When’s the last time you reviewed your email analytics?
You know the ones I’m talking about –
Open Rates & Clickthrough Rates
Chances are if you haven’t looked at them lately you are in for a huge shock because they have inevitably dropped way down.
But before you panic, there is something you need to know.
In the second half of 2021 there were some significant changes to how your email management system can, and cannot, track the number of emails your subscribers are opening.
Last September, with the release of the iOS 15 update, Apple announced that they will block the tracking of email opens in the Apple Mail app.
This change has impacted every single business owner that reaches their followers through email delivery. Which is literally all of us.
Here’s the good news though, despite Apple’s effort to block this very important data, there is a workaround and it’s easier than you think.
That’s why we decided to dedicate an entire episode of The Wellness Business Podcast to teaching you our simple, but effective, strategy for tracking our email engagement.
OPEN RATES ARE NO LONGER RELIABLE FOR EMAIL MARKETING
The issue is that email marketers, like you and I, have been optimizing around open rates as the default email marketing metric for years. Which means that we could easily know what content was resonating with our email subscribers by the number of opens tracked by our email management system.
Since Apple is no longer allowing any email management software to gather that data, it begs the question — without the ability to track open rates for iOS users, what will email marketers and online business owners use to optimize their campaigns?
With this latest change we are forced to use other metrics as our gauge of what’s working and what isn’t. Things like:
- Click-Thru Rate (CTR): How many people are clicking the links in your emails?
- Conversion Rate: With each email sent, how many people end up converting on your call to action? Whether that is buying a product, reading an article, signing up for an event, replying to the email, or following your brand on social.
- Unsubscription rate: Are you losing a significant number of subscribers every time you send an email? A few here and there is normal but if you’re losing subscribers by the masses you may want to evaluate what effect your messaging is having on list retention and growth?
KEEPING A WARM & ENGAGED EMAIL LIST AFTER iOS15 UPDATE
The other challenge that we are now faced with is that maintaining list clean up becomes more complicated. In other words, cleaning your list of people that never open your emails is no longer possible so again we need to find other metrics to track before removing someone from our list.
Opened emails have been the most reliable metric used in pruning email lists of unengaged contacts. To consistently improve engagement and deliverability, pruning unengaged contacts needed to be done consistently.
Often, businesses will remove unengaged contacts that haven’t opened an email in 3 months/6 months/1 year — whatever makes sense for their situation. If a subscriber isn’t even opening your emails, there is no reason to continue emailing them.
But without reliable open tracking data, things become a bit more complicated.
You could use another metric, such as link clicks. For example, if a subscriber hasn’t clicked a link in an email in X amount of time, remove them from the list.
5 WAYS TO OVERCOME THE EMAIL OPEN TRACKING ISSUE DUE TO THE iOS15 UPDATE
In episode 244 of The Wellness Business Podcast you will discover…
- How the iOS15 update has already impacted your business and what you can implement immediately to make tracking easier
- What alternative tracking metrics are still available to you so you’re always crystal clear about how engaged your email subscribers are with your content
- 5 things we recommend that you do starting today to overcome the iOS15 email tracking changes
If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you aren’t a big tracking person, stick with us because we’re going to explain exactly how it already has affected you in your business and 5 ways to overcome this significant challenge.
Links/Resources mentioned on the show:
Links to resources:
