Clear Metrics, Trusted Connections: Email Marketing Easier and More Effective

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Email marketing continues to be a cornerstone of customer communication. To make it truly effective, marketers need two things: clarity in their performance data and trust in their audience relationships.

How can you be sure your engagement metrics reflect genuine interest?

And how do you build a subscriber list grounded in explicit consent and respect for user privacy?

Achieving both accuracy and trust is key to simplifying email marketing and driving meaningful results.

That’s why we’re introducing two powerful enhancements designed to bring precision to your Email campaign analytics and strengthen your customer connections: Filtering for Email Bot Opens and integrated Email Double Opt-in.

Let’s explore how these features address distinct but related challenges, ultimately making your email efforts more transparent and effective.

Filtering Email Bot Opens – Unveiling True Engagement

For years, marketers relied heavily on the email open rate as a metric to analyze campaign performance. But today, this metric often paints an unclear picture. The reliability of the traditional open rate is declining due to factors such as:

• Privacy Measures: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), available on its devices, aims to enhance user privacy. It can prevent senders from knowing precisely when an email is opened. A key way it does this is by preloading email images (including tracking pixels) through proxy servers. This registers an “open” regardless of whether the recipient actually viewed the email.
• Automated Bots: Various automated systems, sometimes used by inbox providers for security scans, also interact with emails. These bots can trigger tracking pixels, mimicking an open action.

This leads to inflated open rates.

Some marketers report seeing rates jump significantly, sometimes reaching unrealistic highs. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to know if an open came from an interested human or an automated process. Skewed open rates distort other metrics like Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) and hinder accurate assessment of campaign performance and ROI. Budget allocation becomes inefficient, and targeting customers based on such false signals, misses the mark.

The Solution: Intelligent Filtering for Accurate Insight

MoEngage now helps you cut through this noise with Filtering Email Bot Opens.

This feature acts as an intelligent filter, analyzing email interactions to differentiate automated or privacy-related opens from genuine user opens.

Here’s what you get:

• Clear Metrics: You get a transparent breakdown of opens:
  • Total Opens: The traditional count of all open events.
  • User Opens: Opens identified as genuine human interactions.
  • Machine Opens: Opens attributed to bots, automated systems, or privacy proxies.
  • Adjusted Open Rate: We have introduced a more accurate metric calculated using only “User Opens,” providing a true reflection of audience engagement.
• Platform Integration: This granular data is available across MoEngage – in campaign analytics, aggregate statistics, reports (including adjusted CTOR), Flows, and Segmentation. You can segment audiences explicitly based on “User Opens”.
• Control & Accuracy: Admins can configure how bot opens are viewed. View-through conversion tracking also leverages “User Opens” for more precise attribution.

The Benefits of Accurate Email Open Data

Filtering bot opens delivers significant advantages:

• Reliable Performance Metrics: Understand your actual email engagement based on human interaction.
• True Engagement Insight: Gauge the real impact of your content and messaging.
• Better ROI Assessment: Allocate resources effectively by focusing on campaigns that genuinely resonate and drive engagement from customers.
• Precise Segmentation: Target users based on verified interest for more relevant follow-up campaigns.
• Dependable A/B Testing: Make confident decisions about email variations based on real user behaviour reflected in the Adjusted Open Rate.

By providing a clear view of genuine engagement, Filtering Email Bot Opens lays the foundation for more effective, data-driven email marketing. But accuracy is only part of the equation. Building trust through transparent consent is equally vital.

Email Double Opt-in – Building Trust Through Confirmed Consent

While accurate metrics tell you how users engage, ensuring you have the right users on your list – those who explicitly want to be there – requires a solid consent process.

The Challenge: Ensuring Explicit Consent and Compliance

Many email lists rely on “single opt-in,” where providing an email address equals subscription. While easy, this doesn’t always capture explicit, confirmed consent.

In an era of heightened privacy awareness and regulations like GDPR, demonstrating clear consent is not just good practice; it’s often a requirement.

Users expect transparency, and regulators demand proof of consent.

Furthermore, lists built without confirmed interest can suffer from lower engagement, higher bounce rates, and more spam complaints, negatively impacting deliverability and sender reputation.

The Solution: Seamless Double Opt-in Integrated within MoEngage

MoEngage now streamlines this crucial process with our built-in Email Double Opt-in feature.

Here’s how it simplifies building confirmed subscriber lists:

• Integrated Setup: Enable the feature, and a new “Opt-in Status” user attribute tracks consent (“Single Opted in” by default, updating to “Double Opted in” upon confirmation).
• Automated Confirmation: Easily create an automated workflow to send a confirmation email upon signup, linking to a verification page.
• Flexible Confirmation Pages: Use MoEngage’s customizable out-of-the-box (OOTB) landing page or integrate your own custom page. The OOTB page allows logo and text customization.
• Targeted Sending: A new campaign toggle lets you “Target Double opt-in users,” ensuring promotional emails only go to subscribers who have explicitly confirmed their interest. Delivery reports show if users were skipped due to a lack of double opt-in status.
• Management & Control: Bulk update opt-in status via CSV uploads for existing lists. You retain control to enable or disable the process.

The Benefits of Confirmed Double Opt-in Consent

Implementing double opt-in brings substantial business value:

• Enhanced Compliance: Meet stringent requirements for explicit consent under GDPR and other regulations, reducing legal risks.
• Improved Deliverability: Build cleaner lists of genuinely interested subscribers, reducing bounces and spam complaints. This helps protect your sender’s reputation and ensures more emails reach the inbox.
• Stronger Customer Trust: Asking for confirmation demonstrates respect for user preferences and privacy, fostering positive brand perception.
• Streamlined Operations: Manage the entire double opt-in process efficiently within a single customer engagement platform, freeing up resources previously spent on complex workarounds across multiple different tools.

Accuracy and Trust for Simplified, Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing thrives on clarity and connection. MoEngage’s Filtering for Email Bot Opens gives you the clarity to understand true engagement by cutting through the noise of automated interactions. Our integrated Email Double Opt-in feature provides the tools to build connections based on trust and explicit consent.

Used together, these enhancements simplify your workflow, strengthen compliance, improve deliverability, and ultimately empower you to run more effective email campaigns. Focus your efforts on genuinely interested users, measure performance accurately, and build lasting customer relationships grounded in transparency and trust.

Move forward with the confidence that comes from clear metrics and confirmed consent.