Just when you thought you were out of the woods with iOS 14 and its effect on your Facebook ads, Apple comes and smacks you with another update.
This time affecting your email marketing.
This update affects one of the most widely used metrics to measure email marketing effectiveness… your open rate.
Whilst it only came out in the most recent update (like… Monday) and will take a while for people to update their OS and phones etc, this is something you need to be across and be ready for.
Three main updates
There are three main updates that you need to be across:
- Mail Privacy Protection will remove your ability to accurately track open rates.
- Private Relay will hide the users IP address while browsing the internet on their device.
- Hide My Email will allow users to mask their real email address with a fake one.
There are ways to navigate this.
Here is what I want you to start doing….
- Don’t rely on open rate numbers anymore > start using CLICKS as a metric that matters.
- Consider ways to make your emails more clickable > links in images, embedded links in copy, links, links links…make it easy for someone to click on a link in your nurture emails.
- Review how you manage your lists > think of metrics that you want to use to understand who is active and who is not and ensure you clean your list regularly to avoid being labelled a “spammer”.
Now, there are rumblings around Europe that Apple’s changes are not GDPR compliant, so who knows whether they will be able to convince Apple to rethink this action. I doubt it. So for the time being….. we’re stuck with this and need to play accordingly.
This is all still very new, so we’ll do our best to update you with any workarounds we come across, but in the meantime, this is the topline info you need to know.
