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Update Your Privacy Strategy

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Identify the marketing impact of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP).
  • Prepare for changes.

Prepare for Change

While change can be uncomfortable, the good news for marketers is that email subscribers who’ve signed up for your communications want to hear from you. And consumers want their emails personalized based on the data they’ve actively shared with you—also called zero-party data. But remember, if you ask for it, you need to use it. 

Like all things, marketers need to prepare for what is changing. Expect the following changes. 

  • Skewed and unreliable open rates
  • Revised deliverability algorithms from internet service providers (ISPs)
  • Increased scrutiny on email marketing programs

Even if you don’t have many Apple mail users, it’s wise to anticipate that other email providers may follow their lead.

Five Ways to Be Proactive

Here are five ways you can prepare for change and ensure your marketing strategy is consumer-privacy friendly.

number one

Audit and update decisions based on opens. Review all your current journeys, automations, and metrics. Switch to click engagement instead of opens. 

  • Don’t forget to audit automations and audience filters.
  • Segment based on the links your recipients click.
  • If you continue some campaigns based on opens, be mindful of timing for reengagement campaigns.

number two

Expand your zero-party data. Zero-party data is optional information that the consumer willingly provides to a company. Expand your preference center or ask for data directly from your customers without leaving the inbox using Interactive Email.  

  • Grow the data and consumer insights organically.
  • Drive interactivity and lean into progressive profiling.

number three

Identify other key performance indicators (KPIs) for your company. Ensure your stakeholders are aware of the reduced reliability of open KPIs. Look beyond the open, because while MPP will impact open rate measurement, it should have no effect on other metrics like click-through rate.

  • Shift your metrics to be outcomes-focused, not impressions-focused.
  • Track your click-through rates like you tracked opens.
  • Include clickable links in the majority of your sends.

number four

Focus on sending personalized, meaningful messages to your customers. Provide the best customer experience that makes them want to engage with your email program. 

  • Follow email design basics.
  • Use the data you have about your customers.
  • Provide value in every communication and include an opt-out mechanism.

number five

Continue to follow deliverability best practices. Review your deliverability strategy and reports for changes and follow these tips. 

  • Review your strategy for subscriber consent management.
  • Look into unsubscribing older, nonactive recipients.
  • Sign up for tools to monitor your IP and domain reputation.

Note

 Learn more deliverability tips in the Trailhead module Email Deliverability Concepts

The Evolution of Engagement 

As the privacy landscape continues to change, Salesforce products grow and iterate with ever-evolving market expectations. To help ensure your data, insights, and predictions are as accurate and reliable as possible, Einstein apps are moving away from solely using traditional open rate metrics. Instead, we’re moving to an engagement rate metric that includes a blend of additional signals—including clicks and unsubscribes combined with open rate metrics that give you a more holistic view of your customers' engagement with your content. 

Note

Want to learn more about changes to each Einstein product? Check out the help page Email Client Privacy Metrics in Marketing Cloud Engagement Einstein.

Marketing Cloud Engagement has many tools to help you make decisions about your marketing strategy. Let’s review how they’re impacted or could help you as you make data strategy decisions based on consumer privacy.

Functionality

Description

Impact

Einstein for Marketers

Automate and personalize your marketing at scale. 

Algorithms are being updated to reflect a shift away from looking only at opens, allowing marketers to stay up to date with engagement metrics.

Path Optimizer in Journey Builder 

Identify the most effective journey for your customers with Path Optimizer.

Tune your Path Optimizer tests to the more reliable clicks metric.

Engagement Splits in Journey Builder using AMPscript 

Create journeys based on engagement with email links that use AMPscript.

Review your journey splits and find opportunities to engage promptly following explicit engagement.

Interactive Email Forms

Gather customer data directly from your email using Interactive Email Forms in Marketing Cloud Engagement. 

Interactive Email is compatible with Apple Mail, and because the results of the form are internally tracked, this engagement won’t be impacted by MPP. Using Interactive Email rather than traditional CTAs and landing pages can increase conversion by 19%.

Google Analytics 360 Integration for Marketing Cloud Engagement

Get better insights from your data and build deeper relationships with your customers.

Marketer-friendly Google Analytics reporting provides easy access to key conversion metrics for email, mobile, and web behavior. You can also easily append tracking metrics to journey messages.

Intelligence Reports for Engagement

Generate, view, and share detailed campaign-level data using Intelligence Reports for Engagement.

Identify the best KPIs for your organization with Marketing Cloud Intelligence. Marketing Cloud Intelligence unifies data from email with data from web analytics tools and revenue databases.

Sum It Up

Since trust is our #1 value, our commitment is to support you on your privacy journey. Change is inevitable, and the best thing you can do is stay informed and flexible. In the meantime, continuously review your strategy, focus on metrics that go beyond opens, be transparent with your customers, and engage with them directly. In other words, keep working your marketer magic. 

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