Every founder I talk to blames iOS. Apple changed the mail privacy protocol and it killed email open rates. The algorithm shifted. Everyone's engagement went down. It's a systemic problem. Nothing you can do. Except this explanation is wrong. It's the excuse that lets founders avoid looking at the real problem: their email isn't actually worth opening.
Yes, iOS changed how open rates are reported. That's true. But open rates falling by 10-15 percentage points over three years isn't due to iOS. That's due to subscriber bases that have grown stale. It's due to email being used as a broadcast channel instead of as a communication channel. It's due to brands diluting their value proposition by sending too much stuff to people who didn't actually sign up for that.
This is uncomfortable because it means the problem isn't systemic. The problem is you. Your email isn't good enough. Your frequency is too high. Your list quality is too low. Your segmentation is nonexistent. Your subject lines are generic. These are fixable problems, but they're problems you have to own.
The Decline of Email Relevance
Email open rates have been declining because email has become increasingly irrelevant for most subscribers. The average inbox has exploded. No one's inbox in 2026 is like an inbox in 2010. Every company you've ever interacted with is emailing you. Every service you've ever signed up for is emailing you. Every deal site is emailing you. The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed.
In this environment, relevance is not just nice to have. Relevance is survival. An email that matters will get opened even if you're in a crowded inbox. An email that doesn't matter won't get opened even if you're the only thing in the inbox. The question isn't whether open rates are declining systemically. The question is whether your email is relevant enough to survive in a crowded inbox.
I've seen email open rates stay flat or even increase for brands that focused relentlessly on relevance. A personal finance newsletter that only sends actionable insights. A fashion brand that sends items curated to what you've looked at before. A software company that sends tips specific to features you actually use. These aren't falling prey to declining open rates because they've gone the opposite direction: they've gotten more relevant, not less.
The Frequency Trap
Most brands make the situation worse by increasing frequency. Their open rates drop, so they decide to send more emails to get the volume back up. This creates a spiral. More emails means more relevance is diluted. Diluted relevance means lower open rates. Lower open rates means more emails. Eventually, the subscriber is receiving three to five emails a week and opening none of them.
The best email strategy I've seen is the opposite. When open rates decline, the first move is to reduce frequency. Send less email. Focus on the emails that actually matter. The open rate will often go up because you're sending things people want to open. Volume goes down, but engagement goes up, and most metrics that actually matter—click-through rate, conversions, customer retention—improve.
The reason this is so hard is that founders are addicted to volume. They want to send more. They have a newsletter template. They have tools that make it easy. They see email as a free distribution channel, so why not use it? Because using it for everything makes it useless for anything. The moment email becomes background noise, it's lost its value.
List Quality Over List Size
Email lists grow through various channels. Some people sign up because they actually want to hear from you. Some sign up for a lead magnet they might read once. Some sign up because it was checked by default. Some get subscribed through a purchase. Over time, the percentage of people who actually want your emails goes down because the people who came in through weak channels eventually outnumber the people who came in because they wanted you.
The solution is not to build a bigger list. It's to maintain a smaller list of people who actually want to hear from you. This is heresy in the email marketing world where bigger is always better. But bigger lists with worse engagement metrics are worth less than smaller lists with better engagement. If you have 50,000 subscribers with a 2% open rate, that's 1,000 opens. If you have 10,000 subscribers with a 10% open rate, that's 1,000 opens. But the second list is worth more because those 1,000 people actually care.
I'd rather have 5,000 subscribers who open everything than 100,000 subscribers where 95% of them never open anything. The small list is your actual audience. The large list is vanity. You should be actively removing unengaged subscribers from your list, not trying to win them back with a "We miss you" campaign.
Subject Lines Are Not Clickbait
A lot of email marketers blame subject line fatigue. Subscribers are tired of being tricked. Subject lines are getting copy-paste formulas. The urgency tactics that worked in 2015 don't work anymore. This is true, but it misses the point. Subject lines aren't failing because subscribers are too savvy. They're failing because the subject line is all the value the email has to offer.
The best subject lines I've ever seen are boring. They don't try to create urgency or curiosity. They just communicate exactly what's in the email. "Here's what moved the market this week." "Three features you probably haven't noticed." "Why demand is up." These don't have any tricks. They work because the content is good enough that people want to open it.
The problem email marketers are trying to solve with subject lines is that their content isn't good enough. So they make the subject line sensational to get the open, and then people click and feel tricked because the content didn't deliver on the promise. This works once. It doesn't work twice. Over time, open rates collapse.
Segmentation Is the Antidote
The best email open rates I've seen come from heavily segmented lists. You send different emails to different people based on what they care about. A software company sends tips about Feature A to people who use Feature A, and tips about Feature B to people who use Feature B. A retail company sends fashion recommendations based on what you've actually purchased or browsed. A SaaS company sends onboarding emails only to new users, not to people who've been around for two years.
Segmentation requires infrastructure. You need data about your subscribers. You need to track behavior. You need to have a reason to send each email to each group. This is harder than just blasting everyone with the same email. But it's the difference between email that matters and email that doesn't.
The irony is that segmentation doesn't just improve open rates. It improves every metric. Click-through rates go up. Conversion rates go up. Revenue per email goes up. Customer retention improves. Unsubscribe rates go down. All of this because you're sending fewer, more relevant emails instead of more, less relevant emails.
The Real Metric: Revenue Per Email
Stop obsessing over open rates. They're a vanity metric. The real metric is revenue per email. If your open rate drops but your revenue per email goes up, you're winning. This happens when you have fewer, more relevant emails. Each one is more likely to convert. The open rate is lower because you're sending less email, but the email you send is higher quality.
Most email strategies are built backward. They optimize for opens and clicks, which are easy to measure. But they ignore revenue, which is hard to track and requires deeper analysis. The email marketers who are winning are measuring revenue. They're asking: did this email make us money? If yes, keep doing it. If no, stop doing it. This filters out everything that doesn't matter and keeps everything that does.
Your open rate falling is probably not an iOS problem or an algorithm problem. It's probably a signal that your email strategy needs to shift from volume to quality. Cut your frequency in half. Cut your list down to the people who actually engage. Invest in better segmentation. Make sure every email has a clear reason to exist. Your open rates will probably drop further in the short term. Your revenue will probably go up. That's the trade you want to make.
— Sam