Open rates have always been wonky but consistently wonky (if that makes sense). A 45% open rate couldn’t be taken at face value but a 15% increase MoM in open rates probably would tell you that something good was happening. It’s was like knowing the temperature of your oven was always off but still knowing that 450 F > 350 F. Open rates aren’t particularly useful unless that’s the only metric you can track, then it’s better than nothing 
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@Yuri and @Ana that’s been my approach as well for years.
Customers, however, have always seemed to put incredible weight on opens (sometimes wanting to take specific action on specific open events 
. If nothing else, hopefully this Apple announcement will help educate the market.
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Unpopular opinion: “Event-driven AI-powered Hyper-Personalized” is Business Astrology for Execs. It uses a lot of the language of science and a lot of math and data without the rigor of science (replicating experiments, peer-reviews, large enough sample size, actually discarding results that don’t make your department look good) and the predictions generated with the data are mostly used to soothe anxiety for Execs/Sales staff/the Product team/the Board about next Quarter’s financial results.
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It’s also catnip for sales ops people. “As soon as your email is opened, call the prospect. It’s magic™!”
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I disagree with the take that open rates are a vanity metric. Litmus covers my concerns perfectly:
What Mail Privacy Protection Means for Email Marketers - Litmus
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That’s an interesting take. Thanks for sharing that article. It highlights some great uses of open pixels. The ‘maintaining lists health and not sending emails to people who don’t open them’ is an interesting one. I wonder how this will be addressed in the future - maybe last time they clicked on a link, last time they shopped at your store or responded to an email instead.