Danielle Gallant – 00:00:03:
Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score powered by Validity.
Guy Hanson – 00:00:08:
We’re your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle Gallant – 00:00:10:
And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. The notorious MPP. Those three letters are enough to strike fear into the hearts of email marketers everywhere. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, MPP was introduced back in September of 2021, and it’s fair to say that it completely upended the traditional rules of email marketing. More than a year later, we’re still realizing the full impacts of Apple’s new policy and dealing with its unexpected consequences. And as we saw even in Validity’s own 2023 Deliverability Benchmark Report, even Apple themselves as a mailbox provider might be dealing with some of these consequences. Since MPP is here to stay, for better or worse, let’s talk about how marketers can pivot to win in this new landscape.
Guy Hanson – 00:01:09:
Absolutely. And to help us have this conversation, it’s a real pleasure to welcome today’s guest, Chad White, who is quite possibly one of the most famous people in the world of email marketing. And if you check out Chad’s LinkedIn profile, he reckons he’s written about 3000 blogs. And I’m just starting to feel inadequate because that’s at least two and a half thousand more than me. He’s been featured in like 100 publications, including MarketingProfs, CMS, Wire, regular contributor to Only Influencers. He’s the author of his own book. So I guess the question, Chad, is, does that leave any time for a day job? And if so, what is it?
Chad White – 00:01:48:
Well, thanks for having me on. I’m the head of research at Oracle Marketing Consulting. We’re a global, full service digital marketing agency that’s inside of Oracle, and we have a very diverse set of skills that we bring to bear for our clients. We do an awful lot of email marketing, but we have expertise in loyalty and SMS and push, so we kind of do it all in the digital marketing space. Certainly email marketing is our home and that’s where we do a lot of our work. And I’m really spoiled to be surrounded by tons of super smart people that I get to collaborate with all the time. A fantastic job. But yes, in my spare time, I also write books about email marketing. So I’m definitely very steep. And I’m excited that just recently released the fourth edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, brand new, completely updated, greatly expanded, full of all the new updates that have happened since 2017 when I released a third edition. And oh my gosh, so much has happened. And certainly MPP is one of those big things that I had to make a lot of adjustments in the fourth edition to accommodate.
Danielle Gallant – 00:02:54:
Some people get excited to meet Taylor Swift. Guy and I get excited to chat with Chad White. So on the MPP note, how did Apple’s MPP upend the email marketing status quo? And what are some of the biggest and maybe unexpected challenges that email marketers are facing right now.
Chad White – 00:03:16:
Yeah. So MPP is a tricky animal because it really did a lot of different things. It blocked forwards, which was not a huge deal. People didn’t tend to track forwards, but it did block those. It obscures device information, although there’s a little bit of some workarounds there and that makes it harder for designers to understand what the various environments are that they’re trying to code for, to do progressive enhancements and to make sure they have adequate fallbacks. So that got affected. But certainly sort of the biggest one is that they obscured opens and they did that not by blocking them, although sometimes we sort of use that word, they’ve blocked opens. They haven’t really blocked opens. What they did instead is that they’ve created just a tidal wave of fake opens that just sort of wash over all the real opens so you can’t tell which ones are fake and which ones are real. And that has caused a lot of sort of profound difficulties for some marketers. Now, not everyone is highly impacted, but a lot of brands absolutely are. And the ones that tend to be more impacted by that tend to be ones where engagement was really key to how they ran their program. I think a lot of people think, oh, thank goodness Opens have been devalued. Not a big deal, it’s always a vanity metric and we should have been like, measuring further down the funnel anyway. Well, that’s lovely if you’re a retailer, because that’s absolutely true. You should be measuring way far down the funnel because you have nice and frequent conversions that you can measure, hopefully a lot of click activity. That’s great if you’re a retailer. But if you’re not a retailer, if you’re a B2B brand, a subscription-based company, if you’re a media company, or a CPG company, chances are opens were really important to how your brand measured the success of your program. We’ve seen the biggest effects for our clients, who tend to be really large senders, especially in the B2C space. The thing that they’re really wrestling with is deliverability. What has changed is brands ability to effectively manage their engagement so they can send all the right signals to inbox providers and be able to get their emails in the inbox. That’s the thing that’s changed. And maybe I should take a pause there, but we could definitely talk a lot more about the ramifications of that system being partially blown up.
Danielle Gallant – 00:05:45:
Well, and we’re here, obviously, to talk about MPP today. That’s what we’re focusing on. But there are more email metric challenges to come, right? Like as we hear more about AI or ChatGPT, and we await the depreciation of third party cookies, marketers presumably are going to have to face more of these challenges in terms of data visibility, right?
Chad White – 00:06:09:
For sure. I love email marketing, it’s constantly changing and I’m a journalist by training, so I’m sort of addicted to the next new story. I’m addicted to the change. I think I would love for the change to slow down a little bit. That would be nice. They’ve had a little bit too much change as of late. Just pump the brakes a little bit. I’m sure there are a lot of marketers that feel similarly, that they wish things would just the pace would slow down a bit. But it’s also exciting in that most of these changes are positive ones. They keep email constantly, sort of revitalized, and a part of the latest and greatest new trends. Certainly huge conversation is happening right now about Generative AI, whether it’s text or images or coding. Very early days there, in my opinion, was that messy adolescent period. So not like the best well behaved tools. But the future is clear. These tools are going to be really important in the years ahead. I think ten years from now, these tools will be baked into a lot of what we do and will be kind of second nature in many cases to how we operate. So that’ll be really exciting. And lots, I think, good things happening there. You mentioned third party cookies going away. They’ve sort of been perpetually kind of slowly going away for a while now, but inevitably that’s going to happen. I think that’s a huge boon for email marketing and a huge boon for loyalty marketing, which are kind of like brother and sister working together to get lots of good zero and first party data to get closer to our subscribers and our customers. Yeah, tons and tons of changes there. The thing that’s I think exciting, though, is that I think there are lots of opportunities for brands now to better understand how their subscribers work, how their customers work, and understand them better. I think that has been one of the silver linings of MPP is that it has cast so much doubt on sort of what I call surface metrics. Things like opens and website visits and things, and really encourage people. To try to get deeper down the funnel, to understand on a deeper level, on a more meaningful level, how their customers and subscribers are behaving.
Guy Hanson – 00:08:20:
You talk about how there’s a lot of positives, and I think even in the context of today’s conversation, that does hold true. I think in my mind, and hopefully yours, anything designed to serve better respect of people’s data privacy is a good thing. And I think from that point of view, MPP is probably well intentioned. But it also kind of begs the question of whether Apple were trying to solve a problem that maybe the vast majority of their customers didn’t even know they had. What do you think?
Chad White – 00:08:51:
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical. I don’t know that this effort was fully sincere. I mean, obviously Apple has built part of its brand around privacy and this feels like a marketing exercise to me, that they were like oh, how could we extend more privacy into email? And I don’t know, maybe they saw what hey.com was saying about spy pixels and stuff and they thought, oh, let’s do something there that seems like that could be really good. But I’m hard-pressed to think of any examples that I’ve seen or read about or heard about of marketers or frankly, anybody abusing tracking pixel data. I haven’t heard of any cases. And it’s like when I can’t think of any instances of this being abused, it seems like it’s solution looking for a problem. Now that said, I do agree with what they’ve done with relays, so bouncing the location signal around. I think that’s data that, again, wasn’t being misused. I’ve never heard of that data being misused, but I think you could easily argue that maybe this is data that marketers shouldn’t have, that it’s a bit over the line and consumers probably weren’t aware of that part of it. But again, I’m hard pressed to think of any cases where that was being abused. It was really just being used to put in local store maps into emails. Very innocuous. But I think that’s a part that definitely makes sense. Maybe we shouldn’t have that. I think it’s arguably data we shouldn’t have. I think that would be one of them. But I think most of the rest of what MPP does, frankly, just makes it harder for good actors to do what’s right and to increase transparency of what tracking pixels were doing. Their opt in language is so skewed, so one sided, and frankly, so misleading that it doesn’t do anything to help consumers understand what these pixels were doing. All they did is make it sound really malicious. And it’s in stark contrast to what Apple does. When Apple asks permission to track their users there, they use words like relevance, which I think a lot of email marketers would use in describing how they use that data. Apple uses relevancy.
Danielle Gallant – 00:11:22:
Let’s talk about some of the ways that we’ve seen email marketers respond to MPP. So in my experience, some clients adapted quickly and drastically. They swapped opens for clicks as their key engagement metric, that surface level metric type stuff that you were talking about. Or they opted for a tiered engagement system to try to gauge what subscribers were doing. Others seem to have completely ignored the fact that open data is obscured. So is there a right and wrong way or wrong way to deal with MPP? And are marketers taking it seriously enough?
Chad White – 00:12:02:
Yeah, they are. I think that we have to recognize that there is really a pretty significant range of impact. A lot of smaller brands, smaller senders, aren’t really being significantly impacted. A lot of B2B marketers. We have a lot of B2B marketers here at Oracle on our Eloquent platform. And in a lot of cases, only like 15, 20% of their subscribers are on Apple devices that have enabled MPP, so they’re not really seeing a lot of impact. But we have a lot of B2C clients who are seeing 80% of their subscribers on Apple Mail with MPP enabled. So there is this really big range. So that’s something to acknowledge. And I talked earlier about how some marketers in some verticals are more affected because Opens were just more central to the goals of their programs. And I think those folks are taking it very seriously, although in a lot of cases it’s not totally clear what they can do to adapt. They just have to a little bit have more of a leap of faith. One of the things that the brands are doing is it’s sort of a multilayered type of strategy. For instance, Opens haven’t gone away. Some of the rhetoric I hear is like, Opens are no good anymore. And that’s not true. Even if you’re a B2C brand and you have a ton of your subscribers that are on Apple Mail with MPP enabled, you still have some subscribers that are not, that are using Gmail, that are using Yahoo, that are using email clients, where Opens are still being as faithfully reported as they were before. A lot of inaccuracies around Opens, but a super useful metric. And so use those, segment your database into two halves, the MPP users and the non MPP users and pay attention to that cohort where you still have good reliable Open data, you can use those folks as a rough proxy for what your entire database is doing in terms of Opens, that is very handy. So don’t ignore that just because it’s small. So that’s sort of number one. I think you mentioned like clicks being more important and that’s definitely the case. A lot of brands are by necessity, digging deeper there. We recently published a blog post about seven ways to get more clicks. One of the things that we’ve discovered is that it turns out that a click is actually roughly like twice as powerful as an Open in terms of qualifying a subscriber as safe to mail. So in the pre-MPP world, if you were kind of using like a six month window for engagement, using primarily Opens, you could probably get away with using a twelve month window for clicks. So that’s sort of an important thing that we’ve kind of learned along the way. But the bigger issue is that clicks are still just too rare, right? There are roughly like eight times as many Opens as there are clicks, something like that. For a lot of brands, like on average, that’s a huge void that we’re trying to fill. And so even if you do everything possible to increase clicks, you’re not going to be able to make up for those loss of Opens, although obviously you could try. There’s definitely a lot of things you can do to increase clicks.
Guy Hanson – 00:15:22:
Let’s dig into that a little bit. You’re right? I mean, when it came along and everybody was saying, cool, we’re going to use more clicks, and you almost had this mental picture as like watching a herd of wildebees migrating across the Serengeti as everyone jumped in to use more clicks. But there’s a balance, isn’t there? I mean, you can’t just stuff an email full of clicks.
Chad White – 00:15:41:
You can’t compensate for the loss of Opens, you just can’t. There’s too many of them. And the other thing is that this is how people engage with email, right? Like a lot of subscribers will just open an email, look at it, and then they’ll close their email client and open up a browser type in the URL of the brand whose email they were just reading and then they’ll go and do so. There’s all kinds of behaviors like that that are completely 100% normal. We wish they wouldn’t do that, but that’s a completely normal behavior. And that’s part of what we’re now trying to get a better grip on is kind of reading those other signals. So yeah, absolutely try to get more clicks, to try to do it in a way that’s not kind of abusive or introduces a lot of friction. That’s one of my kind of key worries is that everyone’s like, oh, let’s get more clicks. Like, oh, we’ll move all this great email stuff to landing pages. Well, you’ve just introduced a ton of friction by moving that stuff from emails to landing pages. That’s not so good. But there are a lot of creative ways and helpful ways that you can try to get more clicks. Sort of my favorite is like more non promotional type CTAs doing more polls and surveys and links to informational things that might help warm people up to then make a purchase. I think a lot of B2B marketers, a lot of content marketers have a really good grasp of that.
Guy Hanson – 00:17:13:
Now. Also sort of thinking about that automatic pixel fire metric, there are some useful attributes to that which maybe sort of not all email marketers have thought about. For example, at least it’s providing a confirmation that you’ve sent that email to a good address, that it hasn’t been junked. And there’s a few others in a similar kind of vein in terms of sort of useful ways that you can still use that automatic pixel fire data point.
Chad White – 00:17:39:
Yeah, I think part of the issue with those open signals from Apple, we’ve called them auto opens or auto generated opens, and I think the fact that we’re still calling them Opens has caused a lot of confusion. One of our analysts, Tommy Hummel, says that these aren’t really Opens, these are really more like delivered signals. But because we’re calling them auto Opens, people I think in some cases are trying to use them like they would use Opens, but they’re really not. It’s more akin to delivered. And that is definitely valuable because you don’t get an auto open if an email goes to the junk folder. So that is a useful signal, but it’s a far cry from being an open. And you do see some brands really struggling with how to then use that data. I’ve heard a lot of different strategies in terms of mailing these folks, like you would mail anybody else who opened to emailing them less frequently, kind of like a reengagement series where you would throttle back on campaign volume to those folks. And then, of course, you have some people who are then completely excluding that data because of the sensitivities of their program. So there’s a full spectrum of how those signals, those auto open signals, are being used. But I do think there’s a lot of confusion, and in many cases, like desperation, brands really can’t really see themselves not using that data because in many cases, it would just be too devastating to their mailable audience size. And over the past year, spam House has been really active, so we’ve had just tons of informational listings. And I’m proud to say that here at Oracle, we’ve not had a ton of these, so I know a lot of you had a lot more. So we felt pretty good about that. I feel like we’ve actually been pretty conservative with our advice to our clients. And so I think we’ve had some good fortune there. I think we’ve avoided a lot of pain on the deliverability side, but we probably have given up some gains on the other side of that equation, trying to reach out to more people. You got to pick your poison a little bit. But I remember at one point connecting the dots between the increased Spam House activity and all of the stuff that they say they’re seeing in terms of risky behaviors by senders. And I remember on LinkedIn, someone from Spam House reached out to me to comment on what I was posting, saying, hey, look, here at Spam House, we don’t use auto generated opens in any of our spam traps or anything. These two issues have nothing to do with each other. And my response is, well, all this bad behavior you say that you’re seeing all of a sudden, where do you think that stems from? That stems from the desperation that a lot of senders are experiencing right now around their engagement management capabilities, and they’re feeling like they need to take more risk to avoid their list size decreasing. And so I still see these things just inextricably intertwined. I see a lot of negative behaviors by senders coming from what MPP has done.
Guy Hanson – 00:21:03:
How should senders actually be measuring engagement post MPP? Based on everything you’ve said and what we’ve learned, we know it’s not as simple as just ignoring open rate and focusing exclusively on clicks. But to your point, there’s a struggle. You’re used to certain metrics, you’re used to certain KPIs. So what should marketers be thinking of now when they’re looking at these.
Chad White – 00:21:29:
Yeah. I did want to reiterate that the rules have not changed. I have seen zero from Google or anybody else, even Apple. The rules are exactly the same as they were prempp, which is that engagement is key. It matters so much. And when Apple Mail and Gmail and Yahoo and if they see your engagement falling, bad things start to happen in terms of deliverability. So that’s key to understand is that despite what Apple has done and made it harder for us to see engagement signals, the rules of the game for deliverability haven’t changed at all, to my knowledge. So knowing that that’s where we’re at, what do you do? So we sort of hinted at some of these things and touched on them already. Can you use auto opens as not quite an open but as some kind of a signal to use that to then message on some type of lower cadence or in combination with other signals? Yes, you probably should be doing that. Should you be trying to get more clicks? Absolutely. I think kind of the hardest part of the equation is trying to go outside of email behaviors to more subscriber behaviors. So post click and using that data, CDPs I think are going to be really helpful. But we’re still kind of early days. Not a lot of folks have CDPs, a lot of folks are implementing them, but we don’t really have tons of CDPs that are up and running sort of optimally just yet. I think they’re going to be a big part of the solution long term, because this other customer engagement has always been important. Years ago, if you had a subscriber who wasn’t opening and wasn’t clicking but was one of your best customers, and they bought a ton of stuff from you, would you stop sending them email? No, you wouldn’t. You would say, look, that’s an exception. I see low email engagement, but that is a good customer. Maybe there’s stuff I’m just not able to see even back then. Maybe there’s behaviors here that I’m just not able to measure that are important and that them being an email subscriber is actually affecting their behavior in other channels. So that’s an exception you would have made years and years ago. That’s an exception that everybody has to get really used to right now, get really much better at sort of measuring those connections. So looking at things like purchase, looking at app activity, looking at web activity.
Guy Hanson – 00:24:01:
You talk about the impact on subscribers, and that’s always one of my pet topics. I think it’s super important for email marketers to spend at least a part of their day thinking about what’s the subscriber view, what’s it like receiving those messages. And I think we talked earlier in the conversation about were subscribers even aware of MPP? And we probably concluded that 99 and 100 probably weren’t. But do you think subscribers are maybe aware that sort of here year and a half down the line. The email product that they’re receiving is starting to degrade a little bit because best practices like recency management and targeting are getting a little bit harder to do. Do you think they’re sort of realizing that it’s not quite as good as what they used to receive?
Chad White – 00:24:45:
Yeah, I realized that to this point. I’ve been crying pretty hard about how this has all affected marketers and made our jobs way more harder than it were in the past. But let’s turn our attention to subscribers, to consumers and what MPP does to them. I don’t think that there’s a lot of good that it does for them either. Again, with the exception of location tracking, which again, I don’t think anything malicious was going on there, but I think that is actually additive. But the sad thing is, and probably the biggest thing that MPP is going to do is that it’s going to end up with subscribers receiving more emails than they would have otherwise. Because brands can’t see when they become disengaged, because they’re unsure of when some of their subscribers become engaged, they’re going to keep sending email. That’s what’s going to happen, right? There’s going to be some folks who are going to be conservative and they’re going to pull back. But I think I’m pretty on solid ground here saying that when it comes down to the mushiness of not knowing that many marketers are going to err on the side of sending more email. And that means that consumers are simply going to receive more emails that they weren’t interested in. But brands just can’t see that disinterest. They’re not sure about it, and so they’re going to keep sending emails. So I think that’s sort of the number one thing that’s going to happen that’s not in consumers favor is that they’re going to get more emails than they would have otherwise gotten. But I think there are other ways in which the email quality is going to be degraded. I think personalization will take a little bit of a hit because open signals can be useful for that. If you have a nice, well written subject line that’s very descriptive. We’ve seen a lot of doubts raised about subject line optimization, about send time optimization, because open signals were pretty key to those.
Danielle Gallant – 00:26:40:
It’s everything. It does feel like it’s this ecosystem shift.
Chad White – 00:26:47:
Yeah, the ripples are really big. Real time content. We see a lot of our clients becoming more skeptical about is it worthwhile to do real time content. But guy, your question was our subscribers going to notice and what are they going to think about it? I think over time they will notice. I’ll tell you what they’re not going to do. They’re not going to blame Apple. They’re going to say, my favorite brand is really falling down. Like, look, their emails used to be great, but now I notice all of these things that are not so great, or gosh, why isn’t this brand that I used to be closer? Why are they still sending me email? That’s so annoying. Now I hate them even more. They’re going to blame it completely on us. So, again, as much as I’ve sort of been whining and crying about how bad this is for email marketers, inbox provider expectations haven’t changed. Subscriber expectations haven’t changed.
Danielle Gallant – 00:27:43:
And beef up your preference centers, people.
Chad White – 00:27:46:
Yeah, please.
Danielle Gallant – 00:27:47:
And I think we’ve kind of already veered into this next loaded question. Is it fair to say that MPP might unintentionally facilitate unethical marketing practices?
Chad Whte – 00:27:59:
Yeah. As I mentioned in my response about Spamhaus and their very vigorous activity as of late, I see the bad behaviors that we’ve been seeing lately as directly stemming from that. Again, desperation. Desperation makes people take more risk. I’ve personally heard of brands wanting to share and sell open and click data to other brands so that they can figure out which of my subscribers are still engaging with emails in their inbox, trying to use that as a signal. I’m not sure that that’s what Apple had in mind when they passed Mail Privacy Protection that they wanted to create think of that. Wanted to create a secondary market for open and click data. Like, I don’t think that that’s what they had in mind, but that’s what some folks are talking about because they don’t know what to do because open signals were so pervasive, so abundant, and so useful. I know, again, not a perfect signal, right? Lots of things sort of inflate and deflate opens not a perfect metric, but a metric doesn’t have to be perfect to be incredibly useful. And Opens were so abundant and so often so frequent that they were incredibly useful. And I think that that’s something that we’re going to be wrestling with for a while now.
Guy Hanson – 00:29:21:
Chad White, thank you so much. This has just been an outstanding conversation on email after ours today. Really enjoyed having you with myself and Danielle. And hey, we must do it again sometime in the future.
Chad White – 00:29:31:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Guy Hanson – 00:29:32:
To our listeners. Join us again in two weeks time. And we actually gave you an unintentional sneak peek today where we’re talking about the importance of looking at email performance through the eyes of your subscribers. Well, next time around we’re going to dig a lot deeper into what consumers and subscribers really want and care about in terms of email marketing. We’re going to be joined by Ian Gibb and Komal Helyer, who will be representing the Data and Marketing Association, the DMA. And we’re going to be looking at the latest edition of the 2023 Consumer Email Tracker Report, which looks exclusively at email marketing through the eyes of consumers and dives into what they like and what they don’t like about those marketing messages they receive. Join us then. Bye for now. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe. So you don’t miss any future episodes. And don’t forget to visit Senderscore.com for loads more great resources to help you become a stronger sender to all you.
Danielle Gallant – 00:30:28:
And for all you sleepless senders out there. Thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.
