The iOS 15 Privacy Changes for Email Marketers

Did you know that every time your business sends out an email, whether it’s for a Black Friday campaign or a monthly newsletter, there’s a 90.5% chance it’s being opened on an Apple iPhone? It means that optimising your emails for iPhone is hugely important, but also that your email analytics and even performance are going to be hugely impacted by Apple’s every whim.

Enter iOS 15.

Thanks to a lot of moving and shaking when it comes to privacy and confidentiality online, the introduction of Apple’s latest iOS update brings with it some new features to help protect individual’s data – on an independent level, this is great news, but for email marketers there are some serious implications for how we measure the performance of a campaign and understand what is resonating with our audiences.

What Changed in iOS 15?

In short, Apple iPhone users were given a bunch of new options to restrict how their data is being accessed by other parties. This includes the option for them to:

• Hide their email addresses
• Hide their IP addresses
• Turn off open tracking
• Turn off open rates

Wait, turn off open rates? Yes, you read that right – the email marketing landscape is about to change dramatically if up to 90.5% of your respondents hide whether they’ve opened your email or not.

What do These Changes Mean?

The way we measure email marketing metrics such as the deliverability of your campaigns (how many bounces did you get?), remarketing, understanding where different customers are in your funnel and more will all need to change.

Losing IP data as well as open rates means kissing goodbye a lot of email segmentation options, like understanding where in the world our emails are going and being able to separate what we send out by geolocation.

What Does it Mean for us as Marketers?

Like much of marketing, this means we will have to do what we do best and think on our feet. How else can we measure email performance? Pivoting to other metrics like click-through rates is a good start but looking to new and emerging tools from analytics companies who are aware of the issue can provide a great opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.

How do we Adapt to the Change?

Do what you can to keep your list hygiene in tip-top shape. For some businesses, this means sending out an email to their least-engaged contacts simply asking – “Do you want to keep receiving emails from us?”. While the idea of directly asking your audience if they want to unsubscribe is daunting and might feel counter-intuitive, the plus side is that you’ll keep your list tidy with contacts who actually want to be there, resulting in a highly targeted audience segment.

At the end of the day, the purpose of email marketing is to achieve conversions, so looking at the purchase history of your users is a great way to keep track of audience engagement. All the metrics that go along with purchase history can also be a great indication of where your customers are at – looking at how frequently they buy from you, how recently they have bought from you, how much they spend and many more data points can be of huge value to you as a marketer.

Paradigm-shifting changes like the iOS 15 privacy update are inherent in digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean you always have to be playing catch up. Adapting to these new changes doesn’t have to be a panic-stricken experience; with some preparation and thinking outside of the box, you’ll be back on top of your email marketing in no time.

Want to make sure you are doing everything you can to optimise your email marketing? Give us a holler.