Send With Confidence
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Time to read: 8 minutes
There is a truism I find myself repeating to my clients day in and day out: send emails to highly engaged recipients, fewer emails to moderately engaged recipients, and NO emails to unengaged recipients.
That formula is at least part of the answer to nearly every common deliverability question: How do we avoid spam complaints, improve reputation, and increase inbox placement? Send emails to people who want them, and don’t send emails to people who don’t want them! Another way to say this is: use an engagement based marketing strategy.
Strengthen reputation by showing mailbox providers that you are sending wanted content to their users.
Improve the subscriber experience with your brand.
Help you maintain list hygiene, avoid spam complaints, and prevent spam trap addresses from lingering in your list.
More often than not, what prevents senders from executing an elegant engagement based marketing strategy isn’t a lack of will, but rather a knowledge gap around how to properly leverage data. Apple MPP has made identifying who is and who isn’t engaged with email much more difficult in the past few years.
Let’s do a quick review of how Apple MPP impacts open data. In September 2021, Apple released a feature that would allow Apple device users to opt in to Mail Privacy Protection, a feature that prevents email senders from gathering information like recipient IP location, device used to access email, and event-based activity like forward tracking. These changes alone represented data loss for senders.
But the bigger problem is how the technology works to prevent this data from being passed on: when a recipient using an Apple mail client or native mail app to access email receives a message from a sender, MPP will download the remote content by default, firing the tracking pixel whether or not the recipient actually has engaged with the email.
The result has been a massive inflation of open rates, especially for B2C brands. We can no longer trust that a unique open is necessarily a human open. After MPP triggers the tracking pixel, we can’t see any “true” human open events associated with that message.
I won’t be the first to say that opens have never been a perfect data point for establishing lead quality. Opens have long been called a “vanity metric” or “surface metric,” but the reality is that many senders relied on open activity and open recency to determine recipient engagement. In the past, if you were segmenting your audiences by date of last open, using that data to determine how much or how frequently you mailed to the segment, and ultimately suppressing recipients that showed zero open activity in the past 3 to 6 months, you were doing a lot of things right.
Leveraging open data this way went a long way to help senders avoid spam complaints and spam trap activity, and generally showed mailbox providers you were trying to deliver relevant, wanted content to their users.
While it’s true that we can’t build email sunsetting strategies around open data nowadays, I push back on the notion that we have to throw opens completely out the window.
It’s been three years since MPP was released, and I still have clients telling me they use opens to establish recipient engagement. Now is the time to stop that practice if you haven’t already. Whatever you do, don’t send email to every single address that has an open event in the last 6 months. Worst case scenario, senders can end up flooding the inboxes of unengaged recipients because they can’t see that those recipients are truly unengaged.
If you are still using open data to establish recipient engagement, you are undoubtedly falling victim to this trap and overwhelming mailbox providers with unwanted emails. The results, especially over time, can be devastating for deliverability and inbox placement health. Mailbox providers will continue to push back on senders that send to unengaged recipients.
So what to do if you can’t build automations on open events? Dig deeper into your data!
The first thing that’s worth noting is that as you look at open activity, there are three buckets: recipients with MPP generated opens, recipients with non-MPP opens, and recipients with ZERO opens. Despite all the mud in the open data waters, we can still clearly see addresses that have zero open or click activity over an extended period of time. You should be suppressing recipients with zero open or click activity in the past 3 to 6 months depending on your sending cadence. I know, I know– you’ll get push back from your higher ups when you suggest shrinking the list. Check out Building a Case for an Email Sunsetting Policy, and remember:
Nine times out of ten, spam trap addresses will never engage with email, so scraping your list of inactives is a way to proactively avoid sending to those risky addresses. Spam trap addresses are often what drives email blocklists, so you’re mitigating risk for your entire database by not sending to them!
Inactive recipients are much more likely to hit the “report spam” button. Enough spam complaints over time and your emails are surely going to start landing in the spam folder.
The more emails there are from you sitting in inboxes untouched, the likelier mailbox providers are to start putting them into the spam folder. Continuing to send to inactives just isn’t worth it!
It can’t be said too many times: clicks are not impacted by Apple MPP, so use your click data! Industry expert Chad White recently found in his research that “...a click is roughly twice as powerful as an open in terms of qualifying a subscriber as safe to mail” (How Senders Can Adapt to MPP, Email After Hours, 14:05).
Your recent clickers are your gold star recipients, and should be treated as a highly active segment of your list. This isn’t to say you need to throw way all recipients that don’t click on your content. Rather, make sure you’re using click data to inform personalized, targeted messaging for this highly active group because they’re the most likely to take the intended call to action.
See if you can shorten email content and push some juicy content behind URLs in order to drive click engagement. Don’t get too carried away– no one wants to open an email only to find a single linked image. But use URLs where it makes sense, like encouraging recipients to click to receive their promotion code or to see the full details of an event. If you need some brainstorming help, SendGrid has published thoughts on what actually drives click engagement.
Note: We understand that bot activity can create inflated click numbers, especially for B2B senders. Check out Braze’s great resource Bot or Not: Understanding Email Bot Clicks for tips on how to identify bot clicks.
Clicks are not the only things that can be used to establish recent engagement, nor should they be. To create a robust engagement based marketing strategy, you should also be leveraging any multichannel data you have at your disposal. This can include website visits, app engagement, logins, recent purchases, in-store visits, or other conversions. A word of warning: make sure you’re using those data points only to establish engagement recency, NOT to assume permission. Just because a subscriber is active in your app does not mean you can start emailing them marketing content they didn’t explicitly sign up for. But let’s say the subscriber did sign up for marketing content, hasn’t clicked in a few months, but has been active in your app in the last week– that is likely a safe recipient to engage with over email.
Even when you’re leveraging all of your data, there will be a segment of your audience for which degree of engagement is ambiguous. You will have a segment that shows zero click or other multichannel activity who still may be opening your emails, with MPP opens obscuring those results. In email as in life, sometimes the best thing to do when you aren’t sure what someone wants is to ask!
Reengagement campaigns are not something you do once a year when you’re dusting off the old database to get ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. They should be regularly running campaigns that identify recipients with no click or other multichannel signs of life in the past 3 months and simply ask them if they want to remain on the marketing email list. No one will be mad at you for asking!
They might, however, get mad if you continue emailing them when they’ve been ignoring you for months. At scale, this could lead to serious reputation issues. Recipients who ignore the reengagement efforts should be suppressed, and recipients who respond positively should be thrown back into the “recently active” bucket. Looking for some reengagement campaign inspiration? We’ve got you covered!
It may come as a shock that Apple’s move to enable MPP was not in fact to ruin the lives of email marketers. Simply put, Apple is trying to protect their users from brands being creepy with data. The fact that the adoption rate of MPP among eligible Apple users is around 95% tells you something: in general, consumers are becoming increasingly wary of brands collecting data about them without their explicit permission.
Instead of pining for the loss of third party data your open tracking and cookies used to give you, embrace the opportunity to connect with subscribers on a more meaningful level. Email sign up forms and preference centers should be used to collect data that is vital to providing an individualized experience for each subscriber as well as information about what content they want to receive and how frequently.
There’s no doubt that Apple MPP changed the rules of engagement based sending strategies. Ultimately, I think the challenges presented by MPP are good for the email ecosystem. They have forced senders to do what they should have been doing all along: digging deep into recipient activity data and leveraging first party data to deliver relevant content to those who really want it, and cutting dead weight from their lists.
Building out an engagement based email strategy that makes sense for your brand can be overwhelming. If you’re not sure where to start, no worries, we’ve got you covered. Our Professional Services team is a group of email industry experts here to help you navigate the muddy waters of engagement data and improve your brand’s email reputation in the process. Reach out and let us know how we can help!
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