with Apple’s iOS 15 update Coming soon-maybe mid-September-now is the best time to check your email list and do some cleanup to ensure good performance, as Apple has introduced new privacy protections for users.
How will iOS 15 affect your email list?
If you, like most businesses, rely on email marketing to reach subscribers, potential customers, and customers to increase revenue and drive sales. You are also likely to use the email open rate as one of the indicators to determine the success of the email template and the health of the email list.
With Apple’s iOS 15 update, users can opt out of email tracking—including when and where they opened the email. Experts predict that most people will do this, as we saw in the iOS 14 update.With the last update, only 5% of U.S. users opted in Let apps like Facebook track their activities, which means that 95% of other users choose not to be tracked.
According to Litmus, Apple iPhone accounts for nearly 50% All traffic to the email client. This means that we can conservatively estimate that with the release and adoption of iOS 15, up to 50% of the public tracking of contacts will be compromised at some point. Soon, other top email clients such as Gmail and Outlook will follow suit.
With this major change, now is a good time to check your email list and use the reliable open rate data you have today to clean up your contacts. With BenchmarkONE, you can easily tag and subdivide contacts, so you can be sure to send you to highly engaged contacts who want to receive your message, and keep your domain reputation shining.
That’s it:
Identify inactive contacts
Sending to participating contacts is one of the best ways to keep your email list clean and healthy. High open rates and click rates, low bounce rates and unsubscribe rates, and minimal spam complaints all indicate to the ISP that your domain is healthy-helping you send more emails to your inbox.
Now is the ideal time to mark contacts who have sent multiple emails but never opened them. Then, you can ban these contacts in future emails, or even give them a status of “not participating” or “inactive” to completely prohibit them from email marketing.
You can easily identify these contacts in BenchmarkONE:
- From the “Contacts” tab, open your contact filter.
- Under Contact activity, select Email activity.
- Add a filter for contacts who send any email anytime or at a specific time of your choosing.
- Add a second filter for contacts who have not opened any email templates at any time or within the specified time range you selected for email sending.
- Add tags or update their contact status
Flag emails with high open rates and no clicks
There may be contacts in your list that will open every send, but don’t click. Maybe they read your monthly newsletter, or you usually send them content without a CTA. With unreliable open data in the future, you will never know whether they will participate.
Fortunately, it is easy to mark these contacts in BenchmarkONE so that you can continue to send emails to these contacts after the open email data is affected:
- From the “Contacts” tab, open your contact filter.
- Under Contact activity, select Email activity.
- Add filters for contacts who open any email template at any time (or time period of your choice).
- Add a second filter for contacts who have not clicked any email template at any time (or the time period you choose).
- Use Contact Score to further filter or sort your list. For example, you may only want to select users with a contact score of 5 or higher to indicate that instead of clicking on your emails, they open them and interact with you in other ways.
- Mark these contacts so that they will not be suppressed in future emails.
Ask the contact if they would continue to hear from you
If you haven’t sent your contact snippets to you in a while, or don’t have much email data, then choosing them to join the email communication is never a bad idea. If they no longer want to hear from you, check the email updates and clear call to action to unsubscribe from your email.
It is simple to automatically unsubscribe contacts from further email communications. You can ask the contact to unsubscribe by filling out the BenchmarkONE form, or simply click the link in the email to unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe via form
- Create a form and include at least one email address field on the form.
- Add form automation to unsubscribe contacts.
- Add a thank you page or edit the text of the thank you page to indicate that you have unsubscribed from further email communications from this contact.
- You can embed your form on your website, or simply link to the regular version of your form.
- Add a link to the form in the email template.
- When users click the link and complete the form, they will automatically unsubscribe.
Add a link with labeling rules
- Create an “unsubscribe” label.
- Under Tools> Rules, create an unsubscribe label rule, and automatically unsubscribe contacts when the label score = 1.
- In your email template, add a link. Ideally, you can link to the thank you page on your website to confirm that the contact has unsubscribed.
- When a contact clicks on the link in your email, they will automatically unsubscribe.
As marketers, we are accustomed to adapting to new strategies and technologies. Since the changes in iOS will have an impact on all email marketing platforms, a little preparation now can greatly help your business succeed.
