How does Apple's MPP affect email marketing?
Internet privacy is becoming increasingly important to all internet users. With most businesses migrating online and everyone's reliance on the internet for day-to-day activities, having a highly protected internet connection is critical. In an attempt to maximize their profits, companies track your online behavior and offer ads relevant to your internet searches.
To address this, Apple's privacy team has been working relentlessly to keep their customers' data safe from third parties. In September 2021, they introduced the Mail Privacy Protection Act, which focuses on shielding users' IP addresses from trackers.
What is the MPP act?
The Mail Privacy Protection Act allows Apple customers to control which apps have access to their personal information. This includes preventing email senders from knowing whether their emails were opened, which impacts one of the most critical metrics in calculating the performance of an email campaign: Open Rate. Open rates are utilized by many email senders to analyze the performance of their emails, giving them insight into what they can do better to sell their business.
How does MPP work?
The Mail privacy protection feature makes use of invisible pixels that prevent third-party apps from collecting user information. More crucially, this feature prevents third-party apps from tracking email opens by masking IP addresses and hiding when users open their emails, making it impossible to link them to other online activities or even discover their specific location.
However, Apple does not enable this feature by default, so users can choose whether to use it or not. Users who want to apply this protection have to enable it manually. To do so, they need to open their Settings app, navigate to Mail, select Privacy Protection, and use the toggle to enable it.
So what happens when an Apple user enables 'Protect Mail activity' in their Mail App?
- First, when the user receives an email delivery notification in their Mail App, Apple triggers a download of the email into the device.
- Apple then routes the email through a proxy server, which pre-loads the content of the email, including the tracking pixels.
- It then downloads all of the images in the email message, either immediately or later. Meanwhile, a copy of the images is created in the user's Apple cache. Since Apple utilizes a proxy server to pre-load the email message, the actual IP address is hidden.
- While copying images to the cache, a request is issued to the email service provider (ESP) to get those images, prompting the ESP to believe the email was opened.
- If the user actually opens the email, it triggers a download of the email images, which are retrieved from Apple's cache rather than the email sender's ESP.
Consequently, MPP makes it impossible to determine when email has been opened, by whom, and where via the Mail App.
How does Apple's Mail Privacy Protection program impact affect email marketing?
Now that we've covered what Apple's MPP is, it should be clear that MPP has a significant impact on an email's open rate by disguising the device's IP address. As a result, email senders discover that email open rates are no longer a viable indicator for measuring email success, and because the user's location cannot be verified, they cannot rely on location-based marketing methods.
The following are the most prominent impacts of MPP on email marketing:
➤ Email marketing features based on email openings have grown less reliable - As part of their marketing strategy, email marketing providers built features that rely on email opens to target a specific audience. Some of the most common email open-based features are:
- List segmentation - Using email opens to segment lists with the most engaging contacts is not a feasible option anymore. Since email opens are undetermined, email marketers can no longer use them to establish who their most engaging contacts are. To obtain authentic email performance, they can segment contacts based on the number of specific link clicks.
- Email testing - A/B testing is a frequently-used test method for determining how an email performs with alternative subject lines based on the number of opens. To establish an accurate understanding of how an email performed, email marketers must now alter their A/B test methods to assess email performance by persuading recipients to click on specific links in an email.
- Follow-up email campaigns for unopened recipients - A follow-up email campaign is automatically sent to recipients who have not opened their emails. Apple Mail subscribers, on the other hand, will no longer receive follow-up emails even if they haven't opened their emails.
- Email automation based on email opens - The use of autoresponders and workflows to trigger a sequence of emails based on opens is now unpredictable and, as a result, cannot be relied upon to identify what email should be sent next.
➤ Personalized emails are no longer possible based on contacts who open the most emails - Marketers often use personalized emails to reach recipients who have opened their emails the most. As email opens are unpredictable, marketers must now find additional ways to personalize their emails and increase sales.
How can email marketers combat the effects of MPP now?
All is not lost; Zoho Campaigns can help you combat these factors with their features to neutralize the effects on email marketing.
Listed below are a few tips and tricks that email marketers can use to counter the effects of MPP:
- Rely on click rates to measure success of an email - Include CTAs in every email to drive more clicks and build a click rate benchmark to make accurate evaluations.
- Send follow-up emails based on click activity - Zoho Campaigns allows you to send follow-up emails based on clicks, thus replacing email opens to engage with your contacts.
- Tweak your automation methods that use clicks to trigger an email series - Create onboarding and nurture series based on email clicks. You can also target inactive contacts by including CTAs in your re-engagement workflow series. Use Zoho Campaigns' Activity based Conditional workflows series based on email clicks.
- Venture into other engagement metrics to measure an email's performance.
- Cleanup lists regularly to ensure good deliverability. Learn how list pruning will help you stay on top of your email deliverability.
- Perform A/B as often as you can based on clicks in your email campaigns and identify the test winners to fine tune your email campaigns. Read our document how to use subject lines to drive more engagement.
- Use an email seed list to perform real time evaluation of your email campaigns.
- Identify, evaluate, and update your current activities related to open rate reliance.
- Include click rates in your reports and dashboard that you regularly use to review an email's performance.
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