Understanding How Apple’s New Privacy Updates Will Affect Email
Last month, Apple announced further privacy updates, set to launch sometime between September – November 2021. As their previous privacy roll out with iOS14 which affected how you can track users on the web (particularly with advertising via Facebook), this rollout will now affect how you can track users’ email activity.
What Is The Update?
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?
Ultimately, there are more metrics than just open rate that help you understand your audience and how engaging your email content is. Click and conversion rates are equally as important and you should continue to focus on those in your reporting. This is also a great time to test your email content! Using split (A/B) testing, you can see what content drives the most engagement and resonates most with your audience.
Although this seems like a bit of a headache, it’s important to keep in mind that at the end of the day, email has gone through many changes previously (the introduction of the Gmail promotions tab, GDPR, etc) and email marketing has always evolved and continued to thrive – in this case it is sure to be the same.
Learn More
Want to learn more about this privacy update and how it will affect your email? Our partners at Campaign Monitor hosted a special webinar event - Navigating an Evolving Privacy Environment where they discussed the changes, and tips for how you can evolve and thrive in this changing environment. You can rewatch it here! They’ve also published a great article on email metrics to help you understand which may be better alternatives to keep track of with open rates on the way out.