Email marketing is an important tool for many organisations, so it’s important to keep up with the new developments that may be impacting your deliverability and analytics.
There are three recent developments we want to look at in particular in this blog.
- Email filtering software looks like unsubscribes. We have heard clients reporting recently that email filtering software has been affecting their unsubscribe rate analytics. The filtering software clicks on links in emails to check whether they are legitimate or not – including unsubscribe links. The clients we spoke to had not seen a spike in actual unsubscribes because the link took visitors to a preference centre that the software did not interact with. However, it is possible that if clicking on the link alone is sufficient to complete the unsubscribe action, use of this tool could remove individuals from marketing without them even being aware.
- Apple Mail Privacy Protection blocks email tracking. This Apple feature, if switched on, prevents trackers from collecting IP addresses, so they can’t track the location of recipients or match their mail behaviour to other behaviour. It also prevents senders from tracking whether emails are opened or not, by automatically marking all emails as ‘opened’ when they hit the individual’s inbox. Given that few organisations collect consent to email marketing tracking in the way that consent is collected for cookie tracking (even though the data protection rules are the same) – and that it’s impossible to switch off using some popular tools – it’s not really surprising that the tech platforms that put user privacy at the heart of their proposition are taking action.
- Apple’s latest Mail update now categorises emails using AI. Apple has updated its Mail app to automatically separate emails into four categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions. It also threads the emails according to the oldest unread email. This might reduce the chance of the recipient doing the work to view marketing emails, making them less effective.
None of these tools would have been developed if there wasn’t a commercial driver to do so – which underlines the importance of considering privacy in the round when designing new processing activities. It’s not enough to think about whether there is a lawful basis to do something – organisations also need to consider the state of the art, and the technical controls that might interact with what they are trying to do.
In my view, data protection rules often have the effect of making it harder to do ineffective marketing that people don’t want, while continuing to allow effective marketing that individuals welcome. It’s important to regularly review the technology in the market – even if you don’t plan to use it yourself – to understand how it might interact with your own goals and objectives and what it says about how your customers feel about their privacy and your data processing activities.
