EU232: iOS 15 Update – How it Will Affect Your Email Marketing

eCommerce Uncensored - Email Marketing | Facebook Ads | Social Media Marketing

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The new 15 iOS update is here. As privacy regulations get more and more restricted, it is becoming harder to specifically track your customer’s behaviors. The guys dive into detail about how the new update is going to be affecting your email, Facebook ads, and other tools you use for your marketing.

This is a direct transcript. Please forgive any grammar or spelling errors.

Kevin: If you run these reports and you run these segments and you see that you have a really huge number of apple users, then these are some of the things that you’re going to have to consider. If you have a smaller list of apple users, then maybe you don’t have to worry about it as much.

Jason: They’re getting between 35% and 50% open rates.

Jason: What that’s telling me is that they’re not sending enough emails

Jen: Your listenting to e-commerce uncensored with Kevin Monell and Jason Caruso

Kevin: Hey everyone. And thank you for joining us. On another episode of e-commerce Uncensored. My name is Kevin Monell and I’m here with Jason Caruso. Now, if you listened to our podcast in the past, you know, that we are very big on email and not only email, we’re big on reading the numbers and the data in email to really identify what things are working and what aren’t working.

Kevin: And, you know, we talked about cleaning our list a couple of weeks ago and we decided to come on here. Um, and discuss these latest iOS 15 Apple updates that are coming out, or that have come out already, actually about a week ago. I think they came out and it, and it goes in line with their continuing, uh, concept of, uh, Privacy settings and things like that.

Kevin: iOS 14 started to block Facebook ads and tracking all the events that are happening in Facebook. So that was a big deal. And now blocking the ads or just
Jason: not

Jason: reporting back.

Kevin: It’s not, it’s just not a, it’s not an on, on the iOS 14 stuff you’re talking about. Yeah. It’s just not all the events. Aren’t trackable the purchase events, landing page views.

Kevin: And you know, and if you go into your attic manager now you’ll see a little note on each, you know, a number that says this might not be accurate due to the iOS 14 app or update. So it’s, it’s, it’s getting more and more difficult to optimize the ads for that just because it can’t track everything.

Jason: Yeah.

Jason: You know, it’s interesting Kevin, because we, uh, for sure, maybe I didn’t think about this, but now. Klayvio is saying that this is a problem with the iOS 15 update, 14 Facebook was having an issue with, and now Klayvio is saying that there’s issues tracking with iOS 15. And I don’t think I’ve ever consciously thought like, Hey, it’s going to get the email, but now that Klayvio is saying it, it makes sense.

Jason: Like, okay, you know, okay. In first Facebook and you know, what’s, what’s, what’s really interesting about this is that if you, if you’re a marketer or you run a business and you’ve been on Facebook or you scroll on Facebook, like most of us do, you know, this is like the big thing right now is like our Facebook ads still working.

Jason: Um, is this iOS thing, did they kill Facebook and whatever? And it’s kind of like all over the place. And people are constantly saying how Facebook is dead and Facebook ads are dead and. But what’s interesting about this is that several podcasts episodes ago, I don’t remember which one it was, it could have even been like a year or two ago.

Jason: We talked about the importance of looking at your, your business and your media buying and your results sort of more holistically, right? Like, and I’m sure, like there were people listening to this and you know, saying like, oh, these guys don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. You know, we have to attribute sales and, and spend to Facebook and this and that and yada, yada, yada.

Jason: But now I think. A year or two later from whenever we said that, um, I think we look more and more like we knew what we were talking about because the truth, the truth is you can’t look any longer at Facebook and say, okay, I spent $10,000 on Facebook. I got back $20,000. It’s a lot harder to do that. And in fact, you’re not really getting the right data.

Jason: So, um, what we said on this podcast was like, look, we don’t necessarily look at how Facebook’s do. We don’t necessarily look at how YouTube is doing or Google is doing. What we tend to do is look at it all as one, like, okay, we spent a hundred thousand dollars this month on, on our media buy and we got back $200,000.

Jason: Right. It in some, in some ways it’s simplified it a

Jason: little bit.

Kevin: Well, if you think about it, it’s like now I’m going to say traditional advertising. It was now a base is now social media and podcasts and things like that. But if you look at older, traditional advertising, like TV and radio, there was no real way to totally track what you’re getting back in return from a TV commercial necessarily.

Kevin: Well, the only radio

Jason: commercial, like a coupon code.

Jason: Yeah.

Kevin: We could do that, but like people didn’t use it. Right. Big brands. Coca-Cola apple. Like they put their brand out there on TV commercials. There was no way for them to actually track back to a specific commercial at a specific time that had an impact on their business.

Kevin: They look at it just like, as you said, as a, as a media buying marketing plan as a whole. And I think that’s, I think that’s what you’re getting at, right.

Jason: Oh, geez. Because we we’ve got an into this performance marketing, you know, like everything now is like, performance-based marketing, like, okay. We put in a dollar, we got back to dollars and yada yada yada, and, and that stuff.

Jason: Is what social media did, you know, having all that data, but basically all that’s happened is, is like you’re right now, social media is going to be similar, not the same, because you do get some data, but similar to running radio ads or similar to running a TV ads, right? Like you have to look at a holistic and be like, what CA what went out and what came in.

Jason: And, uh, it’s interesting because we have, uh, an email list of about whatever 70,000 people, 60, I don’t know the exact number, but, you know, email is what really has always made our outreach profitable. Right? Like even if we got like a one X return on Facebook, you know, email would be five X or 10 X or whatever.

Jason: It always was there kind of just to make sure everything was profitable. And I think that this is just more of a, that right, like more of attributing all of your outreach to one bucket and all of your revenue from the outreach and another bucket. And then seeing if it works. And I, as much as I hate to not see the data in Facebook, I think it could free people like us up a little bit.

Jason: It’s going to be harder to interact with clients because it’s going to be harder to get them the data that they’re asking for. But I think for us, um, who liked to keep our businesses very simple, I think it could, it could, it could, it could be something of benefit.

Kevin: I don’t know how you feel about it when it comes to these privacy settings, things that are happening, like you said, like that’s the rage.

Kevin: Now everybody wants to have privacy. Everybody cares about that stuff, but I don’t know how you feeling. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in the marketing space and this is what I do. And I’ve said this before. It’s like, I don’t mind that Facebook knows what I’m doing. And I don’t mind that, like an email provider knows what I’m doing.

Kevin: Like I like getting tailored messaging. Like I feel like Facebook is better for me if it knows what I’m doing. And I know like you tell people who aren’t really in the space that like, yeah, we’re filing. That’s what we do. We follow you around. I went and looked at shoes over here and now I’m on Facebook and I’m getting, you know, face shoe ads.

Kevin: Like that’s scary to me. How do they know all this? How are they getting all this? Like, I, I get that. But for me, I’m like, I’m cool. Like I’m looking for. And I find like I get seven different kinds of wallets that I want to check out. And that’s kinda how I found my wallet that I love. I like that, you know, even though I’m on someone’s email list that I don’t open all the time, maybe I’m going to get some tailored messaging because I haven’t engaged with them as much in the past.

Kevin: Like I like that. I feel like it’s a really good for me shopping experience. How do you, how do you as a consumer step away from marketing for a second, how do you feel about that as a consumer? Jason?

Jason: Yeah. I don’t really have anything to hide, so I don’t really get the whole privacy thing. I mean, I know some people go crazy over it, but at the end of the day, if somebody wants to know something about you they’ll figure it out, you know, and just setting some, some, some settings in your phone to me, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, they’re still gonna, they’re still gonna kinda know, I think, um, but no, I’m like you, I, I.

Jason: You know, I do. I do like the idea of, of seeing stuff that I care about. Like, I don’t want to see like earrings because I don’t have my ears pierced anymore. I don’t wanna, you know, I don’t want to see that kind of stuff, you know? Um, but so, yeah, I agree now, even though I agree with you for some reason, when the stupid thing pops up on my phone, I always say, don’t follow.

Jason: I don’t know why. I just, I don’t know. It’s just, but

Kevin: when you’re setting something up and you’re like, would you like apple to diagnose, would you like us to send diagnosis to apple or something? I always said, no,

Jason: they don’t ever get back to me and say thank you. Uh, look, we’re looking into this, you

Kevin: know, I feel like I’m getting all my options and I’m I’m and I think part of it is obviously that I’m in this space and it’s something I do.

Kevin: And I like seeing people’s ads and seeing what people are doing and how the retargeting me and things like that. But, um, I don’t know. It’s just, it makes sense to me as, as a, as a, as an online shopper to do that now. So I was wondering, I wanted to just talk about, so this th this apple iOS 15 change that’s coming out.

Kevin: So w what’s actually happening is on iOS 15 for their phone Mac iOS monterey iPad iOS 15 and the watch eight will have the ability to you can then hide the fact that you’re, that you open an email like you won’t, it won’t send data to the email provider that you’ve opened an email. It will hide, you know, specific information about yourself, like your location and all this stuff you can opt in and opt out of on the, on the phone itself.

Kevin: But it’s going to block this activity when you’re using your, you know, your apple mail or your, your, your apple iOS mail. And it’s not going to send that data. So you’re, so marketers, email marketers are not going to be able to track that kind of information.

Jason: It’s interesting because I’m sure Apple is still tracking you.

Jason: Right? Like they know where you are, but they don’t want anybody else to know where you are.

Jason: Right. Like, I, I I’m wondering like what the effect on like these local businesses are going to have, because, you know, local businesses run ads to people that are in like a zip code or just visiting, like visiting.

Jason: Wherever, right? Like you can run local ads or you can run ads to people who are visiting certain places. Um, so that’s, that’s going to be interesting, but you know, I, uh, I do a lot of studying on email marketers and email marketing and, and, uh, it’s funny because we look at our stats in Klayvio and we just tend to trust them.

Jason: Right. But this guy, Ben Settle, who is like this, this copywriter, he B he always says, he’s like, I don’t understand what people’s infatuation with opening or open rates are. He’s like, I just look at how many sales I make. I don’t really care. Like who opens the email? How many people opened the email? It doesn’t really tell me anything he says, because even before this update to Apple, what his argument was, is that, or is it.

Jason: The data still isn’t perfect. Right? Like you can open it in a lot of different ways. And then, you know, so like his point is, is like, and I agree with him, like, I’ve always felt like, you know, our clients ask us all the time, like, what’s the open rates for the emails? Like, what does that matter? I don’t understand.

Jason: Like,

Kevin: yeah, it’s funny you say that. Cause remember we had a client like six months or so ago, or maybe even a year ago now Jesus. Um, and we would send an email out and the open rates were so high and we knew that their email. They weren’t that engaged via email, their click through it. I don’t know if you know who I’m talking about, but the click-through rates were through the roof and come to find out that there was tools out there that these people had these tools on there.

Kevin: You know, these were B2B, this was a B2B client. So these companies enterprise servers. Yeah, they, they actually, they had this like spam filter that would open the emails, you know, check the links, make sure there was no malware, any suspicious activity and then send it to the person’s inbox, click it, all that.
Kevin: Although all that bot activity was sending all this false data to Klayvio. So even like you said, even before this update, it was happening, it was like, I mean, you can only rely on it to a certain extent, but if you see these inflated numbers and stuff, something’s something’s going on.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think that this does for our industry is it actually makes email more Important.

Jason: Right because, so we have this golf ad that when we turn on just blows up, right. We don’t really have anything to sell. So like, that’s the problem. But like, we have this ad that just works like crazy. Right. And the, uh, we don’t, we don’t quite know like how everything, I guess my point is, is like, we’re getting people to sign up to our email list.

Jason: So we’re doing lead gen and we don’t necessarily have to rely on Facebook’s reporting to know how it’s working, because we just look at how so it’s like really easy. We just, how many people signed up? How, how much money did we spend? And we could do the math that way. We don’t really need Facebook. Um, where, where, you know, to me, that, that makes it just that much more important because now instead of trying to make sales on Facebook, um, We can just try to grow our email list and sell people through the backend.

Kevin: Yeah. And I think this pushes pushes us and pushes me and my marketers to focus a lot more on, you know, maybe some next level engagement aside from open rates. Like we’ve used open rates as a metric to identify if things are working, people are actually seeing your messaging, but really now you have to focus on that engagement are people clicking through and speaking of specifically for Klayvio cause we use Klaviyo, we’re talking about Klayvio and so I don’t know, I don’t necessarily, I haven’t used MailChimp in years.

Kevin: I haven’t used an Active Campaign in years. There’s all these other ones out there that I haven’t used. So I don’t know how they’re handling it all, but I know that Klayvio is, is, is really pushing people to look at that, you know, click through rate more strongly because that is still going to be a metric that’s going to be trackable and they are also putting out, you know, they have a re reporting tool and um, And a segmentation setting that you can actually see all your Apple users.

Kevin: So you can start sending people, sending your apple users, segmented email. If you have a huge list of people who are using Apple, you could just send to them and see how it’s affected. So basically

Jason: what Klayvio has said to do is create a segment of apple users and then email them separately. So maybe you maybe, you know, everybody who is opening on an, on an apple device, they go in one segment, everybody opening and all the other devices, they go on other segment.

Jason: And then you can, you can kind of see, um, from there, I don’t know if this is, if this is going to bleed over into Android. I don’t know that Android has as much of a, uh, like choke hold, so to speak. Um, ’cause it’s like, there’s a lot of different platforms that are using the Android network, uh, between like, you know, you got Apple TVs using a Fire Sticks.

Jason: You have, you have phones. I mean, there’s like a lot of different

Kevin: devices. I think you told me it’s like Android is like huge, like even bigger world way bigger. Right. And it just seems like Apple’s the one that’s always got the light shined on it basically. And Android, it’s kind of like, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna sit back over here and maybe no one will shine the light on me and they’re just kind of skating by.

Jason: Yeah. I think because our industry is, is, is quote unquote Apple people for the most part, I think, although, I mean our wildlife photography brand, uh, there’s a ton of apple people in there. I mean, and they’re artists. So that may, that may make sense as well yeah. I mean, there, there are some things that, um, I’m just looking through this article that Klaviyo put out and, um, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we, we talked about cleaning your list and now it’s always a good time to like, take a look at that. But we also talked about like, looking at engagement as like an open, like, and you really can’t.

Kevin: If, if you’re, if you run these reports and you run these segments and you see that you have a really huge number of Apple users, then these are some of the things that you’re going to have to consider. If you have a, you know, a smaller list of Apple users, then maybe you don’t have to worry about it as much.

Kevin: But like when you’re, when you’re doing say you’re cleaning out your list and you’re looking at people who haven’t opened your email in 90 days or 60 days or 30 days or whatever, you’re going to have to rethink that a little bit, because those metrics aren’t going to be accurate. You may have somebody who’s opening your email on an Apple device.

Kevin: And then, so you’re not gonna be able to see that. And so you’re going to have to gauge it more on a higher level of engagement for them. Yeah.

Jason: And that’s interesting because cleaning your list is going to be tougher. Yeah. It’s going to be harder. Like you’re not going to really know. Um, you know, you’re not really gonna know who opened and who didn’t sort of like, you’re trying to clean people, clean the list, uh, because they were inactive for six months.

Jason: They may not be exactly, you know?

Jason: Um, yeah. I mean, there’s other ways you can do it. You can take those email addresses and see if they’ve purchased or anything, you know, you can kind of segment those people and then see. Cause cause they, they do see the device that it was opened on. Right. They just. Well, how would you segment

Kevin: by, well, they’re looking at, you have to look at previous, like at this point, you’d have to look at the previous 30 days when you were able to track moving forward.

Kevin: I don’t know. I, now that you say that like moving forward, I, that segment is not going to be accurate either that number of people who are app Apple users is not going to be accurate unless they’ve clicked. Now they, another thing that Klaviyo has done is they’ve given you the ability to insert, because right now your, your settings, your default settings in Klayvio are the attribution of revenue is going to be based on whether they opened or clicked, which is why Klayvio was saying that your numbers, your open rates are actually going to be inflated a little bit.

Kevin: Like they’re going to be higher as well as your revenue, because it’s going to try to, it’s got like these I’m sure these calculations and these algorithms based on the percentage of email users on your platform, and they’re actually going to send people. Eventually an email. That’s going to say this percentage of your list is Apple users.

Kevin: So what they’re going to try to do is, um, calculate that just based on industry numbers, percentages. So our history, it’s not like your open rates are going to plummet. They’re not going to go down because of this. They’re actually could potentially be inflated a little bit inaccurate because they’re going to try to figure it out without looking at the open rates necessarily.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jason: It’s interesting. You said that because, uh, we were, I’m writing up a proposal right now for one of our prospects. Nate, if you’re listening, what’s up, buddy. I’m talking about you. Um, and their open rates are really high and I’m wondering how much of that has to do with

Kevin: yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe it started for them already and

Jason: like they’re getting between 30% and 50% open rates.

Jason: Um, actually like in the proposal I wrote that. What that’s telling me is that they’re not sending enough emails because really like 30 to 50% open rates with, uh, you know, with a larger list just means that you’re not sending enough emails. Am I, you know, so, um, because we’ve never, I mean, it doesn’t matter who we like, you know, clients of ours that have had over a hundred thousand people on their list, our list with, uh, with 70,000, um, when you get to these bigger lists, they tend to have very, have a much, much like smaller

Jason: open

Kevin: rates, for example, more normalized, open

Jason: rates.

Jason: Right?

Jason: Well, yeah. I mean, like we’ve always said that we thought a 20% open rate for e-commerce for a business who is, is using email regularly is a really good open rate. 20% is a really good open rate. When we start seeing 30% and 50%. It’s just, they’re just not sending enough emails. You know, and we’ve seen that with everybody, with every one of our clients, when they’re not sending enough emails, they get these hot, these big open rates.

Jason: Well, yeah. I mean, you’re only sending an email every once in a while, so that, that makes sense. But when you’re sending emails, you know, for us, you know, email, I mean, in our, in our opinion, email can literally save your business. Um, you know, so, so yeah, I mean, you know, I guess my point, I guess my point is that, uh, not to get off on, off, off topic here, but my point is that, uh, open rates really are not that important, I guess, really what it comes down to.

Kevin: So along with those, um,

Jason: start a

Jason: little bit there, Kevin,

Jason: I was

Kevin: kind of thinking about, yeah, I know there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot to think about here. And this is a lot it’s it affects your business tremendously when you’re, when you’re looking at it a certain way. And you know, these open rates are going to be inflated in turn, you know, based on these percentages that Klaviyo’s going to do.

Kevin: And I’m sure the other email providers are going to do similar things. So you don’t start seeing just a dive bomb of open rates. I’m sure they’re going to want to, because you look at that nut, you’ll get that pretty number and you’re going to start questioning your email providers. Those providers are going to want to keep those numbers up.

Kevin: So they’re going to try to, I guess, try to figure out what that number is. So with the open rates inflating, so is your, your revenue is going to inflate because your attribution is based on the open rate. So what Klayvio has done is they’ve added, um, click only attribution. I don’t know if you were at that part of the article, but you can actually go into your settings now.

Kevin: And it’s only going to attribute a sale or revenue if someone clicks, if you have that setting. So someone could write. Uh, campaign could get, uh, attributed with a sale, even though someone didn’t necessarily open their email. But if you have click, they would have to click through the email for that practice,

Jason: that sale back to that person.

Jason: I think that’s the

Kevin: problem. If it’s a click, if they click through, but say, say, um, I am on an Apple. You can’t buy,

Jason: unless you click through them

Kevin: you could. I mean, why couldn’t I like, well, I can open an email and then I can go type in their web address or I can see them on Facebook later on. Like, so, I mean, there’s so many attribution issues to talk about, like with these different channels going on anyway, but totally like you can, you can open an email and then like one of our clients, they open the email and they call an order.

Kevin: Yeah. That’s like,

Jason: that’s an older

Jason: crowd. Right? Well, that’s an older crowd and they want, they want to talk to someone. But I guess the, the, the, the moral of this story is that. For me personally, I think it’s going to make things for the good marketers, the people who know what they’re doing. I feel like they’re going to be fine.

Jason: I feel like it’s the people who, you know, you’ve seen on Facebook all the time. Like they worry about things like that. I used to worry about quite frankly, before I really understood, like before we started making all this money with our own business on Facebook, you know, I worried about the stupid, like the stupid things, you know, like, yeah.

Jason: And you just see these other marketers who have money, they’re just doubling down and they’re just what they’re doing is they’re taking up because they realize that, and this is another thing not to get off topic here, but you know, if you talk to like a really experienced marketer, they’ll tell you that they don’t ever use social media as a quote unquote selling channel.

Jason: They use it more to just like, get attention, right? Like they’re just trying to get attention. They’re not necessarily relying on Facebook because Facebook at the end of the day doesn’t make the sale. And that’s where I think people, people get like screwed up with this. It’s like, it’s not Facebook making the sale.

Jason: It’s how you’re presenting your offer. It’s if you’re going after the right crowd, it’s, if you know, you have something that people want and people have always attributed their sales to Facebook and it’s not Facebook. And that’s why when I created, um, The Truth About Facebook ads, it has

Jason: really very little to do about Facebook.

Jason: It’s it’s all about how to create an offer. It’s all about how to do these things that won’t be affected, you know, because you can see the sales coming into your store. Um, so yeah. You know?

Jason: Yeah. That’s

Kevin: just my take on it. No, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So guys keep an eye on it, make sure you’re looking at a how thing, how this is affecting your yourself

Jason: and look at your,

Jason: your look at things from a holistic standpoint, don’t look at things so much, so granular anymore.

Jason: You really have to see what’s coming into the business and compare it to what’s going out of the business. And I think, you know, the more you realize that your sales are directly, um, co co you know, like they’re directly a, uh, there are direct. It depends on what I’m trying to say. It’s not the platform.

Jason: It’s like the correlation is your product. How good it is, how well you could sell it, how good your sales pages. Um, it’s not so much Facebook. It’s not so much email. It’s not so much these things. It’s, it’s basically you’re using these platforms to get your message out there to get your brand out there.

Jason: It’s not so much, you know, Facebook doing it or email. So I wouldn’t get too, too excited about it. I know it’s gonna be hard to report to clients, but other than that, I think the good people will,

Jason: will still succeed.

Kevin: Cool, man. All right. All right guys. Thank you guys so much for listening as always, you can check us out at ecommerceunsensor.com.

Kevin: We’ll talk to you guys real, real soon.

Jason: Later.

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