Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection – Take a Closer Look

September 20, 2021 Stan

Now is a great time to take a closer look at your campaign optimization.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) announcement has many marketers taking a closer look at their campaign logic and current performance metrics. If you haven’t jumped on this yet, now is the time.

Wondering what is MPP? The quick answer is that MPP is new privacy protection for the Apple Mail app that will be available in the newest operating systems (iOS 15, iPadOS 15, WatchOS 8, and macOS Monterey). MPP provides recipients with the choice to share their email activity with senders. For marketers, this means Apple Mail app users can now “hide” their IP address and location and block the pixels that track email opens. Impact to businesses will vary based on the number of end-users who use the Apple Mail app and implement MPP, but everyone should be taking a closer look at how current programs are structured to make improvements that will provide benefits regardless of the end-user’s email client.

To prepare for MPP, many marketers have focused on understanding the impact to their current marketing programs and analytics by answering questions like:

How many programs have logic built around email open activity?
Where are we leveraging Send Time Optimization tools?
Where are we using location-based information?
What percentage of our database engages with email on Apple devices?
What are our current open rates?

While you’re evaluating campaigns and optimization tactics that rely on open and location data, here are a few more ideas to consider while you’re “under the hood” making changes.

Take a holistic approach to using behavioral data.

Go beyond the existing programs that have decision paths based on email opens and think through additional opportunities to use email clicks, form submissions, and web visits. Do you have programs that simply send one email after the next without evaluating engagement? If yes, adding some simple logic to check for behaviors after the email send will provide opportunities to create more personalized experiences. For example, if the contact visited the website and consumed content related to another product or service, you can route the contact to a campaign geared toward their preference vs continuing to promote something they are not interested in.

How are you using behavioral data in your segments to target contacts for trigger-based campaigns or to re-engage dormant contacts? Review these segments to understand how much reliance is placed on email open activity. Are there opportunities to filter on clicks, form submissions, site visits, event attendance, etc.? Also, look at how you target active and inactive contacts. If you do not differentiate between these groups at all, this should be the first step. You can begin by separating these groups into unique segments in campaigns to track responses differently. This data alone will provide better insights to optimize campaigns. From there, develop re-engagement strategies for inactive contacts. They should be treated separately from your active contacts.

Engagement rates matter when it comes to deliverability.

MPP may have a long-term effect on engagement tracking and inactivity management, so marketers need to keep an eye on inbox placement rates and spam trap hits to identify potential issues. If you are not closely monitoring your deliverability now is a good time to establish this practice. The rate of engagement end-users have with our email ultimately affects whether the email is sent to the inbox or filtered out as spam. Targeting contacts with profile and behavioral data is a key element to successfully getting into the inbox for all email clients, not just Apple Mail. This practice can help ensure only active and engaged contacts are sent an email and there are no recycled spam traps lurking in the distribution list that can lead to blocks or blacklisting.

As you evaluate current practices and would like some guidance or support, please reach out. We are happy to help!

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