Major Changes for Open Rates and Scoring Due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection
In September 2021, the new Apple iOS 15 Mail App added “Mail Privacy Protection” to its app. In an effort to keep the actions of users private, Mail Privacy Protection marks all emails received into the iOS 15 Mail App as ‘open’ regardless of whether they were actually opened by the user or not.
To not misinterpret any of the data from iOS 15 users, our email marketing platform does not use any of the data from iOS 15 users that have opted into Mail Privacy Protection due to the inaccuracy of reporting. Not using the inaccurate Apple Mail Data in our reporting creates lower open rates and scores on your reports compared to previous campaigns before September 2021, or open rates on different email marketing platforms.
Other email marketing platforms may count all iOS 15 users as opens, dramatically increasing open rates for platforms that do not take into account this discrepancy in their open rate data.
How Your Campaign Reports are Affected
iOS mail users account for up to 35% of all email recipients and growing. That means your open rates, engagement, and lead scores are negatively affected by a margin of up to 35% as compared to an email marketing service that automatically counted all iOS 15 users as opens.
An email marketing platform that does count iOS 15 users as opens could send an email with an actual open rate of 0% and would have the possibility of having an open rate of 35%. That data is incredibly inaccurate. At Truevail we have decided to use only real applicable data to use in your reporting.
Taking into account this discrepancy in data, on average, your campaigns actual open rates will be anywhere from 5%-20% higher than what is reported in your campaign reports.
How Your Quarterly Lead Engagement Reports are Affected
Since we no longer have applicable data for iOS 15 Mail App users, our Quarterly Lead Engagement Reports will not include the potentially false data provided by Apple. We will not add scoring to any contact using Apple Mail to read your email campaigns, and this means even your active users could end up with a lead score of 0 even though they actually are reading your campaigns.
iOS 15 data also affects the automated tagging system we provide. All Apple Mail users will not be recorded of having any actions and therefore will eventually be automatically tagged as Disengaged, Inactive, and Unsubscribe Due to Inactivity. We do not suggest you take any action such as unsubscribing any contacts due to this information potentially being false. Our team will remove the Unsubscribe Due to Inactivity tag in the future.
If you have any questions about Apple Mail Privacy Protection please reach out to us at support@truevail.com.