There is panic again in marketing land. We just got the iOS 14 update, which gives Apple users more privacy. This caused major problems for marketers because we can now trackless data via parties such as Facebook.
While many companies are still busy adjusting to the previous update, Apple has already announced a new update: iOS 15. With the upcoming update, Apple continues its crusade for more privacy. This time, email privacy is addressed.
What does the iOS 15 update mean?
With iOS 15, a lot is going to change in terms of email marketing With email marketing you ensure that people sign up with you on an email list, often referred to as a newsletter. People can sign up with you (opt-in) and you can then email them.. . This makes it possible for iPhone users to shield their IP addresses. As a marketer, you can no longer see in which country your emails are opened. That is not very relevant to us, but it can cause problems for international companies.
A bigger problem is that with the rollout of the update you can no longer see whether your emails are being opened. Most email marketing providers use some sort of pixel that they attach to an email. When the pixel is activated, you as a marketer know that the email has been opened. Based on that, you can open rate How do you increase the opening percentage, also known as the ‘open rate’ (OR) of your newsletter? That is what we will teach you in this article. You can build a huge mailing list, but when the subscribers.. of an email.
Suppose you send an email to 100 people. 40 people open the email. You then have an open rate of 40%. Based on your open rate, you can determine how good your headline and the first sentence of your email are.
Soon, when the iOS 15 update rolls out, iPhone users will be able to disable tracking pixels in emails. As a marketer, you can therefore keep track of your open rates much less effectively. This makes it much more difficult to get different headlines split testing An A/B test is a form of split testing in which 2 variants of, for example, an (opt-in) page or advertisement are tested against each other to increase the conversion ratio. The two variants (A and B) are.. or even determine what your open rate has been.
Why the iOS 15 updates isn’t necessarily a bad thing
In essence, the changes that the iOS 15 update brings are not that crazy. There have been several privacy updates in recent years. In 2018, theGDPR The new AVG Act (General Data Protection Regulation) is on its way. And it fills our heads with question marks. “What does this mean for my website now?” “And for email newsletters… in effect, causing a great deal of panic. It was the start of years of discussions about privacy. Privacy is still a complicated subject on which we all – and by that we mean politics – still cannot get a grip.
Privacy updates come from a good place. They are meant to protect people. However, its implementation is still somewhat complicated. We saw that with the cookie notifications The GDPR, which will come into effect on Friday 25 May, has caused a lot of fuss in the online marketing world. For example, you must make several important adjustments to your privacy policy and you are not allowed to just name and.. which were part of the GDPR at the time, also with the latest iOS update in which Apple users can choose not to send data anymore.
Since the last iOS update, it’s much harder to retarget and show ads to a relevant audience. With the upcoming update, email marketing will also become a lot more difficult.
From a user’s perspective, it’s a very relaxed idea that a company can’t see if you’ve opened a specific email. When you sign up to receive information, you do not directly choose that someone can track your behavior. It is therefore not surprising that marketers can no longer see whether you open an email.
For now, marketers can only see the open rate for iOS users who view their mail via their iPhone or iPad. The behavior of people who view their mail via the Gmail app can still be tracked. However, we expect that Google (and with it Gmail) will release a similar update in the not too distant future.
Is segmentation a thing of the past?
Privacy updates – like the upcoming iOS 15 update – are making it increasingly difficult for us marketers to be relevant. We are slowly going back to the prehistoric times of marketing when you sent a message into the world and could only see if it worked by the result. You can no longer look at individual behavior. This makes marketing much more inefficient.
In recent years we have started to segment more and more. We send our emails based on relevance. For example, if someone opened the email containing the ebook, we know we can send some follow-up information. Does anyone have the email with itebook Do you want to write an e-book yourself? Good plan! The sale of e-books has been growing very fast on the internet for years, but you can still see that there are few e-books for sale in many markets (especially in the Netherlands). not opened yet? Then after a few days, we will send a reminder to view the e-book. This whole flow will soon disappear.
You will no longer be able to see if someone has opened your email. Fortunately, you can still measure whether someone has clicked on a link in your email. For example, MailBlue allows you to add a tracking link to your email, so you can see if someone has clicked. Yet you still miss a bit of relevance. Someone who reads your emails and doesn’t click might be interested in your content after all.
From open rates to interaction
In the past we used to say: ‘The primary purpose of your subject line is to open your mailing’. But actually, you want to go a step further than that. You do not only want the mailing to be opened, but also that it is done with the right intention. You want someone to be curious about the content. Or better: that someone is looking forward to the e-mail and therefore opens it immediately.
Open rates are one thing you can look at to assess the results of a mailing. Just because someone opens your email doesn’t mean they’re actually interested in the content.
Instead of looking at the open rates, you can also look at the interaction. How many comments, clicks and sales Sales includes all activities that you as an entrepreneur, marketer or seller undertake to make more sales of your product or service. does the email deliver? Even if you can no longer see open rates, there will be a lot of data that you can still do something with.
Open rates and keep your email list clean
An important part of email marketing is keeping your list as clean as possible. We automatically check whether people have opened a certain email or clicked on something. Have they not opened anything for more than half a year? Then we assume that they are inactive or do not find our material interesting and we write them out. By regularly cleaning our email list, we maintain a good reputation within email services, such as Gmail. They see that people regularly open our e-mails so that we are less likely to end up in the spam box. If we can no longer see whether people open e-mails, we won’t know who to delete.
Ideally, you write emails that people want to keep. You want your emails to be valuable, even if people don’t take action right away. It is therefore very possible that people always read your emails, but never click on anything. That’s why we don’t want to just remove anyone from our email list who doesn’t click on a link. The fact that we won’t be able to see open rates soon makes it more difficult to clean up.
Do you still want people who don’t click on your email list?
It will soon become a lot more difficult to clean up your email list based on open rates. The question we need to ask ourselves is: ‘Do we really want people who read all our emails but never click on our list?’
Maybe there will come a time when they want to buy something. But how long will that take? Suppose someone has not clicked on a link or sent a reply in the past 6 months – and we email on average once a week. Do we still want to keep those people on the list?
We regularly hear stories from customers who have followed us for years before finally taking action. In the end, they responded to an email that came at just the right time.
On the other hand, we know it’s good for our reputation when people click on the links in our emails or reply. Ideally, you therefore only want to email people who are interested enough that they take action.
It certainly happens that people have been reading everything for three years and never click on anything. But in general, that is an exception. We saw that exception become a reality with our book launch.
If we had a good e-mail before that time, it would yield about 1000 clicks. Usually much less. Still, during the book launch, we’re selling about 8,000 books, the majority of which came from the email list. There were probably a lot of people who hadn’t clicked on anything for a long time but found this cheaper product interesting.
You want to keep the people who open your emails but never click. But on the other hand… People who never click to your website, never respond to action, and never reply, are those people really in your funnel?
Read more: 10 WordPress plugins to force users to log in
How do you deal with this change?
You mustn’t go into a slump with an update like this one. There are several things you need to realize.
First of all, this is just one of many privacy updates. There’s going to be a lot more coming in the years to come and it’s going to get a lot worse. You cannot measure everything in detail.
On the other hand, you want to assume that solutions will come. Systems adapt, there are workarounds and you can start steering on other numbers. Then Google Analytics is explained and simplified in this section of AZ. Step-by-step you will discover which statistics are really important in announced that you could no longer see through which keywords people came to your website, there was also panic. We have also found a way around that. So there is hope.
The third point to recognize is that time changes. It is good to use a multichannel strategy. You only want people on your email list who like to receive your emails. In addition, make sure you have other channels. All about marketing, entrepreneurship, neuromarketing, mindset, personal growth, and more! , YouTube channel, a good SEO SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization (NL: search engine optimization). This course includes all activities you do as a web designer to make your website easier to find in the search engines and thus more visitors. strategy and a social media strategy.
When you are active on different channels, people can reach you in different ways. Maybe some people will respond to your Instagram In this category you will find articles about Instagram and Instagram marketing. How do you use Instagram statistics? How do you build a relationship with your followers? What strategies do you use on Instagram? message, but they don’t reply to your email. By being active in different places, you can divide your audience over the places where they are waiting for you.
What do you still influence?
If there’s an iOS update — like now — you might be a little frustrated with that. But you can also start looking at what you still influence. What can you still do?
Check it out for yourself… How can you make sure you keep the people on your list happy and happy? And how can you ensure that the people you send an email to also interact?
The update mainly means that you have to be more creative and smarter with the mailings you send. You want to make sure you build a closer relationship with your mailing list.
Maybe in a year, we’ll see the update as the best thing that ever happened to us. Who knows, it may lead to many more clicks and our emails will become even smarter. Or will the relationship with our list get better?
Now our mailing list consists of 50,000 active people. Maybe in a year, it will only be 20,000 active people, because many people have gone out who no longer interacted. But maybe the result will be much higher. Then we are very happy with it.
Quality vs. quantity of your email list
When it comes to their email list, many business owners are greedy. It happened to us too. When Martijn took over control of our e-mail list, he started cleaning up. He threw out 26,000 email addresses.
Tony found that quite difficult. He had been building the list since 2010 and thought: ‘Maybe there are people who would like to buy something one day.’ However, that is pure ego. You want big numbers so you make the lottery bigger for yourself.
In the meantime, you’re doing your business short. Your open rates will drop, worsening your reputation. As a result, your emails end up in spam, even with people who might have wanted to read your emails. You are going to send on statistics that are far too low because you are emailing a mass of people who are not getting your emails at all.
Since Martijn manages the e-mail list, it is regularly cleaned. We’ve always gotten good things out of that. And now we’re going to do that again. It’s time for a new strategy.
How are we going to prepare for the update?
It will probably become a lot more difficult to perform split tests with headlines. That is why we would like to test several headlines. We want to collect this data anyway.
In addition, we want to remove several processes. Now many of our processes are set up on ‘will someone open or not’. If that data is no longer there, we may delete many interested people. We need to transform that so that we only look at clicks and answers. We may also remove a few steps completely so that the funnels become a bit cleaner again.
It’s also a good time to look at our overall email strategy. When do we put one call to action A call to action, or CTA for short, is a commonly used term in marketing and refers to inciting users, after receiving an advertising message, to take a specific action or a.. in? And how do we want people to interact with us? Based on this, we set up our new e-mail strategy.
We were already planning to do a big cleanup on all fronts this summer. Also in our email list. It has become a chaos of tags and processes. High time to clear that up.
For website maintenance service contact us.