Hey,

Here’s a super pro tip to kick off the Summer of Email: don’t send thousands and thousands of people to a page with the wrong information.

Yeah. Sorry about that.

As many of you noticed, the instructions on my whitelisting page which I sent you to in last week’s email warning of huge changes coming to mailing lists were out of date (specifically with regard to how you whitelist someone in Gmail).

This is one of the challenges we face with whitelisting – Gmail regularly changes the process. My bad.

In my defense, it appears I’m in good company because I checked and re-checked over a dozen resources over the last few days and every single one of them is sharing outdated advice on how to whitelist in Gmail – even the Email Marketing Services themselves; so something must have changed very recently.

As soon as I find out the correct process – and one which will work for all devices, and one which is simple enough to share with your own subscribers – I’ll let you know.

That wasn’t the only question which came in after last week’s email – it was big news, to be fair. 

I’d like to address some of those questions this week, before we get cracking properly next week on Project Get Amazing At Email Before The World Ends.

Is this Apple news really such a big deal for newsletters? Tools have been around to block email open tracking for ages.

Apple certainly didn’t invent the idea of blocking email open tracking; plenty of niche email clients have been doing that for years. 

But Apple’s move will affect a staggering number of users, even before we consider the possibility of Google following suit – as they are officially hinting. 

Apple is big enough to skew the market on its own though. Combine its sheer size and the fact they will auto-report an open for each email processed by Apple Mail (which is 90%+ of all email on Apple mobile devices and 50%+ of all email on Apple desktop devices), then you are going to see massive open rate inflation everywhere – to the point that your open rates will be basically unreliable once adoption of iOS 15 really starts to gain headway. 

IMO. YMMV. Etc.

Does this kill email marketing? Should I put my energy towards Facebook Ads or something else instead? Or my Facebook Group maybe?

Even if open rates disappeared tomorrow, never to return, and we had no other way of telling who was an engaged subscriber and who wasn’t, it wouldn’t affect email’s status as the most powerful tool at your disposal. 

Keep in mind that email has several unique strengths. It’s personal in a way that other forms of communication simply are not, and it has an incredible conversion rate as a result – making it by far the very best choice for communicating with your readers and doing things like launching those books of ours. 

I mean, it’s not even close.

Also, you own your list. You don’t own your Facebook Group or your Facebook followers. 

Facebook can take that audience away from you in an instant – and does so regularly (I’ve had my ad account banned 8 times in the last 6 months – always reinstated, but always major hassle and stress getting it sorted and others have not been so lucky).

Facebook also charges you significant amounts to reach your audience and that price is rising all the time – whatever you are paying to your Email Marketing Service will be a pittance in comparison. 

Email marketing famously has the highest ROI of any kind of marketing – by several factors. Besides, I’m sure we’ll adapt to these changes – as we always do.

How will we be able to measure who is engaging with our emails? How will we be able to cull our lists if we don’t know for sure who is actually opening?

Email Marketing Services are on it. 

You can read the thoughts of ConvertKit’s founder Nathan Barry here in his article How Apple’s Email Privacy Protection Hurts Creators. You can see that he also thinks this is a huge deal but he says that ConvertKit are working on ways to deal with this change. 

I’ve also heard that other email companies are working on new metrics for you to measure subscriber engagement – and I’ll let you know about any developments in the coming months.

My guess is that, absent some new and magical way of tracking opens that does an unlikely end-run around Apple, services are either going to start estimating your open reach, or coming up with some kind of engagement score which factors in things like clicks and replies and stuff like that.

How should we prepare for this change?

Get better at email and do it this summer! 

It’s going to be harder to measure things in the future, whatever the providers dream up, so if you are planning to get better at email – which should be a top priority for any author – then now is the time. 

And I’ll have lots of resources to share with you over the summer.

Can I point my readers to your whitelisting page?

A few of you emailed me and asked permission – which I definitely appreciate. But this is a bad idea for you, for me, and for your subscribers – even if the info on my page was perfectly up to date BTW. 

***

I'll talk a lot more about all this stuff over the coming months when we really get into it but If you are eager to get going right away, I recommend popping over to the Email Archive and clicking on the Email Sorcery section where you'll find plenty to keep you busy until next Friday.

Dave

P.S. Wistfully remembering summers past this week with Eleni Kadi and Come Dance The Syrtaki.