It’s happening again.
Things are changing in the tech world, but who among us is surprised? If you’re a marketer, you’ve surely grown accustomed to that one pesky constant in marketing called change.
Ever since email marketing has been in play, email open rate has been one of the biggest metrics to track in order to measure an email campaign’s success. Being such a measurable, easy to comprehend statistic, email open rate has helped marketers to see how interesting their content is for their audience.
You may have heard about Apple’s newest update: Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). MPP is a feature that users can choose to opt-in to, that gives them more privacy and control over their data. Essentially, MPP affects current email marketing KPIs in two ways: number one, it obscures the user’s IP address, meaning that their location can’t be tracked. And number two, it disables open tracking, so if users opt-in, when they open emails it can’t be tracked.
This is the biggie. MPP works by allowing Apple to download or pre-fetch an email when it comes in, before a user has opened it themselves. It also won’t allow email senders to track with invisible pixels anymore. This means that open rate metrics are going to be pretty much completely unreliable moving forward. There is no way for a marketer to know which people actually opened the email, and which ones only show as opened because the user opted in for MPP.
It’s clear that Apple is working to provide the utmost privacy for its users since that’s what users are asking for. So if this is what the people want, this is what they get!
However, this may seem like a huge wrench in any marketer’s plans. On the surface, it is true that this update basically wipes out an entire KPI that marketers have relied on. It is forcing us to change the way we think, find new metrics, and strategize in a brand new way.
Annoying!
But actually, we see this as secretly a MASSIVE benefit to marketers.
Surprised? Don’t worry, we’ll show you why this extra work is going to make you flip a 180 too. And we’ll even take away some of the work for you.
Email marketing KPIs are important. We use them to measure the effectiveness of a given email campaign–that is the sole reason they exist.
But email open rates never really measured that.
Open rates show how many people opened the email, sure. But does a company really care how many people saw the email, or how many people were motivated to purchase from the email?
At the end of the day, if one email got a 10% open rate and 100 sales, that’s way more successful than an email that got a 30% open rate and 50 sales.
So, by ruining the accuracy of the email open rate metric, it only forces us to focus our sights on metrics that actually show the success of a campaign. This paradigm shift can help us realign our priorities when planning and then measuring an email campaign.
This again means a little more work initially–but a lot more potential for return once implemented!
We still need email marketing KPIs. It is crucial to find a way to measure results and adjust in order to keep improving our campaigns. Let’s go through some new email marketing KPIs to focus on in the future.
Instead of looking at email open rates, track how many clicks emails get. This will require conscious thought about what calls to action you’re including in an email, which is a great place to be focusing thought. This is also something that your CRM can easily track for you. Looking at number of clicks can give you a similar idea of results as open rates, it’s just more streamlined. More clicks probably means more people opened the email, but it also means that more people were motivated to action because of the content of the email.
Going a step further in the funnel, track conversions that come from emails. This is the end goal of most email campaigns anyways, right? Decide what exactly the main goal is that you want users to do with your email, and create all content around accomplishing that goal.
You can still get a gauge on how many people are interested and engaging in your content by looking at engagement from other channels. Gathering data from social media and other apps can be useful to understand how your engagement is. This metric is useful for understanding if your overall content is hitting and resonating with your target audience.
There has also been a recent trend towards providing more accessibility in emails. This helps attract and retain larger numbers of people if we as marketers make it easier for them to access and be included in our content.
Ways to do this include the increasing practice of ensuring there’s a dark mode in emails. Help make sure every person can view your emails easily. The easier it is for them, the more likely they are to engage with it and eventually be converted.
Additionally, tap into more personalized content. By finding ways to tailor your content to individuals on a more personal level, you can drive conversions. Getting users involved and feeling spoken to directly helps them want to participate more.
We’re happy to know that while things will always be changing in the digital and marketing sphere, we can still rely on good, solid KPIs to make informative decisions. And thinking more directly about our end goals when creating email campaigns and measuring KPIs will only help us improve.
People have long wondered if email marketing itself is dying. Let us be clear: email marketing is not dead.
It is very much alive and well, and we predict that it will continue to thrive in 2022 and beyond. It is an incredibly useful avenue in digital marketing with high potential–and focusing less on open rates will help it to be more fruitful in the future. It is simply email open rates whose funeral we will be attending.
So long, email marketing KPIs of the past.
