The very first step in advancing your marketing execution is to assess your program’s maturity. As you evaluate the data that’s available to you, it’s also important to make sure that the technology you’re using to execute those campaigns can seamlessly activate that data. You’ll need to ingest, transform, and stitch all your data together in a way that’s as close to the message as possible, so you can deliver the most relevant personalization at time of send.

The more advanced your personalization strategy becomes, using 1:1 messaging and triggers, the more connected you become with your customers. Brands that form meaningful connections yield the highest returns by optimizing the balance of promotional and triggered messages (and other 1:1 experiences) that adapt in the moment based on real-time data attributes. 

By introducing programmatic triggers and automations, using advanced data models, and leveling up data management, marketers can send fewer—but better—messages and improve customer lifetime value through higher revenue and improved gross margin.

Introduce more triggers into your program 

The most advanced marketers today are adding more triggered messages to their marketing mix. We consistently find that marketers drive higher average order value (AOV) through expansion of trigger use. Triggers drive a 43% AOV lift on average and a 29% AOV lift for the median Cordial client. By targeting full-price sales such as new product alerts and high-margin add-ons or recommendations, marketers can drive more than just top-line results. And once supply chain data exists in a cross-channel marketing platform, marketers can optimize for gross margin as a KPI through machine learning.

Revolve is a great example of a brand that generated incredible business impact by shifting more of their marketing efforts to triggered campaigns. With the addition of 19 triggers in their first six months, Revolve projected an annual $11.7M, and now drives over 20% of their total email revenue from triggered emails alone.

Use more data and advanced models

Cordial clients who use more data attributes and advanced data models are the ones taking that next step in advancing their marketing programs—and driving outsized results.

Loyalty and lifetime value segmentation, brand affinity recommendations, or back-in-stock alerts (driven by supply chain data) are all elements to most advanced marketers’ strategies today. Among Cordial clients, those who use models like these see a 30-80%+ lift in revenue per message (RPM) across all performance quartiles. On average, advanced data models drive more than 2x higher RPM across all messages and almost 3x higher RPM for triggers.

Using the Revolve example again, they strategically incorporated all of the data they had access to—both customer and business data—to build predictive models that reflect their customers’ unique interactions. By using 16 different data modules with programmatic personalization, their messaging programs were twice as productive than regular batch emails. 

Another Cordial client, Eddie Bauer, took a similar approach by pulling all of their data sources (11 to be exact), into Cordial in real time. Their program collects and centralizes online and offline order data, syncs with their loyalty provider (Merkle), cross references several loyalty IDs and customer IDs, and dynamically renders loyalty rewards amounts, expiration dates, unique barcodes, the nearest store addresses, and a map of the store locations. Of course, all of this creates a unique 1:1 message for each customer.

Level-up your data management

Cordial clients who see the most success in their programs are extending personalization to all message types. Since your customers are experiencing your brand across multiple channels and mediums, it’s imperative that brands create a blend of curated and qualified personalization at every messaging touch point. Marketers can see, understand, and use every interaction a customer has with their brand as an opportunity to tailor messaging and content on a 1:1 basis. This is a big step toward maximizing the data management capabilities of your marketing technology vendor (and if you can’t do this with your current vendor, connect with us to see what’s possible). 

Using all of your business and customer data for real-time personalization requires, ideally, consolidating that information into one platform for a single, unified view. The value is not in the storage of the data (for example, whether your data is stored in a traditional relational database or in something more modern like MongoDB or Snowflake), but in its availability for real-time use. The brands with the most sophisticated marketing programs have realized the value of data availability for activation and marketing execution—by a team that doesn’t necessarily have data expertise, but who are responsible for driving strategic and measurable impact on customer acquisition, engagement, loyalty, and retention.

The post Three shifts advanced marketers are making now appeared first on Cordial.

We’re more than two weeks past the public launch of iOS 15 and the growth continues to be steady. The first of our parting questions asked whether we would start to see an impact on the overall open rate observed by Cordial. We have:

MPP definitely affects our global open rate and no one is surprised about that, though the additional 7 days of data allowed us to see the trend more clearly. Interestingly, the share of open data generated by the three CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly) has remained relatively flat:

We continue to hunt for other involved CDNs but haven’t been able to find any that have a significant share of traffic to be noticed. 

This problem is akin to understanding whether someone’s email address is actually served by Gmail. For this data, our network identification process continues to be manual and we’ve only established ownership for the top 85 networks by request volume. 

In our previous post, we asked whether other traffic from Cloudflare might obscure the reality of traffic from iOS 15. After much checking and re-checking, only 35 opens per day appear to come via Cloudflare’s WARP product.

This leaves us with a single burning question: Will iOS 15 break the internet? 

While not an entirely serious question, there is some concern about the bandwidth required to deliver not just open pixels, but every image in every message sent to iOS 15 with MPP enabled. Cordial serves the vast majority of images for every email delivered through our platform and our initial guess was that our bandwidth utilization would triple as a result of this rollout. This view of image traffic broken out by source network is both expected and mildly alarming:

This is the first time we’ve broken out bandwidth by CDN (all shades of blue, notice Fastly is almost non-existent now) and non-CDN traffic. Our expectation is that iOS’ share of traffic on our network will approach 55% – almost double the share of traffic in iOS’ second week of availability. October 2 and October 4 were Cordial’s highest days for image content serving in history. Our recommendation is that any company hosting their own email images look for an alternative option that is low cost, or even free.

As we continue tracking early adoption, stay tuned for our next article in our iOS 15 series, which will look at the unanswered questions and drill deeper into new data as it emerges. 

For further reading on this topic, check out these resources:

• Early adoption of iOS 15 is on the rise – here’s what we know so far
• Are you iOS 15 ready?
• What the upcoming changes to Apple iOS mean to you
• Keep your eye on the prize as Apple makes changes to tracking email opens
• iOS 15 brings enhanced email privacy features: 6 things marketers should do today

The post Will iOS 15 break the internet? appeared first on Cordial.

If you missed our observations on iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) on the public beta, check it out here. One update to those observations is that Akamai appeared for a brief moment to be using more than one network to emit traffic. We’ll be keeping a close eye on their traffic to see if anything changes.

A quick refresher: Apple is using commercial CDN companies, as a proxy, to obscure traffic from iOS 15 devices. Historically, very little of Cordial’s traffic was served directly to CDNs.

We applied the methodology discussed in our prior article and charted the three largest CDNs and their traffic’s share of total open pixel volume over the past four weeks:

Highlighted in blue is the rise of source traffic from Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly coinciding with the September 20th release of iOS 15. This trend leads our team to believe that the methodology of using the source network (ASN) as a contributing factor in whether originated from an iOS 15 device is sound. In so, what impact does the growth of CDN-sourced traffic have on the open rate? This view of the raw volume of open traffic, by source network, should help us identify whether our open rates really are increasing:

The blue remains a representation of CDN-source traffic. The orange line is our global open rate. The global open rate was calculated by taking the total number of opens in a day and dividing it by the total number of messages sent on that same day. There is some error introduced with a long tail of email behavior, but we assume the long tail to average out over the course of a given day. As represented here, we’re observing a negligible increase in the overall open rate across the system.

Let’s take a look at the impact of iOS 15 traffic on all other networks:

We’re not quite seeing the expected share of volume yet. As iPhone 13 is shipped to consumers and iOS 15 is rolled out to existing phones, we anticipate an increase in overall share. Our capacity planning team used historical iOS data to see that around 55% of Cordial’s traffic originates from iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). We predict a rush to around 44% of raw open volume originating from iOS 15 and long term approaching near 55%.

So what does iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection impact?  

It’s not clear yet, and we have three outstanding questions that remain unanswered:

1. Will the global open rate increase as iOS’ share of opens increases?
2. Cloudflare offers a privacy proxy directly to consumers. Does iOS 15 traffic get mixed with Cloudflare’s WARP product sufficiently that we cannot differentiate between the two?  E.g., Does an Android user on Gmail appear to come from this pool of iOS 15 traffic?
3. Does reliance on User-Agent produce a similar and accurate view?

We’re continuing to track early adoption, stay tuned for our next article in our iOS 15 series, which will look at the unanswered questions and drill deeper into new data as it emerges. For further reading on this topic, check out these resources:

• 3 observations from iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection public beta
• Are you iOS 15 ready?
• What the upcoming changes to Apple iOS mean to you
• Keep your eye on the prize as Apple makes changes to tracking email opens
• iOS 15 brings enhanced email privacy features: 6 things marketers should do today

The post Early adoption of iOS 15 is on the rise – here’s what we know so far appeared first on Cordial.

Key technical background

First, if you’re not familiar with the technical changes, Apple has a post from WWDC that helps explain the network underpinnings of iCloud Private Relay. We expect these underpinnings to be the same for Mail Privacy Protection so we make use of that description to fill in some assumptions.

Second, here’s some important context on Cordial’s traffic. Cordial routes all internet traffic through Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare is both a CDN and a provider of network security and computing tools. The majority of Cordial’s consumer-facing bandwidth consumption are images delivered through Cloudflare’s CDN, including open pixels—the invisible images used to track whether a recipient viewed images in an email and therefore likely opened the message. Cloudflare enables us—and any other customer—to access specific underlying network data in order to better serve our traffic.

Three observations: retrieving, caching, and proxies

While testing the iOS 15 beta’s Mail Privacy protection, we’ve observed the following:

1. Every image in the message is retrieved.  

There is no discrimination for size, placement, or URL components (domain, port, etc.). Something to consider if a significant portion of your mail volume and site traffic is from iOS devices is whether your network can handle the additional traffic generated by this change. For example, if you have an average open rate for iOS of 15% and 50% of your contacts use Apple Mail, the contents of messages sent to Apple Mail recipients may need to be delivered 3.3x more than prior to the rollout.

2. Images are cached somewhere outside of our purview.

After the images are downloaded, they’re not downloaded again. This suggests that caching is happening elsewhere in the network chain and is an open question for our team. Based on the public explanation from Apple, there are 3 locations for the image caching to take place: The Apple Mail client, the Ingress Proxy, or the Egress Proxy. There are both privacy and performance implications to caching at each of the three locations and we’re eager to understand how this will impact our network and the internet at large.

3. The origin of the requests are proxies—not surprising given the public explanation from Apple. 

The proxies as of August 25, 2021, included Cloudflare (ASN: 13335), Akamai (ASN: 36183), and Fastly (ASN: 54113).  Given the product design and privacy goals, it isn’t surprising that these three CDNs are involved. Additionally, we observed that requests tended to be grouped together on a single CDN, then rotated to another CDN after approximately 90 minutes. Even though clustered requests used the same IP address, subsequent requests from the same CDN (more than 90 minutes later) had a new address in use.

We’re continuing to track early adoption, stay tuned for our next article in our iOS 15 series, which will look at the emerging impact on open rates by source network. For further reading on this topic, check out these resources:

• Are you iOS 15 ready?
• What the upcoming changes to Apple iOS mean to you
• Keep your eye on the prize as Apple makes changes to tracking email opens
• iOS 15 brings enhanced email privacy features: 6 things marketers should do today

The post 3 observations from iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection public beta appeared first on Cordial.