[00:00:08.680] – Kathy Powers
Today for joining our Webinar on Apple’s Privacy change and your analytics. It’s a timely webinar coming up for year-end. And in the wake of an interesting change, that’s going to affect everyone. So Engaging Networks is presenting this alongside our accredited partners M+R. And Mal Warwick Donordigital. And just in case you don’t know anything about Engaging Networks, we are a digital engagement platform for nonprofits. We offer all the tools you need for fundraising, advocacy and digital marketing. And I would like to thank our presenters we have today, Anne Paschkopić at M+R, Katie Dunne with Mal Warwick Donordigital and our own Gwynne Dixon from Engaging Networks. I’m going to pass off to Anne now who’s going to get us started.

[00:00:56.380] – Anne Paschkopić
Alright. Thanks, Kathy. Hi I’m Anne Paschkopić I use she her pronouns and I am the senior production specialist and operability specialist here in in Boston. So a little bit about M+R. We are a firm of communicators marketers fundraisers and campaigners who unleash the power of people to do good. We work exclusively with nonprofits fighting for a just and sustainable world. More than half of us are dedicated solely to raising money and engaging activists for organizations that struggle to find new supporter and engender loyalty in a crowded multimedia world.

[00:01:30.130] – Anne Paschkopić
The balance of our firm provides media relations and social media services designed to advance issues and Garner attention to the causes we search at any given time. We work with around 40 non profits here is some of them. And I know that some of you are all on the call today, so Hi, good to see you and look forward to chatting.

[00:01:47.150] – Katie Dunne
Hi Everybody, I’m Katie Dunne, she and her are my pronouns. I’m a senior account executive at Mal Warwick Donordigital, so I work with a lot of our clients to grow their online digital fundraising programs. Before transitioning to the agency side of things. I was a part of individual giving teams in two large nonprofits, one in the UK and another in Australia so I’ve been with Mal Warwick Donordigital for five years. But the organization was actually founded in 1979. So we just celebrated our 40th anniversary right before the pandemic, it was the last party I attended.

[00:02:29.410] – Katie Dunne
We are a team of more than 60 people. We’ve got offices in DC and in the Bay Area in the before times at least.we are a fully integrated agency, so we manage digital, mail, we manage advertising programs, mobile and legacy giving as well. We are a certified B Corp and we’re also an employee owned business. We are proud to work with a host of progressive nonprofits building Direct Multichannel Integrated Strategies. And here are just a couple of them.

[00:03:05.660] – Gwynne Dixon
Hi My name is Gwynne Dixon. I work at Engaging Networks now as a DevOps engineer, starting in support in 2017 where I specialized in email deliverability. So I still bring that work into what I do today in this position. I also do much more work on specifically directly onto the servers as well. In terms of monitoring and management, so a little bit of Engaging Networks were for anybody that’s not on the platform currently, we’re a software as a service that provides nonprofits tools for advocacy, donations, fundraising, digital marketing.

[00:03:43.990] – Gwynne Dixon
And we’re in ESP. We do broadcast as well as an ESP – email service provider. We send 3.1 billion emails on behalf of our clients this year or last year. That’s up from 2.6 billion in 2019. Similarly, giving Tuesday is our biggest day of the year. So the December 2020 giving Tuesday last year, we did 56 million up from 49 million year. Year end is another big one for us so 56 million emails are sent from our mail servers on New Year’s Eve, and that’s up from 51 million 2018.

[00:04:18.880] – Gwynne Dixon
sorry that should be 2019. So we’re growing. while actually, a lot of the list of our clients are getting smaller. So that’s a small sample of some of the clients using our tools for email here as well.

[00:04:34.090] – Anne Paschkopić
Alright. So after those introductions, I’m going to kick us off to talk about what is happening here. There’s been a lot of chatter about these Apple Privacy changes. We don’t know all of the details, but there are some things that we feel pretty confident about. So here’s an intro to kind of what we’re going to be dealing with over the next couple of months. So Apple Mail Privacy protection. This is a new service that Apples gonna be rolling out with their new operating system, and they’re going to require everybody who uses the Apple Mail App to opt in.

[00:05:08.410] – Anne Paschkopić
So once people update their phones or their devices, anybody with an iPad, iPhone or Mac device that uses Apple Mail will see a screen a little bit like this, asking people to either protect themselves or deny protection. We think based on what we’ve seen before and the fact that most people usually say, yes, protect me, don’t leave me vulnerable to privacy invasions. Most people are going to opt in. So for everybody who does opt in. What Apple is going to do is preload all email content.

[00:05:39.970] – Anne Paschkopić
So as a quick refresher, I think we all know that the way that we track opens right now is that there’s a tiny little image, one Pixel by one Pixel image, that when that gets downloaded, it registers as an open in the systems we use. Apple is going to be downloading that information in the background, whether or not people actually look at the individual in question. Excuse me, look at the email in question. So what the effect of that is going to have is that we’re suddenly going to see all of these people registering as having opened emails that they may have never actually seen.

[00:06:13.890] – Anne Paschkopić
Okay, all of these people who are all of these people. So again, this is anybody using the Apple mail app on their iPhone, iPad or their Mac desktop. You can use the Apple Mail App with a lot of different email tools. So it’s not just people with an Apple or an iCloud or Mac account. They can set it up with Gmail with Yahoo, AOL, etcetera. So unfortunately, a lot of the times if something affects a segment of the market, we can target based on say, everybody that has at gmail dot com in their address.

[00:06:46.520] – Anne Paschkopić
In this case, we can’t do it. People are going to be using it across devices and across email domains. Looking at the spread of the market right now, there’s about 40 & of people in the market use the Apple Mail app. So for individual lists, that could be 30 to 50%, expect this to affect about half of your list. It’s going to be a lot of people. Alright. The other really urgent question is when is this happening? Do I have time to prepare? So this is going to happen in September.

[00:07:19.420] – Anne Paschkopić
There’s no specific date. Apple has only just said fall, but realistically, their updates generally will generally go out in September. So we’re probably going to see this start to happen in maybe three or four weeks. When it does start rolling out, we are going to start to see things change right away, but it’s not going to fall off.click. This is going to be gradual. It’s not going to roll out to everyone at the same instant. People don’t always update their phones right away. They put it off.

[00:07:46.960] – Anne Paschkopić
I’m personally one of those people, but we’ll put it off for months and months and months. So throughout September through probably the end of the year, we’re going to see people gradually adopting this new Privacy protection. And that’s going to be when things are very turbulent and frankly, a little weird. Then starting in early 2022, everybody who has upgraded is going to have done so everybody who got a new iPhone for Christmas is going to get that all set up and we’re going to start to see a new normal.

[00:08:17.020] – Anne Paschkopić
You don’t totally know what the new normal is going to look like, but probably starting in January, February people know. Okay, so what’s that going to change? Frankly, a lot. Here’s a couple of the things AI. We’re going to dig into some of these in the next section. But the biggest thing is that any audience segmentation or targeting right now that uses last open date is going to be pretty useless because people are going to register having opened. If they’ve never looked at your email if they opt into this new Privacy program.

[00:08:48.930] – Anne Paschkopić
This is especially critical for deliverability and for purging unengaged contacts. Right now, most folks are using opens, that kind of top of the funnel. If somebody’s looking at our email, they’re probably interested at least interested enough for us to keep sending them more emails. Now, that’s not what opens means. I will pause right now and say that there are some, there are some email tools that some of the time already do this load images in the background, but it’s pretty limited and it’s usually targeted

[00:09:20.140] – Anne Paschkopić
at the folks that are reading your emails anyway, this is just a completely different scale. Again, this is going to be affecting almost half of your list, which means most of your open don’t really mean that somebody’s opening your email. So the next thing is going to change is any automations that rely on somebody opening email. So if you resend to non openers or you have a re-engagement or reactivation campaign that targets non openers, that’s going to be totally gutted by this because again, you’re going to have a ton of people that have opened email and will not be falling into that, you know, non openers category.

[00:09:56.520] – Anne Paschkopić
So next, anything that is A B testing based on open rate, so subject lines or senders anything that you’re using opens to determine the winner, especially automatically determine the winner. That’s not going to be reliable. Possibly when we get to 2022 and that new normal. It will be an Apples to Apples comparison, even if it’s a little bit weird, but definitely through end of the year, you’re going to want to pause that. Dynamic countdown timers that generate a countdown time based on the time of open.

[00:10:30.610] – Anne Paschkopić
They’re not going to work because they’re going to generate the time based based on when that image was cached, not on when people actually open email. Finally, if you’re doing either send time optimization or localized content that are powered by open data by the location of the IP address upon open, that’s going to also be inaccurate because the open time is going to be based on whenever Apple caches the images, the IP address is going to be Apples IP address. So those are just not going to be accurate anymore.

[00:11:01.880] – Anne Paschkopić
We’ll still be accurate. if you’re doing that based on first party data. If your users have provided you with that information and you’re doing send time optimization based on their mailing address or information they’ve sent to you, it’s still going to work, just not if you’re doing based on opens. Alright, that’s a lot that’s changing. Don’t know if you’re breathing a little bit hard. I’ve had a couple of late nights about this, but it’s going to be okay. We know what to do about it.

[00:11:30.580] – Anne Paschkopić
We’ve got some concrete things in the next couple of slides. So let’s talk about how we’re all going to handle this very, very big change. So first big thing that’s going to change is obviously your open rate reporting. Sometime in September, your numbers are going to go up and they will no longer even remotely reflect who’s actually looking at your emails. Then like we said early 2022, that number is going to stabilize, but it’s not really going to mean the same thing it has in the past.

[00:11:59.600] – Anne Paschkopić
Here’s what to do about it right now. Start setting expectations with people that are used to looking at your open rate that things are going to get weird. Unfortunately, open rate going up in September does not reflect the awesome work you are doing. You are doing awesome work, that’s not why the open rate is going to go up, and people who are used to looking at that should expect things to get weird. It’s also a good time to start resetting those norms by talking less about open rate and more about your other metrics because through the end of the year you are not going to be able to use opens to gauge the successive of you’re email.

[00:12:35.070] – Anne Paschkopić
You can’t compare them to your baseline KPIs. You probably can’t even compare open ratest day to day because they are going to change every single day. Instead, focus on click rates conversions unsubscribes. Hopefully you’re already reporting on these numbers, but they are going to be the only thing you can look at because open rates are going to be weird. Finally, in 2022, maybe we can look at open rates again. There will be a new normal, but a huge variable has been introduced and that is how many people on your list are using the Apple Privacy Protection program and how exactly that program is going to roll out.

[00:13:09.080] – Anne Paschkopić
So these might still be useful as a very broad indicator. So for example, for deliverability, we often use a significantly dropped open rate to indicate a problem. If the new normal is a 70% open rate and that drops to 50%, that’s probably still going to indicate a problem. But if it drops from 70 to like 67, who knows what that means. Instead, we’re going to have to go back to those other further down the funnel metrics. Speaking of deliverability list hygiene is going to be really different.

[00:13:40.270] – Anne Paschkopić
Again we cannot use opens as a top of the funnel.to gauge if someone is actually engaged in looking at your emails instead of the open data we have will be significantly less accurate. And open might mean someone is looking at your email, but it might just mean that that email address is in use somewhere. So here’s what to do about it. Right now, I’m going to recommend you grab a screenshot, not a screenshot, but a snapshot of who is on your list, late August, early September before these changes, roll out.

[00:14:13.230] – Anne Paschkopić
That could be as simple as making sure that you send a full list email in this time period and knowing that you can look back and see, OK Anybody that got our August 26 newsletter was active as of that time. And the reason this is going to be useful is because once this change rolls out, people are going to show up as having opened in the last couple of days when maybe they’re not active. So at least we know we have an accurate picture of kind of what’s happening before the change goes into effect.

[00:14:41.420] – Anne Paschkopić
Now, is also a good time to start testing new active audience definitions. If you’ve been defining active as opened in the past twelve months, not going to be able to do that anymore. So you might experiment with donated or clicked in the past twelve months. Instead, you’ll be able to keep doing this testing, of course, moving forward, and you shouldn’t keep testing. But now we do actually have an open rate that is at least as accurate as it was before and if you compare to previous emails.

[00:15:10.600] – Anne Paschkopić
So testing now, before things get rolled out, you’re just going to get a little bit more information about what works. Finally, now is the time to figure out where you’re using open criteria. Look at your queries, look at your targeting, your suppression, look at your reporting. Figure out where you have data blast open or open history, and figure out if you want to pull it out. Do you have something set up to target non openers? You have automatic A B subject line testing set to go out based on opens, figure that out and start replacing it.

[00:15:41.000] – Anne Paschkopić
So through end of year this year, you’re probably going to have to adjust your audience strategy. Maybe you want to keep sending to openers, even though you know some of those opens aren’t real because they’re going to be real through mid September because you have really great deliverability or a really robust list. More likely you’re going to want to look at finding some criteria that do not take open into account and look at recent activity based on things like clicks or conversions. Then in 2022, you’re definitely going to be moving to criteria that does not include opens because the open data you have is going to start getting really sale because it’s not going to be accurate past mid September.

[00:16:22.440] – Anne Paschkopić
Instead, prioritize again, clicks, conversions. Maybe in your data from other channels if you have an SMS list, if you have data on who’s on your website, who’s on your social media channels, who’s involved offline. Some of these things will work better than others for email targeting. Again, this is where testing comes into play. See if you have a list of your offline volunteers, send them an email, see if they’re responsive. Maybe yes, maybe no. It’s going to be a whole new world, but this could be positive.

[00:16:52.270] – Anne Paschkopić
You could end up with a smaller but much more active list as we focus down to the people who are not just looking at your emails, but clicking through and donating. So I want to have a little example here of what you might be looking for. I know that not all of you are on Engaging Networks, but as our host, I’m going to use in this for example, you want to start looking for where in your data you are using opens. One place might be your engagement scoring.

[00:17:19.300] – Anne Paschkopić
So if you’re on Engaging Networks, if you’re using engagement score of ten, which is anybody that’s open in the past twelve months that’s going to start getting fishy. You might want to pull that out and look at engagement scores zero through nine or one through nine or whatever works for your program. Similarly, you’re going to want to look at the profile filter for supporter who opened in the past next days. See, maybe replace that with something else in the drop down, clicked or converted. Also want to check out your queries.

[00:17:48.650] – Anne Paschkopić
Again, if you’re looking for people that have opened an email from a certain campaign or during a certain period of time, you’re looking at a campaign that happens before the change came through, that data is still probably going to be accurate. But you want to consider if that’s something that’s looking forward, swap that out for something else. From here, I’m going to pass on to Katie, who’s going to talk more about some email strategy and how to adapt that to our new world order.

[00:18:19.300] – Katie Dunne
Thanks Anne. So we are going to get deep in the weeds and figure out some of the other things that we can start doing right now to alleviate some of the stress and get ourselves as prepared as we possibly can be for this big unknown. So we’ve talked a lot already about open rates and deliverability. So we want to talk a little bit about specific email strategies that you can employ between now and end of year to sort of minimize the fallout and maximize our success of your campaign.

[00:18:50.080] – Katie Dunne
And as I said, we can start that right now. So since we’re no longer going to be able to gauge our engagement, via just the open metric like a lot of us probably have the past. We’re going to want to focus more than ever on content that really drives clicks from your email message. So if you haven’t already ran some of these on the screen now as A B tests, it would be a great idea to just start plotting them into the messages that you already have planned for the next few weeks and running as many of them as possible.

[00:19:22.340] – Katie Dunne
Oftentimes we find that small tweaks to formatting or placement or the language of your links or your buttons can actually have a really big impact on your click through rate. So these are just a couple of ideas. But honestly, anything that you can think of can be tested. So you know your email program better than anybody else if you’ve already tested some of these, but you can think of a way to kind of tweak the test to do it a different way. Maybe it’s a different color or a different format.

[00:19:52.720] – Katie Dunne
Let’s do that now. Let’s optimize your emails for clicks and have that be the main KPI. So just to look at a couple of these, including more links seems obvious, right. But I think a lot of us over the last while have probably minimized a lot of our email content. We’re optimizing it for mobile. So maybe you just have one button at the top of your email and one at the bottom. Maybe try to mix that up a little bit and see if that moves the needle at all.

[00:20:22.500] – Katie Dunne
The formatting of links is another one that I think often we get kind of bogged down in our control. Right. Maybe we’re using a brand color for the hyperlinks, and everybody is really bought into it. And it’s been tested three years ago when we did our brand refresh, and nobody wants to change it. But is that color actually accessible to everybody.It clear for folks that are using maybe dark mode on their phones. Can we underline the link and make it a little more obvious that it is a link?

[00:20:57.120] – Katie Dunne
Little things like that again can be really powerful. And if I could encourage you to do one of these, if you’ve never tested the language on your actual call to action buttons, do it right now. It can really make a difference. And I think everybody’s going to see different results here because your supporter lists are different, and the way that people are engaging with your emails is different. So those are just a couple of examples of some of the tests that you can run. But another thing that we want to do is actually focus in on the content of the emails themselves.

[00:21:38.840] – Katie Dunne
So when you readjust your engagement definitions like Anne was talking about and your active email send starts changing based on who is actually clicking on your emails. Right. So, say, based on the Engaging Networks criteria that we looked at a minute ago, if you select an option that looks just at folks who are clicking on your emails as the main criteria of engagement, then that file of those people who are clicking is going to be changing over time. Right. Based on who clicked on your email yesterday or last week or 90 days ago.

[00:22:16.800] – Katie Dunne
So this isn’t a one time exercise. We’re really going to need to maintain that high level of click activity to maintain a file that is robust enough to have as the main sort of target audience for your emails. So as well as optimizing for clicks by testing, another thing that we’re going to want to do is supplement your existing messaging with content that’s specifically created to engage people and to drive clicks. So you don’t just want to get in front of the people who are likely to donate via an email.

[00:22:49.420] – Katie Dunne
But the people who have been showing and want to show engagement with your organization, who may not be ready to donate, or maybe they donate through another channel, but they still want to be part of your email list. They still want to engage with your organization. We just want to make sure that those folks are not the people who are falling off of your list because of this change in criteria for your audience. So Again, I just have a couple of examples here of email content that could be woven into some of your strategies over the next while, but there’s so many more things that we could consider here.

[00:23:28.350] – Katie Dunne
So if anybody has some great ideas, definitely drop them in the chat to share with others. But some quick examples are like a do you know, type quiz cultivation. Sometimes we do them in such a way where you don’t need to build out a full quiz. It’s literally one question you noted in the email itself, and then you’ve got the answer on the landing page, which may additionally be a donation form. You can invite folks to watch a video. That’s always a good one. You could send us save the date like a calendar invite kind of thing that folks can click on.

[00:24:06.520] – Katie Dunne
We’ve also done a lot of testing replicating some of the common ISP scenarios that we often see in our own inboxes. So things like this message has been clicpped, click here to see more or the photos haven’t loaded. Click here to see the photos. That kind of thing. We can also get better at using teasers with Learn More buttons instead of featuring, like a full article in a newsletter or something like that. And a good one is hiding the top three results on a top ten list.

[00:24:40.580] – Katie Dunne
So if you’ve got top ten parks in your area, hide the top three and have those sit on the landing page instead. So folks need to click in order to sort of see those winning features, and then downloadable gifts. So freebies like Zoom backgrounds, calendars, Spotify playlists are all really good ways to get folks attention as well. So again, if anyone has other great ideas throw them in the chat and we can chat about them. On the next slide then a couple of other things that we can do right now.

[00:25:21.380] – Katie Dunne
Thinking beyond email, it’s a great time as well to dip your toe into some other channels that you may have been holding back on. So if you don’t already have an evergreen advertising program, maybe you sort of dip in and out when you have big cornerstone campaigns.would say change that now if you can. If you can sort of set aside a really small amount of budget that you can attribute to ads on a monthly basis, that’s a really good way of having

[00:25:52.100] – Katie Dunne
those additional touch points out there on a consistent basis. But it’s also really effective in terms of gathering learning for your ask program. So that then when you do go to run a big campaign, you know how your various audiences perform. You have insights on your creative, and it’s just going to be another way that we can help supplement email in this kind of unknown period. Sms is another great one for anybody who hasn’t sort of taken the dive in there yet. Either broadcast messaging or peer to peer texting can really help supplement a multi channel campaign or even act as a standalone touch point.

[00:26:35.550] – Katie Dunne
So you can use this channel to ask supporters if they want to receive email. You can kind of use it that way as an additional opt in touch point to build that audience. Or you can just gather the data from this channel. So gather the information on the people who are texting you back or who are donating by this channel, and then use that data to help supplement the target email audience that you’ve been sort of testing and tweaking as you go. Another one that I wanted to suggest is if you already have a re-engagement series, I think now is a really good time to just consider tweaking and adjusting the language of it so that you are not necessarily calling out people for not opening emails.

[00:27:24.210] – Katie Dunne
We don’t want to use language that explicit anymore. Instead, we can say things like, we haven’t seen you around as much because for the next few months, while you are using this, speaking specifically here to folks who already have some kind of a win back, or re-engagement series automated already, a lot of the times we have focused that language on people who haven’t been opening emails, and so you might just want to jump in and make sure that that language is a little more open, considering we’re not going to know exactly who is falling into those queries right now.

[00:28:04.410] – Katie Dunne
We can also consider sending, like a reconfirmation campaign like this more than once to people who didn’t confirm. Since, you know, for people who might not have seen this email, it’s no harm to get it out there another couple of times, especially now, as the impact of a series like this is a little more dramatic because people who are not opted into your emails, you know, you might make the call if they haven’t been opening emails to not email them at all through the end of the year.

[00:28:38.460] – Katie Dunne
So we definitely want to use as many of these opportunities to get other folks back in the loop as possible. And again, that’s where things like SMS come in because you could supplement it with an ask there sort of narrow some of the language you would use in a series like this in a text message, and then just make sure that you’re getting the data from that text strategy and applying it to your email file so that folks you are engaging across other channels are given the opportunity to still keep seeing your emails.

[00:29:11.650] – Katie Dunne
So then moving on to the end of the year. Obviously, a lot of what we’ve already talked about will still be relevant, but we might not have as much time to do all of those tests and make all of those tweaks so some of the main things that you might want to consider when thinking about the year end campaign would be again, including new channels like SMS or other non email elements. Even better if you kind of have a little bit of experience with doing them.

[00:29:43.780] – Katie Dunne
But a lot of platforms are offering integrations with other channels. So either like a direct Facebook integration where you can plug your advertising data in, or some SMS broadcast messages. So maybe reach out and see if there’s any opportunities that you’re not taking advantage of that you can pretty easily loop into your overall strategy. We also want to roll out some of the tests from the, excuse me, so the results from the tests that we talked about, that are going to drive a higher click through rate.

[00:30:19.330] – Katie Dunne
And we want to add those engagement messages into the stream. And oftentimes when we’re thinking about year end, people think you know we already have so many emails going out. We don’t want to pepper folks with other things. But so much of it is psychological. When you think of things from the supporter’s standpoint, we really want to maintain the idea that when they see your sender name in their inbox, it’s not automatically going to be an appeal. So maintaining that balance even up until the last week of the year is a really important part of an overall successful campaign.

[00:30:57.590] – Katie Dunne
We also then want to look at the new target audience. So based on all of the kind of tweaks and testing that you’ve done, probably by November, you’ll have found a place where you’re pretty happy with the target audience criteria that you set. But consider adding maybe that larger openers file. So the openers list that will now include all of your Apple mail users, depending on your comfort level here. Depending on your experience with deliverability issues in the past, it might be worth considering adding those folks in on key fundraising dates.

[00:31:36.850] – Katie Dunne
So that would mean like using a smaller email audience for the majority of your emails and then adding in those additional openers, maybe for Giving Tuesday or December 31st, making sure that we’re not entirely letting them fall off of the cliff. The last one that I wanted to add here was adjusting your resend strategy. So if you’re somebody who likes to resend well performing emails to get a little bit more leverage from them, you could change your target of non openers, which is often something that we use.

[00:32:14.910] – Katie Dunne
So we would resend the email to anybody who hasn’t opened the email already. We’re going to want to change that because again that will not be accurate. So we’re going to want to change that either to non donors. So folks who didn’t make a donation through that email or non clickers. So people who didn’t click on that email. And one way to make this a little bit more valuable to people who may have opened the original email is by changing the subject line, so it appears differently in their inbox and by adding some lift note content so that’s any content above the original email.

[00:32:49.060] – Katie Dunne
So maybe it’s like an urgent banner or a countdown clock or something that just adjusts the original email. So they’re not looking at the same thing twice. So then 2022. So as I mentioned, hopefully the new year should bring at least some idea of what the new normal looks like for open rates. But here are some things that you should plan on doing at that point. So I talked a little bit about a re-engagement strategy already, but if you haven’t had a chance before year end, this would be a really good time to set it up.

[00:33:26.620] – Katie Dunne
So I think it might be a lot for some of you to set up a brand new re-engagement strategy right now. So if you don’t have one to tweak, this would be a great time to have that be a bit of a priority. You’ll have a lot of learnings on your audiences from end of year, so that will be a really good starting point. You can set up an automation to those who have become inactive, quote, unquote based on your definition, and then use some of the best performing content from your year end campaign.

[00:34:00.110] – Katie Dunne
So maybe some of those quizzes that we talked about or videos or some of the content where you saw people really engaging and clicking through. That’s a good starting point for building out a series like that. So it doesn’t need to be four or five brand new emails. You can really focus in on some of the content that has performed well in the past. Send that out again in an email series, and then consider an automated SMS campaign. For those who don’t re-engage in the email series, a social media campaign would be another idea.

[00:34:35.220] – Katie Dunne
So driving email optins could work too, depending on the volume of the list, but essentially using Facebook or SMS or other channels to target specifically people who have dropped off of your email list because they haven’t been clicking and targeting them with essentially lead generation content. So here’s an example of a lead gen ad, so it could be a yes or no question. It could be a quick poll survey, maybe a pledge or a petition and driving them to give you their email address again and essentially opt into receiving your emails.

[00:35:21.460] – Katie Dunne
So. I will hand it over to Gwynne now to talk about some of the more technical elements.

[00:35:32.630] – Gwynne Dixon
Thanks so much Katie. And indeed, Anne for the insights they’re so helpful. So I’m just going to talk a little bit about the Engaging Networks platform, really, and where I might be able to help people for those who are already using it and those who might even be thinking about moving over. So as an intro here. I know Anne’s spoken about the amount of the market that is taken up by Apple Mail App around 40% to 50% often of emails received through the Apple Mail app.

[00:36:06.240] – Gwynne Dixon
However, when you reconsider that through control domains, the picture is rather different. So the chart we have here is in fact, for all mail server delivery from Engaging Networks clients in July, and it’s divided up by provider. So here Google is Gmail, Google mail dot com and anybody who uses G Suite, which is kind of their corporate arm or their business arm. Microsoft is Hotmail, Live dot com MSN dot com Outlook dot com Office three, six, five anything like that, Yahoo now is Yahoo, AOL rocket mail who they acquired a long time ago.

[00:36:48.050] – Gwynne Dixon
those sort of domains and then that slice and yellow is Apple mail. It usually comes forth in terms of providers, but it’s a distant fourth. So this should give you a picture of really where you’re going to see the impact in terms of your lists and which domain you’re going to see the big impact on. It’s actually not going to be the Apple domains like Icloud dot com, Me dot coms. It’s going to be the Gmail dot com, the Hotmail dot com the Outlook dot com. So really the question comes from now, what can you do in Engaging Networks to monitor that benchmark

[00:37:27.840] – Gwynne Dixon
it little and see how it changes over time. In the next slide, we’ll look at that a little bit more. And again,Anne already spoken a little bit about our email engagement scoring tool and how that can assist people with its focus on click through and conversion rather than opens. But also here we have in our new visual reporting tools that were launched in 2020, we have the Domain delivery dashboard, and what it shows you is your delivery stratified through all of the different domains that you’re delivering to.

[00:38:06.200] – Gwynne Dixon
So it shows separate metrics at Gmail dot com, Hotmail dot com, Icloud dot com, etc. And you got all the basic stuff there. So open clicks, complaints, all that kind of stuff unsubscribes, and you can you can drill down through that by year by month and where this is going to be useful. As IOS15 rolls out, you’ll be able to see how that open rate starts creeping up for those crucial domains. It’s going to hopefully give you and your list and idea of how much false opening is happening.

[00:38:46.710] – Gwynne Dixon
So that’s the domain delivery tool, it should be able to help you out there. We also have in visual reporting, another tool called Device Browser. Now this is effectively taking raw data we receive from agent tracking in the back end. We repurposed it here to have a little bit more of a digestible format for you. The data is available in some of our transactional exports, but that obviously requires a lot more repurposing on your behalf and what the visual reporting tool does if it does it for you effectively.

[00:39:20.480] – Gwynne Dixon
You’ll notice in this tool, a browser type Apple, it’s usually again around 40 or 50% of most of engagement pie charts in this tool. Now, what we can’t say with that is that it’s maybe Apple mail app. It’s not actually designating an Apple mail device where we can’t specify browser. However, we believe it’s a marker of Apple mail use, so it should be a good spot to be able to go to to see an overall rate of increase and see, like a one stop shop for how that’s increasing over time.

[00:40:03.190] – Gwynne Dixon
Again, not a precise measurement, but a marker perhaps, and something to keep an eye on in the coming months as Apple Mail as well as the iOS 15 and the new privacy set up is rolled out. And so just looking forward then to when Engaging Networks will be looking at it. We’ll be looking at our current agent traffic capabilities, how they perform against the changing email engagement landscape post iOS15 and it’s not a hard date, so it will be in the coming months and into 2020 to 22.

[00:40:45.310] – Gwynne Dixon
And like how we can adapt that potentially in future software updates to provide more for our clients and our users. If we can add more granularity there indeed we’ll be assessing ways to incorporate that for sure.

[00:41:04.680] – Gwynne Dixon
Also some some of the roadmap tools that we’re rolling out in 2022 include SMS, MMS send tools. And we’ll also be looking at revamping our email tools as well. So we’ll be taking all of this into account with those new software updates. So I think that wraps really where we are in terms of outlook for the coming months with the tools at hand in Engaging Networks

[00:41:36.450] – Kathy Powers
Great. Thank you all so much. Anne, Katie, Gwynne, great information. We have quite a few questions, quite a few on engagement scores coming in, so everybody keeps dropping them into chat. As I mentioned in chat you have concerns versus questions. That’s still a question in my opinion, and feel free to drop it in and we can respond to that as well. So I am taking notes in Google Docs and we’ll share this in the summary page.

[00:42:05.000] – Kathy Powers
So let’s start. Does this actually do much for Privacy? Why were open rates part of this overhaul from Apple.

[00:42:15.990] – Anne Paschkopić
I can chime in with my two cent on that. I think it does. It feels like it doesn’t, because the way that I think most of us use open rates is not super creepy. To put it simply, we’re just like, are you interested? Is that cool? But some people do actually use open tracking on, for instance, a one to one basis to see. Hey, I sent my client an email. If you said you didn’t see it, is it a lie or not. People use it to figure out where other individuals are when they’re looking at email, how they’re looking at email. Personally, I’m going to say my philosophy on Privacy, it is not something I want to get into here, but I do know that there is some really personal data that is available through open tracking.

[00:43:02.270] – Anne Paschkopić
I think that’s not how most of us are using it, but it is going to protect people against that kind of abuse.

[00:43:09.900] – Kathy Powers
Thank you. Anne That’s really good to know. Next one, if all my emails appears open, won’t that mean more spam emails, since they often send more to people who opened their emails?

[00:43:26.350] – Katie Dunne
I’ll jump in here. I think that everything is going to be up in the air for the next few months. I think you’re probably going to see more spam emails and more non spam emails, and then the trajectory of what those will take is going to change dramatically.people see the overall impact, particularly on their deliverability of this, but I think how it’s really going to impact deliverability is going to depend on Apple and how Apple treats these changes, because Apple could very easily change their criteria of what it looks like for something to been encouraged to you as to be marked as spam, or there’s so many other criteria that marks something as potentially a bad email that is not just a person marking something as spam.

[00:44:19.390] – Katie Dunne
Right. So Apple has a whole algorithm in the back end that’s determining that. And I would expect that that algorithm and that logic will change based on what they start seeing with these changes here. Hope that answers the question.

[00:44:36.260] – Anne Paschkopić
Yeah and if I can actually jump off that Katie, I think something that’s interesting here is the Privacy change itself is not necessarily going to change everybody’s. Spam algorithms like Gmail is not going to directly change as a result of this. They can still see who’s opening emails in their app, even if I as a sender can’t. However, it’s a whole chain of events. This is rolling out. Some people probably will send lots and lots of emails, because if you’re opening, it means you’re not a dead account, and that could change some downstream filters.

[00:45:10.400] – Anne Paschkopić
As Google and Yahoo and Microsoft machine learning tools adjust it is part of me is very excited and part of me is terrified to see what exactly is going to happen because this is a really big sea change. So I think that it will be interesting to see how deliverability and how spamming kind of changes as a result of that.

[00:45:34.560] – Kathy Powers
Definitely, the next question is actually similar. I think related. Someone asked also, technically, this may actually help deliverability because recipients email server like Hotmail show those as real engagements, the clicks. I’m assuming making the emails more likely to land in inboxes. True, Gwynne you’re our deliverability expert, I think we all have.

[00:46:03.720] – Gwynne Dixon
Probably more of a marketing question I would have thought. I don’t know, Anne and Katie what do you think.

[00:46:10.760] – Anne Paschkopić
I think if you again, it depends how people react. If you as a sender say we’re going to start sending to more committed people only people that click and people that convert. You’ll probably see your deliverability improve because you are sending to people that are sending those really strong engagement signals to your emails. So yeah, definitely.

[00:46:36.250] – Kathy Powers
This is also a good question. Do we know if other email clients like Gmail or Hotmail are considering doing the same thing in the future?

[00:46:44.700] – Gwynne Dixon
I could jump in on that. I’m sure Katie and Anne have something to add. Their bottom line is advertising where Apple’s isn’t. I would have thought Google or Microsoft would be less concerned with this because you’ll see on their clients and a lot of their applications, they’re actually selling ads,emails and so on. So I would have thought they’d be less interested in, more interested in appeasing marketing firms and things like that than following suit. But that would be my take. Again, I’m not a marketing expert, so I would leave more informed opinions to Katie and Anne.

[00:47:27.040] – Kathy Powers
Any additional thoughts on that Anne?.

[00:47:28.980] – Anne Paschkopić
TBD Ha Ha Ha.

[00:47:32.950] – Anne Paschkopić
I think Gwynne is right, but if it becomes a you know, Apple is really selling the Privacy thing, Google and etc may feel that they need to catch up.

[00:47:47.740] – Kathy Powers
Yeah, this one is sort of a Gwynne specific. Maybe even Engaging Networks specific right now our Engaging Networks visual device data only shows Apple mobile and Safarit I hink you addressed this Gwynne, I’m going bring it up just in case and not specifically iOS or Mac Mail for iOS. Can this be updated to give us a better idea of the scope of the issue and in the deck you said they can use it as a marker, but not precise measurement, just,

[00:48:16.360] – Gwynne Dixon
Yeah, the analogy I would use is if you had a blood test and you had a marker of this, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have it. So it’s an indication when we show that we’re showing it’s an Apple device, we don’t have more information, so we can’t say Safari, we can’t say it’s Chrome, etc. So as a deduction, there’s a strong possibility that’s then Apple mail. We know it’s an Apple device, but we haven’t got a browser for it effectively. When I’ve been looking at data, it seems to be coming in strongly in line with the sort of figures we’d expect for Apple mail.

[00:48:55.750] – Gwynne Dixon
Again, we will be looking at agent tracking and how we can develop that and potentially advance it with these changes to Apple Mail Privacy in the coming months and into 2022.

[00:49:11.590] – Kathy Powers
Cool. Thank you. If we filter by clicks and donation, registration rather than open the list will be inevitably much smaller., valid concern. What is your advice on increasing the list size? Also, does EN have any plan on changing the formula of engagement scores so that they still remain useful. It’s sort of a two part question.think I’m going to break this out in the Q and A responses. So the first one is advice on increasing list size or just simply tackling message to right people.

[00:49:44.700] – Katie Dunne
Yes. Well I’ll jump in on that first part. I think a lot of what we talked about today can be used in tandem. And I think what you all decide on as your best practice will be pretty personal to you for at least for these initial couple of months, because I don’t think everybody is going to see a slip that dramatic. Maybe you will. But I think a lot of folks with the conversation that has been evolving over the last couple of years, especially on deliverability.think a lot of folks have already started doing some of this work.

[00:50:19.300] – Katie Dunne
And so if you’re currently sending to your full available email list, you’re going to see a dramatically lower volume there, if you’re like all of a sudden only targeting folks who clicked in the last 30 days. Right. But if you’ve already been incrementally adjusting your target audience to say only people who have clicked or opened in the last 60 days or 30 days, then that drop in volume is going to be less dramatic. I think in terms of practices that you can take on straight away, I would definitely start some of those tests so that you’re starting to increase that amount of folks who are clicking.

[00:51:04.860] – Katie Dunne
So don’t make that adjustment right now in terms of your send list. Keep to the send list that you have been sending to over the last couple of weeks or months and implement as many of those A B tests as possible to improve the click through rate. So you’re actually building the file right before you make the change. So what you want to be doing is encouraging people right now to click and click and click. So that the number. That seven K number that you have hopefully skyrockets a little bit over the next month or so.

[00:51:34.160] – Katie Dunne
And obviously, as part of that, the other thing was intentionally including messages that are their purpose. For the most part to drive clicks and then secondary to that. So if you do all of those things and you’re still finding you’ve had a slight increase in that click volume, but it’s not enough to get you to where you’re comfortable sending emails to just that portion of the file, then I think that’s where you make a choice, right. You can either test and look at your deliverability impact if you just continue going out to your full file, or maybe you include the open , include some of the openers, even though we know they may not all be real openers, but you decrease the amount of time that you’re looking at.

[00:52:20.160] – Katie Dunne
So instead of 90 day openers or 180 day openers, you’re bringing that down to 90 day openers. And just like Anne said, even though we know that they’re not necessarily opening that email, we can have a pretty good idea that that’s not a dead account, right? It’s a live account because somebody has gone through the effort of adding that account to their Apple Mail app and it is still there, and I don’t know about you all, but I definitely wouldn’t keep a bunch of dead email accounts on my Apple mail because it’s taking up a whole lot of my data.

[00:52:52.370] – Katie Dunne
So yeah, I think that’s a pretty good starting point.

[00:52:57.420] – Kathy Powers
I love those ideas you presented in the deck for quick ways to engage you. I’m going to launch a poll right now in case anybody wants to see how easy that is. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be just pull like yes no. And I love the idea of the yes no question actually in the email. So you can just click yes or no right there and you’ve got your click. So there’s some great ideas in this deck, just a few more questions.

[00:53:18.070] – Kathy Powers
We are running out of time. Let’s see. Gwynne can you address the concerns that came up multiple times about people about changing the engagement scores, so some people said remain useful so that they work better around this issue. I believe that a bulk of our engagement scores still don’t account for open, so they are still useful. But can you give us a little bit more context or a little bit more of a future forward looking?

[00:53:44.640] – Gwynne Dixon
Yeah. There’s actually, I mean Anne touched on this. There’s one score really that uses opens, and it’s kind of like an all other score scores one through nine or all clicks and conversions.within different time frames. So like the first three months or six months and so on. It’s only scores ten that takes conversion into account, that’s like anybody else who’s open in the twelve month, last twelve months that hasn’t clicked or converted. People who are using that ten score will want to revise how they’re using it, or indeed, their use of it we’ll probably want to look at how we, you know, our inclusion of it in the coming months.

[00:54:25.410] – Gwynne Dixon
But the engagement scoring remains pretty, very strong in the face of these changes. Just because we’re relying already on engagement stats that are going to become the new normal. So click through, conversion will be the new normal. Things like, you know, donations as a result of conversion, which is also tracked on in the Engaging Networks app will become the new normal. Opens won’t. And I say we’re only using that in one score, and it’s kind of a fall back store.

[00:54:57.180] – Kathy Powers
Thank you. This one’s a good strategy question, and we’re going to have to start, we might take some of these offline unfortunately, so I have 69,000 in my opened last 30 day audience and only 7000 on clicks. And this is actually a recurring theme. If we use clicks as our criteria on sunset, we’re losing 62,000 people who are engaged. I think we sort of address this, but the recurring theme I think that people are very concerned about is A) how to reach their audience and B).I’ve got a lot of questions about messaging this up the ladder.

[00:55:35.780] – Kathy Powers
So how do I message this to leadership and to my boss or to corporate partnerships team who relies on that dud factor of an enormous open rate? Oh, hey, that looks really good. Or an enormous list. So what’s the message we should be sending and how can we reach those people?

[00:55:56.150] – Katie Dunne
I think when it comes to leadership, you know, they might have an interest in the open rate, but realistically, they have a much greater interest in a long term engaged file that is being delivered well across the board and most likely conversions. So I think really what we’re going to want to look at over the next while is how has this actually impacted your conversions. So we’re talking a huge amount about click through rate today, because that’s the next bar. It’s the most likely signal that we’re all going to use as that new top of funnel.

[00:56:30.060] – Katie Dunne
It’s what we’re going to use to create these audiences and to be able to compare emails over time, considering we won’t have that ability so much with open rate until we sort of it plateaus a little bit and we might get to a new normal. Conversion is really what it’s all about, right? That’s why we’re sending emails in the first place. So I think you may not have the 100,000 non openers that you had before, but if they weren’t opening the email, they weren’t clicking on the email, they weren’t converting on the email,

[00:57:01.580] – Katie Dunne
It might not really have that much of an impact on the performance of your email strategy overall. So I think, like holding back a little bit from some of the big dramatics on this is going to be key, and it’s probably on us as marketers to make the case to leadership. Like, let’s wait and see. I’m testing. I’m tweaking. I’m going to play it a couple of different ways over the next few weeks and months, and then I’ll have my learnings going into year end. None of us here is going to do anything that you know, if see that you’re sending to 7000 people and you’re getting zero conversions.

[00:57:47.620] – Katie Dunne
I think the first thing to do is to change the criteria that you’re using for how you send that email. So some of it is going to be short term priorities. Some of it is going to be longer term priorities. I think the most important thing is to, like, not panic and have this be a little bit of a tweaking strategy as we go, which obviously adds work to everybody’s plate in these few months. But that’s going to be the most important thing that we can do is to be reacting to our metrics in real time.

[00:58:18.740] – Kathy Powers
Great. Thank you. We are over time, and there are still quite a few questions. So Katie, Anne and Gwynne do you feel comfortable if we address this in the Google Doc? And we can share that out on the landing page, because I want to be respectful of everyone’s time, our attendees, as well as our time. So I have a ton of those. I’ll pull them all out, I’ll put them into the Google Doc. We’ll make sure it ends up on the landing page that all of your concerns are addressed.

[00:58:46.520] – Kathy Powers
So thank you, everyone for joining. Thank you, everyone, foryour amazing questions. And I know that this is a big change. Huge thanks to our partners, our accredited partners, M+R, Mal Warwick Donordigital and to Katie, Anne and to Gwynne for your time.