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Your iOS 15 To-Do List from Benchmark Email



We already noted earlier this summer that Apple’s iOS 15 update is just around the corner – likely mid-September. As Apple rolls out new privacy protections for users, email service providers (like Benchmark Email) will have less data on some users. We’re excited to tackle this challenge head-on with the rest of the email marketing community. As marketers and as a software company, we’ve had to pivot time and again to changes in the digital landscape. This time is no different, and we look forward to innovating new ways to track engagement and get the most out of every email sent to your valuable contacts and subscribers.

How will iOS 15 impact email marketing?

If you’re like most businesses, you rely on email marketing to reach subscribers, prospects and customers to grow revenue and propel sales. You also most likely use email open rate as one of the metrics that determines the success of your email templates and the health of your email list.

With Apple’s iOS 15 update, users will have the option to opt-out of email tracking – including when and where they open their emails. Experts predict that most will do so, as we saw with the iOS 14 update. With that last update,(only 5% of users in the US opted-in to having applications like Facebook track their activity, meaning the other 95% of users opted not to be tracked.. 

According to Litmus, Apple iPhone accounts for nearly 50% of all traffic to email clients. Which means that we can conservatively estimate that open tracking for up to 50% of your contacts will be compromised at some point as iOS 15 launches and is adopted. And it may not be long before other top email clients, like Gmail and Outlook, follow suit. 

With this big change on the horizon, now is a great time to use the reliable open rate data you have today to clean up your subscriber list. With Benchmark Email, it’s easy to segment contact lists, so you can ensure that you’re sending to highly engaged contacts that want to hear from you and keep your domain reputation sparkling clean.

Here’s how:

Identify Inactive Contacts

Sending to engaged contacts is one of the best ways to keep your email list clean and healthy. High open and click rates, low bounce and unsubscribe rates and minimal spam complaints all signal to ISPs that your domain is healthy – helping you get more emails to the inbox.

Now – before open data is skewed by iOS 15 – is the ideal time to identify contacts that have been sent several campaigns, but have never opened them. You can then remove these contacts from your contact list, or create a new segment that you can suppress from future campaigns.

You can easily identify these contacts in Benchmark Email:

  • From the Contacts menu, go to “Contacts” and open your contact list.
  • Select “Clean List”.

Clean List

  • In the Clean List section, select “Contacts that have not opened last” and choose the number of campaign sends.
  • Remove these contacts or save to a new segment so you can suppress them.

Clean List 2

Save Email Addresses with High Open Rate

You may have contacts on your list that open every send, but may or may not always click. While we’ll be relying on click-through data in the future, we can add subscribers who opened every email to a list you can refer to after open data has lost accuracy.

Here’s how to easily add contacts with a high open rate to a list in Benchmark Email so that you can continue to send to them after email open data is impacted:

  • From the Contacts menu, go to “Contacts”.
  • Click “Create a New List”
  • Choose “Targeted List”

Targeted List

  • Choose “General Clicks and Opens”
  • Select the campaigns you want to use to track engagement
  • For the next step, select Engagement Criteria, “Based on Engagement”
  • Use “All Emails” for your Email Criteria to flag your enthusiastic openers
  • Select “Opens” as the engagement type.
  • Give your list a new name, and save it to ensure you send to these contacts in the future.

Openers

Make a List for Contacts with a High Rating

Another criteria you can use to segment your lists in Benchmark Email is the Contact Rating. This is a rating of 0 to 5 stars, based on your contacts’ engagement. Because this rating uses email opens as one of its factors, your contacts’ rating may change over time after iOS 15 is launched.

To segment your contacts by their current star rating:

  • From the Contacts menu, go to “Contacts” and open your contact list.
  • Click on the three dots to “Create a New Segment”
  • Choose Contact Rating as the criteria
  • Choose your conditions
  • Save and view your new segment

Contact Rating

Learn more about Contact Rating in this helpful knowledgebase article.

Ask Subscribers if They’d Like to Keep Hearing from You

If you have a list or segment of contacts that you haven’t sent to in a while, or don’t have much email data on, it’s never a bad idea to opt them into email communication. Check in with an email update and a clear call-to-action to unsubscribe from your emails if they don’t wish to hear from you any more. 

Every email sent from Benchmark Email is required to have a Permission Reminder, a block of text that prompts recipients to reconfirm their opt-in, or unsubscribe from further email communication. This block is usually in the email footer, but you can make the Permission Reminder more prominent, encouraging subscribers to confirm they want to keep hearing from you, or opt-out of your list:

  • Create a new email template
  • Locate the Permission Reminder in the footer of your email
  • Drag the block where you would like it in your email template
  • Add a text block to add a heading
  • Format and edit text in the Permission Reminder as you’d like

Permission Block

As marketers, we’re used to adapting to new strategies and technologies. A little preparation now can go a long way to set your business up for success as iOS changes make an impact across all email marketing platforms.



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