[Webinar Recap] iOS 15 & Mail Privacy Protection Overview

Check out the recap from our webinar: iOS 15 & Mail Privacy Protection where we discussed some of the impending changes with the new Apple updates with industry experts Zach Moss, from Wunderkind, and Justin Khoo, from Proofjump.

What’s changing? A walkthrough of the user experience

Apple Mail immediately asks users to Protect Mail activity when updating. Apple users are given the option to opt-in or opt-out of MPP. While not everyone will opt-in, there is data to suggest 90-95% of users will opt-in to MPP due to the fact that with the previous iOS 14 release, only ~4% of users opted in to “App Tracking”.

For users, there is a way to turn this off in their settings, but it’s not very obvious as it’s tucked away in settings.

Technical analysis of MPP

How will images behave with MPP? Justin Khoo analyzed how MPP “pre-fetched” images to see if there are any implications to email marketers. Ultimately, he discovered images load unpredictably—not just at “open” time!

“Pre-fetching” images will only occur when users are connected to WiFi and a power source
- How much of the time are people on WiFi and connected to a power source?
- This means “open-time” might still be useful loading images over MPP
- Automatic loading (over WiFi) can happen from several minutes or up to several hours for the from send time to begin downloading “automatically”.
Image cache lasts 2-3 days
- After this period of time, images may be fetched again by Apple Mail
Emails in Junk (spam) folder are not automatically downloaded

What does this change mean for ecommerce email marketers?

Tracking opens will be complicated

Open “trends” are possible—but a true `open rate` will be very difficult. While directionally, users can rely on ~50% of opens coming from Gmail or other providers.
Open-based A/B tests will live to fight another day relying on these other email providers.
ESPs may need to work to segregate out the Apple pixel requests.

Real-time content will require fallbacks

Countdown timers may no longer be “real-time” due to background loading.
- IP-based geolocation needs to fallback to first-party data and merge tags. The more first-party data, the better!
- Dynamic content that is not reliant on opens remains very valuable.

Reconsider open-based segmentation and journeys

Use guardrails for send time optimization based on opens.
- i.e., If an Apple Mail open occurs at 3 a.m., could consider omitting that data point.
All email teams should look at updating engagement segments if using open data.
Journeys based on “open” email events should be updated.