It's time to say goodbye to email open rates

The data privacy landscape is rapidly changing due to laws like GDPR and CPRA, as well as consumer pressure on big tech companies. Marketers can no longer use personal data without restriction. This not only affects digital advertisers, but also email marketers.

Learn how these changes impact email marketing, including open rates, and why measuring direct engagement is critical to success.

Dig deeper: How email marketing is changing: Take this master class

Privacy laws, consumer pressures reshaping marketing

Since 2018, more than 75% of states have considered privacy laws, and 10 states have enacted comprehensive state privacy laws, with more privacy laws being passed as the year progresses.

US law is less clear than GDPR regarding requiring opt-in consent for email marketers. Still, the proliferation of US laws means that marketers who only market within the US and even their B2B marketers (yes, the CPRA applies to business contacts too!) need to be careful. It means that there is. These laws can affect your email marketing strategy in ways you may not be aware of.

Data privacy laws aren't the only thing changing the way email works. In response to consumer feedback, big tech companies like Google and Apple have also introduced platform-side and consumer-side data privacy tools, such as Google's End of Third-Party Cookie Tracking and Apple's Mail Privacy Protection.

These data privacy tools can impact your email strategy in unexpected ways.

For marketers, this is too much to cover in one article. Let's focus on a key metric often used to report email marketing success: email open rate.

Why email open rates are (probably) not effective

If part of your email success reporting relies on email open rates, drop everything and dive into a marketing automation platform today.

Depending on whether you're a B2B or B2C marketer, here's how privacy tools can impact your email open rates:

• Apple's email privacy protection (probably for B2B and B2C)
• Interesting calculation method in Outlook opens (very likely for B2B)
• The advent of DuckDuckGo's privacy email inbox (still unlikely for B2B or B2C)

First, investigate whether your marketing automation platform has an out-of-the-box feature that lets you see which email clients your recipients are using in their sent email reports.

Below is an example from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot). You can clearly see the impact of both Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Outlook.

If your marketing automation platform offers this functionality, consider sending several types of emails. for example:

• Newsletters may include a more consumer-oriented inbox.
• Client submissions are likely to be focused on a business-oriented inbox.

What we're looking for is what percentage of the total can these different inbox clients impact? and When certain transmissions are affected more than others.

Each inbox client is affected slightly differently.

A high percentage of recipients using Apple Mail Privacy Protection in the report means that email opens can be “hidden” from marketing automation platforms by forcing recipients to open them first. This means that your open rate will be artificially higher than it should be. all Send marketing emails before they're delivered to your inbox. There's no way to know whether the opens you see are the first forced opens by Apple, or whether the recipient opens them at a later time.

A high percentage of Outlook recipients in the report means that the email open rate may be artificially set. lower This is much better than you might expect, as most organizations have Outlook configured to prevent automatic image downloads. Most email marketing platforms record an “open” when a pixel is triggered. Pixels are often image pixels, so tools like Outlook that don't automatically download images require the recipient to manually download the image or click a link before it opens. is common. If you think about your own reader behavior, you may be missing the impact of something like a newsletter that allows recipients to read and enjoy lots of content without clicking anything.

You probably won't see it in your reports, but something new like DuckDuckGo's Inbox, like the DuckDuckGo browser version, is intentionally designed to “hide” things like email opens and link clicks from marketers. I am.

This probably won't be the last time we enter this kind of market. Consumers want more ways to hide their data from marketers, and there's no reason not to expect an increase in email-based tools that allow them to do so. These tools are just one more reason to consider moving away from email open reporting.

Automated emails and open rates

Suppose your email client's reports indicate that it has a significant impact on your open rate reliability. If so, your next step should be to evaluate automation using email opening as a trigger point.

Some platforms have this available out of the box, so start by investigating whether there are any open reports for automation using email before manually reporting your entire account. As a good practice for the future, it is helpful to keep documentation of all automations.

This could be if you're doing a customer journey exercise to ensure your recipients don't receive too many emails from your brand, or if you have multiple service lines or sub-brands that might be sent to the same recipient. It is also useful for checking.

The more people working within your marketing automation platform, the more important this exercise becomes. All too common is building great automation, failing to document how and why it works, and then leaving it running when moving to a new company.

For now, take a look at your current dynamic lists, automated email funnels, triggered emails, or anything else you're using automation for. If you find that there are instances where email opens are triggered by this or that scenario, and email opens are no longer reliable, you need to find another data point to use. Try scoring, email clicks, or web page visits for more reliable metrics for trigger-based automation.

Notes on Marketing Automation Scoring

Speaking of using scoring, don't forget to check your marketing platform's scoring values. If email opens are determined to be unreliable, the score you currently assign to email opens should be moved down to zero.

rethinking success

If email opens are no longer a reliable way to report how interested a recipient is in your email content, what can you report?

The answer applies regardless of the impact of opening the email. It's direct involvement. It starts with reporting on linked assets rather than email clicks. How many visitors took the desired action of being interested in the content you submitted?

• You can also look at broader impacts, such as increased website visits or increased overall revenue from email list membership, for example.
• You might also consider creating a report that compares A (people without list membership) to B (people with list membership).
• Are accounts that receive email more profitable than those that don't? That's a good indicator to know.

You can also report on website and landing page visits via Google Analytics (making UTM work in emails), generate interest from campaign members in your CRM, and combine account-based marketing tools with email lists. You can also consider it. Which accounts are showing interest before and after sending the email?

Importantly, it's time to look beyond opens in mainstream reporting and start considering your email program's impact on engagement as the most important indicator of success.