Have you heard about the changes Apple have made to privacy settings in their release of the IOS15? Do you know what it means for you?
Well, first things first - don’t panic! Your email marketing is likely to perform very much like it was before; the biggest change you are likely to notice will be on measuring open rate performance. For many smaller businesses, it won’t have a dramatic impact. It is likely their email marketing was never sophisticated enough for the nuanced changes to affect them.
Here’s our view:
What is it? There will be updated functionality which means users can choose not to share certain information with companies.
The mail privacy protection functionality, when activated, will mean that companies can no longer:
• Track if/when someone has opened their email
• Track their IP address
• Track their location
There is another function which is part of a paid subscription (iCloud+) called ‘hide my email’ which allows users to activate a fake email address for business-facing transactions, meaning that although emails from these companies will reach their inboxes, the companies themselves will not be able to access the user's actual email address. Again, this shouldn't pose a problem from a broadcast email marketing point of view, as your email should still reach the right inbox.
Is it going to be applied across all devices? No, it looks likely it will be optional for the user
So why do I not need to panic then?! Firstly, open rates are not the best indicator of email marketing success. It is much better to focus on conversion – but if that isn’t possible, clicks and website traffic. Secondly, this will not affect all of your audience. Take a look at your email list to see what proportion of them typically open your emails on iPhones to discover how far-reaching this change will be for you.
But wait, aren’t open rates one of the measures of how well my campaign performed?
Yes, they are. The first job is to get your email into someone’s inbox. The next is to get them to open it. The next is to read it, and the next is to act. Optimising all of these will lead to better conversion overall – however, open rates are just a small part of that journey. Having fantastic open rates and low conversion rates will do nothing for your bottom line, so conversion should always be your campaign target. And the fact is that you will still be able to track open rates as a bit of a health check – but you will need to be mindful that this change means pre- IOS15 comparisons are useless, and then likely that the meaningful data collected will steadily erode further with time as more users adopt this privacy setting.
Using A/B testing to learn how to maximise your open rates will still be possible for those that you do still have tracking for, as long as your data selections contain a representative volume of non IOS15 users, and applying your learnings to future campaigns will remain best practice… for the time being at least!
