Wednesday, 11th August
It’s been a few weeks since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection announcement (check out our press release where we cover high level impacts). We’ve been taking this time to understand the impacts to the marketing community, how Emma can help you evolve and navigate these changes, and more importantly, the opportunity this presents to us all to think and engage differently.
Please join us for a special webinar event – Navigating an Evolving Privacy Environment. Join Emma and special industry guests as we discuss these changes and our tips for how you can evolve and thrive in this changing environment.
What we’ll cover:
Don’t have time to watch? Download our one-page overview and review the material yourself or share it with your teams.
We’re going to provide examples and some ideas on how to move forward in this dynamic environment. But first, before we do that, we want to give you more insight into the changes that are happening. For those of you more technically-minded marketers, you’ll appreciate some of the details we have to share. Let me turn the conversation over to Tom Janofsky, CM Group’s CTO, to tell you about what our teams have been doing with testing and research over the last few weeks. All yours, Tom.
Mail Privacy Protection overview
Tom: Thanks again for joining us today. I’m Tom Janofsky, CM Group’s CTO. Today I’d like to talk about the technical details behind the changes that Apple has introduced. At a high level, these Apple changes are consistent with broad trends we’ve seen in the email market over the last few years, including GDPR, Gmail image proxying, and open pixel filtering. The new Apple features we’re discussing today are called Apple Mail Privacy and iCloud Private Relay. Both of these will be opt-in features for iOS, iPad OS, and Mac OS users.
Icloud Private Relay will initially only be available to users on a paid iCloud account.
Based on the user experience we’ve seen in the beta, as well as the uptake rate for the recently released App Tracking Transparency feature, we believe that many users will opt into using these privacy features. Let’s go through specifically what the new features are, and then we’ll talk about specifically who it impacts, and what features you use today that may be impacted. When a user opts into Apple Mail Privacy, the native mail application will first load all images that are shown in an email when the email is downloaded to the device. This is not how it works today.
Which features will impact my subscribers and how?
Today, email images are only loaded when an email is open, including tracking pixels. This is how we determine open rates for an email. Those images are also going to be loaded through a proxy. So this means that the direct IP address of the subscriber is not gonna be available to the email service provider. Additionally, the user agent, which is what an email service provider uses to determine what kind of email client is being used to open the device, is no longer going to be specific enough to identify the device.
In addition, if the subscriber has opted into the iCloud Private Relay, that same functionality that hides the IP address from loading in an email is also going to be carried over to the Safari browser.
So what subscribers does this impact?
Any subscriber who is using the native Apple Mail application to read their email, be it on an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac, will be able to turn these features on. Subscribers who use those devices would instead read their mail through Gmail, or through an Outlook application, or on the respective web views, are not impacted.
Open rates will become less accurate.
Initial Surveys show that for consumer lists, this may be 30% to 40% of traffic, but the percentage of people who are affected will depend greatly on your specific audience. So what does this mean for working with an email product? First of all, it means that open rates will become less accurate. Since email service providers measure opens by counting number of times that an image is loaded, and the Apple Mail privacy change will download all images when an email is opened by a device, this means that open rates will likely go up, and also, there’ll be no way of knowing if a specific subscriber has opened an email or not.
Geo-targeting won’t be as dependable.
The changes regarding IP address masking will affect geo-targeting features. So if you’re currently building a list based on the geographic region that a subscriber is located in, that will become less accurate over time. Specifically how less accurate it becomes won’t be clear until the feature is available in wider use from Apple. Additional areas of impact include engagement and open targeting. So using engagement criteria that target opens or automation steps that target opens will be less accurate than before.
When will the changes go into effect?
Also, device and client segmentation, building lists that use devices or operating systems, will be less accurate than it used to be. In terms of timeline, Apple traditionally releases their updates in September. We will continue to monitor and test each new beta release. We believe that these changes will get widely released in Q3 of this year, and based on adoption rates from previous operating system upgrades, we expect that we will see those be quickly adopted across iOS, iPad OS, and Mac Mail.
Apple’s Email Privacy Changes’ Impact on Your Marketing Strategies & Measurements
Desta: Thanks, Tom. Let’s step back and take a look at how these changes may impact our marketing strategies and how we measure them. We’ll talk about specific best practices later in the presentation. Right now, let’s recap the key things you need to know about how these changes will shape your efforts in the near future. So, the three key things to know are:
1.Allow yourself more time for KPI measurement.
Reviews, referrals, events and more, drip series and campaigns can influence user behavior just by being in a customer’s inbox. Use lengthier time windows to measure success.
2.Be direct and simply ask the consumer for the data you need.
Collect data directly from the consumer when it’s important for segmentation or targeting. Ask, don’t infer, about language, location, time zone, and device preferences. Previously used inference methods are becoming increasingly less reliable.
3.The more info, the better.
Consider collecting additional personal identifiers, phone numbers, social handles, to help bridge gaps in conversion. Mast identifiers and features such as Hide My Email could make it harder to use a lone identifier as a single source of truth.
Where do we go from here?
With these thoughts in mind, later today you’ll hear more about solution best practices and recommendations in response to the evolving conditions that we live in. We’ll talk about updating your landing pages, preference setters, and subscription forms to collect and form customer segments. You’ll also get guidance on how to leverage our platforms to identify success metrics beyond opens. We’ll also talk to two industry experts about their vision on how privacy is shifting the marketing landscape. This isn’t the first technological change affecting digital marketing, and we know it won’t be the last.
We’ll talk with our guests on how to prepare for changes, and what to do to manage expectations for your stakeholders. So, where do we go from here? There’s several areas that we can focus on for the future. First, going beyond opens and click-through rates. Opens and click-through rates were, and remain, proxies to larger success metrics, such as revenue or page views. Clicks will remain a relevant metric for engagement, but they don’t need to be the only success metric that you’re following.
Email marketers often refer to single mass sends, what we used to call batch-and-blasts, as campaigns. The irony is that these sends are themselves just a moment in a series of customer experiences. The aggregate of those experiences is what matters. A campaign is a series of actions leading toward a goal, or multiple goals. It’s time to talk about those goals. What are they, and what do they mean to you? As we look forward at our roadmap in the coming months, know that our goals are centered around knowing about your business goals. We’ll also be focused on making reporting on key metrics easier for you, providing you with a one-stop shop for your success metrics across your digital channels, and making the transfer of data between your systems and our systems seamless, and as real time as possible.
Leveraging metadata
Open rate and click-to-open rate are metadata points about consumer behavior, but they are rarely the true business goal of email campaigns. A consumer’s loyalty to a product or a brand persists, even if they don’t visit it, consume it, or use it every single day. Deriving the type of phone or browser from a web call, from a device to server, mapping an IP address to a city or a region, hinging the definition of success on long-form newsletter because it was opened, but for an often indeterminate length of time, these are examples of metadata points.
Digital marketing has always relied on processing metadata about consumers to position itself as a more attractive mechanism for selling products and delivering information. Any instance to give precise understanding of ROI appeals to executives. Media has long dealt with imperfections in measurement. Ratings books, print circulation numbers, even subscription counts, these were traditionally accepted measures of scale and success, but they never correlated to a precise number of eyes and ears consuming the content. It was and remains, at best, an estimate.
Commerce marketers benefit from straightforward attribution models thanks to cookies and URL parameters. Purchases and revenue are often easy to collect and are traced back to ad hoc campaign sends. However, affiliate marketers know the difficulty in tracing things back to the right source every time. Revenue and purchase count are easy to calculate, but not every commerce company sees those values as the same, nor are they always the measure of success other stakeholders are evaluating.
Implicit attribution
The explicit shift to implicit attribution. Across all verticals, digital marketers need to look and start taking credit for more consumer activity. We have existed far too long in an explicit attribution model when peers and other marketing channels display direct mail events are able to take credit through more implicit and less conservative attribution models. Here’s what’s going to be different, though. If you’re wondering, “Well, what’s the catch in all of this,” digital marketing and digital marketers will undergo a shift to be even more comfortable with implicit attribution models for measuring success.
Maybe a product review happens within seven days of receiving a post-purchase automation series. Let’s take credit for that. If a user clicks on a smiley face or a thumbs up in your long-form, self-contained newsletter at least once a week, take credit for it. Own that success and create a new baseline for active engagement. When a user attends an in-store or on-site event or webinar, attribute that fact to the most recent automation or mass send as a met goal. What we owe stakeholders and executives is an understanding that we, and they, were already comfortable with implicit models of attribution in digital marketing. We can expand that universe to report, attribute, and segment on so much more than email opens and clicks.
Email still works
So, email still works. And remember, when it comes to building loyalty, end users don’t think of their interactions with your brand as a campaign or a statistic. Consumers rely on email as a trusted, direct medium that delivers information, news, discounts, shopping enticement, all in a mailbox that also houses critical bills, medical alerts, and messages from loved ones. A study in 2020 showed that email engagement was up 200% since the pandemic began, at a time when things were pretty uncertain.
That’s a great indicator of confidence in a medium that can queue app downloads, website logins, product reviews, travel plans, donations, event registrations, and so much more, all from a tap or a click in the palm of your hand. As our solutions continue to evolve to better tie push notifications, SMS, chat apps, and so much more to the overall workflow, we know email remains a tried and true method of communication. Let’s pause for a moment before we transition to our fireside chat.
Fireside Chat
So, thank you, everyone, again for your time today, and welcome to our fireside chat. Joining us now are two industry veterans who work closely with commerce and publishing brands across the world. They’re also experts in email marketing and they’ve gotten their background using both our tools at CM Group as well as others. So, today I wanna actually welcome Monica and Allison to join me as part of our fireside chat. So, Monica and Allison, if you wanna go ahead and unmute yourselves, and hopefully that then will give me the option to start by having you both introduce yourselves. Allison, maybe you can give us a little bit about your background to get started.
Allison: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me here today. So, my name is Allison Mezzafonte. My background is in media and publishing. I’ve spent my career working at a variety of media companies and publishers, some digital, some print, some combination of the two. Originally started my career on the editorial side of the house and worked my way over to general management where I had been sitting for the last eight or so years until I left and went out on my own. And so, I work now as an advisor to CM Group and I get to participate in lots of great events like this one. And because my background is very much in media and publishing and I’ve been a customer twice now of Sailthru, I have this unique position where I get to sort of be the voice of the customer within the walls of the company, which is really fun. I kind of get to wear both hats, having been on the other side of the table where you all sit. So, I’m really happy to be here and excited for our conversation. And thanks again, Desta.
Desta: Absolutely. And we’re excited to have you here and just hear a different perspective from somebody who’s, kind of, outside the walls and understands what happens day-to-day at one of our customers. So, Monica, maybe you can introduce yourself for us.
Monica: Of course. Hi, everyone. My name is Monica Deretich, and similar to Allison, I also sit outside of the walls and was a previous customer of Sailthru. I spent my career mostly entirely in retail embedded in e-commerce. I’ve worked for a subscription business, D2C, and now consult with retailers ranging from startup to enterprise and even brick and mortar. So, I’m excited to be here and similar to Allison. I also provide the lens of a retail marketer and what’s important to retailers and the changing dynamics that I’m excited to talk about today. And I bring that to CM Group so that they can best serve their customers.
Desta: Well, I appreciate having you here as well. And, you know, we’ve been talking so far today really about the changes that Apple is bringing which is nothing new. Privacy continues to evolve, and so we’ve put some questions together that we really think our customers…you know, we’ve heard a lot from them, asked them to give us feedback on questions they’re having. But I think getting the two of you to, kind of, give your lens on some things, you know, from sitting in their shoes will be really helpful. So, let’s go ahead and get started. First question is really how do I get my executive team to understand this change? And, you know, we remember that everyone else in the industry is dealing with the same issue. You know, privacy is changing for everyone. So, love maybe, Allison, if you could start us off with that.
Allison: Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think if there’s one thing that we’ve seen across the media and publishing industry is that we’re constantly having to adapt to industry changes. And so, I wish I could say that this is something new, it’s not. But I do think that we’re seeing generally, like, sort of two reactions, right? Either it’s sort of like the world is ending, sky is falling, what are we going to do about this? And then I think there are other companies where they’re just feeling less urgency and they’re sort of a little bit of like, well, what changes are coming up? And I think the thing that’s important to remember is that we’ve dealt with changes of this magnitude in the past, and we’ve always gotten through it, right? It’s forced us to adapt and be more efficient and strategic. And, you know, we’ve dealt with GDPR and CCPA and, you know, years ago, dealing with Facebook and Google and their algorithm and policy updates. You know, media companies have gotten dinged left and right for things like bad UX or bad ad experiences or clickbait headlines, and it’s forced us to adapt and I always think it’s, sort of, made us better for it.
And so, I like to think of it as a great opportunity for the industry to improve, to really work on list maintenance and really our email strategy. You know, there’s one stat that I recently came across that said that 83% of consumers are willing to share their data if it creates a more personalized experience. And so, I think that’s important to keep in mind. I think we have to figure out how we’re going to strike a balance here. Not going too far in one direction and making sure that we’re able to create great experiences for customers while still, you know, playing nice with Apple and managing these privacy changes.
Desta: Absolutely makes sense. Maybe, Monica, we can get your take on it.
Monica: Absolutely. So, on the retail side, I think we’ve been dinged in different ways. We’ve all had a very interesting and unprecedented holiday season and I can’t believe it’s August and we’re going into it. So, I think the nature of retail is that it’s typically responsive to, you know, immediate performance. So, a little bit of blinders and catching breath is sort of the sentiment I’ve gathered from my peers. And I think with this new update coming and impacting another or creating another unprecedented holiday season for retail, I think it’s almost the approach I would take is the, you know, repetition, start to continue to bring this up. And if I can give a tip to those listening in today, you know, bring this up in your recurring meetings and communications with your, you know, internal cross-departmental partners.
This is a big milestone, be proactive, start to understand and view your data and see how much of, you know, your email list is using an Apple device, understand the open rates and the differences. This is gonna help shape the conversation and educate internally to your executive team. And if I could make a suggestion in addition to understanding, you know, the current metrics, you know, start building and bubbling up at the high level, plan to pivot and, sort of, demonstrate the agility that’s probably already been demonstrated in the last year because of all the changes and pivots needed as a result of last year.
Desta: Yeah. It’s definitely been 18, 20 months to remember, or not remember, I guess, depending on how you look at it. And I know it’s changed the world here, and obviously, as we look at privacy, people have become, kind of, more aware, I think, of things. And so, Allison, you touched on it a little bit but, you know, as we look at the past, there’s some moments where digital marketing has encountered some changes and disruptive to the industry. And so, maybe, Monica, maybe you start us off on this one. You can tell us a little bit more about, kind of, how you see those impacting what we do today and how did we deal with it in the past? How do we take it forward?
Monica: Yeah. So, Allison touched on GDPR and CASL, and I think, you know, in my experience, those are the biggest disruptors in email. So, I do think that we have gained so much in the last year, just a positive spin as marketers we’ve become so agile and flexible to things like supply chain issues, shipping delays, inventory challenges on the retail side. We’ve been able to be really flexible and that’s the biggest learning. While we may not have all the answers and, you know, we’re sort of planning for the unpredictable, that is our biggest strength that we’ve basically gained in the last year. And I think, I know we may be talking about these specific tactics, but GDPR and CASL were the biggest things and we’ve gotten through that, right? It wasn’t easy, it had an impact. We’ve navigated, you know, marketing is all about iteration and optimization. You have to start somewhere and then you have to test, right? It’s not a check the box and move on. It’s continue to work on and optimize.
Allison: Yeah. And I would add to that, you know, GDPR, CCPA, those were definitely challenges that we had to face as an industry. But even thinking back before that, you know, before Facebook and social channels were what they are now, you know, we were able to use them as marketing channels where you didn’t have to pay to play, where you could really control and own your own reach with your audience and control the message that you distributed to them. And then, of course, that all changed, and when it changed, it was such an abrupt, sort of, slap in the face where, you know, businesses were building their businesses. Their livelihoods depended on their ability to reach these people who were engaging with them on these channels and then Facebook and otherwise decided to change that.
But I think the takeaway is that there’s always going to be these types of pressures. And it’s like Monica said, we’re always being forced to adapt. I think the reality is, in my opinion, is that as an industry, the sooner that we iterate and adapt, the better off we’re all going to be, specifically around things like changing KPIs. You know, if we all get on board with it on the buy-side and the sell-side, I think, the sooner we can, kind of, move forward collectively.
Monica: I agree 100%. I instantly thought, accept the fate let’s just move forward.
Desta: I was gonna say, I agree too. Change is inevitable. I mean, that’s what we live and breathe, that’s life. And so, how do we adapt to it and how do we become smarter and learn from it in order to apply it forward? So, slightly different question, kind of, related, is it still wise to focus on dormant and disengaged audiences? I know, you know, over the last, you know, many months of the pandemic there was a lot of focus and there are risks with deliverability in terms of domain reputation, etc. So, we’d like your take on that.
Allison: I can jump in on that. So, I mean, my opinion is it’s probably not the best place to put your resources. I mean, I think we’ve seen, you know, the post-COVID slump, there was a ton of engagement during peak 2020. We’ve seen a lot of that drop-off. There’s been challenges across the board at all different types of media companies, figuring out how to re-engage these users. It’s not to say it’s not possible, but my personal opinion and this might swing a little bit too far in one direction but, you know, my sense is, like, let’s focus where we have an audience that is engaged, try to build out that profile and maximize that audience. You know, I think if ever there’s a good time for us to be doing hygiene checks of our lists and get our audience to a good place, it’s now. So, rather than focusing on re-engaging the people who’ve been dormant, I would think more about how can we build upon the audience that’s been incredibly engaged.
Desta: It makes sense. And maybe, Monica, your take on the retail side?
Monica: Well, it actually matches perfectly to what Allison said. So, I echo that and not focus on dormant or disengaged audiences. Maybe that’s a strategy for a different channel but focus on retention before they become disengaged. And, you know, last year, many retailers saw a trim in budget and headcount. So, I typically guide my clients to focus on high intent and high-value users and customers to generate the most results for all of their efforts.
Desta: It makes sense. You know, if we look at this, I’ll say this new world with privacy, you know, does it still make sense to do A/B testing of subject lines, or is that really now irrelevant based on, kind of, the information that we have available to us? And maybe Allison, you can kick us off with that.
Allison: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s always going to be learnings that we can gather, even if they’re not explicit. I think the bigger question is like, how quickly will the technology adapt to keep up? Because really what this means is that KPIs are changing, right, which we all know, and the metrics that we once used to inform A/B testing, right, so opens, for example, are no longer an option for us. So, what metrics are we going to be using to trigger these signals? And I think that’s a question for the technology partners that we all work with that, yes, it will continue to evolve. I don’t think we’re going to have the answer all said and done by September when these updates are due to happen. But I do think it’s very important to be having these conversations with your technology partners to understand what they’re thinking about and how they’re planning to adapt knowing that metrics and the means of trigger are going to change.
Monica: And I agree. So, you should absolutely continue your work subject line testing as a subject line is still a lover for a marketer to engage, you know, a subscriber or a customer. So if I had run A/B winter tests solely on open rate, I probably would have put out some losers, to be honest. A subject line test should be looking at yes, open rate to see the performance of the subject line, but all the way through to click, to conversion, and revenue, right? So, there are so many metrics to do it. You know, obviously, it pushes it down the funnel and focus on click, but I think it’s important to follow the performance on your top winning metrics. So, if it’s a first-time conversion rate on retest or RPM or revenue for your existing customers, run your subject line tests, it’s still a lover for marketers, and look at a primary KPI. Also, I wouldn’t discount the data that is still available after this Apple privacy update. It’s still a solid proxy for the rest of your audience and how they behave, and it’s still a viable way to understand what your customers want to see or what they’re reacting to.
Desta: It makes sense that I think, you know, as part of it from, you know, talking on the product side for the solutions you used out there, we’ve got to do a better job in helping to service the metrics that customers need to go beyond where they are with, kind of, opens and clicks today and get to whatever is meaningful for their business. And so, I think we will continue to build off of that. You know, I guess a more general question and, you know, I wear my hat as a mom of also teenage girls who do a lot of things retail online, they get a lot of stuff, but just will this change consumer behavior? You know, how do we think that will impact a consumer? Very differently, I think, on the media side than the retail side, but how do we expect this to really change what consumers are doing?
Allison: Yeah. I mean, I go back to the stat that I threw out earlier that like 83% of people are willing to hand all over their data if it means a better, more personalized experience. And so, you know, I don’t imagine that this is going to change consumer behavior directly, but I do worry about the impact it’s going to have on consumer experiences with our brands, right? So, there’s a reason that personalization exists, of course, right? And there’s a reason that we collect data and build segments and try to create profiles of our audience because the more we know about them, the better experience that we can serve them. And, you know, like I said earlier, like, I hope the pendulum isn’t swinging too far in the other direction where it makes this type of personalization obsolete and leaves consumers with, you know, generic email experiences because that, you know, we know could affect their relationship with our brands and that’s obviously not what we’re going for here. So, that’s my concern with the update.
Desta: And I’ll say just as a consumer, that isn’t what I want either, because that doesn’t work for, you know, what I want in an experience. And so, Monica would love your take on the retail side.
Monica: Sure. So, I put my consumer hat on and I think about going onto an Instagram and seeing a pop-up that says, you know, show my email, hide my email. It’s always hide my email, and it’s default, I’m a marketer, so that pains me to say but, you know, it’s kind of autopilot mode. So, I don’t think that the consumer’s going to be aware of what impacts it’ll have on the marketing and messaging that we see as a result. So, I don’t think that their consumer behavior is going to change as a direct result of these Apple updates. But similar to what Allison said down the line, it’s going to impact the relevancy of what we put in front of our consumers. I think that as marketers, we need to, you know, sort of shift based on the decisions we can make and what we are able to collect. It may not be a return to analog and “Mad Men” advertising, but it’s gonna be a balance and I think it puts more, I won’t say pressure, but more of a focus on brand authenticity and storytelling.
And that’s really something I know that, you know, on the media side analysis world, the storytelling, that is the product, right? And on the retail side, email has been such a revenue-generating channel that I think it’s evolving to be a part of a broader customer experience across many channels and the metrics of success, more focused on engagement. So, it’s really shifting so many things that we have to take into consideration as far as, like, how are we building relationships with the consumer? And then it’ll tell us and show up, hopefully in immediate KPI and metrics, but ultimately in the customer lifetime value.
Desta: So, we’ve touched on metrics a few times. I guess, you know, if we dig into that a little bit more, what are other metrics that you think people can use as a new baseline as we go beyond, kind of, opens and clicks and how do we measure that? So, Allison, why don’t we go back to you?
Allison: Yeah. You know, it’s hard to say specifically what those metrics are going to be. There are, of course, a number of them. I think we all know what they are. In my mind, I think that the opportunity here is, like, we need to focus, not that we haven’t been focusing on this but, like, increased focus on how to optimize for a customer experience, right? Like, that’s ultimately the direction that we should be heading in because if we have an optimal user experience, theoretically, all else should follow. And I think that shifts the focus a little bit, right? It’s not just about opens, it’s about other actions that might be further down the funnel but might actually be more meaningful or, you know, be greater indicators of brand affinity or likelihood to convert. You know, I think, I mean, I’ve seen this so many times within the industry and the industry’s relationship with outside platforms. I mean, we become dependent on a certain way of doing things or measuring things. And then something like this happens where we’re forced to change and it feels sort of like, you know, the world might end, but then actually we, kind of, move past it and then we just find new ways of operating.
And so, I think, you know, some of the other metrics that we might look at, you know, it could be recency of sign-up, purchase in Monica’s case, in some cases on the media side as well, onsite behavior and email engagement. I mean, I think that there’s plenty of data that will still exist. It’s about really changing the…it’s like a paradigm shift within the industry to get everybody, both the media side and the advertising side, to really shift the way that they view their KPIs.
Monica: Agreed. We’re not getting any new metrics out of this. We’re losing a little bit, but, you know, at the end of the day, there are top-line KPIs that we hold ourselves to in regards to goals and budgets in a retail organization that are not. So, you know, on the positive side of things, I think it’s going to force us to be a little bit more creative on how we gauge performance. And it may involve some more qualitative ways of looking at how consumers are engaging with the brand. We’re spoiled.
Desta: We can continue that way. We just have to figure out what to be spoiled about, I think. And I think, you know, if we look at, you know, a specific example, like if, you know, I have a newsletter, it’s self-contained, like, what options do I have?
Monica: Yeah. I think, you know, I’ll take this one. And I honestly think this may be the fun part of all of this as a marketer to be creative. I think there are tools out there that may have been sort of nice-to-haves that may be a nice layer in regards to our email, like, toolkit, something like live clicker for example. There are a lot of tactics that have been used in your own social programs, like Instagram stories around, like, live polls. That’s a great way to get engagement. You’re getting the user to click. That can be easily translated into an email and not only that to generate the click, but to then pull back into your ESP and leverage for segmentation purposes and really continue to collect that, you know, zero party first-party data to build those relevant messages. And I think that is a really cool thing that could come out of it that we could see changing email campaigns.
Allison: Yeah, I would add this is one of the first things that came to mind for me because particularly in the media space, we’ve seen such success with these types of self-contained newsletters where consumers are increasingly becoming accustomed to consuming their content in that way, where they don’t expect having to click to go back to a website to read the full story. The full story is in the email. I don’t anticipate that that’s going to go away. I mean, I think sort of like we were saying earlier, you know, if you do right by the consumer and you provide a good experience and you meet their needs, I like to believe…hopefully not naively, but I like to believe that all else follows and falls into place.
And so, again, like, I think it’s a little bit of, I don’t wanna say it’s smoke and mirrors but, like, we shouldn’t be changing our email strategies and changing what we deliver to our consumers because the KPIs don’t line up or don’t make sense, or we can’t report back to an advertiser about an open rate. So, I think it’s important to, sort of, keep our focus on that, I know that that’s easier said than done. But again, it’s like I said before, it’s like the sooner that the industry as a whole adapts, both on the buy-side and the sell-side, the sooner we can, kind of, move past this and get back to just focusing on creating great email experiences.
Desta: I think well summarized there. And unfortunately, that’s all the time we have today before we dive in deeper to each of our products. I wanna thank both of you for joining us today. It’s been very insightful just to hear, kind of, your perspectives coming out of industry. And we really look forward to having you back on some future conversations where we’ll share. As a note to everyone, these entire sessions will be sent out in recording with a transcript within the next week. And so, you’ll have an opportunity if you wanna go back and listen to something, think something that you thought you missed, to do that.
And so, we’re not quite done yet, we’re going to pause for five minutes now and give everyone a chance to take a short break. And after that, we’ll be bringing back specific members of our product team who are gonna walk you through best practices and advice for continuing to make the best use of the platform as these changes evolve, as well as answer your specific questions that you submitted. And so, we look forward to that, so stay tuned and we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you.
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Cian: Hi, everyone. Great to have you all here. Hope you enjoyed that really interesting discussion there with Monica and Allison. Great to hear from them. My name is Cian, I’m the director of product here at Emma. I’m joined today by Zach. Zach is a product manager here on the team and knows the Emma platform inside out. As the product team at Emma, we look at potential areas for improvement in the Emma product. We work closely with customers like all of you on this call and really our role is to ensure we’re building features that help our customers the most. So, today we’re gonna focus on three areas. Zach’s gonna give you some guiding tips on how to optimize really your use of Emma to drive results during these, kind of, changing times and privacy shifts.
I’ll then provide a little bit of an overview on some of the upcoming features that we’re working on, things that will help you achieve your goals with Emma now and also going forward. And then maybe the most important part for some, we’ll spend some time on the Q&A questions. I know some of you have submitted questions beforehand and also feel free to reach out in the chat as we go, and we’ll address your top questions we have about the Apple changes and how they might impact your use of Emma.
So, before we begin, I just wanted to recap four, kind of, key points around these changes. The first is that open rates have been very, very popular, but they’re mostly vanity metrics. Before the Apple changes, there were already issues at open rates that many of you might be familiar with for some other email clients and other providers. So, really it’s time to, kind of, move beyond open rates. We wanna focus more on identifying what meaningful engagement and meaningful conversion is and how you can attribute behavior that you see from your users back to your marketing. And we’ll talk a little bit about this in more detail later on, which is gonna hit that point [inaudible 00:50:31].
Also, it’s important to consider what information is critical for you to have for things like segmentation and targeting. We wanna ensure that you’re gathering this information in a very reliable way. Explicitly asking your subscribers is generally the best approach to this. Figures like device info are fine, it’s kind of guiding high-level metrics, but if it’s really critical for you in terms of how you’re speaking to your subscribers or how you’re segmenting your audience, it’s important to get that from a reliable source as possible. And we’ll talk a little bit more about some options there also.
And on a kind of similar note, there’s an ever-increasing number of factors that are going to impact metadata collection. So, if the information is really key, don’t rely on, sort of, conferred metadata, things like location, for example, or device, as we just mentioned there. Make sure you have a really reliable source of information for that. And generally, again, the best way to do that is to ask people if you really wanna know from them, ask them directly. And the fourth point here is you may have industry-specific attributes that are really helpful to your marketing, and it’s good to try and pull them in. So, think about what is unique to your audience and what you want to collect to help, kind of, connect the dots. And think about that overall conversion and your marketing campaign at a higher level like that. And with those four said, I’m gonna hand you over to Zach. Zach’s gonna talk a little bit about Emma-specific recommendations for optimizing your strategy today.
Zach: All right. Yeah. So, we’re gonna go down a layer. We’ll look at a few different, product features within Emma and how we can, kind of, tweak those and make sure that we’re getting meaningful results. So, first, we’ll start with segmentation and targeting. And we’ll see a common theme here where we’re just kind of, again, going a layer deeper with the way we track things, the way we’re, kind of, narrowing down. In this case, we are suggesting that we’re using clicks instead of opens. We’ll see this a little bit and list health as well. But if you can use some kind of combination of both clicked and received, you start to paint a picture of engaged customers. So, if you’re using segmentation, and we typically suggest that you do just to get a better look at your customers that are actually opening emails or clicking that kind of thing, this is the way to do it for sure. Integrations and our EPI endpoints can definitely help with this. You get a little bit more leverage and it opens up options to what, kind of, information you’re creating if you’re custom creating segments and then the different parameters you’re putting in place.
Yeah. So, we’ll talk about list health just a little bit here. So, in the past, we’ve kind of relied a little bit on opens just to see, you know, who’s engaged. I think this is a good forcing function in that we’ll be able to look at a true engagement and dig a little bit deeper and see who’s actually opening the email and clicking, which is ultimately what we wanna do really in any kind of industry type here. So, when we’re talking about list health, we’re talking about, you know, which one of my customers have engaged, how long has it been since they’ve been engaged? Who do we wanna re-engage? And segmenting as a combination with that. So, when you’re thinking about list health, definitely you think through clicks and that combination of have received.
All right, so we’ll jump over to automation and intelligence. These are a little bit more of dynamic tools features and data-driven pieces here. So, A/B testing, definitely a best practice across the industry. You’re essentially testing two different types of emails. In the past, you know, we’ve had multiple options here and I think this is one of the biggest features that benefits from the deeper metrics and the more meaningful, more intentional looks here. So, we have options in place for highest click rate. I would say if you’re generally trying to look for engagement in a mailing or a mailing design, this is the way to go. There’s also the most clicks on a link in each mailing. So, you have a mailing that is singular in focus and you have a one call to action, you really have, like, one objective around this campaign send, it might be worth, you know, having two different emails with the same call to action and say, you know, for just trying to do this one thing, how many people are clicking on this one link in a given mailing? And then, of course, you can choose your winner based on that.
So, we’ll look at journey triggers or automation triggers here. Again, another best practice, remains dynamic, you know, doing the work upfront here really, kind of, takes the long-term work off of you where you can, kind of, create a series, have an objective in mind and, and do some conditional pieces here. So, there’s a condition for if a customer has clicked on anything in your mailing, do you continue to send it to them, or do you not, or do you send something to either condition? So, the big focus here again is, did they click a link in your mailing, getting a better idea of engagement? I think all the way through, if you were to look at this, I think clicks is the way to go. I would think through, kind of, a big picture lens on your automation and say, what am I ultimately trying to get to? So, is there an endpoint to your automation flow? Are you hoping for some kind of signup or conversion? Is there an ultimate call to action to this series of automations? So, almost zooming out looking at your automation through, kind of, a bigger picture lens and using those deeper engagement metrics.
All right. And we’ll look at analytics and measurement here. So, looking at success metrics, this is probably one of the biggest things that our minds go to as marketers when we’re talking about success metrics and iOS privacy. So, not just open rates, but click to open rates can be kind of skewed based on the changes that are coming. So, again, we’re looking at focusing in on click rate here specifically. We wanted to call out click to open rate specifically because it is affected by open rates. And click rate ends up being a more focused, meaningful metric when you’re looking at a response like this.
And then inferred info. So, Cian talked a little bit about this upfront. This is where we get a little bit more creative. We get to think about what kind of data our customers have and what is important to us as marketers specifically. So, thinking about, you know, what key information can I leverage from my customers that I can ask for upfront, knowing that, you know, things like device type or region is gonna be in your hands going forward? So, you’ll have a little bit more control over that. And when we’re using the information that we store and that we’ve collected explicitly upfront, it’s a much better experience for both parties. The other thing I’ll say about this is, just thinking about the, kind of, inferred info that you lean on now, and then thinking about what you have available to you with a CRM or external data sources is a good consideration here. All right. And I’ll pass it back over to Cian just for our future product features, looking ahead.
Cian: Thanks, Zach. And some super good practical steps to take there. So, yeah, I’m gonna look ahead at some of the items that our team is working on, really focused at kind of zooming in a little bit on the pieces that might impact around these changes. So, the first off is, for HQ plan users in particular, we have an exciting update coming for the dashboard pretty soon. So, if you’re the HQ user who’s in here, some users daily, this will be kind of a landing point. We’re bringing a lot of account performance stats right into that initial dashboard view. So, we focus on campaign success and engagement and overall audience growth and performance metrics. And it’s important to call out here that the figures we’ve used are not impacted by the changes that are coming from Apple.
We’ve, kind of, taken into account things like clicks and user growth [inaudible 00:59:24] and these kind of pieces to really give an overview of that performance and metrics and moved away…it’s kind of one of the first features that we kind of started to move away a little bit from pushing the open rates and some of those pieces for the reasons we’ve talked about are not as good as a figure. We’ve also got a, you know, much-improved mailing activity view that you can see on the bottom half of this as well, and we’ll be sharing a lot more detail on this. But all of this would be live for HQ accounts very soon and we’ll be rolling out to you in the near future.
The other piece is just to talk a little bit about Emma is mailing scores. So, many of you would be familiar with the Emma mailings or if you’ve sent a campaign with us you’ve probably seen the score afterwards. So, mailing scores factor in many aspects of a performance. We look at things like shares, opt-outs, click rates. And we do currently include open rates in that as well. So, we are monitoring the potential impact that the changes that we’ve discussed today will have on that score, and our team will, kind of, make adjustments there over time if needed. Currently, we don’t know what extent will be required there, but our goal is to ensure that this remains really meaningful and, kind of, relevant score for you and something that you can genuinely refer to daily. So, we’re watching this really closely. We don’t have changes that are planned just yet, but it’s something that we’re going to monitor.
We also spoke a little bit about today, Zach mentioned trying to drive a more meaningful engaging with your emails, kind of beyond opens, asking people about information that’s important to you, trying to drive that engagement in those clicks with your email. So, we’ve been hard at work for a while now on building an entirely new and massively improved editor experience. This really brings a lot of that formatting and sort of features that we’re familiar with from our existing editor, but tons of improvements in terms of formatting options and new content types that we’re bringing in there. So, really this is designed to make it easier for you to build more engaging emails for your campaigns, and really engage with your audience, and connect, you know, in a better way with them. So, we have some Pro and Plus customers that are testing this right now, we’ll be opening that up to HQ customers and the wider customer base really soon. So, excited to get that in front of you but yes, the big push for us at the moment is on continuing to improve the tools that we give you to drive that engagement as well.
And finally, a little bit on integrations. So, you know, Zach touched on this as well a little bit, but often the information we’re gonna need is scattered across lots of other tools. You know, you might have revenue numbers in Salesforce, you might have, kind of, membership data or something in Mindbody. Depending on your business and the tools that you use, you know, surrounding Emma, there might be information that’s really valuable for segmentation or for targetting, or for, kind of, measuring that kind of definition of success that doesn’t sit just purely within Emma. So, bringing that information that’s in those other tools into Emma can really help drive more meaningful targeting or segmentation or personalization and content within your emails, and definitely something that we’re working on ways to make easier and more valuable for you.
We are currently doing a lot of improvements to existing integrations like Mindbody, ClubReady, some of the integrations you might use right now. And we’re also building some completely new integrations. So, we’ve got discovery underway with partners for brand new integrations that many of you will have asked for in the past that we’re pushing. So, this is a really big investment area for us at the moment. All the integrations that are listed on this slide here are available right now and we’ve a lot of customers on those, but we’ve also got tons more. There’s an integrations directory on the Emma marketing side and also in the product itself. You can find lists of the different integrations in the tools you use. If there’s ever ones that we don’t have that you want, always let us know, we’re constantly looking for integration areas to improve on, but keep in mind that you might have the information that would be super helpful in the segmentation and the, kind of, things you want to do going forward that might be in those tools and we’ve, kind of, gott ways to connect that right now.
Great. So, now maybe the most important piece, your questions. We’re gonna start the section with some of the most common questions we saw submitted before the session. Zach’s gonna, kind of, go through some of the questions then afterwards that has come through from live chat, and also that you’ve submitted beforehand. But I guess before we kick into the live questions, we’re gonna just, kind of, go through some of the common ones we saw submitted ahead of time there.
So, the first one here that we get pretty frequently when we open these questions up was will open rates go up or they will go down? So, the short recap on this is open rates will go up. So, most Apple users will register an open regardless of whether or not they actually opened the email. That’s because as it says here at Apple mail pre-fetches the images and in pre-fetching them it averages it as an open. So, your open rates for Apple users will go. Will this affect my use of onsite analytics or tracking? No. Our testing suggested this won’t be impacted. Features like Google analytics, if you’re using that right now, tracking for that should work just as expected. Our testing has shown that, like, there’s no removal of query string parameters or anything like that. So, we have no evidence to suggest that onsite analytics tracking or other kinds of, like, analytics tracking for that you might be using to connect your marketing through to later actions will be impacted by this. So, good news on that front so far.
Will this interrupt click tracking? No. Clicks should still be tracked accurately and as they happen. So, one thing we’re noting with the opens, as we’ve discussed earlier on, the open rates will be going up and also the open times will be inaccurate as part of that because, you know, they will be both opened by Apple. So, this is not the case in clicks. In all the testing and just, kind of, working through this, click tracking works as expected, and also click tracking at the correct time works. So, we know, like, accurate click numbers and also accurate click times. So, that should all be totally as it works today. We’ve seen no impact on that. Now, we’re recommending an increased use in click tracking, as Zach mentioned earlier on, in quite a few different areas of the product where we’re moving more towards clicks as a measurement and, kind of, something to leverage and to, kind of, move away from opens a little bit. And we’re confident that that should work fine and it’s a, kind of, robust way for us to move.
And the last one of these, can I segment out my Apple users? So, we had a question submitted here just to provide a little bit more context, which was as we change the way we think about segmentation based on open rate, how should we best apply this to our audience? One strategy for iOS and Apple middle users and another for everyone else, or kind of a cohesive approach for all users. So, this is an interesting one, it’s definitely an attractive first thought to think about segmenting Apple users out and treating them differently. What’s segmenting based on device or domain creates a lot of A, overhead in doing that, and B, it’s definitely gonna be limited in inaccuracy. So, after this change that Apple is releasing and with customers as they, kind of, enable these product features, it’s going to be really difficult to know who is using Apple mail and that’s, kind of, part of their intent there. Also, Apple mail apps are very, very frequently used as a client for other email accounts. It’s not just, you know, iCloud or at, kind of, Mac addresses. It will impact Gmail accounts that are using Apple mail as well, for example. So, you know, segmenting based on a domain, for example, will not be a very accurate way of doing this.
So, overall I think any approach to segment out Apple users likely won’t be accurate and, you know, even if you successfully do that, initially, it probably won’t last very long. We should, kind of, expect this to be the direction that the industry is moving and very much how we’re treating it at Emma, and you’ve probably seen this through the webinar is that this is the direction the industry is moving. And we, kind of, need to plan for sustainable longer-term practices that will work with this rather than trying to avoid it, you know, through segmentation. Cool. So, with that, I think we’re gonna go check the chat and also some of the previously submitted questions and Zach is gonna, kind of, pull up some of the different questions we have to go through here now as well.
Zach: Awesome. Yeah. So, definitely good transition here going from the Apple mail question toa slightly different question here with Apple mail. So, we’ve got, it seems like we have already seen a difference in our email opens and clicks. Has the Apple mail privacy protection already been initiated?
Cian: It’s a little difficult to say. So, similar features are already in place for non-Apple devices and non-Apple, kind of, email clients. So, you could definitely argue that Apple is actually a follower in this rather than a leader. Gmail released their, kind of, image proxy tool, like, I think nearly 10 years ago. And that change really made IP address tracking hard. And they, kind of, moved away from some of the things we do with image beacons and stuff. So, some of this was already an issue. So, pre-fetching and blocking images and that kind of stuff, and spam checks that trigger opens and clicks, they were all impacting open rates for some time now. So, there’s definitely a chance that you might’ve seen this because your users are on another client that did that, you know, some of the newer clients, like Hey [SP] as well, for example, would maybe have similar impacts on this.
So, the Apple updates, in many ways they’re most noteworthy not because they’re brand new, but because of the scale of Apple. You know, they have a very, very large market share and that this will just impact at a much bigger scale. So, I guess you could look at that in some ways as a positive that really, kind of, push us as marketers to deal better with maybe issues that existed there for a little while. But to answer the original question more directly, it may have been that some of these factors were already impacting your opens, or if this is very recent for you, you may have seen the effect of Apple, like, testing their services, or you might have subscribers that are on the iOS beta. So, it’s a public data that anyone could sign up for. We definitely have some customers who will have a subscriber base that are more likely to maybe be trying that out or be on some of the testing for that. So, it’s definitely possible.
Zach: Awesome. Yeah. Great response. Definitely something we’ve been battling to some degree up to this point, and this is probably the biggest push in that direction we’ve had since. All right, so we’ve got another question here. Does it look like iOS competitors will follow suit on creating stricter privacy?
Cian: I think it’s super likely that that will happen that, you know, that other email clients and other providers will follow their lead. Very often what Google and Apple do and the standards they set becomes the norm across, you know, tech platforms more broadly. They just have such a massive market share that they generally are a trendsetter. So, hard to say for certain, but I would say it’s very likely that they’ll follow that.
Zach: Yes, definitely agreed. If anyone can, kind of, set the train for our market, it’s one of them. So, all right, next question is, will open data have a disclaimer or be removed?
Cian: We don’t have specific plans to remove it right now and we haven’t put disclaimers in the product just yet. Part of that is because we need to monitor the extent of the impact, like what the extended that impact will be for Emma customers and for, you know, the subscriber base and just how that would play out. We have initial testing that we’re doing on the data but we wanna make a decision when the changes are in the market and that we have, like, all of the information there. So, that will be a very impactful change to make. And we don’t wanna do that without really knowing the extent of, you know, how this impacts the dynamic of opens and different kinds of figures in real life. So, to be confirmed, but definitely something we’re monitoring closely.
Zach: Awesome. Yeah, so we also have a question around email analytics here. So, how accurate are email analytics with this change?
Cian: So, we touched on some of this, but the majority of the stats that don’t leverage opens should still be totally fine in Emma. So, clicks, sign-ups, opt-outs, you know, anything around audience growth, those kinds of pieces should all be totally fine. There’s no reason for us to think that they won’t, kind of, report as they do right now certainly. So, open rates are one and then also automatically, kind of, inferred properties like Zach mentioned earlier on, things like device type, email, client location, those kinds of stats, they’ll also be impacted by this. So, there are core things like audience growth, click engagement, that kind of stuff that they’ll all be totally fine. Most of what you see in responsive insights will be fine that isn’t, kind of, open-based. But just keep in mind that things like device will also be impacted a little bit and things like location and that kind of stuff.
Zach: Absolutely. Yeah. All right. We’ve got a question around junk emails and CRMs. So, how do you plan on dealing with the increased level of junk emails and leads and potentially massive database increases when it is the same person? Deduplication in CRM versus email systems. So it sounds like this person is probably asking about, you know, just the potential multiple contacts coming in, the way we handle that on our side, and then potentially their CRM’s impact on that.
Cian: Yeah. So, Apple’s hide my email feature is probably what you’re concerned on there. And for anyone who’s not familiar, just gonna recap on this one as well. People have the option as they’re signing up to a mailing list as an Apple user to use basically a proxy email, like a fake email that Apple gives them, that’s then forwarded it to their real email just to, kind of, hide their, kind of, core email address. So, really, to the best of our knowledge, there isn’t a good way that we’re aware of to kind of, like, reconcile those email addresses to the kind of, like, real email that’s behind the scenes. That feature that Apple has, it’s really designed to hide individual identity. So, it’s tricky. I think, you know, we can’t speak to your exact setup, but depending on the CRM you use, you might be able to use other identifiers, you know, if you’ve got the same…like, maybe something from Shopify or something else like that, maybe there’s a way for you to piece this together. But I think that’s probably gonna be hard just given that that’s what that feature is kind of, like, really designed to do.
One thing to call out on that question, all the junk email/kind of, like, the worry about additional sign-ups or, kind of, junk emails, there’s no reason in these, like, Apple changes that you should have a larger amount of like false signups or, kind of, like spam emails coming into your lists. At Emma, we’ll be doing the exact same spam checks and sort of, like, compliance checks and everything for everyone. We don’t foresee any kind of, like, changes there. That’s something our deliverability team keeps a very close eye on, and right now we have no reason to think that that will get worse because of these Apple changes.
Zach: Absolutely. All right. So, a question about non-profits and fundraising. So, for nonprofits and fundraising specifically, do you see any ways this change will impact us differently than for-profit organizations? Do you anticipate Apple may lighten their restrictions when it comes to nonprofit email deliverability?
Cian: So, the changes that Apple are rolling out will apply to everyone equally, basically. So, Apple’s changes, like, they’re at a subscriber level as an individual person. So, anything that person does with any brand will pretty much be treated the same regardless of industry or kind of, like, nonprofit or profit status. So, for example, me as an Apple user, if I sign up to a charity or I sign up to, you know, Emma itself, my use of my iPhone is what’s driving, you kno