Are you up on the latest Apple privacy changes? As you probably already know, Apple is always evolving, especially when it comes to the protection and safety of Apple users.
In June 2021, Apple announced the birth of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held every year. This announcement felt like an earthquake in the email marketing world, with lots of speculation about poor open rates, ineffective email marketing, and so on.
For all the email marketing experts who are not aware, MPP was implemented in September 2021. Therefore, it’s time you boost your game and begin by understanding Apple privacy changes, what MPP is, and how it can impact your B2B company’s email marketing efforts.
A Quick Overview of the Apple Privacy Changes
Apple has implemented MPP to hide the IP address of Apple users so that email senders cannot track their IP or location for other marketing initiatives. Also, it prevents senders from determining whether the recipients have opened their emails.
Even though MPP is an effort to protect the personal information of Apple users, it’s not good news for businesses that rely on email marketing.
As of September 2021, MPP was only available for the Mail app on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 devices. However, it is currently also available for macOS users.
How Apple’s Mail Protection Policy Can Impact B2B Email Marketers
After the implementation of MPP, Apple has begun loading tracking pixels instead of the users. Therefore, you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference between Apple bot opening the emails or humans. As a result, you may witness a dip in the email open rate tracked by your email marketing platform.
You can continue to monitor the open rate data; however, we do not recommend using it for measuring the success of your email marketing efforts.
Hide My Email is another privacy feature implemented by Apple. This feature allows Apple users to use multiple random email addresses to mask their personal email addresses. These random email addresses will forward emails to Apple users’ personal inboxes.
The random email addresses mentioned above can result in email opening activity spread across multiple users representing the same individual.
Many email marketing platforms use IP addresses to determine recipients’ location and time zone. With the MPP coming into the picture, you may not be able to track each recipients’ unique location and time.
How to Tackle the Apple Privacy Changes
As you’ve already understood through this post, Apple policies are ever-evolving. Therefore, you need to stay ahead in the game by regularly tracking all the Apple updates on privacy-related features.
Also, remember that email marketing software providers are constantly upgrading their tools to tackle sudden privacy changes, such as Apple’s MPP.
While research shows that Apple Mail and iOS users make up approximately 35% of the global email provider market share, remember that Outlook, Google, and other email service providers do not have policies, such as MPP.
This means you can still track their IP addresses, make the most of real-time email marketing tactics and monitor email open rates.
Open rates are still relevant; however, after the implementation of Apple’s MPP, you may not be able to track a large segment of email users. We recommend lowering your open rate targets and determining new open rate goals.
Even though email open rates are the most widely tracked email marketing metrics, you can also look at the below-listed metrics:
Traffic to your site — With the help of tracking URLs, you can easily track the number of users visiting your site through links in your email.
Click-through rate and clicks — If you’re adding links to blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, offers, and so on in your emails, you can use metrics such as click-through rates and clicks to determine the number of users who’re reading your emails.
Clickmaps — Some email marketing platforms allow you to determine which content in your email is being viewed most or least by the email readers.
In 2003 we launched our business as an email marketing company. We know best practices inside and out. If you need help improving the results of your email program, please book a meeting with us.
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