Speaker 0: Awesome. And we should be live. Hey, MarDreaming. Thanks everyone for joining today. Um, really excited to have you at another session. My name is Julian with Sercante. I’ll be moderating today’s session. Um, During the session, if you’re posting in the q and a or the chat, I’ll be looking at those and help relay those to our speaker. This session and all of our other ones will be available on demand after after the event. We’ll send that in an email to you all. Um, but looking forward to your engagement, we have a really great speaker today, Natalie Jackson, who’s the director of demand generation for CBIZ. Uh, she has an awesome session for us today on your data privacy future and upgrading your account engagement reporting strategy. Take it away, Natalie.

Speaker 1: Hey. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for the introduction. Um, I’ll give a quick thank you to the sponsors. I’ve done quite a bit of event, uh, rolling myself, and sponsors are always critical to the success of an event. So glad that we could be here, um, and thanks to the sponsors who allowed for it, and thanks for joining the session on data privacy. Um, yeah. So I wanna kinda walk through real quick what we’ll cover today, and I only have thirty minutes, so I’ll try to keep it quick and actionable. Um, we’ll start with data privacy and email, and I’ll give you, like, a quick update. What’s new? How is it impacting email? Um, and then we’ll kinda go into how can marketing cloud account engagement slash prodot help you mitigate some of these changes or at least identify how they’re impacting you. And then lastly, we’ll get into some tips for reporting. Um, so for those of you who were on the morning feature of email panel, um, some of this is a deeper dive into some of those topics that we covered then, but please do ask questions in the chat, ask them in the q and a, and I’ll try to get to as many as I can. Um, for today, four goals, understanding data privacy, how it impacts you, um, what you can do with marketing cloud account engagement to identify this issues. Then of course, lastly, like I mentioned, we’ll have some, um, ways that you can identify reports and strategies sort of migrate what you’re reporting on to make sure you’re hitting success.

Speaker 1: Alright, first I gotta start, this is my big caveat. Um, so I am not a lawyer, so please don’t take anything I say as legal advice. I have to give you that, uh, that preface. My partner is in fact an attorney and, um, so I often joke. I’m like, well, I helped you study for the bar bar exam. Um, he likes to remind me that does not count as being an attorney. So putting a big bold preface here, this is my interpretation of, um, sort of what you might be able to identify, how you might identify it, but it isn’t by no means legal advice. Um, if you’re looking for something a little bit more like that, you have come to the wrong place, but I would encourage you to reach out to a privacy attorney to understand the direct impact to your organization. Um, but I am some other things, I’m a B2B email geek, Um, that’s my whole career has been in B2B marketing specifically with an angle on email. Right now I’m a director of demand generation at CBIZ. Um, we are a large B2B service organization, um, with lots of different moving parts. I like to say everything from accounting tax, uh, audits, all the way down to ensuring the person who runs the whitewater rafting company that you might go to when you’re on vacation. Um, so we’ve got a lot of different things that we cover which is super fun, super cool, um, and I’m a couple other things too. So I’m a women of email member, if you are a, uh, woman or woman identifying person out there who is in email, definitely encourage you to check that organization out. I’m the co host of Humans of Email podcast, excuse me, I’m a learner of marketing laws but by no means again am I an expert. So, um, let’s dig into that with our legal disclaimers in place.

Speaker 1: So when you think about some of the big shifts in data privacy, the first thing that should or probably does come to mind is GDPR, which came out in 2018. And, um, if you were in email marketing around that time, it kind of felt like the sky was falling. So, um, you had a situation where there was a really big question around, is GDPR going to put email marketers in a spot where we are gonna have to have everyone opt in. And you can see already that in a lot of cases, b two c marketers have kind of just adopted that approach regardless of whether or not they actually had anyone who was in Europe, which would have been the impacting place for that legislation. Um, they’ve already kind of moved toward consent based marketing, opt in marketing. Um, it’s a little bit harder for those of us on the B2B b side. And I think that that that twenty eighteen year was especially scary for us because if you think about the reality of a b to b email communication, very rarely is somebody going to raise their hand and say, yes. Hi. Please. I would like to receive sales emails from your organization. Now that doesn’t mean we should never ask for consent as b to b email marketers, but it does mean that, um, the way that the standard guidance for email marketing comes across is not always as directly applicable to those of us in b two b as it is for those of the the blind share of marketers in b two c email marketing.

Speaker 1: So what does that mean for today? Flash forward, um, we’re about five years ahead of GDPR. And while we don’t have in The United States sort of like a nationwide perspective on data privacy as regards email, whether or not it has to be opt in, whether or not you have to allow people to anonymize themselves. Some of those big key components of G. D. P. R. We have started to see an explosion of data privacy laws across multiple states. And one of the big ones, of course, that some of you may be thinking about is California. Um, they kinda had a an initial privacy legislation that rolled very close on the heels of GDPR. And honestly, if you think about what those laws have been talked about in the news and in marketing channels, it’s really sounding a lot more like, can you allow somebody to opt out of your email and are you anonymizing their ability to be targeted marketing too? Um, but that does, of course, imply that we have to be thinking about data as email marketers as if we weren’t already. Right?

Speaker 1: Um, some other pressures that you may or may not have noticed that are definitely becoming more prevalent in b to b email marketing are security bots. Um, so if you’re thinking about your click through rates, um, one of the things that you should be asking yourself is, am I impacted by an increasing number of security tools that organizations are putting in place on their email to make sure that the links that are in there are not malicious. Right? Now it pre checks every link. So it’ll check everything and make it look like that individual has checked a whole bunch of links in your email. Um, so that’s something else to keep in mind. And then lastly, the other pressure that we have to think about as email marketers is consumer privacy tools like Apple mail privacy protection. So you have sort of this confluence of three different things happening here. You have legislation that’s impacting what and how we can report an email. We have security tools that are being responsive to some of the bigger shifts towards cybersecurity. And we have consumers who are saying, hey, I don’t want to share all of my data and all of my actions with email marketers. So as email marketers, these are sort of three things sort of coming to a head at the same time that that mean we’ve really got to stop and ask ourselves how is this impacting our email strategy and how could we be responsive to those changes?

Speaker 1: So as I mentioned before, data privacy isn’t just California. Um, this is actually updated in August. Um, if you go to the link there that US state privacy actually don’t think it’s live. So don’t click on that slide, but it’ll be in the slide deck that gets sent out to you. If you go to that US state privacy legislation tracker, it actually updates pretty routinely as different states introduced or passed legislation that’s related to data privacy. Now, um, it’s a good idea to keep mind of this. But one other thing I think is important to recognize and if you follow chad White, who’s a really big name in the email strategy and email, uh, deliverability space, um, he actually had a post this week on LinkedIn that I encourage you to take a look at where he’s sort of surmising that, like, if you think about the fragmented landscape here, what is the likelihood in the next few years that companies are gonna say, hey, this is really cumbersome to think through state by state. What if there was just a nationwide legislation? And I have to say that, like, that kinda makes sense. That resonates with me. And so I would take a look at this map and I would say, even though it doesn’t cover all states right now, there’s a high likelihood that in the next few years there will be something similar, maybe not as rigid as GDPR, but it seems likely that we’re sort of moving toward a nationwide approach to data privacy. Um, consumers are asking for it and you’ve got a lot of pressure here with this fragmented landscape for a nationwide solution to come to play. Um, so it’s a big picture and it’s definitely something that I think we’ll have to react to and respond to a lot more rigorously in the years to come.

Speaker 1: And it’s bigger than advertising. So I mentioned that, um, right now when you think about GDPR, um, you probably are thinking that’s where you have to opt in specifically. You have to say, yes, I consent to having email sent to me, um, but you also have the right to anonymize, right? Um, California’s laws are a little bit different. It’s, um, it’s a little bit more like, hey, they have they have the ability to request to opt out and say, anonymize me. Right? Um, so you don’t have to be quite so rigid with that opt in strategy. But there are some other places that these privacy laws impact your email strategy as well. So if you think about just a handful of these that you could pull from a great tool like one trust, um, you’ve got the right to delete. So that seems easy enough unless you stop to ask yourself, wait a minute, how fragmented is my data landscape? Do I know all of the different places where that specific contact record might live? Yes, it’s probably in your email platform, but depending on the size of your organization, do you have multiple email platforms where you might have to track down that individual? Um, is your crm system architected in a way that it’s easy to find that data point? Um, this is kind of where you might start to ask yourself, oh my gosh, my fragmented data landscape means that it might be very difficult for me to even know where every place of this record or every instance of this contact exists similarly with opt out and profiling. So one of the components here is that, um, in some places, a record, a person to contact can say, hey, I don’t want to be profiled based on my data. Okay, so now ask yourself that makes sense in terms of digital advertising. So I can’t segment a different ad based on what I know about you. But how does that interplay into things like email segmentation? That’s not tested, right? There’s no answer to that, but it’s something that you might consider what would happen if I couldn’t segment based off of what I knew about that person or what if I couldn’t display dynamic content based off of what I knew about that person. So there are some very, um, interesting questions ahead for us as email marketers that have not yet been defined that are still worth thinking about as you ask yourself, is this something I should be worried about or planning for in my marketing strategy?

Speaker 1: Um, here’s one that that I, you may not have considered and that is scoring. So if you’re using scores, especially in tools like Pardot to automate your customer journey, to automate your email nurtures, to do some task hand off, um, that’s where you might wanna stop and ask yourself, hey, am I doing things like increasing a score on an email open? Or am I giving too much credit to email clicks without evaluating whether or not the companies that I’m sending to have security bots pre clicking all of those email links. Um, so ask yourself where, um, different types of actions might be impacted by apple mail privacy by spam bots and ask yourself if you need to reset those scores to zero. So for example, one of the things that I’ve recently done is reset our email opens to a zero, so that does not impact scoring at all for us because we know that there’s that impact of Apple Mail privacy in place.

Speaker 1: Um, you might also ask yourself if you’re using web pages to trigger messages. Um, so that’s gonna be based on cookie tracking which is heavily impacted by data privacy. Right? So who can and cannot be tracked? Um, so as you’re starting to think about, uh, cookie tracking, there are places where you have to say, hey, I wanna give a person the option to opt out of cookies. And if you’re trying to trigger page actions off of a cookie track, that’s gonna be very difficult that they’ve opted out of being tracked with cookies, right? Um, so you also have to think about how that might not work for you in situations where someone has opted out of cookie tracking. Um also you have some choices that you can make inside of part of it. Do you want to go with third party cookie tracking or first party cookie tracking? And have you taken the opportunity to say, hey, I want to migrate to a first party cooking cookie tracking strategy so that I have the ability to do some more targeted marketing.

Speaker 1: Um, we talked a little bit about handing off leads to sales. So, um, if that’s something that you’re doing and you’re saying, hey, if I’ve got a person who’s demonstrating interest in a white paper, go ahead and task them. Or if I’ve got somebody who’s reached a certain contact score, go ahead and task them. You’ll want to evaluate whether or not those actions are being founded upon data that might not be reliable because of data privacy. So for example, if you say, um, everybody who’s open an email is gonna get tasked to sales or everybody who’s clicked on this link is gonna get tasked to sales. You might be falsely tasking people who aren’t actually ready. It’s a security bot or apple mail privacy that’s taking that action and not an individual.

Speaker 1: And then lastly, are you assuming form fills are equal to opt ins? So one of the topics that came up in the future of marketing panel this morning, um, was actually around what types of internet clients people are using. Is it outlook? Is it Gmail? Is it yahoo? And I mentioned that because, um, there have been some big changes that those providers have taken recently to define, uh, what deliverability looks like. So they’re kind of taking their own stance on deliverability and saying, hey, If this company is sending a large amount of emails that seem unsolicited or they don’t have some kind of preexisting relationship or there isn’t some sort of opt in consent, they’re going ahead and taking a proactive approach to drop those into a spam folder. So deliverability requirements are getting much more stringent on the inbox provider side, even as you’re seeing things like privacy legislation put in place situations where you may or may not have to ask for opt in in the first place. So if you haven’t already considered a scenario where the bulk of your email subscriptions are coming from people expressing consent saying, hey, I want to sign up for this, now is the time to start thinking about how you might migrate that strategy.

Speaker 1: So, um, one of the nice things here is that Pardot actually offers, keep doing that, marketing cloud account engagement actually offers quite a few out of the box features that can really help you identify how much what I just mentioned is impacting your organization directly. So I wanna share a few of those with you and I don’t even have all of them listed here. There are several others that are really helpful that you can reach out. Um, sure, Socrante would be happy to help with some of those too, um, just to kinda help you figure out what is it that you need and where can Pardot jump in.

Speaker 1: So the first and foremost one that I would recommend you take a look at is the email clients view and a send report. So if you go over to your email clients and in in an email send report, what you’re looking for here is the percentages for Outlook and Apple Mail privacy, which is great because it breaks it all down super easy. And if you can see on the example that I’ve shared here, we’ve got about 31 and a half percent, um, using outlook and about 34.2% using apple mail privacy. If you sum that up using what we mentioned earlier to say Apple mail privacy is inflating open rates, outlook is potentially deflating open rates. We’re looking at more than 60% of this email sent with unreliable open metrics. Now is that to say you should never use an email open rate? Um, no, there are some really interesting use cases I’ve heard of where people use those to monitor deliverability and inbox placement. So for example, if you notice a huge drop in your email opens, that may not necessarily mean that true people aren’t opening, but it might signal a deliverability problem because when an email is dropped into the junk folder, it does not pre open the image, so that doesn’t get counted as an open. So there are some other creative ways you can use that metric, but it’s not one that you would wanna report out on when it comes down to engagement. And this is something I would encourage you to look at across multiple of your emails. So I wouldn’t just look at one, I would look at many and I would look at lots of different types of newsletters. Letters. So the more complex your email strategy, the more I would dig in on that.

Speaker 1: So once you identify that, Pardot actually has some other really cool reports that you can pull. Um, so the next is automation. So if you say to yourself, oh my gosh, I’m actually definitely being impacted by, you know, some of these email open metrics, What Pardot has done is it actually pulls an open rules audit for you, which is great. So what you can do here is you can go to marketing assets, then automation, and then open rules audit. And it’ll actually tell you all of the different engagement programs that are using email opens as a branching mechanism. It’ll tell you the triggers, it’ll tell you dynamic list and automation rules. So this is a great way to identify really quickly what exactly is happening and how impacted is your organization. There’s also an email open checklist. So as you’re starting to think about like what else should I be looking for if I know I’m being impacted negatively by email opens, um, you can look at things like list cleansing. So are you using opens to keep active subscribers on your list? This is a common practice where people say, oh, well, these people haven’t opened in so long. So I’m gonna keep them on the list because they have or I’m gonna sorry. I’m gonna remove them from the list because they haven’t opened. Well, is that really the best metric if you know for certain that you’re being highly impacted? Um, so you may want to reevaluate how you’re handling list cleansing. We talked a little bit about scoring. So if you’re increasing scores based on email opens, now is the time to set that to zero. We’ve talked about prospect reports. If you’re communicating with team members on email open credibility, that’s probably not the best metric for you to use. And we’ll get into some others that you can use instead. Um, deliverability, talked a little bit about that. So that might be something that you could say, hey, I’m gonna monitor open rates only to make sure that my emails are going where I want them to in the primary inbox. And then variable images. So if you’re using a tool, say, like, nifty images or movable ink that pays per open on an email, you might wanna ask them now, hey. How is my pricing impacted here? If I’m being charged per open, how are you handling things that are not real opens? And similarly if you’re working with vendors who say I can guarantee a you know, 60% open rate, now’s the time to push back on them and say what exactly does that mean when you say open rate?

Speaker 1: Um, here’s the next part of this though. And I know we’re gonna I wanna make sure you got plenty of room for time and we could probably talk about this all day. So let’s talk a little bit about clicks, right. So you think that opens are, you know, we’re all on board, opens are not a great metric anymore, what about clicks? Clicks are a little bit tricky too, unfortunately. Um, and clicks are tricky because even though Pardot does its best to make sure that it’s filtering out tools that are looking for spam and that are pre checking, um, your emails that you’re sending to make sure they don’t have anything malicious behind them, it’s not always perfect. And you’ll still see an increase in bots or you’ll still see some bots in place. Um, so what you can do here is first, make sure that your visitor filter settings are set up correctly and make sure they are capturing some of the biggest players in that, um, security space so that they know, hey, filter out engagement from things like Barracuda. Um, but the other thing you can do as an additional safeguard is you can create a custom redirect that you can just call, hey, this is my spam bot custom redirect. You can add a tag to it that says spam bot. And then what I like to do is I like to say how many links are possible in this email, and then I decrease the score if somebody clicks on that spam bot link by those number of links. What would the score increase have been? 15? Then I’ll say decrease the score by 15 if somebody clicks on the spam bot link. The spam bot link can be a hidden link in your email that really only could be clicked by a bot. Um, and so that’s something that you can consider using as well if you feel like you’re being impacted heavily by security tools and that helps you just get a better understanding of who might have one of those in place.

Speaker 1: Um, it’s also time to consider things like marketing data sharing. So this is a great tool that really helps you understand your data and where it’s coming from And it might be something to consider if you have some of these following scenarios going on. For example, if you have a lot of never active prospects. Um, so if you run a report on your your product prospects and you see a lot of them are never active, you might have a situation where Salesforce is creating records that you, the marketer, are unaware of and are not marketing to. That could be good or bad. Right? So either you wanna know about them so that you can market to them or it could be that maybe those are not marketable and shouldn’t go to Pardot. Why pay for them if you’re not actually going to market to them? Um, it can also, if you’re if you’re having some trouble identifying the source of your prospects, going through marketing data sharing might help you identify, hey, where did this come from? Is it mailable? Is it not mailable? Um, if you’re seeing a high decrease in your sender scores or high opt out rate or high bounce rates or other deliverability issues, marketing data sharing might help you have a better understanding of the data that’s getting synced to Pardot and whether or not that’s negatively impacting deliverability. And lastly, as you’re thinking about data privacy, the future of CPRA, GDPR, and other opt in requirements, it’s gonna become more and more important that you understand how records are getting created in Pardot, where they’re coming from, and if they’re mailable so that you can be ready to respond if privacy legislation changes anytime soon.

Speaker 1: And lastly, let’s talk about adaption on reporting side. So, um, now that we know email opens are dead as my roach has identified here, um, let’s talk about what you can report on website visits, for example. Um, that’s a great one where if you know why it is that you’re sending the email, what is the reason for this email? Is it because I want to educate? Is it because I’m trying to drive revenue? Is it because I am trying to task activate? It will help you understand what is the true measurement of success. It’s not clicks or opens and it really never has been. It’s always been what is the desired action I want someone to take after they receive this email. Um, you can also use things like CRM reports. What’s the overall influence of, say, people who are subscribed to emails and opportunity revenue in Salesforce versus people who are not? So you can easily create a report and say, hey, these are the people who are on our newsletter list. Do they have an overall higher revenue than people who are not? And you can calculate the overall success of your newsletters in that regards as well. Um, you can also look at things like account based marketing software. Um, that will kinda help you understand the impact of email and campaigns. Um, I attended a session two years ago at Marj Reaman on how to set the set up the UTM architecture. Cannot recommend that enough. That’s something that you can look at as well to help you figure out, hey, what is something else I can report on if I can’t report on clicks and opens? Um, so there are lots of other ways to get creative here.

Speaker 1: And then I want you to continue to remember here that email addresses are currency. Um, and I see your comment here actually, I’ll try to get to that one. We’re just about through the slides and I’ll get on that UTM architecture. Um, email addresses are currency. Right? They’re not data points. Um, they’re not, you know, things to ingest. They are people. Right? These are people. And if we can respect their wishes and we can be responsive to what they’re asking us, It’s like being on a it’s like being a good a good first date. Right? If you can be respectful and you’re not too creepy and you’re not asking him too many questions and you’re not sending him a gazillion text messages, I e, emails, you know, you’re probably gonna build a better relationship from the get go than if you’re just blasting people with things that you want them to do versus what it is that they need from you at that moment.

Speaker 1: Alright. And then finally, I promise we’ll get to questions. The last question or the last thing that I’ll say is always ask yourself, are your emails rad? So as you’re thinking about the next evolution of email, make sure the emails you are sending are relevant, that they match the time and expectations of the person that you’re sending them to. Are they adding value to the recipient and not to your sales team? That’s not to say you should ignore your sales team but it is to say that you should be asking yourself, hey, am I sending this person something that’s actually gonna add value to their day or is this noise where I want them to do something they’re not ready to do? And then finally, are they designed in a way that’s easy to navigate so that it’s really clear when that email lands what it is that you want that person to do with that information? If you continue to do those things, you’re gonna be set up for all the data changes. I know we are quite a few questions. If I can’t get to them all and you wanna reach out to me on LinkedIn, definitely please do so. Um, but let’s let’s hear it. What do you have for questions? Where do you wanna start?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Thank you, Natalie. If we do cut off here in the next few minutes, reach out to Natalie on LinkedIn, message her in the chat here. We really appreciate your time, Natalie, and thanks again to all of our sponsors. I’ll go ahead and start with our questions. Let’s go with the earliest ones first. So if we’re using engagement actions as part of scoring and to decide on sales handoff, should we eliminate emails from the scoring in that process and replace with specific actions on landing pages?

Speaker 1: It’s an interesting idea. Um, I would suggest using custom redirects. So in some instances, for example, um, I’ve even said, like, hey, if you already know somebody’s email address, do you need to ask them to download a white paper? I mean, you already know like, the point of a of a white paper download is to gather an email address. But if you already have it, you don’t have to make them take that step. Right? You could just use a custom redirect to say if somebody clicks this link to direct access something, then increase their score by whatever the action would have been on a direct download of a white paper, right, by 10 or something. Um, I do think that open rates should take it be taken out of scoring is my personal opinion. Um, I would say on clicks, I think you gotta understand first what the bot situation is. Right? Um, different industries, I think, have a higher incident of bots that are making it through the visitor filters than others. So I would do an evaluation on that before I would make any changes to my clicking my click scoring.

Speaker 0: Makes sense. Um, another one from Jackie here. Email companies that have layers of security to employee emails, should we assume that these open activity rates are lower because their clients will block the ability to track these?

Speaker 1: Stanbot. Again, use that custom redirect. Yeah. Um, so the custom reader I saw a question about screen readers and how they would handle it. I think it would be as simple as, like, making the screen reader hidden text essentially say, like, you know, uh, screen readers ignore. Right? Like, that’s something I’ve seen other people do where, like, if you’re trying to do something in the back end and you’re being responsive to screen readers, just, like, put it in the text, hey, screen reader ignore this or something like that. Um, or, you know, individual ignore this is for whatever purpose. Um, and you can be transparent with that. I don’t think there’s an issue there. Um, but I do think that, like, having that that hidden link, that custom redirect hidden link allows you to be super nimble in Pardot in a way that a lot of platforms don’t let you be nimble. Um, both with, like, creating tags or completion actions or decreasing scoring or at least, like, branching. I mean, there’s so many different things that you could do to say, hey, how do I wanna filter out people who are impacted by spam bots if you have the ability to tag them as impacted? I think we’re gonna run out of time.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I think that’s gonna cut us off, but thank you so much for all your questions, everyone. Thank you again, Natalie. Um, reach out to her.

Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Yeah. I guess I could I could, uh, answer them right there, couldn’t I?

Speaker 0: Yep. But Yeah. I’ve gotta hop for another call, but really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 0: Thanks again. Yep.

Speaker 1: Bye.

Speaker 0: Oh, and and real quick, you might wanna go backstage too. Just