Countdown timers: mpp’s latest email fatality

So, like, opens are dead - fine. But did they have to take our fun countdown timers too?

Countdown timers, such as Sentric (which I’ve written about previously as being a great tool to lean on for dynamic countdown timers within email), or those from Nifty Images are also Apple's latest victim. Cause of death? The Mail Privacy Protection update in iOS15 and OS Monterey.

Planning on having a server reload an image every time someone opens your email to load dynamic content such as a countdown timer? Think again…

Countdown timers are normally known as a fantastic way to create urgency, buzz, or an end-date to campaigns that you wish your subscriber to act upon. In the example I’m showing, Casper uses a countdown timer at the top of their email to show how much time is left on their 15% off event. If not obvious, that time has since passed and it’s now sitting at 00 across the board.

How do these countdown timers work?

When the email content is loaded, the email will refresh every time it is able to access the server, and its date/time stamp, allowing the content to be refreshed and show how much time is left.

How will MPP impact this?

But, with Apple’s latest update, the content is only fetched once. And it’ll be fetched that one and only time when it lands in your inbox, regardless of if you’ve opened up the email or not.

Because the content with MPP only loads and refreshes once, the dynamic countdown timer is now essentially only a static image. Having loaded once, it will continue to show the time remaining on the countdown timer at the time the content was initially downloaded.

Does this mean all dynamic content is dead?

It appears that images are cached for a couple of days, up to a week currently, meaning that those elements within an email that are in the form of an image updating after calling to a server are going to be lagging, if not great for the end user.

How can I adapt to this?

As of September 23rd, 2021, this is a learning experience for all of us as marketers, as is for ESPs and CRM tools. We’re all in it together though - everyone wants accurate data.

I’d recommend as a starting point to explore looking into segmenting out those on an iOS15 operating system and showing them a static image from the start. It’s not as cool, but it’s better than a countdown timer that isn’t doing its intended job.