In the past few months, Apple essentially changed email marketing for good.

With the rollout of its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature, Apple essentially threw a wrench into a few key email marketing metrics.

Instead of you sending an email directly to your members or audience, emails sent to those with MPP toggled on will work like this:

• The email is sent from your server
• Before it gets to the recipient, it goes into Apple’s proxy servers
• Apple’s proxy servers pre-open the email and downloads all images (including the pixel image that email servers use as a trigger to track metrics)
• The email goes to the intended recipient
• Rather than click and email metrics being sent back to your server, they go back to Apple’s proxy servers

Essentially, MPP stops senders from seeing a user’s tracking details, including:

• IP address
• Email opens and forwards
• Timestamps (including those for open times)
• Geolocations
• Device types
• Browsers or platforms

For users, the experience of receiving email won’t really change. In fact, it’ll give them better protection over their privacy and data.

But for anyone who uses email marketing metrics to inform their content strategy, this complicates things a bit. It means a number of your email marketing metrics will become inaccurate, such as:

• Inflated open rates
• Inaccurate data and open times for these emails
• Inaccurate data on where and how people take in your content

I know what you’re thinking: this just applies to Apple Mail, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that Apple Mail accounts for more than 47% of email client market share. And beyond that, Apple Mail also works with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and company domains, so it could even impact non-Apple email addresses.

So, what can you do?

Some email marketing services, such as ActiveCampaign, automatically tell you how many opens are attributable to Apple Mail so that you can filter them out of your results.

But for those that don’t, this MPP change isn’t the end of the world. Luckily, there are other important metrics that you can still track that are equally important as open rates and times, including:

• Clicks: How many people clicked on the links to your articles, service pages, or calls to action? If this number remains high, that’s a good sign.
• Unsubscribes: How many people unsubscribe from your mailing list? Your goal should be to keep this under 0.5%. If it gets higher, you may need to reevaluate the kind of content you’re sending.
• Bounces: If you’re getting high bounce rates, your mailing list may need a clean-up.
• Spam Reports: If you’re getting high volumes of spam reports, it’s wise to look at what you’re sending, to whom, and why and to evaluate why they might be finding it unappealing.

MPP will throw things off, but in the long run, there are simple ways to maintain effective email marketing campaigns regardless. If you’d like help creating email campaigns that nurture leads and engage your existing members, get in touch with us today.