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:
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