Raisin Bread by MarketerHire - 5 reasons Meta just might work

Each week, we run a Twitter poll asking the same question: Which Raisin Bread subject line will win the A/B test? 

So far, the results have never been wrong. We respect and fear you all. 

(Check our Twitter to see if your streak continued this week!)

In this issue: 

• B.J. Novak’s accidental side hustle 

• Get ahead of iOS 15 

• Facebook’s ad dollars in Q3, by device type

EXPERT Q&A

3 ways to get ready for iOS 15 effects to 5X

Forgotten about iOS 15? You’re not alone.

“Many people thought it was going to be a Big Bang event,” Chad White, Oracle Marketing Consulting’s head of research and the author of Email Marketing Rules, told MarketerHire. 

But Apple isn’t quite ready for its own tech. Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) seems to “have pretty dramatic effects on [Apple’s] backend servers,” White said. 

Don’t let the slow rollout trick you, though. White estimates we’re seeing 20% of the effects — like obscured open rates — that we’ll see late next year. 

Here are three things email marketers should do now to get ready. 

1. Don’t try to juice clickthrough rate.

“A lot of marketers are going to turn around and optimize for clicks,” White said. 

But if your audience loved your emails before MPP, they probably still love your emails now. You just can’t measure that love as easily. 

If you change your email design significantly and stuff emails with links, “you’re going to get more clicks,” White said, but “you’ve added friction into the process.” 

2. Measure behaviors beyond email. 

So if open rates are murky, and optimizing for clicks dings UX — what's the performance metric to watch? 

White’s suggestion: web or app sessions and purchases indirectly prompted by email marketing, White said.

Not click-through exactly, but… follow-through. 

Figuring out how to measure this could take time. White recommends building out email lookback windows ASAP, so you can see whether browsing and buying behaviors are influenced by your emails. 

3. Tweak automated email series.

Automated email flows based on opens may now be sending to people who haven’t actually opened your emails. 

Try automating emails based on clicks or replies instead. “There’s a lot of different options for how you can reconstruct them, but doing nothing is worse,” White said. 

Our takeaway?  

Apple may be taking MPP (relatively) slowly, but you should still modify your lookback windows, keep your links at bay, and update your automated series — or you could find yourself in the dark.

“[Apple’s] goal is very clear,” White said. “They want to obscure the activity of their users.” 

TWEET TREAT

What if Meta is cool? 🤔

Facebook rebranded as Meta on Thursday, and Twitter exploded with jokes about the company metastasizing, copying Metta World Peace, and, uh, not being a haunted well.  

One brave man stood out from the pack, though: Former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. He was into it.

Meta’s silver lining

In a threaded tweet, Constine added:

Facebook has always been shrewd with naming, claiming whole concepts by using simple names: Groups, Pages, News Feed, Messenger... Meta similarly colonizes the entire metaverse, making you think of it anytime you discuss the medium

So, two silver linings of Meta:

• “Metaverse” now brings Facebook — sorry, Meta — to mind.

• It’s a prefix, so it tacks easily on the front of product names.

Other potential pros we brainstormed:

• It’s short and sweet.

• It’s crisis PR, since it comes in the middle of a whistleblower scandal — and it’s working.

• It gives Facebook a clean slate with the (many!) users who haven’t followed its naming saga.

Our takeaway?

Meta is crisp, concise and makes Facebook synonymous with the metaverse.

And it’s goofy AF. Many things can be true!

SMALL BITES

Apple's hottest product, B.J. Novak’s secret career and more

Comparative candle advertising sparked legal trouble for Italic.

SMMs: for up-and-coming social networks, keep an eye on France. 

Ad dollars flowed toward Google (and away from FB) after iOS 14.5.

Accounts with <10K followers can now use the link sticker on Instagram. 

How to create a New Yorker-esque brand, according to The French Dispatch's designers.

The average add-to-cart rate on TikTok is 15%. Covergirl more than 3Xed that.

Cheers to whoever first put B.J. Novak’s face on packaging.

How (and why) did a dating app get 1.5M LinkedIn impressions?!

Google says design — not just text — determines content quality. 

Apple marketed its $19 microfiber cloth so well that it’s backordered into 2022. ​

FROM OUR BLOG

3 questions to ask yourself before you start freelancing

So you might start working as a freelance marketer, but you aren’t quite sure if freelancing is the right fit. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before you take the leap.

1. How many hours do you want to spend freelancing?  

You could start freelancing 40 hours a week, or you could freelance while working a full-time job — like the third of Americans who have a side hustle. 

2. How much stability do you need? 

Clients come and go, and some weeks can be very busy while others are quieter. It’s not unheard of for work to dry up for a few weeks. Or months. 

3. Do you like to promote yourself on LinkedIn or Twitter? 

Building a personal brand online helps many freelance marketers find work. But that’s less important if your work comes from an agency or a talent platform like MarketerHire.  

Want to transition to the freelance marketer life? We have a six-item starter to-do list for you on our blog.

DATA SNACK

How Facebook stayed afloat in Q3

Here’s something sort of mysterious: Facebook only missed Q3 revenue projections by about 2%. 

Even though in the prior quarter, it lost its ability to target ads and track conversions for most iPhone users.

One way FB stabilized itself? By showing fewer ads to black-box iOS devices. 

Less Facebook Ads spend went to iOS users

Thesis Testing pulled data from 20 different Facebook accounts. In total, they spent $37.1M on automated Facebook Ads  placements from January to August 2021. 

Once iOS 14 launched in April, about 10% of these accounts’ spend shifted from iOS to Android users.

Spend seems to be shifting back towards pre-iOS levels now — in August, iOS devices won 1%+ of total ad spend back from Android.

Our takeaway?

iOS users are too valuable to ignore — but iOS updates made them too confusing to throw 70% of Q3 ad dollars at.

Whether humans or algorithms decided this, it probably helped Facebook minimize ad performance problems and focus on analytics issues. 

Of course, the majority of Facebook ad dollars still went towards iOS users — but a smaller majority!

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