Understanding email in post MPP

For many years, the data to understanding email success was simple and easy to obtain. One of the core metrics that was seemingly the basis of email success evaluation was open rate. Simply if an email was opened by a recipient, it told you that someone was compelled enough to investigate further. Sounds like a success right?

For the most part, yes. But, that's the old way.

In September 2021, Apple rolled out the Mail Privacy Protection tool. In short, when an email is sent from an ESP or an email service provider, Apple will open the email, masks identifying characteristics of the recipient and then send the email to the inbox.

Since this adoption, the long relied upon metric, the open rate, has suddenly grown to be irrelevant. That's because data will show an email was opened, but not known if it was opened by intended recipient. So now what?

Over the course of the last several months, greater emphasis has been put on measuring clicks within an email, or the calls to action. That data is still trackable.

Just recently released by Litmus was a report about getting a better understanding of email in a digital world more focused on privacy. The report is called "Email Analytics in 2022" (Download it here).

What did Litmus find in its report?

Before MPP went into effect in September 2021, 64% of marketers were concerned with the impact it would have on their email analytics and means of measuring campaigns; 43% were planning to change how they measure email performance; 26% weren't sure.

In April 2022, Litmus reports 53% of Apple Mail has been impacted by MPP. Data such as significant increases in open rates are among the results marketers are seeing. Litmus said Gmail is prefetching images as well, adding to the uncertain reliability (or lack of it) regarding open rates.

So how do you adjust?

• Re-evaluate your email strategy.
• Re-evaluate your email marketing goals.
• Re-evaluate your email templates.
• Re-evaluate what's important to your business.

Here are some metrics Litmus suggests as potential new email analysis metrics:

• Email read rate. This depends on your email tool. But having an email open read equals eight seconds.
• Click-through rate.
• Unsubscribe rate.
• Bounce rate.
• Spam compliant rate.
• Conversion rate.