Apple's New Mail Privacy Protection (what to do about it)

Apple's new iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection system - was announced in June and it is currently being rolled out now in September 2021. The upshot of this will be that measuring open rates for your emails will become effectively impossible.

My favorite mentor sent me this this morning.

Q: What is Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)?

It's a new privacy system that prevents email senders from tracking IP addresses and open rates.

Apple effectively opens emails automatically as soon as they arrive - so the open rate for recipients using Apple Mail will always be 100%.

This makes it impossible to accurately track which subscribers opened emails in your email system (ActiveCampaign, Aweber, MailChimp, Drip, etc).

Q: How much of an effect will this have?

Only time will tell, but I personally think it could be quite significant because:

(a) A LOT of people use Apple to read their email.

Litmus reckons Apple has 58% of the email market share and a whopping 90% on mobile:

https://www.omnisend.com/blog/post-ios-15-black-friday-plan/

(b) Apple users don't have to have MPP activated, BUT the framing of the option for Apple users invites them to "Protect" or "Don't protect":

Which option would you choose?

Q: What does this mean for my email marketing?

Open rates are now becoming considerably less reliable.

So you can't accurately:

- Clean your list based on subscribers who haven't opened emails for a long time
- Resend emails to people who haven't opened them
- Create email automation/autoresponder sequences that rely on open rates
- Use contact scoring that awards engagement points for opening emails

Q: What can we do about it?

Firstly, in my personal view, these changes are not a huge problem.

After all, tracking open rates is a definite "nice to have" but certainly isn't essential for highly effective email marketing.

For example, you can run a hugely profitable email list without ever looking at open rates - and there are many people running online businesses who do exactly this.

Also, email service providers are starting to take account of the changes too.

For example, my email system ActiveCampaign is turning off open tracking for users which have Apple's MPP switched on.

However, if a user who DOES have MPP enabled clicks a link, then ActiveCampaign will record both a click and an open (because they couldn't have clicked the link without first opening the email).

This may imply that while the absolute percentage of opens won't be accurate, the relative open percentages across emails we send could still be useful.

For example, if email A gets 30% open and email B gets 10% open then it's likely the email had a more effective subject line, even though 30% and 10% aren't the true proportions of your list that opened.

(this is getting a bit technical, but hopefully, it makes sense?)

That all said, I will be "downgrading" my use of opens:

- I'm more likely to resend to all, instead of resending to unopened emails
- Focusing on clicks instead of opens in my engagement contact scoring
- I'll probably still clean my list every 3-6 months based initially on open rates, but before deleting subscribers I'll first send a re-engagement campaign inviting subscribers to click a link if they wish to stay subscribed.

This is just my personal thinking right now.

It's early days and things may change.

And that's the best course of action I’d recommend for you right now: be aware of what's happening and think carefully about what you can do.

I wouldn't rush into any knee-jerk reactions either, as the current take up of MPP is only just getting started.

The world of online business is constantly in flux so expect to see lots more changes like this over the coming months and years (and not just from Apple).

None of these will be show-stoppers, even if they appear to be in the first instance.

So don't be one of the many people who panic when they arrive - just educate yourself, keep being informed and play it cool.