Is your nonprofit's email dead?

Confession time. In my personal Gmail account, I use a product that tracks the emails that I send. This way, I know if someone's opened my emails. So I can easily tell not only that my son opened my email instructing him to take out the trash but I can also tell when he opened it and on what device he used to open it. No more "excuses" that he never got the email!

For nonprofits, the technology that's used by your email provider to give you information on your emails is exactly the same. The one you're probably familiar with is "open rates." And whether those are vanity metrics is a subject for another day.

Last week, Apple announced that part of iOS15 will include Mail Privacy Protection. In short, they are eliminating the ability to use this technology to protect user privacy.

Lots of email providers, small businesses, and marketers are freaking out. As a caveat, I'm no email marketing expert like Tatiana Morand or Ephraim Gopin but read a bunch of articles over the last few days and came to a better understanding of what's at stake. (Feel free to correct me in the comments!)

Should nonprofits care? The short answer is: yes.

First, the most email opens happen through an iOS device. 93.5% of all email opens on mobile come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens. Overall, 61.7% of all emails are opened in Apple Mail, on one device or another.

Second, this isn't really avoidable. People are going to use this feature and your old metrics will be completely useless. Here's someone from Apple explaining the "changes you can expect."

Third, especially for nonprofits, open rates have been an important way to scrub your email list to ensure that you aren't emailing people who don't need/want your content. Even if you aren't doing sophisticated drip sequences or series, one of the few remaining metrics you'll have is click-through rates. But as Neiman points out, URL stripping might be the next frontier of this power play by Apple. Because email providers require you to keep your list clean for deliverability, nonprofits will have a Sophie's choice between keeping unengaged people on their list resulting in spam filtering or removing people who don't click on a link.

So is email dead for nonprofits? No...we still have to use it and will continue to.

But there are two immediate implications (even though iOS15 doesn't come out until the fall):

1. Our previous metrics are going to change. While open rate is the primary one gone, it will be harder to evaluate the effectiveness of email campaigns and it has yet to be seen how deliverability will be impacted by these changes. However, there are other ways to triangulate effectiveness. Obviously, the easiest metric to track is click-through but we wouldn't send a bunch of "Donate Now!" emails all year long.
2. How we engage with our email stakeholders is going to change. Certainly, not everyone believes this is doomsday. Although the only suggestion presented was a user survey, which not only is more work on the part of already busy nonprofit practitioners but also requires some level of sophistication to track that preference at the user level.

As with all things in technology, change is the coin of the realm. This gives us an opportunity to adapt and connect with stakeholders in more meaningful ways over email as well as discover new ways to measure engagement and investment. While there are many for-profit pundits that are declaring the end of email marketing, I'm more certain than ever that nonprofits will rise to the challenge.

Again, if you know of other experts in the space that have solutions to these issues or have creative options, please share them in the comments so all of us can figure this out together!