How Apple’s Email Privacy Update Will Change Your Inbox Content

Apple is changing the ability of advertisers and publishers to see if consumers are opening emails – and that could mean big changes for the future of email marketing.

Apple announced several new features in June for mobile and desktop operating systems that will have a major impact on email.

The company will give its users the option to remove tracking pixels or small images that email marketers use to indicate whether you’ve actually opened an email. There is also a feature called “Private Relay” for subscribers to Apple’s iCloud + storage service that would hide IP addresses. Finally, a feature called “Hide My Email” will allow users to share “unique and random” email addresses that can be forwarded to their personal inbox, which they can delete to control who contacts them.

Of course, not all email users use Apple email products. But they’re a large proportion: An analysis of 3 billion email openings from January to March by email marketing firm Litmus found that Apple on iPhone had the largest share of email openings. emails, at 38.9%. Google’s Gmail was next at 27.2% and Apple Mail (desktop) 11.5%. Email openings on iPad were also just over one percent.

This means that a significant portion of marketing emails sent each day can be more difficult for senders to obtain data.

The changes, which are expected to come with software updates in the fall, are forcing marketers and publishers who use email to reach their subscriber base to rethink some of the ways they’ve measured, monetized, or used. e-mail.

As a result, consumers could potentially notice a difference in the marketing emails they receive – and may see brands reaching them through other means outside of the inbox, such as texting.

The way a burrito chain or credit app sends emails to consumers often looks like this: Marketers can use tracking pixels in emails to give them an idea of ​​when someone actually opens this message. As part of the new changes, users will be asked to choose whether they want to “protect” their email activity by masking IP addresses and privately uploading remote content.

Open email rates weren’t a perfect metric. In the email industry, “opening” an email has been viewed as a signal of interest or engagement. But if you’re someone who clicks indiscriminately to open emails just to mark them as read, that doesn’t mean much.

In the future, emails intended for consumers who use Apple email products and opt for “Email Privacy Protection” will appear as if they have been read immediately upon sending, which means that information will not be very useful for marketers.

For a business like Domino’s, email is of utmost importance: the business uses email to communicate with tens of millions of customers, to notify customers of the location of their order, to notify them of offers and offers, etc.

Domino’s vice president of digital marketing, Christopher Thomas-Moore, said the timing, for example, of when people open emails at lunchtime was helpful in sending the good message when people really want it.

“We potentially lose this data,” he said. “So maybe we’re going to be a little less relevant now when we send you information. Because we don’t touch the moments that matter most to you. ”

Thomas-Moore said there could be an evolution for the business in figuring out how to perform these types of functions without all the data it previously had. He said there were still questions across the industry about the real impacts, and he expects it will take some time to find out.

Erik Fialho, COO at LeftLane Sports, said the change is making it harder to do things like A / B testing subject lines to determine which is best at getting people to open. LeftLane is a parent company of adventure travel and e-commerce sub-brands focused on the outdoors.

Fialho said his company is already looking at other metrics aside from email openings, such as the number of consumers who click on the email or the number of buyers.

Some marketers use open data in emails to perform a kind of “retargeting” where someone opened an email and didn’t end up trying to make a purchase.

What email marketers are curious about is how email service providers are going to fine-tune the way they do “deliverability,” or how they decide which emails get to you. mailbox, or which are dedicated to the spam filter. Sending emails to customers who don’t continually read them can be detrimental to deliverability.

“At the end of the day, you need your email to actually go to someone’s inbox and not their spam so they can even respond,” Fialho said. “What if email service providers ignore the fact that suddenly a lot of these email marketers won’t have one of their key rates to consider, whether or not they should send emailing a customer and whether or not the customer is engaged can be a challenge. ”

It will also pose challenges for newsletter-based businesses. Myles Kleeger, president of customer engagement platform Braze, said companies that monetize audiences based directly on email content are likely the ones that are likely the most affected by Apple’s changes, as they charge often based on open rates.

“A lot of them charge based on some granular detail that you might not be able to get anymore,” he said.

But these companies will likely look for other ways to get readers to click and prove they are reading, whether it’s a poll or a ‘thumbs-up’ button to show they are reading. engage in one way or another.

Future Plc, which has more than 180 media brands including Marie Claire and Golf Monthly, is already using metrics that rely on more first-party data, said Allison Markert, vice president of advertising and sales operations B2B. This is all the more important as more and more privacy-focused initiatives are underway in the industry.

One of the outcomes of all of this is that marketers will likely put more effort into asking consumers for permission to email them and keep emailing them, and relying on explicit authorization rather than open rate data.

Flooding consumers with spam could not only cause consumers to unsubscribe, but if consumers are deactivated enough, they could turn to Apple’s “hide my email” feature during signup, Nirish said. Parsad, Marketing Technologist at Tinuiti.

Marketers are also grappling with a number of other privacy changes in the industry, including Apple’s previous changes that have given users more transparency and control over which apps want to follow them to. for advertising purposes.

“My first reaction [to the email announcements] was “Here we are again,” said Domino’s Thomas-Moore. “Certain hypotheses float on the impacts. But we are still so early in discovery and understanding that I expect us to find ourselves at the center as we continue to move forward. “

All of this could also mean a shift to other means of communicating with customers.

“Ultimately it will become more and more difficult over time to use email, in general,” said Fialho. “And that doesn’t necessarily mean email is going to go away. It’s still a very profitable marketing channel. It’s still a very useful tool. But that’s one of the reasons we started looking at other methods of communication. ”

LeftLane Sports has taken a big step towards text messaging this year, he said.

Fialho said the text results were positive in terms of clicks and conversions. But he notes that these must be texts that the consumer would really want. He gave the example of a consumer who took an interest in New Balance running shoes that were out of stock, and texted him when it is back in stock with a coupon he can use. .

“You absolutely want to make sure that you don’t overload this client with unnecessary texts, so they have to be really personalized and important,” he said.