Apple's privacy protection – What this means for your emails campaigns

What is MPP? 

MPP stands for Mail Privacy Protector. According to Apple, "Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can't link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you've opened their email." As of September 20, 2021, MPP is available for the Mail app on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 devices.

MPP affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device, no matter which email service is used, such as Gmail or a work account. The main impact this will have will be on marketing or campaign emails - tactics like newsletters and promotions that utilise open rate metrics.  The privacy update also gives Apple users the option to choose between "Protect mail activity" or "Don't protect mail activity". If Apple users decide to protect their activity, Apple will hide the IP address which stops email senders from learning whether an email has been opened.  Yes, this does sound alarming. However, there is nothing to be concerned about. Email marketing will still be an essential tool for business!

MPP's impact on email marketing

Over the past few years, privacy has become quite a big issue in many industries, not just email marketing. Privacy is an essential process to have in place as people are entitled to their online privacy. However, it is necessary to note that this new update will only impact Apple mail apps on IOS 15. No other email apps will be affected.

Changes to open email rates: There is concern that if your audience are primarily Apple mail users, your campaign marketing email open rate statistics may become less reliable if more users decide to upgrade and activate their privacy protection. According to a blog by Vision6, tracking accurate data via available rates will become nearly impossible. The good news is that open rate is just one metric and there are many other useful metrics you can use to determine the performance of your email campaigns.

Some of the effects for your Apple Mail audience who opts into MPP are:

• Any audience cohort, segmentation, or targeting based on the last open date is increasingly unreliable.
• Automated flows and journeys that rely on someone opening an email need to get re-engineered.
• A/B testing subject lines using opens doesn't work anymore.
• Send time optimisation is now inaccurate if your email tool hasn't reworked its algorithm to exclude opens.

 What can you do now?

Courtesy of the Vision6 post we have listed five things we think you can do now to help maintain the useful measurement of your newsletter email activity ensuring ongoing effectiveness:

1. Audit your contact lists to see how many of your subscribers use Apple Mail to read your emails. This will help you determine the kind of impact you’ll see. You never know, you might find that you will be largely unaffected.
2. Create audience segments based on current open rates so that you can keep using them, if need be. It’s not ideal to continue using these lists based on that data long-term though. 
3. It might be difficult to use opens as a sign of deliverability problems in the future. So take the time to clean up your lists and implement strategies to increase lead quality.
4. Start tracking click-through rate, and other engagement metrics, instead of deliveries and opens. This will give you a good baseline for reporting on your campaigns moving forward.
5. Start testing subject lines and email creative to get a better idea of what resonates with your audience. You can use this data to help shape your campaigns in the future.

The effects of the latest changes to Apple mail will not be as bad as you think! By utilising new metrics to track your email activity you will still be able to track measurable results for your newsletter email campaigns. Of course, we are a little biased however we believe that using a quality product like C9 Campaign for your campaign email activity is a great step to ensure your marketing email activity continues to be as efficient and effective as possible. If you have any concerns or wish to learn more about the privacy changes (or C9 Campaign), please don't hesitate to contact our team.