A sales demo told you texts have a 98% open rate. Your email dashboard says nearly half your list opened last week's newsletter.
Neither number means what it looks like. One can't be measured, and the other counts people who never read a word.
That matters because opens are usually the headline in marketing reports. If the headline is wrong, the decisions built on it are too. This guide covers why opens mislead, the five numbers to track instead, and a short monthly check you can run in ten minutes.
Texts don't have an open rate
A standard text message sends nothing back when someone reads it. There's no read receipt and no tracking signal. Once the carrier delivers it, the trail stops.
So any "SMS open rate" you've been quoted is an estimate built from surveys or industry assumptions. It isn't a measurement of your campaign, and nobody can measure it for you.
Some phones show read receipts in certain chat apps, but those settings belong to each person and don't apply to business texts in any reliable way. For planning purposes, treat SMS opens as unknown.
Email opens stopped being reliable too
Email opens used to work by loading a tiny invisible image when someone opened the message. That's how your platform knew.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection changed that. For people using Apple Mail on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, emails are loaded automatically when they arrive, which counts as an open whether or not the person looked. If a lot of your customers use Apple devices, your open rate goes up while nothing about their behavior has changed.
Opens can still show a rough trend over time. They can no longer tell you who read your email.
Important
Check any automation that runs on "opened." If you set up a follow-up for everyone who opened your last email, it's now going to people who never read it.Switch those triggers to clicks or replies, which are real actions.
The five numbers worth watching
Each of these records something a person did, which is why you can trust it.
Start with delivered, because the rest depend on it. A campaign with strong clicks but poor delivery is still losing customers you never reached. The guide to why texts don't get delivered covers the fixes.
Count replies as results
Most marketing reports focus on clicks. For a local business, that misses a lot.
Many of your best texts have no link at all. "We have a free slot Thursday at 2pm. Want me to hold it? " gets a reply, not a click. A customer texting back "Yes please" is the result you wanted, and a click-only report would score that message as a failure.
If you text customers to book, confirm, or answer questions, treat replies as a main number. Count them per campaign, and check how many turned into a booking.
Compare yourself to last month, not to a report
It's tempting to look up an industry benchmark and see how you measure up. Be careful.
Published benchmarks vary widely because platforms count differently. One divides clicks by messages sent, another by messages delivered, another by people. Many reports also come from online stores, where texts work very differently from a salon or a plumbing business.
Your own numbers, counted the same way each month, are a far better guide. A click rate going up month over month tells you something real. A comparison to a figure counted another way tells you very little.
Pro Tip
Pick one way of counting and stick to it. Dividing by delivered messages is the fairest, because it ignores texts that never arrived. Write the method at the top of your report so everyone reads the numbers the same way.
Use the people who engaged
The people who clicked or replied are your warmest contacts. They've shown interest recently, and they're the most likely to respond again.
Two practical uses. When you have a new offer or a spare slot, send it to them first. And when someone hasn't clicked or replied in months, consider sending to them less often, which protects your opt-out rate and your delivery.
Smart Segments can group contacts by what they've done, so the engaged list updates itself. Tracked links show who clicked, and from which city and device, so you can see which campaign and which placement did the work.
A ten-minute monthly check
Run this once a month from your campaign dashboards.
Keep the results in one place so next month has something to compare against.
The number at the top of your report
Look at the last marketing report you shared with your team. If the headline number was opens, ask what decision it changed.
If the answer is none, it's the wrong number to lead with. Put replies or bookings at the top instead, and the report starts telling you what to do next.
