3 KPIs You Need To Care About For Email Marketing Reports IN A POST EMAIL OPEN WORLD

Picture this scenario.

You've just put together your shiny new Email Campaign Report, helping you identify which email marketing campaigns are working, which email marketing campaigns are not working, and guiding you to improve your email marketing performance for the next campaign.

You're so excited to share your report with your boss and co-workers to share your new insights, when Debbie Downer, your "never optimistic" cubicle neighbor sees the email you are about to hit send on.

• Debbie: "You know, open rates don't matter anymore. This report is going to be useless"

• You: "What do you mean?"

• Debbie: "Opens are inaccurate thanks to Apple".

• You: "Is that true?"

• Debbie: "That's what I read online".

Panic hits you like a ton of bricks.

Could Debbie be right? You hadn't heard of this news.

Desperate to find answers, you scramble to find any resource you can about email open rates and Apple online.

Information is conflicting. You find some declaring the end of the email open rate Others are proclaiming that the whole thing is blown out of proportion.

So what's the real story? Is the email open rate dead? Or is it all just a big hoax? Before you send out your email campaign report to your co-workers and boss, you need answers.

I'm here to help.

I'm here to tell you that the email open rate is NOT dead - but it's on life support. Open rate has dramatically changed and has clearly become a less reliable metric than ever before.

So What did Apple change about measuring Email Open rates?

• Apple announced in June 2021 a new initiative rolling out to Apple devices called Mail Privacy Protection (i.e. MPP). MPP is positioned as a feature to protect Apple user privacy.

• MPP hides your IP address so email senders can't link your activity with other online activity - this includes determining if and when you've opened an email.

• MPP impacts any email opened from an Apple Mail app —no matter which email service is used inside the Apple Mail app.

• Apple users must explicitly opt-into MPP in order to take advantage of this feature.

Why does it matter?

• Without getting too technical, Apple users who use Apple Mail and opt into MPP will (in most cases) have their email marketing messages automatically downloaded and therefore have their email marketing messages marked as opened automatically.

• The world LOVES using Apple devices to open email marketing messages. According to Litmus, Apple iPhone (iOS Mail), Apple Mail (macOS Mail), and Apple iPad (iPadOS Mail) combine to make up nearly 50% of combined email opens in 2020.

WHAT WOULD WE EXPECT THE IMPACT TO BE?

• Since most companies expected Apple users to explicitly opt into using MPP AND 50% of email opens come from Apple users, most have predicted the death of accurate email open rates.

• Specifically, the expectation would be increasingly higher open rates, since Apple users would have their emails automatically flagged as opened.

SO What WAS THE ACTUAL IMPACT?

• Mixed - email marketing software companies reported initially that the impact was not nearly as large as they would have anticipated. However, MPP has clearly grown in importance over time.

  • AWeber initially reported slightly elevated open rates.

  • MessageGears reported recently that MPP significantly increased open rates.

  • SendGrid reported significantly increased open rates

So, Debbie Downer had a point.

Email opens are at least relatively inaccurate now thanks to Apple. Opens can be accurate for subscribers who are not using Apple Mail on Apple devices. That doesn't represent everyone in your list (in all likelihood) but it's probably not a small percentage of your list.

The good news?

Your email marketing software may be working on a solution to identify and isolate Apple Mail opens to help you discover which opens you can trust and which opens may be inaccurate.

The bad news?

Not every email marketing software has a feature that helps you identify Apple Mail opens. In addition, even if you identify Apple Mail opens, you're probably excluding a large chunk of opens from calculating your true open rate.

The conclusion to me is clear: Finding accurate email marketing open rates is likely never coming back.

Email marketers have held up open rate as a truly awesome KPI for years.

In reality, open rate has always been one of the least useful KPIs you can use in measuring your email marketing performance.

Why?

Opening an email is the lowest level of commitment a subscriber can take with your email marketing content. It's the same as visiting a store, walking around the store, and leaving without looking at any items.

Your email marketing program needs to persuade your subscribers to take deeper action.

Here's 3 KPIs YOU NEED TO CARE ABOUT For Email Marketing Reports IN A POST EMAIL OPEN WORLD

1). Delivery Rate

The most important first step to ensuring your email marketing campaigns are effective is ensuring that your email marketing campaigns actually reach your subscribers.

The best way to measure whether your email marketing campaigns are reaching your subscribers is to use delivery rate.

Delivery Rate: The percentage of emails that were delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Delivery Rate = Delivered Emails / Sent Emails

Your goal is to reach 100% of your email subscribers. There's all kinds of reasons that this will be unlikely over the long-run, so your goal should be to maximize your delivery rate. How do you do this? The simplest way to consistently reach high delivery rates is to segment your email marketing list.

Generally speaking, email marketers have one of two options when they are ready to send their latest email marketing campaign to their subscribers.

• Send the content to all of their email subscribers

• Send the content to a segment (or a portion) of their email subscribers

You should always be looking to send your email marketing campaign to a segment of your email subscribers. Why?

Simply put, your email marketing marketing campaigns will be more likely to reach your subscribers (i.e. emails are delivered) if you only send your campaigns to a portion of your subscribers.

Without getting too technical, when you send your email marketing campaigns, mailbox providers like Gmail are looking to ensure that you are a reputable email sender. If Gmail determines that you are not a reputable email sender, they will NOT deliver your email marketing campaign to your subscriber's inbox.

So how do you get on Gmail's good side and land in your subscriber's inbox? Segment your list!

High level, there are two ways you can think about segmenting your list:

• Subscribers who have engaged in your email marketing campaigns in the past are more likely to engage in your email marketing campaigns in the future.

• Not all subscribers care about your content.

If you're looking for subscribers who engaged in your email marketing campaigns in the past, most email marketers would find subscribers who opened their campaigns in the past.

• If you can identify email opens accurately (i.e. non Apple Mail opens) in your email marketing software, this is the perfect place to start.

• If you cannot identify email opens accurately, find subscribers who have clicked through your content in the past or made a purchase and use this as a starting point for segmenting your list and sending your email marketing campaigns.

If you want to measure delivery rate and other delivery rated key performance indicators, check out my guide on building your own deliverability report.

2). Click Rate

After subscribers receive your content to their inbox (hooray, successfully delivered email marketing campaign!), your next step should be to try to get your subscribers to engage with your content.

Before the MPP update, email marketers could pretty accurately measure four levels of subscriber engaged

Four Levels of Subscriber Engagement

Delivered Email > Opened Email > Clicked Email > Converted from Email

After the MPP update, opens are now relatively inaccurate. We're now down to a new model of subscriber engagement that email marketers can measure fairly accurately.

Three Levels of Subscriber Engagement

Delivered Email > Clicked Email > Converted from Email

If you've successfully delivered your content to your email subscribers, your next level of engagement to achieve is to try to get your subscribers to CLICK through your email content. Since your email campaigns can reach a different number of subscribers each campaign, we need a metric that helps evaluate what percentage of your delivered emails were clicked.

Enter the almighty Click Rate. So what is Click Rate?

Click Rate: The percentage of emails that were clicked based on the number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Click Rate = Unique Clicks / Delivered Emails

Your email marketing campaigns should be to motivate your email subscribers to take an action - and the easiest action a subscriber can take once they open your email is to click through your email content.

Click rate should be the KPI you use to evaluate success for all of your email marketing campaigns.

3). Conversion Rate

Congratulations! Your subscribers have officially clicked through your email marketing campaign. It's now time to get your subscribers to take the ultimate action - convert!

How can subscribers convert on your email marketing campaigns? Well, it's different for every industry and business model. At a high level, when a subscriber converts on your email marketing campaign, they are taking your desired business action.

Some common examples of "conversion" activities include:

• Make a purchase

• Fill out a lead form

• Download a free resource

• Click to call

Ultimately, email marketing programs help make businesses money. Email marketing is THE best marketing channel for generating return on your investment - yes, better than social media!

Measuring whether subscribers took action and generated business results is the most important KPI you can measure.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of subscribers who made a purchase (or completed your desired campaign subscriber action) based on the number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Conversion Rate = Unique Conversions / Delivered Emails

Your goal is to maximize your conversion rate for your email marketing campaigns. Make sure your email marketing campaigns are set up to measure conversions associated with your business.

Take the time to ensure you're measuring what business results you drive from your email marketing campaigns. After all, you spend hours building and sending your content to your subscribers. You need to know whether all that effort was worth it!

If you're looking for help measuring all three of these KPIs, head on over to my FREE Email Campaign Report. The FREE Email Campaign Report helps you measure your email marketing campaigns and understand all of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs).

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