Clearly Apple is serious about their user’s data privacy. Since Apple iOS14 Facebook and Instagram have become less efficient for digital marketers around the world. And now Apple has recently confirmed that its iOS 15 update will include two important features, mentioned below, to further cater to data privacy
- Mail Privacy Protection
- Hide my Email
Mail Privacy Protection
Mail Privacy Protection feature will allow the users to load privately the content of the emails sent to them without disclosing their IP addresses. Apple’s Mail app will henceforth not share a user’s IP address, making it difficult to identify a user’s location and thus making it difficult to build a profile of that person. This will work by masking the recipient’s IP address. This in turn will block the ability of the sender to confirm if the user has opened or forwarded the email.
To understand this further, you need to understand how email service providers (ESPs) work. All ESP insert an invisible 1 by 1 pixel image in the content which gets fired up as soon as the user opens up the email. This helps the sender gather data about user behavior and hence ESPs are able to provide gross and unique open rates and other user behavior data points to the sender. This data is very important for the email marketer. They use it to understand the user behavior and at times also tag them, aimed at upgrading/updating their stage in the marketing funnel.
Now with the introduction of ‘Mail Privacy Protection’ by Apple, senders will become blind and will have no data on the open activities of the receivers if they opt in for the ‘Protect mail activity’. Only the apple users who will not opt out for this i.e. chose ‘Don’t protect mail activity’ and android users will be tracked.
With apple continuously offering their user the options of not being tracked it has also started giving a FOMO to android users. And if android also decides to follow this league, it will in turn mean wiping out around 98% share of email users.
Email service providers operate in manner where they demand and promote their senders to maintain a healthy subscriber list. To do so senders keep a track of the users who do not open their emails and if the users continue not to react to the emails, eventually remove these users from their subscriber list. But doing so will become impossible for the users who will opt in for email protection.
Hide my Email
Hide my email is another feature which is a part of the upcoming iOS 15 update. It will allow users to sign up for offers across the web (for various products or services) with a random email id created by apple. The emails received on this email ID will be forwarded to the main email id of the user. This email ID can also be deleted easily by the user, this will massively reduce mass circulation of user data and email ids across the web.
Hide my email will make life difficult for email marketers since there will be no way of finding out if an email id entered is a genuine email or a temporary id. Hence it will drastically impact the deliverability of the emails. This feature will also lead to an increase in the bounce of the emails.
How to prepare for iOS 15
Due to the features discussed above it will pose some challenges to your email marketing campaigns. But we some suggestions for you
- We advise you to do all the A/B testing and segmentation before all the iOS 15 update is rolled out. Do your testing around subject line, email content, best time of the day and the best day of the week.
- Start using CTR as a metrics rather than ‘Open rate’ – CTR i.e. ‘Click through rate’ tells us that how many users have clicked on the link. And since ‘open rate’ data is likely to become unavailable or inaccurate in the future, one should start focusing on the CTR going forward.
- Clean up your email subscriber list – Based on whatever data you have from your past campaigns. Clean up your list and make it as relevant as possible.
- Optimize your campaigns on quality and not tracking ability – Start optimizing your campaigns based on quality of the campaigns, i.e. email content which provides value to your readers, and not based on tracking of user or their behavior
Email marketing will not be dead; neither is it going anywhere. It is probably time to change gears as per the hurdles coming your way. Just prepare yourself as per suggestion above and keep reading our blogs at MarketingYug.com
Written by Monish Kumar