By Ray Estevez, Anteriad Chief Information Officer

How will your email marketing be impacted by Apple’s upcoming privacy protection strategy – mail privacy protection (MPP)? We believe MPP will affect B2B email marketing strategy in three main areas:

• Email opens (read receipts)
• IP tracking
• Device location identification

Apple recently announced that the new privacy protection feature will be available in the Apple Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS15 and macOS Monterey devices. Availability could be late Q3 or Q4 2021, so there’s not a lot of runway to prepare for the impact.

How Apple MPP Impacts B2B Email Strategy

The main feature of MPP is that it stops email senders (B2B marketers) from using 1×1 pixels to collect information about recipients. In essence, MMP prevents senders from knowing when a user opens an email. It will also mask the IP address, making it hard to determine the recipient’s location. 

Apple device users will need to activate the MPP feature when they first open the Mail app. This won’t be turned on as the default setting.

Once users understand that their data is being loaded and stored by Apple, they may have concerns about how it protects Mail activity. One obvious question is, will Apple leverage this email content for their own marketing and targeting purposes?

Don’t Rely on Email Opens to Measure Performance

Email marketing remains essential to any multi-channel B2B campaign, including our own customers’ programs. We’re taking action proactively to prepare for the arrival of the Apple MPP feature. Here’s a partial list of what we’re looking at. Feel free to use these yourself:

• Establish an “impact” baseline – How many email recipients use the Apple Mail app?
• Expand email hygiene and delivery program – Marketers won’t be able to rely on “opens” as a sign of email delivery for Apple Mail recipients. We now put all of our emails through quarterly email verification and hygiene.
• Continue emphasizing click-through rate over opens
• Expand testing of creative to select what’s most compelling to an audience. Engagement (click-through) will be more important than ever.

Email opens are good for gauging if your message got through, but engagement is what matters most. Marketers who mainly rely on open rates won’t get a fully accurate measure of campaign success.

Email Marketing Must Evolve to Deliver Leads

In our opinion, the Apple MPP is actually pushing marketers to operate at a higher standard. We are working very closely with our customers to innovate their overall digital marketing strategies and rely on more valuable metrics like clicks and engagement to prove campaign effectiveness.

The engagement data we capture gives marketers a clearer, more accurate picture of audience intent.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll look at other ways MMP may impact your marketing and how you can prepare for the changes.