As a father I love that my kids have an extra layer of privacy online when they use some Apple products.
As a marketer and entrepreneur, Apple's MPP creates some challenges.
Basically, for businesses who are used to knowing the open rates of their emails to customers... get ready for that to go away.
According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”
Here are some key takeaways:
Klaviyo, MailChimp, Active Campaign and other email marketing software will still be able to track clicks and sales which are much more important metrics than opens.
In the very unlikely event that Klaviyo, MailChimp etc's click and sales data is not useful, Google Analytics can be used to get click and sales data by email segment and email content.
A key action is to create a segment of non-Apple Mail users. This segment will have a reliable open rate metric. So you'll have a reliable proxy for email open rate (ie, which subject lines are working best).
Automated flows should not be triggered by opens, and a/b tests should use clicks or conversions as their KPI rather than opens. This is much better anyway, assuming sales or leads is the name of your game.
Mail Privacy Protection will only be available on iOS 15 for iPhone and iPad for now - meaning opens will still be available from people using any device not running iOS 15.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection launched today.
Have you noticed your open rates change? Let us know in the comments. What’s interesting is we’ll see our open rates go up artificially, not go down.
