“Privacy has been central to all our work at Apple from the beginning. Every year, we push ourselves to develop new technology that’ll allow users to take more control of their data and make better-informed decisions about whom they share it with. Various innovative features have been incorporated into this year’s update, which will give users more granular control and deeper insights than ever before.”
– Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Software Engineering
Apple’s ground-breaking mail privacy protection announcement during its 2021 annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC21) has left email marketers in a bit of a pickle. While some fear the demise of email marketing, others dismissed the announcement entirely. However, we believe that marketers need to brace themselves and prepare for impact to deliverability, analytics, and email design.
And if you’re wondering what this fuss is all about and how it’ll affect the realm of email marketing, you’re at the right place.
We believe that there’s no need to worry.
With Apple’s Privacy Protection initiative, there’ll be a few changes that’ll impact the world of email marketing. But there’s no one platform that these changes apply to. It doesn’t matter which email marketing platform you use; these changes are applicable to all. Hence, if you rely heavily on email marketing, it’s extremely critical to familiarize yourself with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.
We have put together this guide to help you understand:
- What’s Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection?
- How Does Mail Privacy Protection Affect Email Marketing?
- When Will Mail Privacy Protection Be Imposed?
- What’s the Number of People That May Opt-in For Mail Privacy Protection?
- How Does Mail Privacy Protection Impact Email Marketing?
- How Does Mail Privacy Protection Not Impact Email Marketing?
- The 4 Steps You Can Take to Achieve the Best Possible Email Marketing Results Post Mail Privacy Protection Feature Rollout
Let’s touch down on each of these points one by one with more insights.
What’s Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection?
Like we mentioned before, Apple, during its WWDC21 event, announced a few privacy-focused features that will be coming to Apple Mail with iPadOS 15, iOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.
As stated by Apple, “In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection will stop senders from utilizing invisible pixels for collecting information about the users. This new feature will allow users to prevent senders from knowing when they open an email. At the same time, this feature will mask the users’ IP Addresses, such that it can’t be used to determine their location and link to their online activity.”
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will be an opt-in option for users. Upon launching their Mail application for the first time, the users will be greeted with:
Following are the three key areas being addressed by Apple with this update:
- Location Tracking
- IP Tracking
- Email Read Receipts
The first two will most probably impact personalization. Whereas the third one will impact different areas like analytics tracking, creating data-driven marketing campaigns, and more.
In simpler terms, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection allows users to mask their online mail activity.
Up until now, data from email was loaded when the recipient opened an email and downloaded the images. Now, this data comprised a pixel. This pixel allowed email providers to track information like:
- Email was opened
- What device was used
- Sometimes, where the recipient was located when they opened an email
Now, with the Mail Privacy Protection feature, Apple Mail will automatically preload content of emails and images – this includes the tracking pixel as well – irrespective of whether the recipient opened an email or not.
With this move, Apple has made data fetched from the pixels completely unreliable for email marketers.
As simple as that!
