A few opinions from years of doing this work. Happy to be argued out of any of them over coffee.
Open rate isn't gone. It's no longer a number I'd build a KPI around.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images for a huge share of inboxes now, so "opened" often means Apple's servers checked in, not that a person read anything. A report that leads with open rate is mostly describing Apple's infrastructure.
Open rate still has some use. It can flag a broken send or a subject line that's badly underperforming. I don't want it anchoring a KPI target, and that goes for click-to-open rate too, since it's calculated from the same inflated open count. Delivery rate, click-through rate, and opt-out rate hold up better. I build reporting frameworks around those, and treat open rate as a helpful sanity check rather than the headline.
The value isn't the number. It's that email, social, web, and the CRM all point to the same thing.
A campaign rarely lives in one channel. The same push shows up as an email send, a paid social flight, a landing page tagged in GA4, and an opportunity logged in the CRM, and if the ID doesn't carry through cleanly across all of it, nobody can actually see the campaign, just fragments of it in four different tools. That's the real cost of a loose ID convention: not a wrong guess on one send, but four channels reporting on what looks like four different campaigns.
I treat the ID as connective tissue across channels, not a label that only means something inside one platform. The same ID, or a cleanly mapped equivalent, threads through the email platform, the social ad manager, GA4 UTM parameters, and the CRM, so a campaign can be traced end to end instead of stitched together after the fact. It's a small discipline, but it's what lets marketing, sales, and ops look at one campaign, across every channel it touched, and agree on what happened.
A lead score works better once sales helped write it.
I've watched marketing defend a scoring model and sales quietly ignore it, and both sides usually have a point. Most scoring models get built in a room without sales in it, then handed over as settled fact instead of a starting draft.
"Marketing Qualified Lead" only means something if both teams agree on what qualified means, and that agreement needs revisiting as the business changes. I treat the handoff as an ongoing relationship between two teams, not a one-way pipe. Teams that keep re-agreeing on what "ready" looks like tend to trust each other's numbers more.
