Author: Post and Courier Staff

Trident United Way is a catalyst for measurable community transformation in in education, financial stability, and health in the Lowcountry. For 20 years, Trident United Way has hosted Days of Caring, the largest day of community service in the Tri-County area. Jeannine Nash, Administrative Assistant, recalls the first Days of Caring in 2001, when The Post and Courier volunteered to help at The Florence Crittenton House for at-risk young women. “It was a good feeling knowing that we were helping those in need, and I remember how appreciative they were of our help.” Since then, The Post and Courier employees have participated in Days of Caring each year, helping numerous non-profits and centers across The Lowcountry.

This year, The Post and Courier volunteered to help The Navigation Center. The Navigation Center serves individuals and families experiencing homelessness by connecting them to services and housing. We were tasked with repainting the building exterior. Our 16 volunteers picked up our brushes and paint buckets, and by the afternoon, the task was completed. The goal was to make all who come to the center feel welcome, and giving the exterior some love certainly made a difference. Matt Ojala, Deputy Director of The City of Charleston Department of Housing and Community Development, wrote a note when he saw the completed project:

“Thank you and your team for all your hard work today. You all did a tremendous job. When I swung back by The Navigation Center this afternoon everyone I spoke to were singing the praises of The Post and Courier.”

THANK YOU to all of our volunteers, including Jake Buck, Daniella Fisher, Andrew Fleet, Reid Griffin, Jocelyn Grzeszczak, Alex Kellner, Grace Lardear, Stephen Massar, Amos McCoy, Abby Prokop, Emilio Santana, Debbie Sledziona, Libby Stanford, Amy Sutton, Elizabeth Wassynger, and Shannon Warnecke!

***blog post written by Claire Linney

Apple’s iOS 15 email privacy updates are revolutionizing how email marketers pull data. Data allows us to figure out what’s working and what’s not. With the new updates, email open rates will be impacted in a big way. We talked about what this iOS email privacy update is, but how can you adjust Your Email Marketing Strategy to fit this new change?

One

With the unreliability of open rates, it’s time to revaluate which email marketing metrics you focus on. Opens and clicks no longer hold the power they once did. Email clicks hold more weight than they used to. Consider focusing on the conversion rate, list growth rate, overall ROI, click rate, and the number of emails being forwarded and shared.

1. Conversion rate: the number of conversions (a specific action such as sales) divided by the total number of visitors
2. List growth rate: the rate at which you’re gaining new subscribers versus contacts unsubscribing
3. Overall ROI: the amount of money earned for every dollar invested in email marketing
4. Click rate: the percentage of recipients who click a link in your email
5. Forwarding/sharing: how often recipients forward or share an email, expanding campaign reach

At the end of the day, the most integral part of strategy is relying on metrics that drive your central business goals. Alignment is key.

Two

It’s time to revamp the triggers in your automated email series. Stray away from triggers related to open rates. Set triggers around whether someone clicks a certain link, time-focused triggers, date-focused triggers, and triggers driven by ecommerce, perhaps someone leaves a full cart at checkout.

Three

With MPP, you don’t know how many people are opening your emails. But, it’s critical that your emails are opened! Now is as good a time as ever to re-focus on engaging email subscribers.

Email subject lines are the first thing a consumer reads when deciding to open an email or click delete. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. If you were reading the email, what would make you click? 

Consider the contact sender’s name in the from section of your newsletters. This needs to be a name that consumers know and trust. Following subject lines, preheaders (words that show in an email preview) are an important email component. Preheaders are a great location for a call to action.

Four

Since we’re shifting from email open rates to click rates for measuring engagement, it’s important to create content that makes consumers click. As a general rule of thumb, don’t include your most valuable content in an email. Leave readers with a curiosity gap to click through to your website.

Five

To get the most out of your emails, add interactive elements to engage subscribers. Polls and surveys invite your consumer to contribute to the conversation.

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, know that there will be more changes to come. Being able to pivot and adapt your strategy over time is one the strongest tool in your email marketing toolkit.  

Apple’s iOS 15 email privacy updates are revolutionizing how email marketers pull data. Data allows us to figure out what’s working and what’s not. With the new updates, email open rates will be impacted in a big way.

There’s no need to panic, but it’s important to understand how the new update will influence your email marketing strategy. Apple’s privacy updates apply to their infamous Mail app and impact data regardless of your preferred email marketing platform. Open rates and location data are the main data sources affected.

Email Privacy Protection

As Apple cracks down on its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) options, consumers have the choice of withholding whether they do or don’t open their emails (open rates). For email marketers, this means we have less data to analyze the habits of our audience.

Announced in June 2021, Apple upgraded their privacy settings with the release of iOS 15, making it easier for iPhone users to regulate the use of their personal data. MPP protects data from third parties and hides IP addresses, preventing the linkage of online activity to determine a user’s location. This feature is active on Apple’s Mail app for the iPhone, iPad, Apple watch, and Mac computers, after users have opted in.

Previously, data was sent over from an email immediately when opened by the recipient. The data detailed whether the email was opened, on what device, and often the recipient’s location. The key takeaway, email open rates are no longer a reliable email performance metric.

Why It’s Important

Apple Mail is the default mail application for all Apple devices and accounts for 52% of all email opens, according to Litmus. Apple rolled out MPP for all Apple Mail users on September 20, 2021. Nine times out of 10, consumers will opt to protect their privacy.

Email features you may have relied on previously could be impacted due to inaccurate email open data. One example entails auto-sending a follow-up email to a recipient who didn’t open your initial email.

If 52% of your email list uses Apple Mail, it’s projected that 96% of them will elect to employ the MPP feature. Thus, half of your current email subscribers will skew email open rate data, making this an utterly unreliable metric. You can expect to see your open rates increase.

How Your Email Marketing Strategy Is Affected

Regardless of your preferred email platform, MPP will impact the email marketing industry as a whole. You can expect your email open rates to increase as a result of Apple automatically marking emails as opened on behalf of their users. But, open rates are no longer dependable as a key performance metric.

A click-to-open rate (CTOR) contrasts the number of unique clicks to unique opens, indicating an email’s effectiveness and ability to get consumers to click. CTOR is a result of email opens, so MPP will cause your CTOR rates to drop drastically. But, MPP won’t impact total clicks.

Previously, audience engagement was determined by how often recipients opened your emails. But, you’re likely to see an abnormally large surge of audience members with high engagement.

Open rates play a part in the segmentation of an email list, ranking subscribers from maximum to least engagement, again based on how often subscribers open emails. Rather than basing email segmentation off how often contacts open your emails, base it off of how often subscribers click links within your emails.

Some email platforms, HubSpot included, can set up an automated email series, which will trigger depending on whether or not a user opened an earlier email. Since Apple Mail records an artificial open rate, you may consider using an email click as a trigger in an automated email series.

Traditionally, A/B subject line testing functions on open rates when two versions of the same email are deployed to a small section of your contact list, complete with two differing subject lines. The subject line with the higher open rate is regarded as more effective, but it’s now unreliable with Apple’s MPP update. Consider basing A/B testing around click rates.

As privacy regulations increase, marketers will have less access to consumers’ personal data and habits. With artificial open rates, we won’t know the time an email was opened, the device an email was opened on, and the geographical location in which the email was opened.

Despite Apple’s MPP update, email continues to have the highest ROI, generating $42 for every $1 spent, out of all marketing channels. At the end of the day, the overarching goal of email marketing is to drive sales and increase the bottom line while targeting new customers and sustaining engagement with your current email list.