Introduction
It may not come as a surprise to you that the privacy landscape is shifting once again. Over the last few years, marketers have dealt with a whole host of changes around how we can hold and process customer data. This time, it’s Apple who are continuing the trend.
At Vuture, we’ve been working with the CM Group family to fully process Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection announcements, using data from beta programmes and doing a whole load of testing. This guide will take you through the key points.
What is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)?
In short, MPP aims to provide Apple users with more control over how much data marketers can collect about them. There are two major impacts on marketers:
- For contacts who are opted in, and where certain conditions apply, images in emails will be pre-fetched at the point of receipt, instead of when the emails are opened.
- Apple is masking IP addresses, so that all traffic is routed through a proxy server.
We will focus on point 1 in this article because that will have the most impact on Vuture functionality.
In order for these changes to apply, the contact in question must be using Apple's native mail app, have downloaded the latest update—iOS15, opted into the relevant privacy setting, and have a WiFi connection at the time of receipt of the email.
What does this mean?
The most direct effect is that open rates for all marketing emails—where at least some emails are opened using opted-in Apple devices—will increase. This is because images will be automatically pre-fetched at the point of receipt, rather than at the point of open. In those cases Vuture will record an additional open against the contact.
Apple is also obscuring the device information for customers who have opted in, so email software will not be able to detect the exact device being used to open mailings.
What should you do about it?
This is a universal change, and designed to protect the privacy of Apple’s customers. While there are solutions being talked about across the email world to try to omit these automatic Apple opens from reports, it’s not an exact science. There are also many other inconsistencies and false data when dealing with open rates, so the general advice is to move away from opens towards more accurate metrics, such as clicks.
What is Vuture doing about this?
The Vuture team has explored several ways of working around these changes and identifying opens by the Apple proxy server, but they are not completely reliable. Even if they were, as a responsible ESP, it’s important for Vuture to respect changes made by email clients, especially where it concerns the privacy of contacts. This is why we are advising that marketers start to move away from open rates in favour of more accurate metrics, like clicks.
The first step is to enable our users to assess the impact for their particular audience. This is why, from the end of October approximately (depending on your firm's deployment schedule), you will notice a new category in the Vuture Email Device Dashboard, called Apple Proxy. In these cases, we know (with around a 99% probability) that it’s an Apple open, but Apple will not send information back about which device or browser is being used.
At the same time we are considering various methods to help address similar inconsistencies caused by bots in click data, and we will be releasing a solution for this soon.
