Learn how iOS 15 will impact your newsletters, and get tips on how to adapt your email strategy to maintain effectiveness and accurately measure results.
Thomas Haurum
Apple is rolling out its major ‘legacy of privacy leadership’ strategy, responding to users’ right to privacy. This means that any of your subscribers using Apple devices will have the option to protect their email activity.
The iOS 15 update is expected to arrive in autumn 2021 and, in practical terms, means your subscribers will be able to:
This could have a major impact if you send out a high volume of newsletters, as the update will make it much harder to analyse your data – and therefore to optimise based on it.
In this blog post, we give you 4 actionable steps you can prepare for now.
But first, let’s take a closer look at what we know so far. (You can read Apple’s official announcement here.)
Many of us look at open rates when we start to evaluate our email campaigns. How well did we manage to grab people’s attention?
You may also have used this to test which welcome email to send subscribers the first time they encounter your brand.
With the new iOS 15 update, it will become difficult to determine which email actually performs best – if measured by open rates.
This also means your email marketing tool will struggle to assess your campaign’s relevance for the recipient. This can have negative consequences, such as your emails ending up in the spam folder.
This means your email system will no longer be able to see the geographical location of your subscribers. In other words, after iOS 15, it will become difficult to send emails based on time zones.
For B2B companies in particular, who try to capture leads, it also means your email system will no longer be able to link employees from the same company.
In the new iOS 15 update, users will reportedly be able to use a ‘Hide my email’ function. This allows users to, for example, participate in competitions or use discount codes with an “alternative” email address. As a result, you won’t be able to see the subscriber’s actual email.
This also means you won’t be able to see if your competitors are signing up for your newsletters, lead forms and so on. It will also be more difficult to calculate the lifetime value of your subscribers, as purchases and behaviour may not necessarily be linked to the same email address.
It can sometimes be a good idea to clean up your subscriber list to ensure the best possible deliverability for your newsletters. If there is little interaction with your emails, it can negatively affect deliverability. This is often done by removing subscribers who do not open your newsletters. (You can send them a “last chance” email first.)
After the iOS 15 update, this process will be significantly hampered, and it will be harder to identify which subscribers to remove. Therefore, it is worthwhile carrying out this exercise in advance.
Once iOS 15 is released and it is no longer possible to track 100% of your subscribers’ opens, it will also be harder for you to test. So make sure to test as much as possible before the update. That way, you can identify your most effective subject lines and use these in your automated email flows!
How to split test with:
Mailchimp
Active Campaign
Klaviyo
MarketingPlatform
If you have previously measured your efforts based on ‘opens’, you will now need to think differently.
Fortunately, there are other parameters by which you can measure your performance. You can look at clicks, replies, unsubscribes and more.
Start now by making your subscribers aware that you need their feedback in order to show them the most relevant content.
For example, you can send out a newsletter encouraging your subscribers to set their preferences according to their interests.
On this basis, you can ‘tag’ your subscribers and ensure they receive the most relevant content possible.
Additionally, it’s a good idea to encourage potential new subscribers to provide their real email address, rather than using the ‘hide my email’ feature.
Inform them when they sign up or make a purchase, for example, that order confirmations, warranties and so on may be lost if they do not use their real email address.
We know the update is coming, and that it will change how we do certain things at our end.
However, we do not know everything until the update is released, so there’s no need to panic just yet…
We will need to analyse our KPIs using parameters other than ‘open rate’.
But there are a few things to prepare in advance (see the section above).
You might also be interested in reading:
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