You Can Thank Apple for This...

After 18 months of unrelenting change, I suspect the last thing most wine marketers need right now is another challenge. But that’s precisely what recent changes announced by Apple mean to any winery using email marketing.

Here’s the problem: later this Fall, wine marketers won’t be able to trust two of the critical metrics typically used to measure and target email campaigns. Open rates will soon become artificially inflated, while the ability to track contacts who “read” a message will become nearly useless.

So how does that affect you?

It turns out that Apple delivers 93% of emails opened on mobile devices, and 58% of emails opened on desktop computers. The bottom line is Apple’s policies affect most of your customers’ emails. 

So if you’re using open or read rates to manage your campaigns in any way, now’s the time to adapt your marketing practices before the holiday rush.

TAKING ACTION NOW
In the short-term, before Apple launches their latest iOS operating system, now’s a great time to:

• Measure your email marketing audience
  Most professional email marketing platforms can generate a report showing which contacts use Apple browsers for mobile and desktop email.  This insight will give you a better understanding of the percentage of your list that may be affected by Apple’s upcoming updates.
  
  
• Review & refine email segments
  You may have several saved segments/audiences that use Last Open Date or Last Read Date. If you use these segments to target your campaigns, now’s the time to change your marketing recipes so you won’t be under or over-serving your best customers with email messaging.
  
  
• Re-evaluate key email marketing metrics
  Shift your focus to the most meaningful performance indicators: Clicks and Conversions. Create your own benchmarks today from these essential metrics so that you can be ready to measure performance once the iOS updates are live in the Fall.
  
  

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
All indications are that Apple’s recent changes are part of a prolonged strategic war waged on targeted advertising (i.e., Facebook) and fought under the banner of privacy.  And since email marketing is directly in Apple’s cross-hairs, savvy wine marketers need to adapt.

Without the ability to identify which contacts are opening their messages, wine marketers now face a dilemma.   Either you can send your messages to everyone, increasing your spam score and depressing email deliverability.  Or you have to use other methods to engage active customers.

Perhaps this will motivate more wineries to abandon the “spray and pray” tactics of typical winery newsletters in favor of preference-based messaging personalized to each customer’s interests.

Or perhaps this is just another nail in the coffin of email marketing, accelerating customer and merchant adoption of SMS and push marketing as superior alternatives.

But after surviving the last 18 months of pivots, successes, and setbacks, wine marketers shouldn’t be phased at all by change.

Happy Selling!

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