5 Tips for Effective Email Marketing in an Age of Increasing Data Privacy

In an age of increasing customer privacy, can email marketing still be as powerful as it once was?

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That’s a question many brands are asking themselves as they navigate the consequences of Apple’s 2021 Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature, and data privacy policies like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, Canada's anti-spam legislation, and New Zealand’s Privacy Act.

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MPP gives users the option to hide their IP address and protect mail activity. If they choose to do so, this prevents companies from seeing whether subscribers have opened their emails when using the Apple Mail app. An open rate of 100% would be reported, skewing the results of email marketing campaigns—and skew they have. The impact on open rates has been so significant that 62% of email marketers say that they’re now prioritizing different KPIs to measure the effectiveness of email.

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As for GDPR, this requires that companies operating in the EU obtain explicit and informed consent from their subscribers. This affects the way they collect, store, and use personal data, starting from the moment a user enters their information into a sign-up form. 

But while the effect of these regulations and features is certainly being felt, the changes aren’t all negative.

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In fact, many companies see increasing data privacy as an opportunity to design better, more personalized email campaigns—and you should too.

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Here are 5 tips for effective email marketing in an age of increased transparency:

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• Create meaningful, engaging content
• Segment your audience for a tailored experience
• Prioritize different KPIs.
• Regularly clean your email list.
• Be transparent about data collection and usage in sign-up forms

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1. Create meaningful, engaging content

One of the best ways to overcome the challenges of increased data privacy is to create emails that your subscribers actually want to read.

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That means doing the opposite of what many other organizations are doing: Using email exclusively to sell. Remember: Not everyone who subscribes to a brand’s email list is ready to buy. And even those that are (and who’ve bought before) will quickly grow tired of promotional emails that offer nothing of value. That’s a surefire way for your company’s content to end up in the inbox of a secondary email address that’s rarely, if ever, used.

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To prevent that from happening, put your customer at the center of your email marketing.

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Make sure your emails provide valuable information that helps solve their problems or improve their lives. This could include sharing industry news and trends, providing how-to guides or tutorials, or offering exclusive tips and insights (first-hand or through interviews with industry experts).

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Clean beauty brand Saie does this really well with its email series featuring employees’ favorite things. While products are mentioned, the emails make sure to talk about other things (separate to the business). Here Lauren, Saie’s Head of Community, shares her love of rock climbing and a new wine bar that’s opened up in San Francisco with readers.

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As you can see with the example above from Demand Curve, engaging visuals and formatting are essential to make the emails more enjoyable and easy to read. This could include using high-quality images, bold headlines, and clear calls-to-action. 

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But it’s also about maintaining brand consistency so that no matter where subscribers are in the world, they know they’re reading an email from your organization. 

For large global organizations, this is easier said than done. Circulating brand guidelines to regional offices is one way, but an even more effective solution is to use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool like Wedia that integrates seamlessly with your existing MarTech stack. This provides pre-branded templates that enable sales teams, regional entities, partners, dealers and franchises to localize email campaigns whilst maintaining brand consistency.

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2. Segment your audience for a tailored experience

One-size-fits-all email campaigns will miss the mark with many subscribers. Instead, brands should use segmentation to create hyper-personalized email experiences. Particularly those operating in diverse markets that have their own regional preferences, cultural nuances, and local events or holidays.

But how can companies achieve this without risking inconsistencies in their overarching brand messaging and values?

By using a centralized DAM platform that provides pre-branded email templates. This means that you aren’t publishing the same content for each of your channels, markets or locations. Instead you’re empowering local teams to tailor the global strategy to their specific contexts.

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For example, Volvo Car France who use Wedia to provide 115 dealerships with email templates to make the localization of marketing campaigns more autonomous and efficient. 

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The self-service DAM platform allows quick and easy access to email templates, images, videos, audio files and more, and the ability to track the engagement of their own contact lists. In 2023, 92 print and email templates were created.

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3. Prioritize different KPIs

Since open rates are now skewed thanks to the iOs 15 update, brands cannot rely on this KPI alone to measure campaign effectiveness.

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Instead they should focus on other KPIs such as clicks, click-through rates, web traffic, click maps, unsubscribe rates, and audience surveys. By monitoring these metrics, companies will gain valuable insights into how their audience is engaging with their content.

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Moving away from open rates as the primary KPI is no bad thing. While it can still be used to understand whether a subject line has worked well (or not), other KPIs do a much better job of telling you how engaged your audience is.

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For example, your customers might be opening emails but are they clicking on links to find out more information or discover new products? If your average click-through rate is less than 1% , it might be time to review the content of your emails.

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Unsubscribes is another KPI to keep a close eye on in the wake of iOs 15. This is a surefire way to tell whether your emails are resonating with your subscribers or whether, in fact, they’re finding the frequency annoying or the content irrelevant. 

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Last but not least, feedback forms and surveys are a great way to understand what your subscribers want more of and crucially, the survey submission data shows how engaged they are with your emails.  

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4. Regularly clean your email list to remove inactive subscribers

As satisfying as it might be to have a high subscriber count, regularly cleaning your email list is essential to understand the true value of email marketing campaigns. 

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Not only is there no point in sending emails to subscribers who aren’t interested in your content or have directed it towards a spam folder, but it can also be expensive. With many email marketing platforms charging based on subscriber count or email volume, a leaner list ensures you’re not wasting resources on disinterested individuals.  

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But how do you go about refreshing your email list?

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There are 4 steps to follow:

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• Identify who is inactive versus disengaged by creating a separate list of subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a certain period of time e.g. three or six months.
• Decide whether you’ll measure engagement by opens or something more active (i.e. clicking on a link).
• Send a series of emails (between one and three) that aims to re-engage them. You could offer a discount code (if relevant), but what you absolutely must do is make clear why they should stay on your list. What great emails have you got coming up? Why is the content valuable? Give them a reason to fall back in love with your newsletters.
• After a week or two, mark the truly inactive subscribers appropriately and remove them from your database.

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5. Be transparent about data collection and usage in sign-up forms.

Transparency in data collection and usage has become the cornerstone of successful email marketing. And this starts with the sign-up form, the gateway to building a trusting relationship between brands and their subscribers.

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After all, consumers don’t hand over their email addresses very easily. They have busy inboxes and more than enough promotional emails to sort through on a daily basis. Therefore, if brands want to grow their subscriber base, they must demonstrate that they value data privacy. A key part of this is getting consent. 

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Here’s how marketing consent is defined by the rules of GDPR: 

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Consent of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.

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Want to make sure your company’s email sign-up form is GDPR-compliant? Use this checklist:

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• Ask for consent for each specific purpose. For example, if someone provides their email address for billing purposes and you want to give them the option of receiving your marketing newsletters, you would need a separate checkbox for that. If, however, your sign-up form has only one purpose (e.g. to send a marketing newsletter) then you don’t need a checkbox.
• Ask users to actively opt-in. Including a checkbox that says ‘Please tick this box if you’d rather not receive these emails’ is not the right way to get consent. You need to make clear what subscribers are signing up for and only if they check the box do you take that as actively opting in.
• Don’t use pre-checked boxes and ensure that individuals can refuse to consent
• Add a link to your company Privacy Policy
• Tell individuals that they can unsubscribe at any time
• Explain what you’re going to do with their data
• Have easy withdrawal/unsubscribe mechanisms in place

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You can make your email sign-up form even better by being explicit about what subscribers will get and how often they’ll get it. 

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For example, this sign-up form from HelloFresh which spells out exactly what subscribers will get when they subscribe.

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But it’s not just fun B2C companies that can (and should) have engaging email sign-up forms. After all, a recent study found that B2B marketing emails see a 23% higher click-to-open ratio than B2C emails!

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That’s more than enough reason to make your sign-up form as compelling as people. You can achieve that in a few ways:

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• Tell people what they will get and how often they’ll get it
• Offer them an incentive
• Have a clear call to action
• Include just one or two entry fields
• Use social proof

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Here you can see how Brian Dean from Backlinko utilizes social proof (the quote from Kieran Flanagan), makes it really easy to subscribe (one entry field) and leverages the ‘fear of missing out’ feeling with the call to action: Get Exclusive SEO Tips That I Only Share With Email Subscribers.

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Empower your teams and delight subscribers with email templates made possible by DAM

Personalized email marketing will overcome the challenges of data privacy in 2024.

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This means leveraging tools like DAM that make light work of distributed marketing.

To explore the benefits of a DAM system and how it can help you better connect with customers around the world, book a free demo today.