The data privacy landscape is changing rapidly, driven by legislation like GDPR and CPRA, plus consumer pressure on big tech companies. Marketers can no longer use personal data without restrictions. This affects not only digital advertisers but also email marketers. To understand how this impacts email marketing, including open rates, and to ensure success, marketers need to measure direct engagement.
Privacy legislation, consumer pressure reshaping marketing
Since 2018, more than 75% of states have considered privacy legislation, and 10 have enacted comprehensive state privacy laws, with more passing privacy legislation as the year progresses. The U.S. legislation isn’t quite as explicit in requiring email marketers’ opt-in consent as GDPR, however, it still affects marketers who only market within the U.S., and B2B marketers who are subject to CPRA.
Big tech companies like Google and Apple have also implemented platform- and consumer-side data privacy tools, such as Google’s end of third-party cookie tracking and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection. These tools can impact email strategies in unexpected ways. For example, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection makes it look like an email has more opens than it actually does, and Outlook’s way of calculating opens may inflate click rates in email reports.
Measuring direct engagement
To measure the effectiveness of email marketing, many marketers use the email open rate. However, this metric is likely to be invalid due to the impact of privacy tools, and marketers should investigate their marketing automation platform to assess the percentage of recipients using these tools, and if specific sends are more impacted than others.
For example, a high percentage of recipients using Apple Mail Privacy Protection in a report means that the email open rate will be artificially higher than it should be, as this feature enables recipients to ‘hide’ their opens from the marketing automation platform. Outlook also presents issues, as it is set to prevent the automatic download of images, which can mean that recipient opens are missed if they do not manually download images or click a link.
To ensure success, marketers need to move away from reporting on email opens and measure direct engagement instead. This means looking at website visits, overall revenue increases driven by email list memberships, and account-based marketing tools. Additionally, marketers should review any automations using email opens as a trigger point, and adjust their scoring values accordingly. This will enable them to report on the effectiveness of their email marketing in a more reliable way.
Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/its-time-to-say-goodbye-to-your-email-open-rate/
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