On 7 June 2021, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC21), where they announced Mail Privacy Protection for their Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices. Set to launch between September and November 2021, the policy will stop senders from collecting user information. Using invisible pixels, it prevents senders from knowing when they open an email while masking their IP address. This means it can’t be linked to other online activities or used to determine a location.
So what happens when the Mail Privacy Protection comes into effect? And what can you do to prepare for life after Apple Mail pulverizes your open rates? In this blog post, we unpack how Mail Privacy Protection will impact your business.
How Mail Privacy Protection Works
First things first, you need to understand how Mail Privacy Protection works fully. Once the Mail Privacy Protection comes into effect, the following will happen:
- A message will be sent to the email user once the Apple Mail app is opened. It will prompt the user to either “Protect Mail activity” or “Don’t protect Mail activity.” This means that the new policy will not be turned on by default.
- If the email user opts for the “Protect Mail activity,” Apple will route emails through a proxy server to preload message content before the email receiver sends it. This will happen even if the receiver does not open the email.
This process is a lot more technical than that, but the critical part is that the policy affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app. No matter the device or email service used (Gmail, Microsoft Office, etc.), the policy will impact anyone who uses Apple Mail. If an Apple device user uses an alternative email app, it will not affect them.
For businesses, this means you may not be able to tell who has opened your emails or when or where it was opened via Apple Mail.
What Does This Mean For Email Marketing?
Over the last few years, privacy has become a massive issue for many industries. Since the introduction of CCPA and GDPR, consumers have been given the right to request to have all their personal data deleted by companies, making it useless to marketers.
In 2020, Litmus’s annual email client market data showed that iOS Mail, macOS Mail, and iPadOS Mail had over 46% combined email opened in 2020. Since then, their share of email opens has grown to 49.7% as of the end of July 2021. Unfortunately, this means that if your audience makeup consists of the majority Apple Mail users, your open rate will drop come Fall 2021.
Even though many marketers consider the open rate as a vanity metric, but it is still a beneficial one if used in combination with other metrics. For an email marketer, now is the time to include additional metrics into your reporting, including clicks and conversions.
What Happens To Content & Campaigns That Rely On Opens?
Besides being a metric, opens are also used in re-engagement campaigns, automated sequences, real-time personalization, and deliverable monitoring. So what happens to campaigns and content that rely on opens when Apple Mail audiences opt-in for the Mail Privacy Protection? Here are a few of the potential effects on companies:
- Email segmentation, cohort, and targeting based on the last open date will be rendered useless.
- Automated email workflows that rely on a user to open an email will be considered ineffective or need to be re-engineered.
- Send time optimization that allows marketers to send emails at an optimal time will become useless and inaccurate.
- Countdown timers might show outdated times.
- Interactive emails that reference external CSS may not work.
Is This The Beginning Of The End?
The pending implementation of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has brought about many other questions regarding other platforms. Some of these questions include:
- What will real-time personalized tools do to ensure they deliver the right content to the right people?
- Will ESPs respond and continue to help marketers determine an email program’s success?
- How will AI platforms be impacted?
Preparing For The Implementation Of Mail Privacy Protection
Even though the future for email marketing currently seems unclear, here are a few things you can do to prepare:
- Figure out how big of an impact this policy will have on your business. You can easily do this by determining how much of your audience use Apple Mail.
- Begin to test creative to understand what resonates with your audience so you can continue sending engaging emails.
- Track click-through rates instead of open rates to measure the success of campaigns moving forward.
Email Marketing Needs To Evolve
As an email marketer, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can undoubtedly be worrying as you will no longer be able to give consumers the personalized experience they expect from brands. But now is the time to innovate as the doors have been left wide open to get creative and find new ways of doing things. As email marketers, it is your job to give subscribers and customers the best experience at the end of the day.
