The iOS 15 Update: What Marketers Need to Know
We’re usually relieved to see an iOS update to fix any bugs or lags that we’ve been experiencing with our Apple devices. As the new iOS 15 update takes place, one of the key features will be privacy-related. If the user enables Mail Privacy Protection, then Apple Mail apps will mark emails as opened, regardless of what the user has actually clicked. To any marketing team that tracks open rates for their emails, they’re no longer going to be able to depend on this data when evaluating how their audience is interacting with clicking the email.
What are marketing teams to do? Don’t worry, while this update may disrupt this portion of your tracking, there are plenty of other ways to test how your audience interacts with your content. In this blog we’ll explain ways to pivot your focus on to other ways to gather audience information, analyze it, and turn it into actionable methods that yield results.
Email Marketing: Back to Basics
Let’s break down the components of an email your team would send: Subject line, content, and CTA. What can you do to improve each part of the email and how can you measure what your audience chooses to engage with?
Subject lines should be attention-grabbers, you want your audience to lock into that line and want to open it. There may be some time to still track what kind of subject lines they’re clicking.
It’s time to brainstorm some fresh ideas for the subject. Make a word cloud, play with word order, and conduct some A/B testing to gather as much information as possible.
Once you’ve gotten your audience reading the email, the work has only just begun. Now it’s time to show them the stellar content you’ve had waiting for them. A few takeaways for your content:
It naturally follows your subject line.
It’s interesting and well-written.
The content will guide your audience to the next step.
The content leads the audience to the CTA. The call to action needs to be clear and you have to keep the customer’s journey in mind. Where are they at and what is your goal?
Do you want your audience to sign up for a newsletter so they get the newest information about your business? Or are you leading them to your website so they can capitalize on a deal that’s offered for a limited time? No matter what your CTA is, it needs to be easy to identify so the audience can follow through and is ready to do so.
When you have your emails curated, then it’s time to use your tools and workflows to assess how your audience is responding. Clicks and the volume of response will show you what your audience wants to engage with and it also can show if some of your messaging needs some refining.
Do Some “Spring Cleaning” This Fall
One of the upsides of the new update is that you can get rid of all the addresses that aren’t interacting with you. These individuals may no longer be using the email address in your database. As the volume of these types of email addresses grows, it could mean your emails will be targeted as junk — routing to a folder where your audience is sure to ignore what you’ve sent.
As your list is tailored to active emails of people you want to reach, you can focus on who is responsive and continue to weed out the inactive ones. Maintaining this means you won’t have to worry about your list growing with unused addresses and increasing the chances of being marked as spam.
Remember Your Audience
Outreach doesn’t stop at email. People engage in all types of ways — mainly, their phones. While the iOS update may affect email data, there’s one main function on cell phones that your audience could be more interested in using to receive information. Texts can be a new tool that sets your business outreach above the rest.
Use SMS to provide users with news, updates, or other ways you are aiming for them to engage with what you’ve sent. If some users seem to never open their email, sending that content via text may be a way to bridge that gap.
This is the time to be creative. Think of the ways to tailor the customer experience so you’re able to reach your audience and establish a relationship with them right from the start. Implement ways to strengthen that relationship and maintain a dialogue. You may find that the iOS 15 update was the inspiration your business needed to elevate to the next level. Curious to learn more about creating customer journeys, evaluating your company’s metrics, and being at the forefront of the marketing industry? Reach out to The ADage Marketing Group today and let’s start talking.
