Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: What the iOS15 Update Means for Retailers
With the recent rollout of iOS15, we’ve had many retailers come to us and ask how they can rework their campaigns within the guardrails of these regulations. To help unpack not only what the iOS15 update is, but also its larger implications on how retailers should approach digital, our VP of Marketing Sarah Cascone sat down with our Senior Product Marketing Manager for Bluecore Communicate, Kellye Snodgrass, and our premier agency partner MERGE’s Senior Director of Email, Brittany Pettrone, to get their insights and expertise.
Sarah: Let’s kick it off with the basics. Brittany, can you take us through what the iOS 15 update is and what it means?
Brittany: Absolutely. On June 7th, Apple announced new privacy tools for Apple Mail and Safari as part of the rollout of iOS15, which was released on September 20th. These new privacy changes will impact any type of email account (such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo) that is configured with the Apple Mail app. There are two main areas of impact: Apple will be masking IP addresses and sending limited device information. This will interfere with the use of pixels by making a request for the pixel when the email is delivered to the server — not when the email is actually opened.
As a result, all delivered emails to any email account configured with the Apple Mail app will appear as open, even if it’s not actually open — which has an array of impacts. We will lose open data, timestamp data, and forwarding tracking. This update will also block IP addresses and hide email addresses, as well as inflate open rates, lowering CTO rate and skew list segmentation if retailers are currently segmenting based on opens. Timestamp data will also be skewed, which will impact live content populated at the time of open, such as countdown timers, live poll results, and live maps.
IP addresses being blocked will impact location-based data for dynamic content or segmentations, and the “Hide My Email” feature lets users share unique, random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox at any time to keep their personal email address hidden.
Sarah: Okay, got it. So Kellye, what does this indicate for the future of data privacy as a whole?
Kellye: It’s such a good topic. The thing to think about is that this is just not going away. This theme of privacy regulation and these rollouts that are impacting email and the marketing industry as a whole have been coming up over the last couple years. So for us, the way that we think about it is that it’s really solidifying the importance of having a program that’s grounded in first-party data, and then also making decisions based off of engagement metrics that actually matter.
One thing that I think is important to talk about is open rates. Brittany just covered that open rate and open data, which is one of the things that’s most impacted by this rollout. It’s a metric that’s been used by marketers and email marketing programs for over a decade. It’s very commonly used.
But when we think about open rate and open data, it’s really across all of the engagement metrics that are available to us as email marketers. It’s really one of the metrics that has the lowest indicator when it comes to customer engagement and customer loyalty. When you think about open rate, someone can open an email and not even go to the website, they could not even engage with the site or engage with the products. They could be opening the email at a time not best for them, never revisit the email, and never end up going to the site. So we really think of open rate as more of a vanity metric here at Bluecore, and we’ve really thought that for some time now, and this rollout is solidifying that.
One of the things that we encourage our customers, as well as the Bluecore product team to do, is focus on the KPIs and the metrics that we have available to us that are better indicators of actual customer engagement — things like click-through rate and conversion rate, that are further down that funnel.
A great example of that, just to put our money where our mouth is, is our send time optimization features (STO). STO determines the best send time for every single individual at a one-to-one level. It’s a common email capability that almost every ESP has. While most ESPs have built their feature based on open data and determined send time based on when a shopper is most likely to open an email, we built ours based on clicks. We’re going that step further to focus on when we think a shopper is most likely to not just open, but engage with the brand, visit the site and be further down the funnel, closer to that purchase.
Sarah: Absolutely. I want to talk a bit more about what you hit on when you called opens “vanity metrics”. What exactly does focusing on clicks versus opens, reflect for how retail marketers measure success?
Kellye: It’s really not much of a transition that we’re asking for here, and it’s pretty simple. When you’re thinking about a purchase funnel, with your top of funnel metrics vs. bottom of funnel metrics like conversion or even a repeat purchase, it’s totally normal for us as marketers to focus on those bottom of the funnel metrics and try to find more customers that are making purchases or even making repeat purchases with lookalike audiences or predictive scores and all of that good stuff. So what we’re really talking about here is that simple shift to decisioning based off of data – one step lower than open rate across the purchase funnel, then making decisions based off of that so that customers that are actually engaged go to the site. Because we believe in that so strongly here at Bluecore, we’ve actually built our pricing model based off of that as well. While other email service providers are focused on charging their customers based on email send volume, we’re focused on charging our customers just based on clicks whenever we’re actually driving that engaged traffic to the site.
Sarah: It’s all about that customer engagement. So Brittany, how should retailers be preparing for the shift as we think about moving away from clicks to open?
Brittany: For email analytics, we definitely recommend moving away from depending on opens and open rates for engagement metrics. Click through rate will become the standard, as Kellye discussed, for engagement. We really need to be utilizing additional metrics to gauge engagement such as unsubscribes, spam complaint rates and subscriber lifetime value. Also, I think it’s really important to become familiar with your current metrics, both remaining metrics and also metrics that have been removed as a result of this rollout.
For marketing list segmentations based on email engagement, if you managed your marketing list or re-engagement campaign based on email opens, update the logic to include additional customer metrics, such as purchases or account activity, website browsing, SMS engagement, even mobile app activity or other non-email activity. Create new entry criteria for re-engagement campaigns based on updated logic and redesign your success criteria for the campaign.
We also recommend updates to your trigger campaigns that are currently using open and non-open decision criteria to a different engagement metric such as click or purchases. Definitely consider and promote a preference center with your frequency settings available. We’re also recommending that you go to your email service support teams and get their guidance and their support moving in this new direction.
Kellye: For sure. Leaning on each other during this transition is so important. And that’s why it’s so great to have partners like you, and to share learnings as we figure out how to work in this new world. One thing that I meant to mention earlier, but I think it’s so important to reiterate, is that we’re not discounting open data. We’re obviously encouraging everyone to focus on clicks, but there will always be a place for it. We just want to stress that there is an opportunity to focus on these other metrics through this change..
Sarah: For sure. I think that the big picture shift here is important because on the surface we could talk this update to be something that only impacts email because it’s it’s a channel specific KPI, but in reality, we’re moving to a world where marketing programs are becoming measured by channel agnostic metrics like e-commerce revenue or loyalty. And this privacy change in email could affect the entire business. So I think we should all be paying attention to what’s happening in the privacy regulations space so that we are measuring what matters and ultimately delivering a customer experience that gets shoppers to come back and buy again and again.
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