Open Rate (vs. Conversion)

Open rate is an email-platform metric and every sending tool reports it. It arrives in restaurant marketing through that lineage rather than from anything hospitality-specific. A restaurant CRM reports it too, alongside numbers an email tool cannot produce, because the same system holds the reservation and check history for the person who received the message.

What does an open rate actually count?

An open rate counts loads of a tracking pixel, not readings by a human. A one-pixel image sits in the message and the platform records a request for that image as an open. Anything that fetches images fetches the pixel.

Two things distort the count in opposite directions. Privacy features in mail clients now preload images on the recipient’s behalf, so messages register as opened when nobody looked. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection does this by default for Apple Mail users, and they are a large share of most consumer lists. Meanwhile a guest who reads the message with images blocked never registers at all. The result is a number that moves when Apple changes a setting, and a year-over-year comparison across such a change is not measuring the restaurant’s marketing.

SMS has no equivalent metric. There is no pixel in a text message, so a texting program produces deliveries, replies and opt-outs, and no opens whatsoever.

What should a restaurant measure instead of an open rate?

A restaurant should measure bookings, visits and revenue in a defined period after the send. This is available to a platform holding both the send log and the guest’s reservation and check history, and it is the reason campaign reporting inside a restaurant CRM looks different from campaign reporting inside an email tool.

One nuance matters for reading those reports honestly. Engagement usually has not disappeared from the calculation; it has moved upstream. Credit typically starts from an interaction with the message, an open or a reply, and the platform then looks for a booking or a visit from that guest inside the attribution window. The number displayed is revenue and the gate in front of it is still an engagement signal. So a change in how a mail client handles images can move attributed revenue too. Read the figure as a strong indicator rather than as a hard count.

Is open rate useful for anything?

Open rate is useful for two narrow jobs. It compares two subject lines sent to similar lists in the same week, where the distortion applies about equally to both. And a sharp drop in opens across every send is an early deliverability signal, usually meaning messages are landing in spam folders rather than that the writing got worse.

Neither job involves reporting the number to an owner as a measure of marketing performance. A 55% open rate on a message that produced no bookings tells a restaurant that its subject line worked and its offer did not.