What Does Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection Mean for Emails Sent Through ClickDimensions?

With Apple’s release of iOS 15, and macOS Monterey in late 2021 Apple have rolled out their Mail Privacy Protection feature for email read on iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. ClickDimensions along with the entire marketing technology world has followed this development closely.

What is Mail Privacy Protection? Here is the description Apple offers:

“Mail Privacy Protection helps protect your privacy by preventing email senders from learning information about your Mail activity. If you choose to turn it on, it 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 you’ve opened their email.”

First Things First: Tracking Pixels

The above statement essentially shows us what Apple sees as the future of the tracking pixel in email marketing. A tracking pixel is a graphic with dimensions of 1×1 pixels that is loaded when a recipient opens an email. When you send an email via ClickDimensions, the tracking pixel is added using a code in the email. If a recipient opens the email message, the code is processed by the client – usually the user’s mail app, like Outlook or macOS Mail, and this is registered and noted in the server and, for ClickDimensions customers, synced back to your Microsoft Dynamics 365 instance.

The following data can be acquired and analyzed with a tracking pixel:

• Type of email used, for example on mobile or desktop
• Type of client used, for example a browser or mail program.
• Time the email was accessed was visited
• IP address (gives information on the Internet Service Provider and location)

ClickDimensions has always used the concept of inferred opens that do not rely entirely on the tracking pixel placed in the email messages that you send through ClickDimensions. Inferred opens are when the recipient does not download images—including the tracking pixel—but they do click or unsubscribe.

How does Mail Privacy Protection work?

Mail Privacy Protection is now available in the native Apple Mail app with iOS 15 on iPhones, iPad OS 15, and macOS Monterey. Emails opened in other email clients on an Apple device will not be affected, but of course many recipients will have both laptops and phones and open email on both.

Now the new privacy options are available  to Apple users, email recipients will be able to choose to have their devices privately load remote message content, hiding their mail activity.

Apple is positioning this as an advantage for brands; that more people will read emails with all the images and visuals you include, as opposed to using features that block images in your carefully crafted email marketing messages.

They key changes they have flagged are:

• Mail content will be loaded automatically after delivery and the time of mail viewing will no longer be correct.
• Content is loaded without revealing recipient’s IP addresses; the location and type of device the email is being read on aren’t gathered.
• Opens will be detected, regardless of if the user read it or not.

According to recent research from Litmus, more than 40 percent of emails are opened in an Apple Mail client. It is expected that many users will enable Mail Privacy Protection when or after they upgrade to the latest OS, so email marketers may begin to see their open rates fluctuate unpredictably.

How should you change the key metrics you track?

Of course, email opens are useful for marketing professionals, but as has been noted for some years, they have never had 100 percent reliability as an email marketing metric. If other mailbox providers and email client app creators follow Apple’s trend, open metrics will continue to become less valuable over time. Other strategies for tracking engagement can include:

• More reliance on Click email events, and actual engagement by your recipients
• Leverage Subscription Management and monitor unsubscribes and spam complaints
• More comprehensive multichannel marketing across landing pages, surveys, social marketing and SMS
• Regular reconfirmation campaigns

Can you adjust for Apple Mail Privacy Protection triggered opens in ClickDimensions?

Yes, with the release of the 2023.04 ClickDimensions solution you will now see a new email statistic called Adjusted Opens which accounts for the pixel-load that is attributable to Apple MPP. The goal of this new email statistic is to provide an estimate of how many emails were opened by actual humans after removing the Apple MPP triggered opens from the number of Total Opens recorded. You will most likely see the overall level of Adjusted Opens fall slightly below what you saw prior to November 2021, but the value of your data “further down the funnel” will be more accurate and provide greater utility to track engagement of your subscribers.”

Happy Marketing!