As you might have heard, Apple Mail is making some changes to their app. Instead of loading images directly from the sender’s host every time you open an email, emails will be cached by Apple Mail the moment it arrives in your inbox.

While the impacts will vary for marketers, there is one metric that will be much less useful than it was: individual email opens. And that will be true on a few levels.

• Open rate will skew upwards and be less insightful
• Individual opens will be less reliable as a factor for reengagement campaigns to keep your database clean and healthy
• Individual opens will be less reliable as a trigger for further automation or programs

But do you know what isn’t changing? Click rates. Which leads me to something we sometimes forget about email.

Other Channels

I want you to think about a few marketing channels and consider both what they’re good at maybe not as good at.

Whether it’s social media, display ads, paid search, TV, you name it, the vast majority of marketing channels are really good at getting a message in front of a lot of people, but it requires that they be using a certain app or watching a specific device or browsing a specific site.

In other words, if where people are is Point A (ESPN.com, their couch, the golf course, etc.) and where you want them to be is Point B (your booking engine buying a ticket), most channels require them to change their Point A. And even if they do, clicks rates show none of these aren’t that great at getting them to Point B

Email? Well, that’s different.

That One, Key Strength

When you think about those points and mix in clicks rates, you quickly realize that:

• Email is pushed to where they are (often accompanied by an alert)
• Email also gets clicked at 10x-100x the rate of other channels

You quickly realize that while we’ve known email is awesome for a long time, another way to describe it’s awesomeness is simply that email is crazy good at getting people from where they are right now to where you need or want them to be.

And what relevance does an open rate have in that context? Honestly, very little.

The Future of Emails: Clicks

The more I think about these changes, the more I feel like the future of email is about clicks.

It will be about a shift toward simpler, more-intentionally designed templates and copy that are designed to capitalize on that Point-A-to-Point-B power and shift content from the inbox to other places where, if we’re honest, it often already lives.

Tomorrow and Thursday I’ll dig into more specifics about what this might mean for two things: newsletters and your email workflow.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.