It’s fair to say some marketers are a bit worried about comments Apple made regarding the iOS 15 update. If you missed it then Apple Mail is getting a new Privacy Protection feature, which will affect tracking pixels in emails, which essentially means that senders won’t be able to see if someone has opened an email and their IP address will be hidden, so it can’t be linked to online activity or location.
Basically, every email will show as 100% opened, so it means that open rates become a useless metric. It’s not surprising that some people are a bit shocked by this announcement and what it means for email marketing campaigns.
When’s this Happening?
It’s thought that this roll-out will launch in mid-September 2021 and users can opt in or out of this feature. It’s likely that a lot of users will probably opt into this. Privacy is becoming more of a priority for users, so any apps that track users will be increasingly rejected. Open rates, click to open rate, send time optimisation and countdown timers will all become redundant features for marketers using these metrics for insight, and with around 40-60% of users reading via an Apple device, this is a big wedge of users.
It’s a big change, but it doesn’t necessarily mean push the panic button. Yes, open rates can tell us things and indicate whether something like a subject line is successful etc, but they don’t actually give us proper insight, as much as other engagement metrics.
Measuring through engagement, interaction and purchases will give you better insight.
If you’re still a bit worried though, let’s take a look at how this doesn’t have to be a massive deal:
- While you can, divide your users into Apple & Non-Apple lists, so that you can take a look at any trends and set a bar. This way, when the update comes in, you can still generate open rate insight from your Non-Apple users and have some reassurance from your findings about whether there’s much difference between these users at all.
- Start using clicks and conversions as your most important metrics to measure engagements. They will tell you more about how users are interacting with your campaigns.
- Before the changes, if there are any new things you want to try in subject lines then test them out while you can with open rates. For example, you might want to try out using emojis in your subject lines.
- Ask for feedback from your users now about your emails and what they want to see from you in the future, so that you don’t have to rely on open rates as a metric.
- Cleanse data and offer users who don’t read emails to opt out, as it’ll be more difficult to remove non openers from your email lists in the future.
This is a big change for marketers, but it doesn’t have to be wholly negative. If you need any help or advice with your marketing then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team at DOWO today.