Have you heard about the iOS 15 update? It really has people freaking out! Should we be worried that email will become obsolete, or should we not worry at all because it’s just an incremental upgrade to what is already a billion dollar industry? Well I’ve got some good news for those of us who are scrambling. There’s actually no need to freak out whatsoever when thinking through how this latest technology might impact your business and its marketing strategies moving forward.
The iOS 15 update is here to start, there are two major things going on. The first one being email privacy protection: this allows people to sign up for offers or opt-ins with an apple generated randomized address instead of their real one which Apple then forwards the emails too.
Val Geisler has an article on Klaviyo’s blog about how people have more than one email address, and they use the less-used ones for signups. This has been going on for a long time now so it really shouldn’t cause you any additional worries – people have been doing for years on their own what Apple is implementing!
Now, on the flip side of things there’s email privacy protection. So this goal is to block senders from being able to track open rates which has everyone talking about how they won’t know their opening statistics anymore!
So what are we going to do, open rates is a very important metric, and one that the email service providers themselves use. Personally, I think one of the more interesting aspects of this is that we haven’t yet seen how they’re going to adjust, for example, their algorithms and engagement tracking to see what’s going on and monitor accounts. But let’s take it back a step here and talk about ourselves, about our ecommerce stores, about our newsletters, and how this is going to impact us.
First of all, don’t panic.
I love the analogy to SMS messaging – it’s something that has been around for a while but is now being updated and integrated with newer technology. And yet you never know who opens your message or how many people read them! And yet, it can be a profitable channel for many brands.
If you’re already emailing your business (you are, aren’t you?!?) one of the best things you can do is to find out what are your base open rates and click through rates on automations (flows) as well as campaigns? That’ll give a little bit of an idea moving forward how things like that match up over time and give you something to compare to down the road.
A couple other things that I think are going to be really interesting is how flows (automations) operate. If you have flows or automations that are based on opening an email (as a metric or trigger), then you may want to be looking at other engagement metrics.
You could use the visit site metric, most email systems have access to website visits so if someone goes there you know it’s them! Another good idea is keeping your email list cleaned of inactive subscribers.
Segmentation is based or partially based on opening, so you’re going to want to look at that. Segmenting your list can be done by looking for people who have not opened any emails in the past 90 days and then checking if they’ve been sent more than 10 (or whatever number) of emails over a 3-4 week period. You may need to adjust this time frame because too many customers could end up being removed from your system if you’re dependent on open rates which won’t be available!
Some alternatives are click rates, site visits, or a combination.
Now is the time to get ahead of it! Looking at how we’re dependent on open rates you can find alternatives that work for your business.
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