Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection explained
15 June 2021Apple this week announced a slew of new privacy protections to be introduced in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection announcement is a hot topic among marketers this week and you may have a few questions on what it means for your email marketing strategy.
Desta Price at CM Group walks through how these changes are likely to affect your email marketing and what you can do about it…
This change is like the many that have preceded it in the email industry – like when Outlook stopped loading images by default, the introduction of the Gmail promotions tab, the GDPR, and others. With each of these changes, email marketing has persisted, evolved, and continued to thrive and we know that the same will be true with the Apple update that is set to launch sometime between September - November 2021.
What is happening?
The Apple update will give Apple Mail users the option to “Protect Mail activity” which will include:
- Blocking invisible pixels to collect information about the user
- Hiding their IP address detected during email image loading
- Privately loading all remote content
What does this mean for you?
For your subscribers who use the Apple Mail app and choose to enable the Privacy Protection feature:
- You will not be able to see an accurate email open rate for these users and thus your overall open rate could be affected
- IP addresses will be masked so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine a user’s location
What can you do?
Importantly, open rate is not the only email metric that provides an understanding of your audience engagement. Click rates and conversion rates will continue to be a strong indicator of engagement, and should be important metrics in your reporting. Further to this, we recommend testing your email content to understand what’s resonating and driving the most engagement with your subscribers.
We will continue to provide you with updates and recommendations as the topic of email privacy protection evolves.
Where To From Here?
Feel free to give us a call, email, or use our contact form to discuss your project and how we can help you.
