Apple is coming with some updates with the new iOS 15 that will no doubt affect email marketing.
But how concerned should you be about this?
In this video, I’ll clear some doubts and share some ideas that will help you with this new iOS update.
If you need help with your email marketing, head over to http://oasisoptimization.com/
Let’s talk about the iOS 15 update, what that means as far as email. Should we be freaking out? Should we not? But let’s get into that. So real quick, I’m Adam Moody with Oasis Optimization. If you’d like help or you’d like to talk about your e-commerce email marketing, whether it’s automations, it’s flows, it’s content, it’s whatever you need. You can find me at Oasisoptimization.com. Now, about the iOS 15 update. Just to get everyone on the same page.
There’s two major things going on here, too. They have male privacy protection and hide my email. I think that I’m going to work backwards first, hide my email. It sounds like what it is. This allows people to sign up for email offers or opt-ins or whatever it is with an Apple-generated randomized address instead of their real one, then Apple then forwards it. So this to me is kind of a non-deal. After thinking about it and looking at what other people have said reading, for example, the Klaviyo blog, there’s a great blog post there by Val Geisler.
Val, if you ever see this, I hope I’m not butchering your name because I love your tweets. But anyways, it’s Val Geisler. But she had a great article, some great sources and a couple others that I read mentioned the same thing, that people have been doing this for a while. A lot of us have more than one email address. We have that one email address where we sign up for stuff and we know we’re going to get a ton of email there.
So this to me is nothing new. It does make it easier or maybe brings it into the mainstream and it’s something to watch. But really, this isn’t anything new. Now, on the other side of things, there’s the mail privacy protection. So the goal of this, or rather the end result is that it would block the sender’s ability to track opens and forwards. That is the gist of it. And what everyone, of course, is talking about is that now we won’t know open rates.
So what are we going to do? That’s a very important metric and one that the email service providers themselves use, which personally I think is one of the more interesting aspects of this, is that I haven’t seen yet how they’re going to adjust, for example, their algorithms and engagement to see what’s going on if they can’t see what’s happening. But let’s talkback, talk about ourselves, about our e-commerce stores, about our newsletters and how this is going to impact us.
First of all, nothing to panic about. I love the analogy to SMS. It’s something that has been around for a while, but it’s SMS messaging a little bit newer. But we’ve never had open rates. You never have any idea who opens the SMS. You can maybe they get a notification on their phone buzzes, but you don’t know who actually reads that. And yet it’s still a profitable channel. So this isn’t something that has to be done in order for email marketing to continue by any means.
I think that one of the best things you can do if you’re already using email in your business is to go ahead and find out if you don’t know this, find your numbers right or know your numbers. So, what are your base open and click-through rates right now on your automations, your flows as well as your campaigns. And that’ll give you a little bit of an idea moving forward, how things are matching up over time.
Less important but that’s something you could do now. One of the other things that are or rather a couple other things that I think are going to be really interesting is how flows operate. At least that’s in Klaviyo, depending if you’re using like Active Campaign or different systems, your automations, because a lot of these operate on things like clicked an email, purchased something, did this, did that. If you have flows or automations that are based on open, then you may want to be looking at other engagement metrics.
And a lot of these you could use like visited site. Most email systems have the ability to know when someone visits your website so you could trigger things that way. Basically anything but opening. You can still change it to. Another one is keeping your email as clean. A lot of engagement. Segmentation is based or partially based on opening. So you’re going to want to look at that. Maybe you have something where, you know, if somebody hasn’t opened an email or clicked an email in 90 days and they’ve been sent more than 10 emails.
That’s kind of a common way to clean up an email list. You may have to adjust that because you may start actually purging too many people out of your system. So some stuff to look at there. And I agree that using a combination, I’ve heard this a lot, instead of just saying open rate, trying a combination of how long they’ve been on your list, what other engagement signals they’ve had, and have they done things like visited the site, you really can combine this stuff and still get good results.
So I think that the most important part here is just to realize that, hey, this is coming. Is this guy falling? Nope. Email is still super effective and. What can you do now and now is to get ahead of it, look at, hey, are we highly dependent on open race? Do we have automations or flows that are solely relying on opening? Because if so, we probably need to adjust that. And just like mentioning the SMS and saying how we’ve never had open rates for that, if you’re not doing SMS that may be something that you want to start doing now, can be super profitable and a great way to augment your email sending.
So definitely a few things you can do there. So if you have questions about any of this or you’d like to talk about your e-commerce email marketing, how you can get that taken up several notches, you can find me at Oasisoptimization.com.