By now you’ve probably heard about Apple’s privacy changes that will come into effect with iOS 15 in September. This change will have a significant impact on businesses that use mailing lists to engage their customers. This is on top of handling PII compliance (PII = personally identifiable information) which is in itself a complex endeavour (for a PII checklist see here).
If a user decides to use Apple’s mail privacy protection, Apple mail will disable tracking pixels within Apple mail. Apple will also hide IP addresses so that you don’t know a user’s location or use it to build a profile around them.
These changes will affect all email domains of users that use the Apple mail on their iPhone, Mac, iPad, or Apple Watch. The simple strategy to filter out Apple email domains like icloud.com, me.com, etc. won’t be working.
You will see changes of opening rates starting in September 2021. Email subscribers on your mailing list who use Apple’s mail app will appear to open every email you send. This happens regardless of whether or not they actually opened your emails. The bottom line is that if your data tells you that everybody opens your emails then you don’t learn anything of value.
Based on the experience with iOS 14 that reached 90% adoption within 10 months we think that there will be a rapid adoption of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection. Apple will ask users to either “Protect Mail activity” or “Don’t protect Mail activity” when they open the mail app. When given a similar choice to opt out of tracking, about 96% opted out.
Strategies for your mailing list
A good start is to use alternate means to engage with your customers. With qnews you have an efficient and easy to use alternative for newsletters. qnews provides you analytical data of your newletter subscribers and provides a seamless integration for your newsletter solutions. All you have to do is to add your qnews email to your email list. qnews automatically generates messages of your emails and sends it to all your qnews app subscribers.
Interested? Subscribe to qnews with a click and learn more.
Sources:
https://nightfall.ai/pii-compliance-checklist-best-practices
