Discover how iOS 15 impacts 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, addressing users’ right to privacy. This means that all your subscribers who use Apple devices will have the option to protect their email activity.
The iOS 15 update is expected to arrive in autumn 2021 and, more specifically, it will allow your subscribers to:
This could have significant consequences for those who send out frequent newsletters, as the update will make it more difficult to analyse your data – and therefore also to optimise based on it.
In this blog post, we offer four practical steps that you can start preparing 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 rely on the open rate as a starting point for evaluating our email campaigns. How effective have we been at capturing attention?
You might also have used it to test which welcome email you should send to subscribers the first time they encounter your brand.
With the new iOS 15 update, it will be much harder to determine which email is actually performing best – as measured by open rate.
This also means that your email marketing tool will have a harder time assessing the relevance of your campaigns for recipients. This can negatively affect deliverability, increasing the risk of your emails landing in spam folders.
This means your email system will no longer be able to see where your subscribers are located geographically. In other words, the ability to send emails by time zone after iOS 15 will be limited.
For B2B companies in particular, who are trying to capture leads, your email system will no longer be able to link employees from the same organisation together.
The new iOS 15 update is rumoured to include a ‘Hide my Email’ function. This allows users to participate in competitions, use discount codes, etc., with an “alternative” email address. As a result, you will not be able to see the subscriber’s real email address.
This also means you will not 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 be linked to a single email address.
It can sometimes be beneficial to clean up your subscriber list to ensure the best possible deliverability for your newsletters. Low engagement can negatively affect deliverability, so it is common to remove subscribers who do not open your emails. (You can, for example, send them a “last chance” email.)
After the iOS 15 update, this process will become significantly more difficult, and it will be harder to determine which subscribers to remove. Therefore, it is a good idea to carry out this clean-up beforehand.
When the iOS 15 update arrives and it is no longer possible to track 100% of your subscribers’ opens, it will also be harder to test. Make sure to test as much as you can before the update. That way, you can identify your best-performing subject lines and use them in your automated email flows!
How to split test with:
Mailchimp
Active Campaign
Klaviyo
MarketingPlatform
If you are used to measuring your efforts by open rates, you will now need to think differently…
Fortunately, there are other metrics you can use to evaluate performance: clicks, replies, unsubscribes, and more.
Start now by making your subscribers aware that you need feedback from them to provide the most relevant content.
For example, you could send out a newsletter encouraging subscribers to actively indicate their interests.
Based on this, you can ‘tag’ your subscribers to ensure they receive content that is as relevant as possible.
You can also encourage potential new subscribers to provide their real email address, rather than using ‘hide my email’.
Let them know, for instance, when they sign up or make a purchase, that order confirmations, claims, etc., may be lost if they do not use their real email address.
We know the update is coming and that it will change some aspects of our work.
However, we do not yet know everything until the update is released, so there is no need to panic just yet.
We will need to measure our KPIs using metrics other than ‘open rate’.
A few things can be prepared in advance (see the section above).
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