Our users delete our emails without opening them, and that is a success.

We tracked email opens and deletions across 3.1 million sends over 6 months.

Opened and clicked: 8%
Opened and not clicked: 19%
Deleted without opening within 10 seconds: 44%
Deleted without opening after 10 seconds: 29%

The 44% who deleted within 10 seconds were not ignoring us. They were recognizing us. The subject line told them everything they needed, and they acted on it without opening. For a reminder email, that was the intended outcome. For a newsletter, it was a failure.

We had been reporting "open rate" as the health metric for every email type. For transactional and reminder emails, the fast-delete was the goal. For newsletters, it was a signal the subject line was doing all the work and the body was not needed.

We split our reporting by email intent. Reminder emails were judged on action taken within 24 hours regardless of open. Newsletters were judged on open and read time. Our newsletter open rate was actually 31% — we had been averaging it against reminder emails that were designed to be deleted.

What metric are you averaging across email types that mean completely different things?