Apple’s email privacy protection feature puts the future of openness in serious danger. Let’s take a look at the future of open interest rates.
Ask any marketer what they use to measure email marketing results, and there is no doubt that the first statistic they will mention is Open rate.
This will be one of the first named metrics which makes perfect sense, as it is usually the first line on anyone’s email marketing analytics dashboard. As long as marketers have been sending emails to customers and prospects, they have been looking at open rates to provide indicators of success.
But with Publish Apple’s mail privacy protection Function, all of this will change.To gain insight into MPP and how it works, you need See our guide on the subject. But for this article, you only need to know this key effect:
MPP deprives marketers of the ability to track open rates, which means that the future of open rates and the way we measure email success is changing in real time.
But does this mean that the open rate as a meaningful indicator is really dead? Let’s look at the future of open interest rates and how we can think beyond them from now on.
So, is the open rate really dead?
Yes, almost! listen, ____ do you died? ! Conversation is usually an exaggerated, subconscious reaction to something. For years, people have been trying to say this to e-mail. But this time, it is very real. The email open rate as we know it is a thing of the past.
The following is a brief overview of how Apple’s email privacy protection feature works.
When users opt in to email privacy protection, they allow Apple to prefetch (or download) emails and email images to their devices. This happens regardless of whether the user decides to open and read the email. Email image pixels (indicating open and open rate) are included in this preload. This means that the email may be marked as open, even if the user does not open or read it.
Anyone who uses the native Apple Mail application to read emails, whether on an iPhone, iPad or Mac, can open these features. Although we don’t know what the option rate will be, you can expect it to be high. Initial investigations indicate that this may eventually affect 30-40% of your total subscribers, depending on your demographics.
As the 30-40% open rate data becomes completely unreliable, we think it can be said with certainty that with the adoption of this feature, the open rate will become an increasingly unreliable and unimportant indicator.
Why you don’t need an open rate to succeed
Although this may seem sudden and intense, the truth is that the open rate has never been as reliable as you might think. Although the open rate is designed to reflect human interaction with email, these numbers have been distorted in the past by anti-spam filters, autoresponders, and an increasing number of mailbox providers (open tracking has been disabled).
Therefore, although this is the largest and possibly the last nail in the coffin, the opening rate has never been a reliable and reliable indicator that you might think.
Even in the best of circumstances, the open rate as a yardstick is not a key indicator of success—it’s just a proxy we use along the way. Website visits, purchases, and income generated; Those ones It is the type of goal we are pursuing when creating email campaigns. In the post-MPP world, keep in mind that the entire customer experience is more important than ever, not just the open rate.
Creative way to track engagement without tracking open
Yes, open rate can give you insight into subscriber engagement, and you may be worried about how to track reader engagement. Don’t worry, there are many other more important metrics to track, and they can give you a better understanding of how and how often subscribers interact with your email.
Here are some of our thoughts on optimizing your email to increase engagement, in addition to opening:
Use surveys to understand the pulse of subscribers
It’s smart to include surveys in your emails for several reasons. First of all, surveys are a good way to invite email clicks, otherwise you may not get many clicks. Providing readers with different ways to click on your email will help you get a good understanding of who is involved and who is not.
Second, surveys are a good way to collect first-party data. You can ask subscribers about their content preferences and even collect information.Asking for data such as their location or the industry they work in can help you Audience segment Take it a step further and provide a more personalized email experience.
Chili Pie The idea of the survey was well executed in the recent newsletter. There is more content below, but the introduction starts with the survey to provide readers with a clickable element. It also gives Chili Piper the opportunity to learn more about its subscribers in a friendly and voluntary manner.
Encourage reply
Responses are also a trackable indicator that you can use to monitor email engagement. The cool thing about this is that the invitation response is more personalized. It shows that there is a person behind the creation of the email, not just a company.
With this in mind, you need to make sure that there is a system to handle responses. Asking to respond to a huge list immediately in an email can overwhelm anyone on the team.But ask for a reply Welcome emailFor example, it will automatically log out at different times and is unlikely to take up your inbox too much.
View user activity on your website
As we mentioned before, the goal of email campaigns is rarely just to get opens or clicks. Usually, what matters is what the user does after clicking on your email.
If you have access to Google Analytics or other tools on the website, use it to see what users do after clicking your email. How many people are buying products? How many people are arranging a presentation? What matters is their activity after clicking on the email, and these are the high-value insights you need to include in the report.
How do we adjust in Campaign Monitor
Since Apple announced email privacy protection, our product team has been adjusting our analytics dashboard to show you meaningful and accurate metrics.
In order to provide you with the most reliable measure of email engagement, we have replaced CTOR with Click-through rate On the “Campaigns” and “Overview” pages. You can still access CTOR from the Clicked column-see the example below.
Click the tooltip
We have added a handy reminder about these email metrics, you can refer to it. Click “Learn More” to access related resources in our Help Center.
Email indicator reminder
Remember, we are still in the early stages and we are still testing and researching the impact. Once we get more information, we will provide you with further updates.
wrap up
Yes, as a reliable email marketing indicator, the open rate seems to be over. In the short term, we need to reconsider some of the ways we report the success of email campaigns. But it also gives us the opportunity to think about which indicators are really important to our activities, and start optimizing and reporting on these content.
The open rate is dead, but email is by no means.
