Hey, We aren't quite done yet with our focus on email marketing in this here newsletter, although we will start mixing things up quite a bit soon. I think email as a marketing channel is only going to grow further in importance over the next few years, rather than shrink, and I also firmly believe that all authors need to get on the email train and start reaping the (considerable) benefits. All this iOS 15 malarkey doesn't dampen my ardour for email one bit. I am, however, a little disappointed that some better solutions haven't been forthcoming from the main email providers just yet:
I have endless sympathy for the pickle they have found themselves in – just for the record; this is not a problem of their making. But I had hoped back in June that we would have some better solutions by now. What would I like to see in an ideal world? Well, some of the things that the email companies themselves were teasing back then – like some kind of new metric to replace open rates. Perhaps some kind of subscriber engagement score, possibly drawing on all those little signals that can improve or ding your sender reputation with the likes of Gmail. But before we dig into what that could look like – which will also shed some light on how we might handle list culling in this Brave New Privacy World – let me answer a question many of you have been asking. What About Clicks?Click tracking is currently unaffected by the Apple privacy moves, leading many to suggest it should simply replace open tracking as your prime metric. While I agree with large parts of the reasoning, there are several issues worth noting: 1. Click tracking isn't as perfect as some assume. It works differently to open tracking – the simple version is that your mailing list service replaces your links with redirects so the traffic passes through their servers and can be tracked. Apple's moves don't touch that, and are unlikely to in the future unless Apple (or someone else) takes the axe to redirects, which I would file under "Highly Unlikely" given how ubiquitous they are. So much online stuff would break that it would make this look like a storm in a doll's house teacup. Anyway, because of the way click tracking works, coverage isn't perfect – for example, anyone not receiving HTML emails or who has HTML blocked (like many corporate email addresses) will not have their clicks tracked. And this can be a problem if you want to use clicks to decide who should be removed from your list, and so on. Although you can reasonably argue that open tracking had similar blind spots (and I would certainly agree). However… 2. Less people click things than open things. Often a lot less. Let me use this newsletter as an example. I have a large and healthy list numbering in five figures. My average open rate is pretty great – almost 55% since I moved to ConvertKit earlier this year. But my average click rate is only around 5%. Granted, that would be much higher had a released a book in that timeframe, and I was generally minimizing links just after I migrated from MailerLite just to help overcome a temporary deliverability wobble, but you get my point. Even with a large, healthy list with generally great engagement levels, my click rate isn't super high, and considerably lower than the open rate. Which is a problem if you want to use click rates for similar things such as culling and generally measuring the effectiveness of your email game. 3. Focusing on clicks encourages clickbait. Don't get me wrong, getting your subscribers to routinely click things in your emails is extremely valuable – especially when the endgame of this convoluted enterprise is to, you know, sell books. But an overarching focus on clicks is dangerous because it encourages some hinky stuff. I've seen suggestions that you should just send a teaser paragraph or two in lieu of the full email, and get subscribers to click the link to read the rest – presumably housed somewhere on your site. Problem with that is your mailing list content is no longer exclusive, removing a key reason for signing up and remaining engaged with your newsletter. It's also a terrible user experience IMHO, and will dampen engagement rates. And remember the point here isn't do get Grade A data, it's to keep engagement high inbetween book launches. The data is only useful for measuring what kind of job you are doing on that front. Doing things which adversely impact that goal is self-defeating. So where does that leave our erstwhile email marketing author? I've always liked what Tammi Labreque says in her book Newsletter Ninja where she says you should be seeking opens, clicks, and replies in all your emails – or as many as is practical. But I'm sure Tammi would agree that what's ultimately the most important is engagement – that your emails are interesting or exciting or useful or funny and that people look forward to receiving them, find value in them, are jazzed about opening them, and devour the contents. Focus on that and all the other good stuff will come anyway… even if we might have some difficulty measuring that in the short term. If you focus on clicks rather than engagement, there's a danger you start undermining the engagement – which is the real goal here. What Could Replace Opens?I don't know what ConvertKit is working on, exactly, but it sounds like they might be fleshing out their Subscriber Score metric. I'm not sure what goes into it, but some interesting stuff has started popping up on their revamped dashboard. It looks like this (I've just removed some private data on the left-hand side). What you see here is a mapping of my subscribers based on a score of one to five-stars. I don't think ConvertKit has broken down what feeds into that, but it's probably just taking open and click data for now. (And in my specific case, you see a large cohort of highly engaged subscribers and then a rump of guys who look disengaged and/or aren't actually receiving my emails.) I don't know how sophisticated this metric is – all ConvertKit says in the tooltips is that it's based on "engagement." But how sophisticated could it become, in that ideal world scenario I spoke about up top? Well, here I'm purely getting into speculative territory, and I'll be completely upfront about my ignorance of the finer technical points here. Some of the stuff I'm suggesting might simply be impossible. But if we are shooting for the moon here, this is what I'd love to see. Services like Gmail assign each sender (or sending domain) a sender reputation and that's one of the key things in determining if your message gets accepted for delivery at all, whether it goes into Spam, Promotions, or Inbox. That sender reputation of yours will be affected by all sorts of things like emails being opened or not, replied to or not, marked Spam, deleted unread, and technical stuff like if your emails generate a lot of hard bounces. It's quite a long list. Now, I don't know how much of that information is available to mailing list services, or whether any of it can be deduced from the outside. It's not like your Sender Reputation is a publicly viewable score. But if any of that stuff can be deduced by the likes of ConvertKit, then it would be fab if those harvested signals could also feed into a newly beefed-up Subscriber Score, something that would truly show us the engagement levels of our subscribers. A gal can dream, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Willie Nelson with Blue Skies. |
Saturday, October 2, 2021
These email solutions are a bit hinky 🤨
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