Hiding opens with Apple’s new update
On June 7th, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced major updates to its current privacy functions for iOS15 and macOS Monteray that give Apple Mail users the ability to hide an invisible tracking pixel, and subsequently, their IP address that lives in the emails it receives.
Whether you are a Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or an iCloud user - if you view and open emails through Apple Mail on your iPhone, or your Mac, you can now prevent ESP’s and the brands that use them from knowing if you’ve opened the email or not.
You are probably thinking - that sounds great as a consumer. But is it actually all that?
This notorious Apple update will come with multiple curveballs for marketers. Apple will pre-fetch every email’s content at the time of delivery if you choose to not hide the pixel, so regardless of whether or not you open your emails, it will appear you have. So not only will it hide those opens for subscribers that wish to remain mysterious, it will show 100% opens for any remainder of those who don’t care. What a doozy!
Open rate, in my opinion, is a vanity metric. You can have an open rate of 50%, but if no subscribers are clicking through your email, or hitting your conversion goal, it’s not really doing much for your business - but congratulations you have an open rate of 50%. You’ve spent money on these email sends and maybe built some sort of brand awareness? However, no shade if you are a company like Marketing Brew, where their whole business is a newsletter. But really, most brands can be doing a lot better than just driving open rates up.
Open rates are normally a measure of engagement or inbox placement, and I usually take a strong stance that if a subscriber hasn’t opened any of your emails in the past 6-months, you should let them go. As a subscriber, if you have your opens hidden, are you at risk of being removed from an email list with the same strategy? Potentially.
Brands will need to reevaluate how they define engagement, and furthermore how they continue to keep their email lists healthy.
As a brand you’ll need to:
Tighten up email acquisition - ensure you’re validating email addresses at the time of signup with a double opt-in to ensure you aren’t placing any recycled, or pristine spam traps on your list that could impact your reputation
Redefine what a healthy list looks like for you - when will you let users go if they haven’t engaged with you in the past 6-months? Do your emails drive a click-through each send that could be an indicator of whether or not a subscriber is active?
Revisit your email goals - what is the purpose of your email? Is it to drive action or awareness? Can you strike more of a balance to ensure subscribers have a reason to engage with your emails instead of just scanning them?
As a subscriber, you’re probably never thought of the following but here’s what you’ll need to do:
Engage with emails - want to show brands that you are actually interested in receiving content? Click-through to them, reply to them.
Unsubscribe - every morning, I wake up to approximately 30 emails all before 8 am. Most of which I slide and delete before even opening. Not only am I harming their reputation by doing so, but I’m also actually just wasting my own time when I could just unsubscribe from emails I no longer engage with.
If you’re a subscriber thinking this privacy update is about to be the holy grail of a middle finger to brands that want to track you, sorry, we still will to an extent. My job isn’t to figure out where you live, I really don’t care about that. All I care about is delivering content that is personalized and valuable to the subscribers. I also care about knowing if my emails are landing in a users spam folder or not.
I personally am looking forward to these changes, I think it’s going to be a great opportunity to make brands think more deeply about what they measure as successful in their email programs. What is that main bottom-of-funnel conversion goal you’re trying to drive in the first place? For example:
Product purchase
Subscription
Event signup
Open rate rarely tells you if this conversion goal is going to be met. Sure, you’ll reach more subscribers with a higher open rate, but isn’t it the content within the email itself that would influence a user towards the goal?
Before I wrap things up I want to point out that keeping your email list healthy and removing inactive subscribers is essential to inbox placement. I have seen brands never remove inactive subscribers and the harm caused by large amounts of subscribers never clicking or opening emails takes months of work to fix. You should not care about how many users in total you are reaching, if only 10% of them engage.
Instead of always trying to grow the top of funnel list size amount, think about your conversion goal and how you can move the needle there. And then, think about what factors negatively impact moving that needle - the one I am thinking about here is overall list health. The penalties for not having a clean list are detrimental, starting at hitting spam traps, it’s only just the beginning.
Changes I expect to see from brands in response to this update:
Brands moving their newsletter out of the newsletter email itself, and onto a landing page (driving clicks to the site)
An increase in double opt-in emails from brands asking you to verify your email address at time of signup
An increase in engagement campaigns throughout the lifecycle asking users to click-through, or engage with the email
More 1:1 communication from brands asking subscribers to reply-back with their thoughts
Despite my minor excitement, I mourn my eagerness to use send time optimization, with this update will be a useless feature many ESP’s have started to launch.
Are you ready for this update? Litmus reports that Apple holds 58% of the email client market share, time to buckle up!
