Apple back in September released a big Privacy Update with their new IOS 15 features. While this update is great for consumer privacy, it comes at the cost of your email marketing efforts and effectiveness. For this reason, we will be helping you understand what changed.

What changed in IOS 15?

Since the launch of IOS 15 in September, Apple has been rolling out new features which include privacy-related changes to their users. These changes impact all email service providers that send emails to Apple Mail users. Those features are:

1. Mail Privacy Protection which prevents senders from seeing if and when a recipient opens an email in Apple Mail. It also hides a recipient’s IP address, so senders can’t determine their location.
2. Hide My Email which lets users share unique, random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox anytime they wish to keep their personal email address private.

What does that mean for your email marketing campaigns?

• Higher Open Rates – without changes on engagement. Apple will be loading pixels on behalf of their users which “open” the emails you send to your audience even if your don’t actually open it. As a result, your email metrics for your might show higher open rates. Therefore analytics data might be inaccurate in the future and processes related to them might be compromised.
• Geo-targeting Related Processes will be less effective. Processes such as sending emails depending on your recipient’s time may no longer function for Apple Mail users since the IP address will be masked.
• Open Activity might be spread across multiple contacts for the same contact. With the new “Hide My Email” functionality, users can create a fake, random email so they don’t share their actual email with companies. In practice, this means that there may be several different “contacts” opening an email, even though just one person exists.

What does that mean for your plans?

While that might come at a cost for your marketing campaigns, they are designed to create better experiences for Apple users. What you need to focus on now, is to continue on your current marketing campaigns, and continue creating more engaging experiences for your audience.

As for your metrics, since Apple’s changes are already taking effect, you might need to move towards different and more reliable metrics as they will be looking different down the line. Last but not least, you need to review your current audience and their data, do a downstream marketing audit such as reviewing your Lists and List Segmentation.

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