Every day, the average person spends around three hours on email, making email marketing a powerful element of a company’s internet marketing strategy. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your business, products, and specials to your audience efficiently and effectively. You can segment your contacts for highly targeted messages, reach people at crucial points in the sales funnel, and connect with your audience on a deeper level.

However, with the continual advancement of digital technology comes a growing concern about privacy protection. We share so much of our personal and financial information online, a data breach could mean identity theft or financial ruin. Although recent privacy laws and regulations have impacted the way email marketers measure metrics, email marketing can still be an effective tool for internet marketing success.

What Privacy Concerns Mean for Email Marketing

In recent years, online privacy has become a major concern for today’s internet users. In fact, almost 74% of American internet users are more concerned with privacy protection than ever before. As a result, several acts and regulations have been passed in an effort to increase the security of online information, including:

  • GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): the strictest security and privacy law in the world. Although it was passed in Europe, this regulation applies to any organization who gathers data from people in the European Union. The GDPR is firm on how digital information is gathered and processed, and who can obtain it.
  • CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act): gives California consumers more control over what personal information is collected by businesses and how that information is used. Consumers’ rights include deleting their information from gathered records and opting-out of the selling of their personal data.
  • MPP (Mail Privacy Protection): more impactful to email marketing in particular, Apple uses this to hide email recipients’ IP address so senders can’t locate or track users’ online activity. It also keeps senders from seeing whether their emails have been opened.

MPP is especially problematic for marketers because email marketing works by gathering information about an audience, sending targeted messages, and tracking metrics to determine the success of the campaign and the marketing strategy overall. These metrics reveal information like when emails are opened and how often, on what kind of device, and from what location.

All of this enables companies to optimize their emails and deliver more relevant content that will resonate with their consumers. By giving consumers anonymity, privacy regulations make it difficult for email marketers to deliver the right message to the right person through the right means.

Email Marketing Metrics Can Still Be Leveraged

Despite these recent challenges, email marketing can still be an effective marketing tool. Its success will just depend on a new approach. Since you can no longer rely on open rates as a viable measurement tool, you’ll need to think outside the box as you plan your internet marketing strategy. Consider applying the following tactics:

  • Separate your Apple-based contacts: since non-Apple clients aren’t affected by MPP, you can still use your former metric procedures to determine open rates. Use those metrics to gain insights into your non-Apple users. These results will give you a good indication of what is and isn’t working for their needs.
  • Rely more on click-through rates: although you can’t see who is opening your emails and when, you can see what content is engaging your audience. You’ll understand what keywords are aligning with searches, which ads are garnering attention, and what content is performing well overall.
  • Monitor social media threads: observe chats and posts to see whether email-specific content is being discussed by your consumers. Positive feedback is a good indicator that your emails are well-received.

With some adjustments to your tracking methods, email marketing metrics can be leveraged for optimization and revenue generation.

Hire Email Marketing Experts

Migration Marketing is a boutique consultancy specializing in strategic marketing plans that deliver positive results.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you develop an effective email marketing campaign.