Will Apple’s iOS 15 privacy update kill email marketing?
So, if you aren’t aware yet, Apple made a huge announcement recently at their Worldwide Developers Conference.
The Mail Privacy Protection is one of the many privacy-related features that Apple is rolling out in iOS15, as they continue to expand on their legacy of commitment to user privacy.
In that moment, though, many email marketers and small business owners felt their hearts drop into their stomachs.
The privacy update essentially means that, soon, email service providers like ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Drip, and others, cannot have access to which emails you open and click without your given consent.
What could this mean for email marketing?
Email marketers base email performance on open and click metrics.
We build automations based on what people click and open.
We curate specific content for people based on which emails they are most interested in.
Now, it seems that all of this is going away. All of the industry statistics are going to go by the wayside.
But is that really the case?
Or are we just worrying over vanity metrics?
Let’s take a look.
What it means for email marketing.
For years, opens and clicks have been the main way that many marketers and business owners gauged the performance of their email marketing efforts.
But for email geeks, open rates have long been a point of discussion in the subject of vanity metrics.
The truth is that, while email open rates may simply be a vanity metric, those numbers are incredibly useful.
People have to open your emails in order to click on what’s inside of them.
But furthermore, we know that email open rates affect deliverability, which is the likelihood that an email actually reaches a subscriber’s inbox.
With these important things in mind, it would seem marketers were dealt a huge blow by losing the ability to track these numbers.
Not necessarily.
What to track instead of open rates.
While open rates DO matter, they aren’t the end-all, be-all.
If 100% of people open your email and nobody takes action, the campaign is a failure.
As with any changes to algorithms or privacy policies in the last few years, this doesn’t mean the end, it just means we have to find other ways to measure the success of our email campaigns.
Here are a few places to start.
Website Visitors
When you send campaigns in the future, you may not be able to see how many people opened or clicked your emails, but you can see how many people visited your site the day(s) following your sends.
An uptick in website traffic on those days is a good indicator that the emails you sent out were well received and that the content/offer you shared proved to be useful to the readers.
Conversely, if you’re promoting a specific blog post or product in your email and don’t see any jumps in traffic on the day(s) around your email, it could mean that your email was not a smash hit. (It could also mean that the content is no good, but that’s another conversation)
Conversion Rate
To determine a successful conversion rate, you have to determine what you mean by “conversion.” What is the overall goal that you want to accomplish from the email?
As an e-commerce store, your conversion may be pretty straightforward — did people buy the product you were promoting after you sent out an email?
If your goal in the email is to fill seats for a webinar or workshop, then that is your conversion.
With a defined conversion, you can gauge how well an email performed by how many people bought or booked or signed up.
You don’t need open rates or even click rates for that!
Unsubscribes
While I constantly tell people not to be afraid of “Unsubscribes”, they do give us some pretty valuable insight.
You’re naturally going to have people unsubscribe from your content or newsletters, and that’s okay because more than likely, they aren’t your ideal customer anyway.
But don’t totally disregard Unsubscribes. According to CampaignMonitor, the average unsubscribe rate is 0.1% — use that as a baseline. This metric won’t be going away!
If you start to see your unsubscribe numbers creep up, you have an issue with your content, your frequency, or other issue.
Try a shift in your approach.
To be a great marketer in 2021, you must be pretty good at adapting by now. With the constant algorithm changes, adaptation has become a cornerstone skill of the trade!
So we can’t create automations and sequences based on subscriber interaction quite like we used to. It’s time to adapt — change the way we email
Maybe the future of email is to create a more relational experience with our subscribers?
In his book from 2019, Marketing Rebellion, Mark Schaefer delivers a manifesto on how the companies that are most human-like in their marketing are the ones that are going to win.Instead of churning out complex, automated email sequence after complex, automated email sequence, maybe we’ll get back to being a little more human
Try a bit more of a relational approach to your emails.
Ask questions.
Drive engagement.
Write emails just like you would to another person sitting in front of you.
Make it feel natural for people to respond to you.
Get back to creating human, relational experiences.
I try to create these experiences in my emails and I encourage my clients to do the same.
Love Your First Year is another company that comes to mind who does a fantastic job creating engaging email content for its subscribers.
Just because the two main metrics by which we measure our email success are going away doesn’t mean email success goes away.
Get Started Soon...
While this new iOS 15 release isn’t scheduled to happen until September 2021, don’t wait to start tracking these new metrics and trying new approaches.
Get used to the new normal now.
In fact, tracking new measurements may actually help us become better marketers.
Instead of obsessing over open and click rates that may or may not tell the full story, we might just start paying attention to the metrics that do tell the full story.
And better yet, we may just start sending the kind of content that our subscribers are looking for!
