Apple’s Privacy Measures Hit More Than Facebook Ads
Originally published In Illumination (Medium) on June 17, 2022.
After the bang, came a whimper across the digital marketing sector.
While people were panicking about the hit to their Facebook Ads campaigns, few internalized the follow-up punch that Apple delivered to email marketing in the name of solidifying their positioning on privacy.
The Lead-Up: Privacy Over Convenience
The ‘bang’ in this case, was the release of iOS 14.5. In December 2020, Apple stated that iOS devices would give their users to option to restrict Facebook’s access to their data. The change was to take place in June 2021.
Popular wisdom during the lead-up to this cut-off was that it wasn’t a huge deal. According to Trey Sheneman of ASK Method Company (cited below), many gurus in the Facebook Ad marketing space made claims that the adoption of privacy measures would only make up approximately 15–20% of iOS users.
The truth was, that by June 2021, privacy adoption was nearly 90%. Barely 10% of users allowed Facebook to freely continue mining their personal data.
The Aftermath
Compared to the blowout that accompanied FB’s loss of its marketing data, the reaction to the rollout of iOS 15 was muted.
In September 2021, another major shift was brought in as part of Apple’s privacy mandate. When the iOS 15 updates were announced, email open rates were considered an important KPI metric of digital marketing.
While open rates do not represent actual engagement, they are rated similarly to impressions on social media. As part of the marketing funnel, it measured whether a potential user was aware of the campaign. Remember: a potential customer will have to have ‘contact’ with your product on several occasions before they engage, and more still before converting to a customer.
When the update hit, emails open rates going to iOS devices were marked at 100% — trashing the dataset to render it functionally unusable. At the time, a lot of good advice on how to pivot one’s email marketing strategy was circulating.
Months later, much of this information has been forgotten. The same publication (Forbes) giving instructions on how to pivot away from open rates went back to putting out content on how to boost open rates without a word on how that KPI had been impacted.
In essence, those who were in the game in September of 2021 knew what was coming and how to adjust.
But anyone coming into it from a freelancing or a small business track might miss that this had happened, and get led on a merry chase with skewed data.
3 Ways to Optimize Email Marketing After iOS 15
Keep Your Content Focused
According to Landon Ray from Ontraport (cited below), “one percent of one percent of marketers know” that open rates are no longer a reliable metric for digital markets to follow.
It’s more important than ever to focus on the user’s problem and work backward towards your messaging. This may mean segmenting your mail lists along to lines of your user personas. Having a way to drive your marketing strategy to better speak directly to the customer, and provide them with direct value, is critical.
Keep It Short, Keep it Simple
Everyone is shouting from the rooftops lately about how email marketing is the one true marketing tool to drive engagement. A side effect of this is that people are now absolutely inundated with email offers. People aren’t hesitating to classify something as spam, or relegate it to the promotions folder.
Justin Welsh is one example of this being executed well. His newsletter, “The Saturday Solopreneur”, distills some solid advice on audience and revenue growth. As it suggests in the name, it arrives every Saturday morning, and always starts with an estimated reading time. Justin’s emails take up about two to five minutes of one’s time.
Furthermore, the content that does make it through both the manual and automated filters needs to be designed to drive clicks. As a KPI, clicks remain wholly unaffected by the update and represent true engagement.
Clean Your Lists Regularly
As mentioned, people are getting a lot of emails these days. Send too many, without clear value, and it’s not hard to get marked down as spam, or have the user opt-out due to oversaturation.
Ray found that this merited a secondary email segmentation based on engagement. Essentially, the idea was to scale back how often they attempted to engage people if they hadn’t clicked through within a given period of time. Ray’s example was a window of 90 to 120 days. Subscribers within this window would be moved to a lower frequency email list.
Further reduction of frequency would be applied for those who had not engaged for longer than 120 days. This methodology gave those subscribers a break, and allowed marketers to focus their energy on the segments actively interested in the offer.
Summary
2021 was a chaotic year for marketing data analytics. Some lessons stuck, but some bear repeating, just like your offers. If you’re still measuring your audience with email open rates as a primary KPI, a few simple steps can put you back on the right track:
- write your content with the user and the problem you mean to solve in mind;
- keep your content short, sweet, and driven towards clicks for actual engagement; and
- Clean your subscriber lists regularly, and bump disinterested ones to a lower frequency segment.
Citations:
Landon, Ray. Web 3.0 Email & Follow-up: How Email And Follow Up Marketing Must Evolve to Keep Up. Web 3.0 Futures Symposium. ASK Method Company. June 6, 2022. https://askmethod.com/qf22w3f-nv2/?
Shenaman, Trey. Web 3.0 Traffic: Effective Lead Generation in the Cookieless World. Web 3.0 Futures Symposium. ASK Method Company. June 6, 2022. https://askmethod.com/qf22w3f-nv2/?