As marketers, one of the key indicators we use to measure email success is the open rate. When an open rate is high, it hints that your subject line did its job to pull in readers.

It means you’re sending emails at the most engaging time of day, or your subscribers are eagerly waiting to get your content in their inbox. When it’s low, it signals that your email subscribers might not even be reading your content.

However, the way email marketers leverage open rates could change with Apple’s recently announced iOS 15 privacy features.

The impacts iOS 15 could have on email marketing

The iOS 15 update comes with several new privacy features, and some of these will include:

• Mail Privacy Protection

Research suggests that those with early access to iOS 15, Apple Mail will allow users to opt in to mail privacy features that mask IP addresses and block third parties from tracking email opens or other IP data.

• iCloud+ (Subscription)

An iCloud subscription with additional privacy features including a VPN-like Private Relay feature, which prevents sites from tracking Safari users who opt-in and allows users to see which websites they’re sending information to.

• Hide My Email (within iCloud+)

An email address-cloaking feature that enables users to give sites a “fake” email address. While promotional emails sent from the brand to the fake address will still go to someone’s inbox and shouldn’t impact important communication, brands will not be able to see the person’s real address unless the contact shares it.

So far, all Apple has said about these privacy features is, “In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

Although Apple hasn’t specifically said whether ‘Mail Privacy Protection’ will be an opt-in or automatic feature, research from iOS testers suggests that the Apple Mail app prompts users to turn mail privacy protection on when they enter the app.

How to navigate through the iOS 15 changes

To help email marketers navigate the potential changes that could happen, and to also help their clients have a better understand how this could impact on email marketing campaigns, here are a few tips and strategies to consider as the iOS 15 rollout gets closer.

1. Continue following updates from Apple

Although Apple’s iOS 15 features have been announced, don’t stop updated your Apple devices. Remember, there’s still a lot that we don’t know yet. For example, while it seems like this feature will require an opt-in, Apple hasn’t explicitly confirmed that.

2. These changes won’t impact all email readers

Although Apple Mail and Apple mobile devices make up over 35% of the email provider market globally, there are also other email providers that won’t be impacted by the iOS 15 updates. Google, Outlook, and other email providers haven’t announced similar privacy updates, which means their open and IP data could still provide solid tracking information for email marketers.

While you should be wary that other companies following suit on these email privacy features, it’s important to remember that you’ll still currently get open data from them.

3. Consider adjusting open-rate goals

Although open rates aren’t going away any time soon, with these updates many email audiences might become unable to track. Therefore, you might need to adapt your open rate goals to determine what your new low, average, and high open rates are, according to the impacts of the new iOS updates.

It may be good to track your email open rates for a month or so after the rollout to see what new averages look like based on hard data.

4. Leverage other email marketing data

While open rate is a key indicator for email marketing KPI’s, it’s only one of many ways to determine if your email content is successful. Here are a few others that may be worth focusing on:

• Clicks and click-through rates: If you share links to content, such as blogs, product pages, and offers in email, your click-through rates can give you insights on how many or how often email readers engaged with and clicked on your content. High click-through rates can hint that your content was very engaging.
• Traffic to your site: Using certain softwares or plugins, you can monitor how much traffic came to your website from one single email. Ultimately, if you’re trying to build your audiences or getting people to make purchases, you’ll need to send people to your website. Good email traffic hints that you’re successfully getting visitors where they need to go with your content.
• Clickmaps: Many email providers allow you to see which content people clicked on the most or least within the email. This can help you see which content within your email was most and least clickable.

On top of leveraging KPIs that are less impacted by Apple’s change, you can also use email tools or benchmark reports to see how your email rates compare to that of other brands in your industry.

To discuss this further, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our marketing team.