New changes mean it’s likely the end of using open rate metrics. What does this mean to estate agency?
If you’ve run email marketing and sent newsletters and market update reports for years, you’ll have an interest in what the changes from the Apple Mail privacy Protection will mean to you.
The Apple Mail Privacy Protection, set to roll out with iOS 15, will allow users to block email senders like publishers, retailers and estate agents from detecting when they open an email.
If you think that’s a small amount of people, you’d be wrong. Users who use the Apple Mail client on the iPhone, Mac, and iPad devices make up over 46% of combined email opens in 2020 with more set for 2021. Gmail makes up just 27% and Outlook a very small 0.9%. (Source: Litmus)
In short, marketing teams up and down the land have looked very worried, as have publishers getting paid per impression. Typically seen as a vanity metric, the lack of any data around open rates sets a new standard in marketing.
So, what does this mean for your estate agency marketing and your updates?
Open rates are less important than engagement rates – but that’s not new.
Opens don’t tell us anything about intent, conversion, or engagement.
Open rates have been ok at best historically to track what’s going on roughly, but now they are becoming far less so. The industry average email open rate is 15% – 25%, with an average click-through rate of 2.5%, and it’s the click rate that’s of interest. But clicks aren’t the only way to look at engagement and interest.
With Acaboom we track the viewed rate which is people clicking the button in the email and opening a URL we control – we have complete visibility of the results.
We can say that of some 750K sends over the last six months, pre-appointments and nurturing emails are picking up 40% in views – which compared to the industry open rates mentioned above, is about double. But, the view rates for proposals are even better with 84% being viewed, and 59% of these multi times.
We’d argue that a view is different to an open. How often have you accidentally opened an email, perhaps in your work email, or when you scroll at night. A view that tracks the time spent on page is a very different animal, showing reading time and interest.