Open rate. Click-through rate. Ask most marketing teams how their email program is performing, and those are the numbers they’ll show you. But here’s the problem: Open and click metrics don’t tell you whether your email program is actually working. They tell you how people interacted with the email message, not whether the email generated meaningful results for the business. Relying on them as key performance indicators (KPIs) can lead to optimizing for the wrong outcomes entirely. ## What the data shows about open and click rates I’ve seen subject line A/B split tests where the version with the highest open rate produced fewer conversions or lower revenue per email (RPE) than the other versions. I’ve also seen campaigns where the version with the highest click-through rate generated fewer conversions or lower RPE than the other versions. This isn’t just anecdotal. Looking across subject line tests I’ve conducted for a wide range of clients and audiences over many years, the results are striking.…