Your email open rates may be lying to you
Loyalty marketing teams in many companies celebrate rising open rates and click-throughs reported on their dashboards. These traditional engagement metrics offer a false sense of security while a brand's best customers may be quietly slipping away. The problem is that what they measure has remarkably little to do with what actually matters: whether a customer is genuinely committed to your brand, whether they would recommend you to someone they care about, whether they will still be with you in two years.
The Measurement Trap.
Consider a familiar scenario - a loyalty team launches a campaign. The emails go out. The open rates come back strong - perhaps 30%, perhaps higher. Clicks look healthy. The tools you use endorse these numbers as the right ones to track. The team reports success. Leadership nods approvingly. The playbook gets repeated.
Months later, the same team discovers that a meaningful segment of those highly "engaged" customers - the ones who opened every email, clicked every link - have churned. Meanwhile, a different cohort of customers who barely touched a single communication have remained loyal, spent more, and referred their friends and family to the brand.
The confusion comes from assuming activity means commitment. A customer who opens an email has demonstrated one thing - that they opened an email. Perhaps the subject line was clever. Perhaps they were bored. Perhaps they habitually clear their inbox. None of these behaviours indicate loyalty. None of them predict retention. None of them tell you whether that customer would choose you again when a competitor offers a slightly better price.
What Engagement Actually Looks Like.
True engagement goes further than a click. It is a choice - repeated, unprompted, and often invisible to your tracking systems. The customer who refers a colleague without being asked to do so is engaged. The customer who adds a second product or service to their relationship with you, on their own initiative, is engaged. The customer who remains with you through a price increase, a service disruption, or a better offer from a competitor is engaged.
These behaviours share a common characteristic: they require the customer to invest something of themselves - their reputation, their time, their trust - in the relationship. While an email open costs nothing, a referral costs social capital. The most valuable signals in your loyalty ecosystem are often the ones companies are not measuring, or measuring poorly. Advocacy. Organic cross-sell. Retention through friction. These are the vital signs of a healthy customer relationship.
The Advocacy Threshold.
A useful mental model is to think of engagement as a spectrum with a critical threshold: the point at which a customer moves from passive participation to active advocacy.
Below the threshold, customers may interact with your communications, redeem occasional offers, and maintain a transactional relationship. They are present but not committed.
Above the threshold, customers become extensions of your brand. They recommend you without incentive. They forgive your inadvertent mistakes. They feel a sense of ownership in your success. They are invested. The question every loyalty program must answer is "how do we move more customers across the advocacy threshold?"
Reframing the Metrics That Matter
If traditional engagement metrics are unreliable proxies for loyalty, what should replace them? The answer requires a shift in perspective - from measuring what customers do with your communications to measuring what customers do for your brand.
Referral behaviour is perhaps the purest signal of advocacy. A customer who recommends your brand to friends or family is staking their own reputation on your performance. This is not a casual act. Track not just program-driven referrals, but organic ones.
Voluntary expansion measures whether customers deepen their relationship with you on their own initiative. Do they add products? Increase frequency? Upgrade tiers? When this behaviour occurs without promotional stimulus, it indicates genuine commitment rather than opportunistic response.
Retention through friction reveals which customers are truly loyal versus merely around for convenience. When you raise prices, change terms, or experience service failures, who stays? The customers who remain through difficulty are your true believers. The ones who leave at the first sign of inconvenience were never really yours.
Net Promoter Score, when properly implemented, provides a direct measure of advocacy intent. The question is simple: would you recommend us? The answer correlates with behaviours that actually drive long-term value.
None of these metrics are as easy to capture as an open rate. None of them produce the satisfying, immediate feedback of a click-through report. But they tell you something real about your customer relationships, whereas open rates tell you something real only about your subject lines.
At CORA Loyalty, we encourage clients to build an advocacy layer into their measurement frameworks - a set of metrics that specifically track customer behaviours above the advocacy threshold. This layer sits alongside traditional engagement metrics, not replacing them but contextualising them. High open rates paired with low advocacy signals become a warning sign rather than a celebration. Low open rates paired with high advocacy signals prompt investigation.
If you’d like to get a conversation started, please reach out to us at loyalty@thecoragroup.com or use our contact page.
