MWD BLOG

Like we posted about earlier this month, we’re hard at work prepping for the looming Apple iOS 15 rollout of Mail Privacy Protection. If you would like a refresher on what that means, the very short story is that over half of email users will now look like they are opening every email you send them. The long story is here.

In thinking about how to handle this new environment, it’s important to keep in mind your ultimate goal. The rollout this fall will require a huge change to how bulk emailers operate, nonprofit or otherwise. However, our true goals will not change—sending the right message to the right person at the right time in order to spread awareness of our work, steward donors,  and increase commitment to your organization.

Email plays a large role as a component of a multi-channel marketing and fundraising strategy. We want to continue to send engaging content to people who want to receive our emails. But open rates will no longer be as meaningful as they were before. We anticipate at least 80% of Apple Mail users will be automatically opted in to Mail Privacy Protection by Giving Tuesday. Over that time, open rates will become more and more inflated. Recipients using other email tools, applications and platforms will remain as accurate as they are right now.

Mail Privacy Protection means we may not be able to achieve our goals or understand our metrics as efficiently, at least for a while—but we believe if organizations are still doing the right things, engagement with their mission will remain high.

Our specific recommendations are as follows:

Measure Engagement by Clicks

One reason Apple’s changes are a concern is that organizations currently rely heavily on open rate to measure engagement. Email Service Providers (ESPs) can prevent your emails successfully delivering to inboxes if there is a high level of disengagement. The way we dealt with this before was primarily by using email opens to assess whether a constituent was “engaged” or “inactive” on our email list. Often this was in concert with the person’s giving behavior, clicks, and forwards—but open rate was the main driver.

• Now we’ll defer to clicks as the primary metric of engagement. Most email platforms do not use pixels to drive clicks, autologin links or actions subsequently taken, so we will still have that data available by constituent and can use it to identify whether people are active on our file and should therefore continue receiving our emails.
• Re-engagement and winback email targeting should no longer rely on opens as a metric. We recommend using clicks within the timeframe to generate audiences. Organizations using Luminate Online should change their Engagement Factors to include only clicks. As you may be doing now, you may wish to layer in giving behavior to determine whether folks are active or inactive.
• To prepare for the rollout, create these journeys, Engagement Factors, and queries now, and identify how similar the audiences are to your opens-based audiences!
• For some platforms, click information is also driven by pixels that connect the information back to an individual. These platforms may opt to change how they work in order to deal with Mail Privacy Protection. For now, though, journeys built on opens or clicks will erroneously filter out anyone using Apple Mail, as those constituents will all appear to be engaging with the delivered emails whether or not they are actually opening them. Nonprofits using these platforms can continue to run open- or click-based journeys, and they will continue to target a portion of their inactive audience, but they will go to fewer people.

Focus on garnering clicks in addition to opens

All non-fundraising messages should encourage clicks more consciously than they may have before. Examples and ideas: share the first question of a quiz, encouraging people to click through to find the answer or finish the quiz. Encourage survey taking. Invite people to update their information online.

• All non-fundraising messages should encourage clicks more consciously than they may have before. : share the first question of a quiz, encouraging people to click through to find the answer or finish the quiz. Encourage survey taking. Invite people to update their information online. Provide the first part of a story or update in an e-newsletter, with the rest of the information on your website. Share a video still that folks must click through on to watch. Note, Fundraising emails already promote clicks through to give but do not have high click-through rates compared to other messages. Therefore, our focus is on changes to the rest of the emails organizations are sending.
• We still have a couple months before these changes will go into effect, so if you have a re-engagement and winback series prepped, plan to launch it at the end of August so your file is as clean as possible when Mail Privacy Protection rolls out.

Improve your email deliverability to the inbox in other ways

Opens are just one way email senders are able to prove they are good actors to ESPs. We recommend leaning into some additional tried-and-true aids for deliverability, especially as re-engagement and winback email series may be less effective.

• Third-party tools like Validity and Fresh Address’s Blackj@ck use seed lists to help organizations identify if their deliverability to the inbox is going down over time due to the lack of insight on engagement from open rate metrics.
• Maintain list hygiene through third-party providers for list cleans and real-time email validation. This ensures bad actors and inadvertently bad emails (honeypots, temporary email addresses, misspellings) are removed from the file. We aim to roll out real-time email validation across clients on their highest-traffic email signup forms and pledges. We are also recommending increasing the frequency of list cleans from annually to quarterly. List cleans will be more important than ever, since it’s going to be harder to determine whether someone is inactive once they join the list.
• Complete your sender authentication by creating and adding SPF, DKIM and DMARC to your sender profile. Check your domain to ensure you have not been added to any blocklists.
• More guidance on sender reputation and more can be found in our Email Deliverability blog post here.

Resends to non-donors

Many clients squeeze more out of some well-performing emails by re-sending them to non-openers of the original message Since so many more folks will look like they have opened, this tactic won’t be as useful.

• Instead of emails to non-openers, use a similar technique: send the message again, targeting non-donors to the original email/campaign rather than non-openers.
• In addition to changing the subject line, add a liftnote to make the message more different from the original.

A/B tests

A/B testing that uses open rate to indicate the winner, like sender name, preheader, and subject line tests may not be possible. Testing send time may be impossible too since Apple will route messages through a proxy to open images (including pixels) before it delivers them. Depending on file size, some organizations may find it difficult to achieve statistical significance on tests of open rate.

• Do as much envelope testing as you can right now before these changes come into effect.
• In order to continue email envelope tests, we recommend identifying the most active audience, based on recent clicks, current donors, or other methods. Target this audience for an A/B test since their open rates are more likely to provide data that will help us achieve the quantity of response required for statistical significance considering the Apple Mail opens; then roll out to the rest of the file.

• We hope to eventually begin to run email envelope tests again once we’ve identified the “new normal.”
• Add tests to your plan to optimize for clicks, such as test of hyperlink formatting and CTA button size, placement, and copy.

Adjust your KPIs

• Because opens will no longer mean the same thing as before, we recommend trying to not focus on open rate for a couple months around the rollout, unless it goes down, which is a very bad sign. It will be hard to stop using open rate since we have relied on it for so long. Once the rollout has settled, we will have a new benchmark for what a typical open rate will look like. Although it will be less meaningful than before, it will still be useful to compare across messages and benchmark with others—since everyone’s will be changing!
• Revenue per thousand emails launched (or RPME), is an under-utilized metric that could be tracked more closely for a meaningful KPI beyond opens and clicks. This metric is very different across organizations, so we recommend comparing with your own organizational benchmark for prior years rather than industry benchmarks.
• Long-term cadence testing with our clients has identified several important things: digital donors give at higher rates when they receive more mail; offline donors give at higher rates when they receive email; and donors who make donations across more than one giving channel have a higher lifetime value than those who give in only one. Using match-back reports and other cross-channel analysis will help you identify fundamental problems with the email program beyond what open rate could tell you.
• Finally, I’d like to share yet another reminder that unsubscribes are not bad per se, but large swings can be meaningful.

In order to manage a great email program and enjoy deliverability to the inbox, we will continue to send great content with appropriate actions for people to take. AND we will do this while offering opportunities and encouragement to click through more so than we did in the past. Innovation and adaptation will help nonprofits maintain a clean list, manage the most active audiences they can, and therefore get the best deliverability to the inbox possible.

We have several months to try new techniques. How are you preparing for Mail Privacy Protection? Share your questions and ideas!

Wendy Marinaccio Husman, Vice President, is a direct response professional with almost 16 years of experience in development. Prior to her work with MWD, she served as the Director of Development at Alonzo King LINES Ballet and the Membership Director at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy; she also spent a year in Shanghai consulting on email campaigns, database setup, and direct mail.  Wendy received her Bachelor of Arts in Science, Technology, & Society from Stanford University and her Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University.