Is Your Marketing Strategy All-Inclusive?

Is Your Marketing Strategy All-Inclusive?

By now you’ve probably realized that consumers expect more diversity from their favorite brands’ marketing content, images, social media, community initiatives and offerings.

If you’re not considering diversity and inclusion with thoughtfulness and intent, you’re losing out on a big opportunity to connect with your audience. And you might even be losing customers.

Here’s why diversity in marketing matters — and a few action steps to take.

Audiences Want Diversity

Everyone wants to feel like they belong. Yet, many consumers don’t find themselves accurately portrayed in marketing, if they can find themselves there at all.

A majority of Americans (61%) believe that diversity in advertising is important, and 38% say they’re more likely to trust brands that do a good job at it. Likewise, consumers report being more loyal to brands that make a commitment to addressing social inequities.

Now more than ever, diversity has a direct impact on brand reputation. Your audience wants to be represented, and if they’re not, they’ll find somewhere that they are.

Action Steps

  • Define what diversity is. Diversity in skin color is a great start but go further than that. True inclusion involves a diversity of disabilities, religion, gender, body types, and all other things that make people unique.
  • Walk the walk. Your audience can see through a shallow social justice campaign. Prioritize diversity throughout your organization, including not just your marketing materials but also your company and team.
  • Diversify your content. Before greenlighting a piece of marketing content, ask yourself: Is the language inclusive? Are the images diverse? Is the copy human and empathetic? You want people to feel welcome and understood by your ads — not left out.

It’s never too late to bring diversity into your marketing. We can help, so get in touch today for additional guidance and advice.


Tips for Adapting to Email Privacy Changes

Tips for Adapting to Email Privacy Changes

Are you up to date with Apple’s latest email privacy changes?

Last September, Apple made some pretty big changes to the iPhone’s Mail App. The most notable change for email marketers: a “Mail Privacy Protection” feature that lets users hide their activity from third parties. And this feature, which rolled out with the iOS 15 update, is one that will definitely require you to adapt your email strategy.

What is the new privacy feature?

Mail Privacy Protection is an opt-in feature that provides users with more control over their personal data by allowing them to hide certain activity from third parties. Unfortunately for marketers, this includes data around location and open rates.

This has a few major implications. For instance, if you send an email to a user with privacy protection on, the message will be marked as opened even if they never see it. Along with a lack of location data, this makes it harder to track true opens, segment lists, A/B test subject lines and optimize your content for each subscriber.

What should you do?

Privacy protection is already an option for users with iOS 15, so if you haven’t started making adaptive plans now is the time. Here are a few places to start:

  • Prioritize other metrics. Open rates may be unreliable, but there are other metrics you can use to track performance. Pay more attention to clicks and conversions.

  • Remove hard bounces. List hygiene is a little trickier with this feature. Set up automatic removals of hard bounces if possible to help protect your IP reputation.
  • Focus on high-quality content. You’re hopefully doing this anyway, but it’s extra important now. Personalize emails based on the information available to you, and make sure there’s value in every message you send.