Apple’s iOS 15 changes: Here’s what email marketers need to know

Apple’s latest software upgrade will forever change how we do email marketing.

Released this week, the iOS 15 operating system will see new Mail Privacy Protection features begin to kick in as Apple users update their devices. 

With Apple controlling a large chunk of the email client market share, email marketers must pay attention and prepare to pivot … again. 

Here’s what marketers need to know to better prepare for this change, and what your next-step strategies should be to continue measuring the email engagement of your subscribers.

iOS15 changes explained

The core of Apple’s product philosophy is to protect the privacy of their users. So, with this new iOS 15 update, Apple is introducing the following:

Safari IP Protection: This new update will block a smartphone’s IP address, meaning Apple won’t be tracking individual IP addresses, and they will instead be represented as a group of individuals. For example, your Google Analytics dashboard will now display a group of users located in a specific region. This change affects how Google Analytics collects users’ information. 

iCloud+ Private Relay: This feature is for paid iCloud services, and will see Apple relying on machine learning to anonymise your traffic. This means Apple will have one server that knows who you are and another server that knows what you’re browsing. Machine learning technology then combines these two behaviours to show an anonymous person is looking at your page. Both the website and the cookie tracker won’t know who you are: so it’s a win for the user, but not so much for the marketer.

iCloud+ Hide My Email: This is another paid feature that email marketers are dreading as it will likely affect email open rate tracking. As marketers, we’ve become accustomed to offering discounts or exclusive offers in exchange for your visitors’ email address. But with this new feature update, visitors can now get this information straight from their Safari browser. It’s another win for the user. 

Source: Apple newsroom.

App Privacy Protection: This feature will allow users to retrieve a report to see exactly what each app is doing on your phone. For example, they will be able to see how your fitness app is tracking you on Facebook and Instagram, attempting to enforce privacy protection for users through transparency with other third-party apps.

How will your email marketing change?

In your business, you would currently be relying on data provided by your marketing automation providers such as tracking, targeting, analysing, optimising and reporting on several important email marketing benchmarks. 

Let’s explore the most common benchmarks and how they will change:

Email open rates

Many marketers rely on this metric to know if someone opened their newsletter. Their email marketing platforms, such as Mailchimp, will report a percentage based on the number of emails sent. So if you see a 20% open rate, you’d want to know how you can improve it so you can reach more people. 

However, the accuracy of this metric has been hard to measure by many email marketing platforms. The reason is that the likes of Mailchimp have to rely on the data that is sent by Email Service Providers (ESP’s) — think iCloud, Hotmail, Gmail — and we know they are also in the business of protecting their users, so they won’t easily share any data either.  

Sometimes your subscriber can scroll through their emails while on the phone, but never click to actually open and read the email — which is still counted by some ESP’s as “email opened”. This information is then sent to your Mailchimp account, where it will be displayed as “opened”. 

With the new changes, Apple will start to rely on bots to pre-load some of the content, further fooling platforms like Mailchimp that will record and display emails as 100% opened.

This means that now, every email will appear to have a 100% open rate — although platforms like Mailchimp are working to automatically filter out these bots.

Let’s not forget that the ultimate goal of sending an email is not to see who opened it, but to convert recipients into paying customers.

Best email open time

Email marketing platforms were able to report back on the best time to send an email to your subscribers. However, with Apple’s new software update, this data will become sketchy. 

You are relying on the ESP’s to share this information, and we know they are not that keen to do so.

So to circumvent this, we’ll need to dig a bit more to understand who our customers are, how engaged they are on other platforms and how much revenue you’re generating from each of your campaigns. 

This will determine when the best time is to send your next newsletter or promotion.

What’s your next-best strategy?

1. Establish a baseline of data before the change finds you

   I recommend that you immediately start reviewing historical data such as email open rates, click through rates, revenue, and other relevant customer data. Try to form a baseline of data that will become a benchmark for all your future email marketing campaigns.

2. Instead of relying on ESPs data, focus on collecting first-party data

   First-party data means you’re collecting data from your customers directly via a form or a survey. For example, an e-commerce business could collect first-party data such as a customer’s date of birth in order to include birthday specific promotions.

   First-party data also includes first-party cookies, which allows you to personalise and automate your email marketing to your subscribers, and geo-target them based on their physical address, rather than by their IP address. 

   You can get creative in how you collect this data. Instead of designing a boring form, you can try to create a quiz so that you can gamify this process, making it a bit more engaging for your visitor. 

3. Consider having your own Customer Data Platform (CDP)

   A CDP will allow you to collect any customer data, online and offline, which you can cleanse and enrich automatically in real time, thus creating a single source of truth of your customer. 

   With this process you can collect the website tracking information and combine this with your email marketing information. In other words, you can say goodbye to Apple and Google tracking altogether as all your customer data will be sitting on your dedicated servers.

4. Invest in a smart marketing automation platform

   In order to win as an email marketer, you do need to invest in a smart marketing automation platform that will allow you to collect, track, enrich and cleanse your database, and will show you a 360-degree view of your subscriber profiles.

   These platforms are built to go beyond just sending emails. You’ll be able to attribute each of your email marketing campaigns to an actual customer and learn all the steps they took before they made a purchase from you.

5. The click through rate is king

   This metric is the only accurate metric to come from your email marketing platform. 

   It’s also proof of how well your email content is. 

   You can easily improve the click through rate (CTR) by changing your subject lines; including different call-to-actions in the emails; testing text to image ratio; and conducting A/B split tests across different segment groups.

Changing for the better

Online privacy is a hot topic for many of us and the controls by big tech will just keep getting tighter. 

As a customer of Apple’s products, I’m celebrating their decision to grant me sovereignty over my personal data. As a user, this change is empowering and it feels good!

On the other hand, as a marketer, it’s forcing me to re-think my complacency as I’ve been relying on third-party data to build successful marketing campaigns. It was much easier than building strategic dashboard models to piece data points together. 

But overall, this is good news. This change allows marketers to be strategic in how we collect, store and use data. 

It’s also a good reminder for us to respect our subscribers and actively listen to them so we can target them better. We must say goodbye to spammy ads and emails, and welcome marketing strategies that respect consumers’ time and attention spans. 

As David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’, famously said:

“The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.”

His statement serves as a reminder for all marketers to put their customers first.