Apple's Mail Privacy Protection Is A Help, Not A Hurdle For Email Marketers

Historically, pixels were embedded within an email to allow a provider to determine if a user has opened an email by recording if the images were loaded. While this was never 100% accurate, it was reliable and measurable. The MPP release, though, automatically loads all images in an email that’s delivered to the Apple Mail app, giving the appearance of an open. To that end, the false opens will ultimately inflate the open rate in your metrics. 

“The fact that we can no longer measure open rates accurately doesn’t mean that people stopped reading emails. Email engagement hasn’t changed as result of privacy controls,” Multiview CSO, Yariv Drori, said. “We must adapt and change how we evaluate email engagement given the data that we do have. Leverage meta data to glean insight about the engagements we can still measure. Insights about WHO engaged with emails, and context signals that tell us WHAT readers engage with will become the new focus for email reports.” 

MPP will not influence your total clicks and conversions, which will remain a dependable avenue to measure the success of your email. In fact, here’s a breakdown of what you can still measure even with MPP in effect.

• Clicks: You’ll be able to still track what and who is clicking on URLs within your email campaign. This is a much more valuable metric for engagement, anyways, as the recipient was compelled to learn more about the topic at hand with the link provided. 
• Landing page visits: If you’re not doing this already, make sure to associate a landing page with every topic and/or article within your email campaign. This will allow you to see the effects of the campaign you’re running because you can track who visits the landing page you’ve placed as a URL within the email. 
• Conversions: Running a membership or event campaign within an email? Tracking the conversion of who’s joined, renewed, or registered will be a great metric for you to pay attention to. This is especially true if you’re adding a tracking code onto the URL. Based on the conversions, you’ll be able to determine who joined, renewed, or registered from your email. 
• Subscriber behavior: Subscribers have many ways to alert you if they like the emails you’re sending. Forwarding emails to family, friends, and colleagues is one of those ways. 

Begin doing A/B testing with the different metrics above to really determine success, which will ultimately provide you with more subscriber-centric information. For example, you can compare the click rate on campaigns that were delivered to similar-sized distribution lists to determine which email campaigns were the most engaging.  

With all the information at your fingertips, you won’t have to worry about the inflation of open rates. A comprehensive approach to email analytics based on clicks, website visits, conversions and behavior is far more valuable to determining engagement and success.  

MPP is not the end of email campaigns, we can promise you that. In fact, Google is said to release a similar – but different – approach mid-late 2023.