How will the iOS 15 announcement affect email marketing privacy and deliverability?

Key findings

• Open rate inaccuracy: MPP further complicates the already unreliable nature of email open rate tracking due to pre-fetching and caching by various email clients.
• IP address masking: The privacy feature conceals users' IP addresses, impacting location-based targeting and analysis.
• Deliverability debate: While some experts maintain that core deliverability mechanisms, such as spam filters, are unaffected, others foresee a downstream impact on sender practices due to reduced actionable engagement data.
• Privacy enhancement: Apple's move represents a significant step forward for user privacy, aligning with broader consumer data protection trends.
• Focus shift: Marketers are compelled to pivot from open rates to alternative engagement metrics and a more holistic view of subscriber interaction.

Key considerations

• Engagement metrics: Emphasis should shift to more reliable indicators of engagement, such as clicks, conversions, website activity, and app usage.
• List hygiene: The importance of maintaining an active and engaged subscriber list increases, requiring new methods for identifying inactive users.
• Compliance: Reviewing data lifecycle management and consent processes to ensure continued GDPR and ePrivacy compliance without reliance on open data.
• Warmup strategies: Re-evaluating email warming processes to focus on actionable engagement signals like clicks, rather than opens.
• Industry adaptation: The email marketing industry must evolve its measurement and optimization strategies to thrive in this new privacy-first environment.

Key opinions

• Loss of insight: Marketers express concern over losing their primary metric for understanding subscriber interest and the “wantedness” of their emails, which is crucial for list segmentation and campaign optimization.
• Compliance challenges: There are worries about demonstrating continued consent under regulations like GDPR if open tracking, which previously informed data lifecycle management, becomes unreliable.
• Warming concerns: Questions have arisen about how to effectively warm new sending domains without accurate open data, traditionally a signal of positive initial engagement.
• Measurement adaptation: Marketers acknowledge the need to adapt their measurement and segmentation strategies, moving away from open rates.
• Industry impact: Some foresee a potential decline in marketing email quality if senders lose critical engagement signals, leading to a “race to the bottom” in terms of engagement-based optimization.

Key considerations

• Alternative metrics: Marketers must focus on explicit actions such as clicks, website visits, and conversions as primary engagement indicators.
• List segmentation: Developing new strategies for segmenting subscriber lists based on robust engagement signals that are not affected by MPP.
• Content relevance: Prioritizing highly relevant and engaging content that naturally encourages subscribers to take explicit actions within the email or on linked landing pages.
• Subscriber experience: Fostering a positive overall subscriber experience to encourage direct engagement and value perception, rather than relying on hidden tracking.
• Testing methodologies: Implementing new methods for A/B testing and campaign performance measurement that account for the changes in open rate data.

Key opinions

• No direct filtering impact: Many experts assert that spam filters and inbox placement mechanisms do not rely on image opens, but rather on authentic user behavior.
• Open rates already flawed: The accuracy of open rate data was already compromised due to various caching and pre-fetching behaviors by email clients, making the iOS 15 change an acceleration of an existing trend.
• Wantedness metric: Some argue that despite their flaws, aggregated open rates were the most statistically significant metric available for gauging subscriber “wantedness” and fighting abuse at scale.
• Alternative metrics needed: There is a general call for collaboration to develop new, privacy-aware methods for measuring email effectiveness that account for the loss of open data.
• Warmup unaffected: Deliverability experts suggest that core warming principles for new IPs or sending domains remain the same, focusing on actual clicks and positive user interactions, not just opens.
• FBLs problematic: Feedback loops (FBLs) from ISPs are considered problematic due to incomplete data sharing, making them an unreliable sole metric for abuse monitoring.

Key considerations

• Focus on real interaction: Prioritize metrics that demonstrate explicit user engagement, such as clicks, replies, forwards, and conversions on landing pages.
• Industry collaboration: Encourage the development of new, privacy-preserving standards for data measurement across the email ecosystem.
• Holistic engagement: Advocate for looking beyond email metrics to measure overall brand engagement, including website visits, app usage, and social media interaction.
• Sender responsibility: Emphasize the long-standing principle that sending truly wanted mail to a clean list is the most effective way to ensure good deliverability, regardless of tracking limitations.
• Adapt to client behavior: Recognize that mail clients will continue to evolve their privacy features, and sender strategies must adapt accordingly.

Key findings

• Mail privacy protection (MPP): Explicitly stated to prevent senders from learning whether an email has been opened via remote content loading.
• IP address hiding: Confirms that MPP masks users' IP addresses, obscuring their location and other IP-based data.
• Device-level implementation: The features are integrated into Apple's native Mail app across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, affecting all email accounts configured within it.
• User opt-in: Users have the option to enable or disable these privacy features, giving them control over their data.
• Broader privacy initiative: MPP is part of a wider suite of privacy enhancements across Apple's platforms, signaling a long-term commitment.

Key considerations

• Data collection limitations: Documentation confirms that any email marketing strategy reliant on pixel-based open tracking will receive inaccurate or absent data for Apple Mail users.
• Focus on declared user actions: Senders must shift focus to metrics derived from explicit user actions, such as clicks on links, form submissions, and purchases, which are not impacted by MPP.
• GDPR compliance implications: Organizations should review their data processing agreements and privacy policies to reflect the reduced ability to track certain user data, especially concerning legitimate interest bases for processing.
• Evolving landscape: The documentation underscores an ongoing trend towards increased user privacy, indicating that email marketers should anticipate and adapt to further privacy-centric changes from technology providers.
• Technical adaptation: Email service providers and marketing automation platforms need to technically adapt their reporting and segmentation tools to provide relevant data in a post-MPP environment.