iOS15 privacy changes have email marketers dreading the end of accurate open rate data. But what if we look at this change from the consumer’s perspective?
This content was first published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 6.13.2021.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that none of you enjoy robo calls. My social security number is fine, and I didn’t even have a car when you were calling about the issue with my title, so you can lay off, robots of the world.
What about cold sales outreach? Does anyone enjoy navigating through ten thoughtless cold pitches as they’re trying to clear out the inbox? Or how about receiving a phone call from an unfamiliar number when you’re expecting medical test results, only to receive a cold pitch from the same person whose email and LinkedIn messages you have ignored?
I have not received a single thoughtful email pitch in my entire career.
This is where the line between despicable and justifiable starts to blur, at least for sales professionals. VP of Sales types will defend cold calling to the death in their LinkedIn bro-etry missives. “It doesn’t matter if some of you don’t like it, as long as it works!” they say. “Now go out and crush those phones!”
Now, what about your brand’s own email marketing? Let’s say you send five to seven emails per week…or more…to your entire list. Do you think the average subscriber is opening and digesting all of that content?
But if I suggested that you pull back on your email sending frequency tomorrow, you would defend your strategy just as vehemently as the LinkedIn sales bros defend their cold calls:
“It doesn’t matter if some of you don’t like it, as long as it works!”
What is the common thread between robo calls, cold sales outreach, and batch and blast emails? Externalized costs.
Externalized costs are costs generated by an activity that the person or entity profiting off the activity doesn’t have to pay. The textbook example is the corporation that builds a new factory that produces chemical runoff, polluting the nearby town’s drinking water. The corporation profits, the townspeople pay with a decreased quality of life.
Wasted time is the externalized cost of irrelevant marketing. If construction creates noise pollution and billboards create light pollution, the endless stream of marketing messages that we contend with every day create time pollution.
I bring this up because Apple recently announced that they are implementing new privacy measures in their native email client:
No pixels means no more open rate and clickthrough rate metrics. And no IP addresses mean no time zone-personalized send times or notes about the nearby store. You will still be able to see traffic from email messages in your web analytics.
Many marketers were up in arms–how can you manage an email program without open and clickthrough rate metrics?!
But I’m going to turn the question on its head. I saw a tweet from a digital product person that said something like “You think your users are engaged. Log all of them out of the app and see how many take the effort to log back in. That will show how engaged they really are.”
We can apply the same litmus test to email. What if, instead of assuming a correlation between open rates and engagement, you forced subscribers to click a link at the bottom of your email each week to STAY subscribed? What percent of your list would do that?
This question shines a light on how much of a vanity metric open rate really is. I open a lot of emails accidentally. That doesn’t mean that I absorb the content or particularly enjoy it.
If email newsletters required an active confirmation of interest each week, email marketing strategies would be much, much different.
Most brands have email content strategy backwards. They start with “we have seven (or five, or however many) days to fill this week” and then attempt to reverse-engineer their existing content bank to fill those slots. There is pressure to send some email, any email, because a day without email is a day with lower revenue.
But in an active opt-in universe, brands would start with content, because subscribers would only put in the work to stay on the list if the emails were entertaining or valuable. I’m sure this will never happen. It’s really just a thought exercise.
If you’re a digital marketer who actively avoids your chosen medium as a consumer…think about that for a minute. If you send emails to your customers but never opt in to emails when you make your own purchases…think about why. If you lean heavily on paid social advertising but scroll past most ads in your own feed…think about why.
Before we learn about clickthrough rates and ROAS, we learn that we should treat others the way we want to be treated. But as marketers we’re often happy to use tactics that would alienate us as consumers.
Access to digital marketing channels and their metrics has been a boon for entrepreneurs, I’m not going to dispute that. But, unfortunately, metrics have become a rock for lazy or just plain cowardly marketers to hide under. Yeah, I am going to say that.
Campaign metrics help us understand how a campaign is performing, but they don’t tell us anything about the viewer’s experience with that campaign. Good marketers need to fill in the details themselves, and that requires understanding of both the product you’re selling, the value you’re offering, and the customer you’re targeting.
What has actually happened–especially in retail–is that brands are so desperate for one more dollar that they abandon positioning altogether. Our customer is “anyone who will buy it through this Facebook ad”. Campaign optimization discussions focus on hacking the platform, not emphasizing with the customer.
And like robocalls, cold calling and batch and blast email, things will probably continue along this path until they fail to work effectively anymore. The Apple announcement revealed how much of the digital commerce and marketing landscape is truly rented land.
So you need to make a conscious decision: am I building a brand, or am I running a platform arbitrage play? A brand is strong enough to survive outside a given platform. An arbitrage play has a sell-by date.
By the way: if you’re interested in building a brand, you should read about customer congruence.