l open rates are no longer relevant.

Data privacy is rapidly changing, due to legislation such as GDPR, CPRA and consumer pressure. Marketers are no longer allowed to use personal information without restriction. Email marketers and digital advertisers are both affected.

How these changes affect email marketing, including the open rate, and why it is important to measure direct engagement.

Privacy legislation, consumer pressure reshaping marketing

Since 2018, more that 75% of the states have looked at privacy legislation. 10 state laws have been enacted, and will be passing more privacy legislation throughout 2019.

It’s not as clear as GDPR in that it requires email marketers to obtain consent. Even so, the proliferation of U.S. legislation means that even marketers who are only marketing within the U.S. or B2B marketers will be affected (yes, CPRA applies to business contacts! Attention is needed. You may not be aware of the impact that these laws have on your email marketing strategy.

Email is changing not only because of data privacy legislation, but also because consumers are demanding it. Google and Apple, in response to consumer requests, have implemented platform- and user-side data privacy measures, such as Google’s End of Third-Party Cookie Tracking and Apple’s Mail Security Protection.

These data privacy tools can have unexpected effects on your email strategy:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection and other user-controlled features can make an email appear to have been opened more than it really has.
• Email reports may be inflated by security bots.
• Third-party cookies may be used by your marketing automation platform to track users.
• DuckDuckGo’s email inbox, for example, may “hide away” your interactions from marketing tools.

It’s impossible to cover all of this in one article. We’ll stick with a key metric that is often used to measure the success of email marketing: email opening rate.

Your email open rate (probably) isn’t valid

Drop everything and get started with your marketing automation platform immediately if you rely on the email open rate to report on your email success.

The impact of privacy tools could be different depending on whether you are a B2B marketer or B2C.

• Apple’s Mail privacy protection (likely B2B and C2C).
• Outlook’s strange way of calculating openings (very likely B2B).
• DuckDuckGo privacy email inbox is a reality (but not for B2B and B2C yet).

You will first want to check if the marketing automation platform you use has a built-in feature that lets you see which email clients are being used by your recipients.

Here is an example from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly Pardot, where you can see clearly the impact of Apple Mail Privacy protection and Outlook.

You’ll want look at different types of emails if your marketing automation tool offers this feature. You can, for example:

• Inboxes of newsletters could be more consumer-oriented.
• The client sends may be more targeted at business inboxes.

You’re trying to determine what percentage of all sends could be affected by the different inbox clients or, if certain sends are more affected than others.

Each inbox client has a different impact:

If you have a high percentage of recipients who use Apple Mail Privacy Protection, your email open rate will be artificially inflated. This is because recipients can “hide” the fact that they opened emails from your marketing automation platform. They do this by forcing to be opened before delivering to their inbox. It’s impossible to know if an open is due to Apple forcing the email first, or if it was opened by the recipient afterward.

If you have a high percentage of Outlook recipients, your open rates may be lower than anticipated. This is because most organizations set Outlook to prevent automatic image downloads. When a pixel triggers, most email marketing platforms will record the “open”. A tool such as Outlook, which does not download images automatically, can miss recipient opens when the recipient doesn’t click on a link or manually download an image. You may be missing out on the value of a newsletter if you don’t consider your reader behavior. A recipient can enjoy a lot of content and read it without having to click through.

You won’t find in your reports something like DuckDuckGo inbox, which, like its DuckDuckGo web browser counterpart, was designed to “hide”, things like email openings or link clicks, from marketers.

This is not the first of its kind that will be introduced to the market. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t see more email-based tools to help consumers hide their data from marketers. These tools are another reason to move away from email open reporting.

Open rates and automated emails

Imagine that your email client reports show a significant impact on the credibility of your open rate. The next step is to assess any automations that use email opens as a triggering point.

Before manually debriefing the entire account, check if your platform offers this feature. Documenting all automations is a good idea for the future.

This is also useful if you are doing an exercise on the customer journey to make sure your recipients don’t get too many emails from your company or if your company has multiple service lines and sub-brands which could send to the same recipient.

This exercise is more important the more people that are working in your marketing automation platform. This is a common mistake: someone will build a great automation but fail to document the reasons why it works and leave it running after they move to a different company.

Review your existing dynamic lists, automated emails funnels, triggered email or anything else that uses automation. You may want to look at other data points if you find that email opens trigger if/then scenarios. For a more reliable trigger-based automation metric, try using email clicks or website visits.

Note on Marketing Automation Scoring

Don’t forget about your marketing platform when it comes to scoring. If you find that your email opens have been deemed unreliable then you should reduce the score you currently assign to emails opens to zero.

Reconsidering Success

What can you do if email opens no longer provide a reliable indicator of how interested recipients are in the contents of your emails?

Direct engagement is the answer, regardless of whether or not an email was opened. It’s a good idea to report on the asset that you are linking to, rather than the email. How many people engaged with your content?

• You can also consider the broader implications of email list membership, such as an increase in website visits or revenue.
• Consider creating a report comparing A — those not on the list — with B — those on the list.
• Are email-receiving accounts more profitable than those that don’t? This would be an important metric.

Consider combining your CRM with your email list to pull interest from members of your campaign. You can also use Google Analytics to report on landing pages or website visits (and put those UTMs into action in your emails), or your account-based tool for marketing. What accounts show interest before and after emails are sent?

It is important to consider the engagement impact as your most important success metric.

The article Time to Say Goodbye to Your Email Open Rate first appeared on MarTech.