Understanding email engagement

With the recent rollout of Apple's iOS 15 update, it'll be harder for marketers, especially those who rely on email analytics, to get an accurate representation of the success or failure of their digital campaigns.

In case you missed it, Apple's latest update features many new tools and modifications. But one feature that garnered the attention of marketers and is seen as controversial is the Mail Privacy Protection tool.

Apple, as well as Google and other companies, have invested in new resources to put the user in more control of their data. For example, one of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, "prevents senders from learning whether an email has been opened, and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or use it to build a profile on them." (You can read more about it here)

In short, the data in email marketing will be clouded, meaning not 100 percent accurate. Therefore, it makes decision making difficult about how to adapt to the changes.

Litmus, an email marketing specialist, recently released a report called "2021 State of Email Engagement Report."

The purpose of the report is to provide a benchmark based on billions of email opens as well as offer insight about how people interacted with email this year. It's a great resource to explore as we prepare for a clouded data future regarding emails and email marketing.

You can download the full report here.

But here were some of the highlights in the report:

• Users using Apple iPhone and Apple Mail account for 51.6% of the email opens. Including Apple iPad adds 1.4% to equal 53%.
• Mobile devices account for more than 42% of email opens. Desktops account for 16%.
• Gmail is, by far, the most popular webmail client at 85%.
• More than 90% of people use Apple iPhone as an email mobile client.
• 9 a.m.-noon, in the U.S., is when the majority of emails are opened (21.2%).
• The average time spent to read an email is 10 seconds, that's down from 13 seconds in 2018.

Apple's iOS 15 update is now available; what does that mean?

We've known for several weeks that Apple was going to release its latest update, iOS 15. In a blog posted Sept. 20, Apple announced the availability of the update.

According to Apple, "iOS 15 introduces new ways to stay connected, powerful updates that help users focus and explore, and intelligent features to get more done with iPhone. FaceTime updates provide more natural video calls, Focus helps users reduce distraction, new features like Live Text use on-device intelligence to surface useful information, upgrades to Maps provide brand new ways to navigate the world, and much more. iOS 15 is available today as a free software update."

Click here for the full blog post.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Improved FaceTime calls
• Improved messaging features
• Improved notifications
• Redesigned browsing on Safari
• Enhanced Apple Maps tools 

The one new feature in this update that's garnered the most attention, at least from a marketing standpoint, is the updated privacy tools and features.

Apple, as well as Google and other companies, have invested in new resources to put the user in more control of their data. For example, one of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, "prevents senders from learning whether an email has been opened, and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or use it to build a profile on them."

Another privacy enhancement is with Siri. From Apple, "Siri’s protection of user privacy goes even further with on-device speech recognition as users’ audio requests are now processed entirely on device by default, enabling more personalization, offline requests, and faster performance."

To help better understand what this update means and how marketers will need to adapt, check out my blog post, Apple Mail changes coming; how marketers should prepare.

Here are more quality resources to help with your transition

Facebook Outlines Impacts of Apple's Data Tracking Update, Provides Tips on How Brands Can Improve Ad Performance

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Is Here: What It Actually Means for Email Marketers and What to Do Now

Instagram and nonprofits

Instagram provides users and businesses to take advantage of their creativity in both video and pictures or graphics.

Sure, that sounds like Facebook and other social media sites. But what separates Instagram from Facebook (despite that Facebook owns Instagram), is Instagram often sees higher engagement rates than like posts on Facebook.

In addition, according to Hootsuite, 81 percent of people who use Instagram do so to research products and services.

Recently, I came across a blog that goes over how to utilize Instagram to your advantage in the nonprofit sector. It was a very quality read.

Click here to read the article.

Hootsuite has also provided templates for IG Story covers. You can download those here.

Agenda revealed for Wisconsin Marketing Summit

In November, I have the honor of being a guest speaker at the Wisconsin Marketing Summit in Milwaukee.

The Annual Wisconsin Marketing Summit is an opportunity for 200 brands based across the state to join expert creatives, agencies and marketing directors to exchange ideas across digital, experiential, print and brand marketing.

Join five panel discussions and two presentations in person to review best practices, hear from emerging leaders, and established giants in the region and come away with solutions, ideas, and contacts. 

The panel I'm on will talk about technology and insights. The timing is perfect given the latest shifts and changes regarding user data privacy and third-party cookies.

Learn more or register here: ICSMAX Wisconsin | ICSMAX (icsummitsmax.com)

Here is the event agenda.

Apple Mail changes coming; how marketers should prepare

Today, I sat in on a very informative and important webinar hosted by Litmus, an email marketing company. It was called "The State of Email Analytics and Privacy."

It has been stated often this year by not just myself, but many within the social media, digital and email marketing industry: privacy and transparency is growing in demand among consumers.

One action that is coming up soon is Apple's Mail Privacy Protection tool. It is believed to come out some time this fall, potentially as soon as September.

“Privacy has been central to our work at Apple from the very beginning,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, in a press release. “Every year, we push ourselves to develop new technology to help users take more control of their data and make informed decisions about whom they share it with. This year’s updates include innovative features that give users deeper insights and more granular control than ever before.”

What is Apple's Mail Privacy Protection?

According to its website, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about a user. The feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.

How it'll work is users who opt-in to this offering will receive an email from you. When they do, their information will go into a proxy server that will cloud that information and make it invisible. After process is done, the analytics will then be sent to you. It essentially will erase open rate and the IP address to prevent you from knowing where the person opened the email.

Read Apple's press release here.

What's the big deal?

From the consumer standpoint, it offers them the opportunity to be in more control of how their data and activity is tracked and stored. Supporters of this argue people who have access to this data are perceived as spying.

From the marketing standpoint, it offers them the opportunity to better understand their audiences and deliver more personalized experiences. Thus, reducing unwanted ads, emails, etc., and that's the key point made by those who support this stance. By eliminating that information, there is concern users will be more upset to receive emails or marketing messages that don't pertain or have little to no interest to them.

It's a fair argument on both sides. And that's why it is interesting and complicating at the same time.

Something else to keep in mind. Litmus estimated that about 50 percent of people who opened an email within the last year did so through Apple Mail. Yikes!

How do marketers adjust?

There are a lot of ways to do that. But simply: you're going to have to adjust and rethink important metrics, consider metrics that you weren't before.

The Mail Privacy Protection tool will essentially make email open rates irrelevant and highly inaccurate. For a while, that was maybe the No. 1 metric to understand an email's success. Was it opened by the people you sent it to? It makes the most sense to measure your ROI for your email marketing on that.

Another important metric that is often used is utilizing send-time optimization. That metric will now be rendered useless and inaccurate.

One of the immediate steps to take is to do an audit of your email audience. Figure out who uses Apple Mail. Then figure out who doesn't. Creating new audience segments will be helpful too. Separating the Apple users from others will give you comparable data. In my experience, if one group shows data, the comparable data is too far off. It may not be exact, but it can give you an estimate.

Other steps to take:

• Re-evaluate how you measure engagement in emails. Suggestions include conversion rate (how many people receive an email and how many conversions you have), mailing list growth or decline, or click rate within the email.
• Put a stronger emphasis on smart, catchy subject lines and preview text.
• Put a stronger emphasis on overall engagement within an email, again, such as clicks on link(s).
• Create a poll and simply ask your audience: What do you want to receive? How often?

Here are several links to great resources that'll help you adjust:

• How Apple’s Mail Privacy Changes Impact Email Marketing by Constant Contact
• 14 ways email marketers should adapt to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection by Oracle
• The Mail Privacy Protection Survival Guide for Marketers by Litmus
• What will be your average open rate after Mail Privacy Protection? by Litmus

Understanding the value of UTM in marketing

Technology, privacy and transparency, as we know, continues to evolve. It leaves marketers regularly looking for ways to understand how their campaigns are performing.

Say hello to UTM, or Urchin Tracking Module.

UTM has five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. When used correctly, it can be a very powerful marketing analysis tool.

The parameters are source, medium, name, term and content.

Here is an example of a new with a UTM applied:

 https://www.westbendtheatreco.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=ourtown

As you can see with this setup, the UTM source was set as "Facebook" with the medium being "link" and campaign being "Our Town."

This data will provide you terrific insight onto where your users are coming from (source), what they're clicking on (link) and, in this case, what post led them to the page (campaign).

All this can be tracked within Google Analytics.

Also, it is recommended you use URL shortening tools like Bit.ly or Rebrandly to make the URL more appealing.

I like Rebrandly because you can change the URL after the "/" to whatever you want it, to make it more personable and realistic.

Here are a few great resources to help you with understanding and setting up your own UTMs:

• Campaign URL Builder
• What Are UTM Codes? UTM Tracking Explained
• Collect campaign data with custom URLs

Then, how do you find the results in Google Analytics?

You log in to your Google Analytics and click on "Acquisition," then "Campaigns".

Then use primary dimension as "Campaign" and look for what you labeled the UTM under category.

Or, you can find it via "Medium."

Intuit to acquire Mailchimp

Intuit, a global technology platform that makes TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, and Credit Karma, announced Monday, Sept. 13, it has acquired Mailchimp, a global customer engagement and e-mail marketing platform for about $12 billion.

"Since day one, setting our customers up for success has been our top priority, and we’re confident that our acquisition by Intuit will advance that mission and secure the legacy of support for small businesses that we’ve built over the last 20 years," wrote Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp co-founder and CEO, in an email. "Like Mailchimp, understanding small businesses is embedded in Intuit’s DNA, which affirms my belief that this is the right next step for Mailchimp, our employees, and importantly, our customers."

According to the press release, the transaction is expected to close prior to the end of Intuit’s second quarter fiscal 2022.

"Together, Intuit and Mailchimp will work to deliver on the vision of an innovative, end-to-end customer growth platform for small and mid-market businesses, allowing them to get their business online, market their business, manage customer relationships, benefit from insights and analytics, get paid, access capital, pay employees, optimize cash flow, be organized and stay compliant, with experts at their fingertips," the release says. "Delivering on the promise to be the single source of truth, small and mid-market businesses will have the power to combine their customer data from Mailchimp and QuickBooks’ purchase data to get the actionable insights they need to grow and run their businesses with confidence."

Read the full press release here.

OFFICIAL: Selection to UW-Parkside Customer Service Certificate Program Advisory Committee

I'm truly honored and excited to be selected to be on the advisory committee for the University of Wisconsin-Parkside's Customer Service Certificate Program.

The committee brings together some of the best minds in creating positive customer service experiences. The committee's job is to oversee the curriculum of the program, evaluate it and make recommendations for future course offerings.

Here is a description of the program by UW-Parkside.

Here is the brochure.

Here is my bio on the school's website.

What can you get from social listening?

Social listening provides you very valuable first-person information about the people who interact with your social media channels, and even your overall online presence.

As we continue to shift toward a decrease in third-party cookies, collecting that first-party data will be vital as we go into 2022 and beyond. Social listening is one way to do that.

What is social listening? It's a tactic of analyzing and responding to conversations online through social media, but also online as a whole. This not only tells you what's being said about a company/brand/organization, but also helps you understand who is saying what they are.

How to use social listening tools for business-wide success

Managing your reputation online

Just having a presence on social media isn’t enough anymore. Scheduling posts out weeks in advance and then forgetting about them, and not analyzing performance, won’t help you increase customer leads. You need to be actively monitoring who is discussing your business and what they want from you. Engage with your customers, no matter if what they said is positive or negative. 

This engagement data will be so helpful as retrieving demographic data becomes increasingly more difficult.

How to adapt to online privacy updates

Announced earlier this year, Apple's latest efforts to increase transparency and protect user privacy is a great thing for consumers. For marketers, it presents a new challenge in how to effectively advertise on digital (and social) platforms.

App Tracking Transparency is a privacy feature by Apple that asks if the user grants permission for their activity to be tracked. Among the information tracked include location, sites visited, and products added to shopping carts.

Internet privacy has long been a debate as the Internet has evolved into a highly-sought source for information, which includes shopping for products online.

Users believe it's "creepy" for their activity to be tracked. With this update, a notification gives more freedom to the user, and it tells them what is being tracked and how it's used.

Those who argue in favor of being able to track data say it's a way to put relevant information in front of a user, and eliminating or making that data more difficult to collect, will irritate users more because they'll see more irrelevant content. Therefore, it could lead to negative experiences on websites and social media platforms.

So, how do we adapt?

These changes put a much greater emphasis on a strong organic strategy. One way to do that is through search engine optimization or SEO.

To do that, you have to optimize your website that makes it easier for search results to place your business/organization higher up on the SERP (search engine results page). This will definitely be difficult because the competition for it is going to increase as we try to better understand the effect the privacy changes have on digital advertising.

Some examples to accomplish this include:

• Make sure the keywords related to your business or present on your website.
• Make sure your Google Business listing (address, website and phone number) is up to date.
• Make sure your call to action (CTAs) are out in the open, easy to find.
• Make sure your online store is clear and concise.

Something else that will be key is understanding your email customer database.

Remember, those are people who have already shown an interest in your company/business/organization. They've voluntarily said they are OK with you contacting them. Getting them to that part is often the hardest part.

Collect that data now.

Developing and sustaining customer relationships through email will be an important tactic. (Read "Future of email marketing, privacy")

Hootsuite rolls out new features

Hootsuite has released several new features and has made some fixes in its latest update.

Among the new features are:

• You can now manage and respond to Instagram business accounts messages and Stories right from your Hootsuite Inbox. You'll need to reconnect your Instagram profiles and make sure message access is turned on in Instagram to start seeing Instagram messages.
• You can now filter by post status in the Planner calendar view. 
• You can now see the optimal times to publish as you schedule posts in composer, specific to each of your social media accounts.
• Dark mode is now available on the Hootsuite mobile app.
• You can now filter posts by language (detected automatically through machine learning).
• Benchmark your mention volumes to better understand how your audience and mentions are evolving over time. Set what you want to benchmark for (platform, sentiment, emotion, interest, language or country) and see how mention volumes have increased or decreased since the last period.

An improvement made in latest update is posts can be filtered by status within the planner. Statuses are drafts, expired, pending approval, rejected, failed, scheduled and published.

Some fixes that were made include:

• Resolved an issue where link previews for posts scheduled to LinkedIn were not displayed after the post was published.
• Resolved an issue where the order of streams in the Quick Switch feature did not reflect the order under My Boards.

For more information, click here.

REPORT: Video at forefront of evolving social media landscape

Video and live streaming, according to a report by App Annie, is going to be a key influencer in marketing for the remainder of 2021 and into 2022.

The 32-page report (found here) said "TikTok has upended the streaming and social landscape - with average monthly time per user surpassing YouTube in the U.S. and UK, and making significant strides in South Korea, where YouTube leads by 2.5 times."

Total time spent in the top five social media app - TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger and Telegram - with an emphasis on live streaming are set to surpass 500 billion hours on Android phone alone, outside of China in 2021.

"Live streaming is driving growth in engagement for social apps, which sets them up for consumer spend," the report says.

Speaking of consumer spending, look for that to continue its upward trend for the remainder of 2021 and into 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many consumers and businesses to think differently about how to shop and sell. With many brick-and-mortar stores forced to close because of the pandemic, coming up with new revenue streams have been at the forefront. Over the last several months, social media apps are connecting businesses to shoppers in a different way.

After the fourth quarter in 2019, consumer spending through social apps was at $14 billion. After the second quarter of 2021, that number has jumped to $22 billion. It's expected to increase.

And, according to the report, with 74 billion social media apps downloaded through the end of the second quarter in 2021, the revenue opportunities are there.

Lastly, looking at time spent on apps, YouTube continues to be the leader, followed by Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram and TikTok.

In all, the report says consumers are shifting to a video-first social experience that favors content creators.

"Short-video, authentic content and live streaming are pillars to cultivating deep engagement, with live streaming in particular driving growth in time spent," the report says.

LinkedIn to eliminate Stories

LinkedIn has announced it will eliminate its LinkedIn Stories feature by the end of September.

A message I received from LinkedIn, "We just announced some big changes coming to LinkedIn Stories, and as an admin of a Page that has published Stories in the past, we wanted to make sure you were among the first to know. On Monday, Sept. 30, 2021, we plan to suspend LinkedIn Stories in their current design and will be working on a new format that better supports the needs of our unique professional users."

Starting Sept. 30, Page admins will no longer be able to upload Stories to LinkedIn, and members will not be able to view them. More about the change can be read here.

Stories will be available through the end of September.

"We recommend that you pause any further creative development for LinkedIn Stories after that time," LinkedIn said. "We apologize in advance if this causes any inconvenience, but know that we are excited to continue investing in this product in the future."

For questions about how this affects your organization, contact LinkedIn here.