Email Open Rates no Longer a Reliable Key Metric after iOS Privacy Update

Email marketing played a significant role during the pandemic, as this form of communication allowed business to reach their clients directly via their mailboxes.  Email marketers heavily rely on the key metrics like open rates, clicks, opt-outs to measure the success of their campaign.

With iOS 15 Apple has announced the introduction of their Mail Privacy Protection Policy (MPP), another step for Apple to improve the privacy measures across their network of products.

What does this update really mean?  Apple Mail users account for approximately 53% of all Apple users and this update protects that group from sharing their open rate data.  Before the update, when an Apple Mail user opened their email, a tracking signal was sent indicating that the email has been opened.  Currently, the image is cached on an Apple server after an email is sent but before the message is viewed by the recipient, eliminating the ability to know if the email was opened at all. The protection feature works by hiding your IP address and no longer allows the sender to track your mail activity.

It’s time to move to the downstream metrics and start relying on clicks, conversions and opt-outs as the KPIs for your email campaigns.

Looking into the future, the changes in cookie tracking, more strict privacy settings are going to continuously focus more on protecting the user and making it more difficult to track behaviors.  This will force marketers to build better campaigns, better mailing lists and provide more thoughtful campaign structure to improve engagements.

About the Author

Lion Tree Group specializes in website SEO and digital advertising campaigns for large and mid-size businesses. With continual changes in the way consumers engage with your product or service, we merge imagination and technology to help brands grow in an age of digital transformation. We create a blend of paid search ads, contextual display and email campaigns with the latest OTT and YouTube strategies, to deliver the best conversions, all within your budget.