The Death of the Open Rate and WTF Happened at WWDC?
Whether it was an alarming pop up notification or just something talked about in passing at your last company huddle, you may have heard the latest hot digital marketing gossip that THE OPEN RATE is dead. The bad news? That may actually be true. The good news? We’ve compiled the important details fueling the frenzy (brought on by Apple’s 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement), and cut through the noise for you.
About the Conference | Context
WWDC is usually the conference where Apple announces new devices, but this year it was more focused on software updates, and a lot of them were privacy related (not surprising given Tim Cook’s affinity for privacy, and the nation’s renewed interest in protecting consumer data). Apple has four pillars of privacy:
Data minimization - requesting and using only the data that you actually need.
On device processing - pulling as much out of the cloud as possible and storing your personal data on your owned device
Transparency and control - provide a clear understanding of and control over what data is used and how
Security protections to enforce privacy protections
They also have the most market share according to Litmus. In May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile came via Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads (NiemanLab). Gmail only has 18.6%. On desktop, Apple Mail is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens. Changes announced at this conference will fundamentally change our business. This is a significant disruption to our most profitable channel and often our only direct relationship with our customer, so everyone needs to pay attention.
What’s Changing | The Likely Impact
Mail Protection Privacy
The shot heard round the world: Apple Mail will now block tracking in email. In other words … goodbye to open rate reporting. Publishers use email open metrics to maintain an active and healthy database, stay on top of deliverability standards and to decide which users to re-engage. TFD uses them to determine how much a user is engaging with our content, which determines if and when we want to send them an offer, or spend money to retarget them with display ads. Engaged users, up until now have been ~readers that open emails~, and this metric is almost always tied to top line KPIs.
We’ve come to rely heavily on open rates as a benchmark of success, in large part because it’s easy and it gives us a sense of achievement. However, an open rate is the bare minimum to decide if you have a good email product. If you have decent open rates, you may actually have more reason to thank your data team or audience development team who have been keeping your lists clean enough to get decent open rates, rather than patting yourself on the back for good content. Opening an email doesn’t actually mean that a user read all of your content, it doesn’t mean they cared enough to learn more —or had time to learn more. Open rates are akin to chasing after followers, but click rates are like getting engagement on social media. Engaged audiences are better than mass followings, and they convert at a higher rate.
Right now people are busier and at their desks less. Last week I had 444 notifications, which was a 182% increase from the week before, but my screen time was down 14% week-over-week (in this very effective sample of one). How many newsletters do you think I archived without reading this week? Even the ones I look most forward to opening! So maybe it’s okay that we can’t measure open rate. You’re competing not only with other emails for attention but real life experiences again. Optimizing towards engagement, can and should improve the content we put in front of our users, so when users do open, they want to click on our content. So maybe, Apple is doing all of us a favor.
Refocusing on engagement metrics should push publishers to produce more engaging newsletter content and more enticing ads. Publishers now need to monitor what content is getting clicks in email, and start sending more of it. We’ve talked a lot about humanizing your team and your editors, but what about humanizing your work? How do you go about scrubbing your list? Why not just be honest with your readers, tell them exactly what you want them to do, click this button so I know this is interesting to you. If you like it, we’ll do it more.
What if you combine your first party data strategy with polls or requests for feedback in your newsletter? A click gives you more data about your user’s interests, and a nice engagement metric that can help you heal from the hole left in your heart for the open rate.
Blocking IP Addresses
Apple also announced it will block IP addresses from being accessed on Safari or in Apple Mail as a part of Cloud+. This is a free service to anyone using Safari or Apple Mail. Private Relay, a new Apple protocol that “maintains a stopping point between the user’s IP and the request.” In layman's terms that means that any website (*cough* Google *cough*) will not be able to see the user’s IP address or precise location —without the user’s explicit permission.
While not as many users surf Safari as open Apple mail, it certainly will be interesting to see the impact on Google Analytics data. Keep an eye on your sample sizes in your demographic data, you may see those drop, even lower. TFD clients usually see between 25% and 40% of all user’s demographic profiles inside Google Analytics. If we drop to <20% how much can we rely on the data? I feel like I don’t need to say it again, but creating a first party data strategy is absolutely necessary for publishers now.
An interesting tidbit: Private Replay isn’t going to be available in places where the state openly monitors their citizens’ web use: China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines. (Reuters)
Sign in with Apple Log-In
Also announced: Apple is also going to use a native log in option that allows users to “sign up with Apple”. This will not only block the user’s IP but also create a “ghost” iCloud account that will forward their email to their actual account. This is going to help determine which companies are the source of data leaks, but it is also placing a middle man, on email, and on Safari through Private Relay.
Focus Mode
On to other things that aren’t directly related to email, but can and will impact publishers. Focus mode gives the user more control over notifications, like a layered version of Do Not Disturb. Push notifications can be muted for certain things for certain hours in the day, entering/leaving a location like work or the gym, or by events in their calendar.
Gone are the days of 444 notifications for me, because I will 100% pause my personal email notifications, group chats, and Twitter push notifications during work hours … How frequently are you alerted to something that pulls you out of your current train of thought? What emails will you skip now that you are going to check them all at once, and not when a notification passes your eye on your computer or phone?
Thinking ahead: This could impact things like email send times. Now’s the time to start analyzing what time users are coming to your site the most from email. You won’t have email open time to go off of anymore. Apple did say there will be APIs for developers to ping to understand whether or not users are in focus mode, and there is an override API that can be used for “breaking news”. I’m curious to see what ESPs do with that information, and whether they’ll start adopting tailored sending practices.
Have y'all :eyes: iOS now classifies notifications across a range of passive <-> critical?
— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) June 7, 2021
0: Passive: Yelp recommendations, spam, marketing,...
1: Active (default): breaking news, scores,...
2: Time-Sensitive: package delivery, simplisafe,...
3: Critical: amber alert, EMS,... pic.twitter.com/0tqaLTUfPV
Improvements to Spotlight
If you have an iPhone, do you ever swipe down and start typing so that you don’t have to open Google or find your Mail app. You know when you start typing the word and options come up for you? That feature is called Spotlight, and it’s about to get… more efficient. Spotlight is like an index of everything your phone knows and Apple is working on making content on the phone more cohesive. In other words, Siri is going to start suggesting the content it chooses, first. We’ve already seen this before with Google’s offerings taking over the SERP. (P.S. sign up for The Markup newsletter, it’s fantastic #notsponsored).
Spotlight is “becoming an alternative to Google for several key queries, including web images and information about actors, musicians, TV shows and movies…. It also showcases links to where you can listen or watch content from the artist or actor or movie or show in question. They include news articles, social media links, official websites and even direct you to where the searched person or topic may be found inside your own apps (TechCrunch).“
I’m curious what this will do to IMDB (Amazon owned) or Google’s rich search results that pull from Wikipedia. I’m also curious as to how this is going to impact search behavior. If your phone is a search engine of all of your own apps and those in the app store, will iPhone users become less dependent on Google’s results? It will fundamentally change how the internet is queried by users, on mobile at least.
Apple is placing itself between users and their interactions with the internet, via app, email or search, all in the name of privacy. The decisions they make will impact marketers in all industries. Maybe you should unironically buy the marketers on your team some cookies. We’ve had a tough year.
As Ken Blom, SVP of Ad Strategy and Partnerships at Buzzfeed said “The question surrounding everyone’s first-party data is, how do you add more than, ‘Did they read a post?’ to your direct understanding of your audience and their preferences. If you haven’t figured out your first-party data strategy yet, we can help. Stop worrying about selling your open rates and focus on knowing what makes your audience tick.
More Resources
There has been great coverage on this topic and on all things privacy from TechCrunch, Digiday, and NiemanLab, but if you only have time for more read, it’s this one.
If you want more in depth coverage like this, let us know here.
