Category: Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Your email open rates are changing

6 minute read
Tony Macpherson Tony Macpherson

Unless you’ve been living on a remote island somewhere you’ll know that on September 20th Apple’s iOS 15 update was launched. It contains a feature call Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) which – amongst other things – will eliminate the ability to accurately track email open rates.

For the uninitiated, email opens are recorded using a tiny image in the email code. When the email is opened, that image loads, which tells the sender an email was opened, by whom, when, where and on what device. What Apple have done is add a ‘middle man’ into the mix. Emails are now firstly routed through Apple’s proxy servers to pre-load email content – including the tracking image – before serving the email to the original recipients.

This will make it impossible to tell whether real people or Apple opened your emails. We won’t know when the open happened, where the person is located or which Apple device they use. That means no more mobile vs. desktop insights!

For some email campaigns, we are already seeing the percentage of emails where the device data is being hidden by MPP at 20%. That’s double what it was a week ago and we expect this to increase as more Apple users install the latest iOS 15 update.

What will the adoption rate be?

Whilst MPP won’t be switched on by default, when opening email for the first time after installing iOS 15, you are presented withprf a screen asking if you would like to be tracked or not.

When Apple launched its App Tracking Transparency tool in April, 96% of people opted out. There is no reason to expect Mail Privacy Protection will be any different. I mean, who in a post-GDPR and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook etc. world would say ‘Yes, please track me’!

So, from now on you can expect to see your open rates jump. You just won’t know if any of that increase is real. With estimates putting Apple proxy opens at 75% you can be sure this jump isn’t because your audience suddenly loves you more.

…and why does that matter?

The upshot of this is that open rates will no longer be a useful metric when measuring subscriber engagement. This has repercussions for a range of emails you may already be sending, including:

  • A/B testing subject lines using opens to determine the winner.
  • Targeting based on the last open date.
  • Automated workflows and journeys that rely on someone opening an email.
  • Send time optimisation based on previous open times.
  • Countdown timers may also show incorrect times as they will start at the Apple open rather than the real recipient open time.
  • Local content driven by opens or IP addresses, such as the nearest store location (although this is more of an issue in large geographies like the USA rather than the UK).
  • AI platforms that use email opens in their algorithm for creating optimised subject lines.

Going forward, list hygiene management using non-openers over time will become a challenge although as Apple can only cache images if the Mail app is running, it means those email addresses are valid.

There is a chance this could all backfire of course. The muddying of these waters will mean emails that are less targeted and none of us want that. We have all come to expect a high level of personalisation. Sometimes we even claim we are happy to trade a degree of privacy for an improved experience. However, I can’t see this becoming a big enough issue to prompt large numbers of people going into mail settings on their iPhones and switching MPP off again.

So what can we do to best prepare our email marketing for the future?

Who’s who?

The first step is to understand the email client breakdown of your audience to determine who uses an Apple device. You can also create a reliable opens audience for non-Apple Mail users as you can still use the open metric here.

Update and remind people about your email preference centre. Give them a range of choices on how they would like receive emails from you. And – as always – keep your email list clean to stay on top of deliverability.

Focus on click rates

The goal of any campaign is most likely not about how many people open an email but how many make a purchase and in between the email open and the website is the click. We are already focused on click rates and now we’ll need to rely on these even more. The open-to-click metric will also need changing to clicks compared to emails sent.

Expand your engagement-based segments

As open rates become increasingly unreliable, double-down on your engagement criteria to include clicks, web visits and purchase activity. The numbers who meet these criteria will naturally be smaller but it’s a good way to continue having highly-targeted engagement segments.

Segment your contacts based on how far they are on their path to purchase. This provides another data-driven measure of intent that can be used for targeting.

Add new channels

Other channels like SMS and push notifications can help expand your reach. In 2020, the number of SMS messages sent increased nearly 400% with conversion rates doubling.

For web push notifications, the increase was around a 30% conversion rate, which is nearly five times what it was the previous year.

Whilst you should consider these channels to mitigate no longer having complete email open data, neither SMS or push notifications have open rates at all so have always had to measure success in terms of conversions. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that email is still at the top of the pile in terms of ROI. A drop in the accuracy of measuring open rates isn’t going to change that.

Shopping data

Place more importance on customer purchases using recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) data.

If you don’t already have one, create a customer lifecycle program which can identify customer stages based on all of these other metrics. It will allow you to build and automate data-driven campaigns based on purchase behaviour.

Be creative

Be adaptable so you are able to move quickly when things change. We should always be looking for new ways to provide value to our customers. The ultimate goal is revenue from initial and repeat purchases, not open rates.

As marketers, we have all the data we need to help understand customer preferences which should allow for smarter promotions overall. The open engagement metric may be more unreliable, but the metrics of clicks and conversions remain unchanged.

Hide My Email – should I worry?

Another part of Mail Privacy Protection allows people to hide any of their email addresses (e.g., Hotmail/Outlook, Gmail, etc.) by generating unique, random icloud.com email addresses that forward to their real email address. These are used only once. If people hide their email from multiple companies, they will have generated multiple fake emails (one for each website).

icloud email addresses aren’t anywhere near as prevalent as Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook. Nonetheless it’s worth tracking your email data at a domain level to check for growth.

These fake email addresses can be deleted which means next time you mail them they will hard bounce and, If you get a lot of these, your email deliverability will suffer.

Another challenge is tying email activity to purchases when, say, someone signs up for your newsletter with Hide My Email but then later make a purchase using their real email address.

Whilst it is early days, Hide My Email is unlikely to gain enough traction to become a problem. After all, there have been similar services available for years. Also, if you’re seeing lots of new random icloud addresses appear in your database then you have a more fundamental trust issue. These people saw enough of a reason to hide their real address from you in the first place.

The future is bright

If your core objective of marketing is to provide the right value to the right customer at the right time, you shouldn’t have too much to worry about.

However, Apple’s iOS 15 update is certainly making it more challenging. Apple may be leading the way but expect other companies to follow suit. We should all see this as an opportunity to look at the other ways customer engagement and behaviour can be measured and improved.

Ultimately what Apple has done is a good thing. We have all had our trust eroded over the years by unscrupulous marketing. Spammers often use harvested email addresses. There is ever-pervasive advertising that follows you around the internet. And the almost sinister use of AI algorithms that present us with filtered realities within social media platforms – just to keep us there longer so we see more ads.

In this brave new world it has become easy to forget the marketing fundamentals of building trust and respecting our customers. Apple have just given us a reminder.

Email Marketing

What’s the real cost of not outsourcing your Email Marketing

3 minute read
Mike Parry Mike Parry

Why is it more expensive to do something in house?

Just recently our sales team have come across a number of potential small business accounts which have said; We manage email marketing ourselves… It’s become a part of my role and I fit it in when I can… We’re too small to outsource… We use the DIY email builder for our emails… We can’t afford to go for email marketing outsourcing.

The answer to all of these is simple: You can’t afford not to outsource and here’s why:

As a small business you need to leverage every penny of your resource to it’s maximum. If you’re an SME you probably don’t employ a marketing manager, a designer, a coder or a database administrator. This means someone on staff is muddling through, it might even be you.

Whoever it is has a value beyond just their salary.

The Marketing managers role (or your role)

Whilst they are conceiving an idea, writing a brief, writing copy, designing and then trying to build an email they are almost certainly not doing what you are paying them for. The same is true whist they are maintaining an email database and trying to segment your list for more targeted mailings.

And it doesn’t stop there. Once they have managed to do all these things are they then going to test that your email renders as it should in all the major browsers, on all the main smart phones and tablets and finally all the major versions of Apple Mail, Outlook and other office based email clients?

What if they find a rendering issue, which if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor to build and update templates you almost certainly will? How long will be spent trying to fix it before giving in and sending the email despite its issues? Below is an example of a simple 2 image and a few lines of copy email and a bunch of code spaghetti added by a WYSIWYG. Imagine then having to try and edit that!

Email HTML Code Spaghetti
All this code spaghetti added by a WYSIWYG Editor

How much is a poorly rendered email going to impact your ROI from the campaign? What perception will your recipients have of your brand if the email is difficult to read, is missing images or just plain broken? Below is an example of an email built with a WYSIWYG rendering in Outlook 2013 and Apple Mail, as you see the first one is a brand car crash!

Two versions of an email
How Hypnos email rendered is Outlook 2013 and Apple Mail

Are they likely to engage with that email or future emails you send them? What is the cost of losing an engaged user because their experience with your emails is poor.

If you add up the physical cost in terms of time, the opportunity cost of lost sales today and lost customers tomorrow and weigh that against the cost of outsourcing – which could be as little as £250 a month – the question becomes not can I afford to outsource but can I afford not to?

Associated benefits

There are other benefits too. Outsourcing your basic email broadcasting also allows you to outsource the clever stuff, such as triggered emails which have higher open and click through rates.

You are able to automate welcome programmes, birthday messages, anniversary of purchase, the cross sale, order confirmations and dispatch notices.

Getting these and other automations right give your business a more professional look and improves customer confidence because you’re sending the right messages at the right time.

The benefits outweigh any physical cost, with hard earned customers staying and paying for longer whilst helping grow your database and increase profits.

The real cost of email marketing outsourcing is your bottom line. Contact Tony, tony@theemailfactory.com or call 0131 557 7780 today to see how we can help.

Email Marketing

Prefer your customers stay? Try a preference centre

5 minute read
Mel Jewell Mel Jewell

Preference centres

If GDPR is any indication, we live in a time in email marketing where consumers want to feel more in control, and what better way than to tailor-make what information you send them per their specifications. This is where preference centres are ideal – rather than simply opting out from all communications, you can let them hand pick what they want, to both eliminate the feeling of receiving unwanted emails and hopefully inspire greater loyalty with your brand.

To give you some idea of the benefits, these are the results from two of our different preference centres:

Client Total Preferences
Selected		 Total
Unsubscribed		 Preferences (%)
A 43,787 364,073 10.74
B 20,258 299,740 6.33

As you can see, you may be able to retain a good 10% of your disengaging data that you might otherwise lose, so if your email marketing strategy lends itself to some different types of communications, why not consider a preference centre?

If you don’t want the hassle of the development work to set one up, our platform has an inbuilt tool which will simply require you to provide the colour scheme, the settings and the text you want with no coding required. Here’s how it works…

Types of forms available

  1. Sign-Up Form Display

This form is designed to be a public URL which you can direct people to, in order to sign up to something new.

  1. Update Profile Form Display

This form is designed for people already signed up to you, where they can opt in for certain things (and anything left unticked they are opted out of) as prompted by you in an email.

  1. Opt-out Form Display

This form is designed for people already signed up to you so that when they unsubscribe they can then be given the option to opt-out from certain things only to see if you can encourage them to stay active, or of course everything if they still prefer.

  1. If you’re interested, you can also check out our earlier guide to how a simple data capture form also works on our platform.

 

How the preference centre works

Summary

So, depending on what type of form you are opting in for, you can see how to access the preference centre on the summary page:

SignUp Form Access

For the Sign-up Form you have the choice of using the Public URL, adding it as a personalised link into an email or sticking it on your website via a Lightbox script.

For the Update Profile Form you can simply add it as a personalised tag via within your campaign sends.

For the Opt-out Form you would connect it to a profile (meaning not all your sends would have this included if you didn’t want to) and then if someone clicks unsubscribe it will appear.

List selection

The first step is to plan what preferences you want to capture. Say, for example, you are an apparel shop, you might send regular communications individually on Hats, Jackets, Shirts, Shoes or Trousers. If you create a list for each type in the platform, then people will be added to (or updated on) each list they tick as opted in or opted out depending on what type of form you used. Then you can ensure you remove anyone “list opted-out” from your next send for each type. By simply re-submitting to each form, the preferences can be changed in each list.

On the List Selection tab:

List Display

You can force the user to only be able to select one of the boxes or any of them, and can also choose if you want them to appear in one, two or three columns to suit the layout you want.

List Select

Then simply Add all the lists you want, and they will be instantly connected to your preference centre form.

Input fields

The next tab determines if you wish you include any extra information beyond the types of communications people can opt-in for e.g. Title, First Name, Last Name, DOB etc.

Input Fields

You can update the settings for the Sign-Up Form to Display all selected fields, or to email only. For the Update Profile Form (where the email is known because it would have come directly form an email communication) you can opt to allow all the fields you choose to be updated, or hide them. You can then choose stylistically if you want the field label to be to the left or above the text box.

Field Selection

Then it’s a case of simply choosing which fields you want to include, and having the ability to label them something meaningful to the user.

Content management

This is where you can pick your colour scheme:

Colour Scheme

Then choose the various elements you want to appear on your various forms by filling out the relevant tab(s) with:

  • Header Panel – to display your logo as it is in the platform
  • Page Title
  • Form title
  • Form Introduction paragraph
  • Submit button Label
  • Confirmation Page text
  • Footer paragraph
  • reCAPTCHA (to try to keep the robots at bay)
  • An opt-out from everything option

Copy Settings

If you do choose to include a “Stop All Communications” option, the system is even designed so that clicking that button clears all the list options, and vice versa, so you can’t have somebody accidentally unsubscribing from everything.

There is a final option for the Sign-Up Form in that you may wish to email a link to those signing up for the first time which will only sign them up once they’ve clicked, also known as Double Opt-in. There is one final tab in this section which lets you fill out the subject line and text you would want to appear in the email, or you can simply disable it if you only need Single Opt-in.

Preview

Preview

Finally, you can take a look how all your settings appear to see if you need to make any final tweaks before publishing. You can flick through the three form options and the preview pane will update the form layout to your specifications. You can then fill them out, hit submit and can get some test results showing what would have happened to check your logic.

Test Results

This inbuilt tool should take no more than 15-20 minutes to fill out, test, tweak and publish. That’s enormously quicker than starting from scratch and your preference lists should be simple to apply to any campaigns being sent from the system. You won’t have to worry about juggling your data outside the system either to make sure you honour the preferences. It’s our preferred way of doing preference centres, so why not see if it works for you.