Response Media
September 2, 2021 3 years ago
(1)The fall 2021 update to Apple’s mobile OS, labeled iOS 15, has significant privacy-focused features for users while making marketers’ jobs a little more complex. An opt-in feature called Mail Privacy Protection is of particular interest to email marketers, as it affects the usefulness of one of the most basic tools of data capture. And since iPhone users represent an average of 39% of email opens, Apple’s change will affect any marketing team that uses email as part of their CRM.
THE CHANGE
The invisible pixel is a single-pixel image in all marketing emails used to register opens, as well as reveal useful information such as operating system, geolocation, and other data points to better understand the user. To protect their mobile device users’ privacy, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will relay images, including the invisible pixel, through a proxy server, reducing the usable data that can be gleaned.
Additionally, those images users receive in their email will be pre-loaded, hypothetically increasing apparent open rates for everyone using iOS 15 and opting into the feature.
HOW TO PREPARE
Though it’s unclear what the exact effects of the rollout will be, there are a few ways to prepare to lower the chances of your organization and clients being caught off guard.
“The first thing to do is prepare your clients,” says our Senior Email Marketing Manager, Mary Pate. “Let them know there’s a chance your metrics will be off for Apple users until you can more accurately understand the open rates again.”
In addition to frontloading clients, have your data team prepare reports now so you’ll have several analytical baselines from which to compare after the rollout.
CLICKS RISE IN VALUE
“The reliability of open rate data decreasing means that other metrics such as click-through rate will become more valuable,” says Pate. “More and more unique CTAs can encourage greater click-through to keep getting that engagement data.”
Jennifer Streck, our Vice President of Client Strategy, agrees. “Clicks become more important overall with this new iOS feature; however, some email goals aren’t click-through. Sometimes the goal is just informing the customer of something, like a seasonal release.” When number of opens are less clear, marketers must be flexible and expand their idea of what success looks like.
MEASURING ENGAGEMENT
Additionally, the value of A/B testing will increase, as well as reexamining audience segmentation. Knowing less about the raw number of opens matters less when your team has control groups and various audience segments to compare against.
“The biggest danger here is the possibility of not being able to identify an unengaged audience,” says Streck. “If it’s harder to tell who is opening, you don’t know when to send reactivation offers, and you can lose people or increase your likelihood of being sent to spam.”
To combat this, it helps to think more about how emails are split (awareness-based vs. click-based, for example) and deepen engagement with more quality content. Collaborate with the tech and analytics teams to find emails where opens are the biggest metric and strategize ways to improve your data-gathering amid increased ambiguity.
“At the end of the day, opens and clicks are vanity metrics,” says Streck. “They can tell a clear story, but the real goal is engagement. It’s a broader goal, but it can be quantified—it just takes a little more legwork on the front end.”
Read about all the new privacy features coming to iOS 15 to find out how else this privacy change may affect your business. If you need help navigating all the changes, reach out to us. We’d love to help set you up for success.