Email Marketing: 74% of marketers are concerned about privacy changes. What will happen in 2022?

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If you work with email marketing (as basically all marketers do), you've probably started to worry about how all the recent privacy regulations and changing industry rules are affecting your strategies and how to adapt to it all.

Well, you’re not alone: ​​A survey called “ Email in 2022 ” found that 74% of marketing leaders are concerned about impending privacy changes, while 82% of organizations are preparing and committing to better organizational alignment.

A lot seems to be changing, from Apple 's iOS 15 and MPP, to the find investor through investor database deprecation of app tracking data and new government regulations.

Despite all this, email marketing is far from dead: According to Wordstream benchmarking research , email campaigns had an average conversion rate of 4.29% in 2021.

To help us better understand some of these privacy trends and how they will impact marketers’ routines in 2022, we’ll review the data from SparkPost’s report.

Let's take a quick look at the results of email marketing in 2021
Omnichannel marketing strategies rose in 2021. An omnichannel strategy typically includes email, SMS, live chat, social media, display, and any other channel that can make it easier for you to reach your customers.

Looking more specifically at email, Sparkpost’s report showed that 76% of marketing leaders think their email marketing program has had a positive impact on business in 2021, up from 58% in 2020.

Additionally, 34% of leaders said they are increasing their email marketing-related KPI metrics to reflect their company’s reliance on this digital channel.

This suggests that despite the current challenges in collecting marketing data, this channel remains highly profitable for businesses, especially when combined with others, as mentioned above.

You need to understand the types of customer data
Okay, so your company is already using email to generate revenue as part of its marketing efforts, but what exactly do you need to know about privacy policies to adjust your strategy?

First, we need to go through a quick overview of the different data types.

Zero-party data
We are talking about when the user voluntarily and intentionally shares their information with you.

An example is interactive content – ​​when the user completes a quiz or assessment on a page of your website and then also provides their email address to collect the results.

Communication preference pages, phone numbers, or landing pages and surveys on social media are other examples.

First-party data
Also known as 1P data, this is the information you collect from your customers’ interactions and behaviors.

Examples include website activity, purchase history, email engagement (email opens and clicks), and customer feedback program scores.

Second-party data
This is when companies sell or share the personal data they have collected with other companies.

It is typically shared between parties that have similar audiences and customers.

Third-party data
Last but not least, we have third-party data.

Essentially, this is any data that has been collected or organized from a variety of sources and is often managed by organizations that do not directly interact with customers.

There are many markets where these massive data sets can be purchased, and some examples include demographic data, survey responses, income data, and online activities such as websites visited and browsing behaviors.

Prepare your army: Mail Privacy Protection and other resources
Now that we have those concepts in mind, we can talk about one of the most impactful changes in the data world: the loss of third-party cookies .

In 2019, Firefox started banning these cookies and Google has just declared that it will no longer support third-party tracking in Google Chrome browsers .

Another recent change that has impacted the digital world is the widespread adoption of Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) by iOS users (97%!).

This feature can hide IP addresses and block remote content, resulting in artificial email open rates, images not automatically loading in emails, and email-related activity data that marketers can't track.

Google, Safari, Firefox and Apple are just the beginning. Clearly, there is a movement towards decreasing the use of third-party cookies. The Sparkpost report indicates that more than 50% of open data will no longer be trusted by the end of 2022.

This means that businesses will likely have to rely more on first-party data. It’s an opportunity to rethink your nurturing flows and improve all communication channels, with the goal of having a concise message and alignment across different sources of customer acquisition and retention.

Marketing teams will likely need to innovate the methods they use to collect data, because their own data will be their most valuable asset.

Additionally, it is also an opportunity to review KPIs, as the reliability of email open rates will be affected by MPP. Similarly, MPP can also interfere with other important metrics, such as customer acquisition cost, as it might be more difficult to target ads to your audience.

And now what?
We are more than just marketers. We are also customers of many companies and understand how important it is to maintain your privacy.

If things are changing, it is because there is a need to improve the customer experience, and marketing will adapt to meet that need.

Businesses will likely have to rethink their budgets and how they allocate their resources. Focusing solely on advertising is likely to become obsolete soon, but it will open other doors for marketers to build strong relationship programs using email marketing and meaningful content.

Teams are going to have to go above and beyond just buying information about last week's Google searches for shoes; they're going to have to earn their audience's data by providing value to them.