Overview
The new update for iOS includes Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) which allows users to prevent email senders from seeing if or when an email is opened. HubSpot, Mailchimp, and other email marketing platforms use tracking pixels to identify when emails are opened.
MPP uses a proxy server to pre-load message content, making it look like Apple users opened emails they may not have opened. It is believe this will inaccurately inflate open rates for email marketers. 22.22% of Apple users had updated the iOS 15 as of October 5th and it’s believed the current adoption rate is around 50%. 90% is expected by January. So the effects won’t be fully felt until adoption gets higher.
How is iOS 15 Impacting Email Marketing?
It is difficult to find good data to reference, but one source has seen a drop in “opens” attributed to iOS users and a subsequent increase in open rates from unspecified users. This aligns with the predictions about MPP.
However, for our clients, I haven’t noticed any noteworthy changes in open rates. This is likely because HubSpot has a Bot Filtering feature that identifies bots – usually those that open every email and click every link – and ignores them in statistics. This feature has correctly identified the “bots” employed by MPP that preload message content. As a result, these “false opens” aren’t inflating open rates. It does prevent complete results:
Presently about 10% of the traffic we’re seeing is being opened with Apple iOS 15 devices. So if you send to 1,000 recipients and have Bot Filtering enabled, you’ll only see opens from about 900 recipients – all of the folks who are not using Apple iOS 15 devices with MPP enabled. But we do not actively remove sent events, so in effect, your open rate, in this example will actually appear to go down over time, though we believe the true activity has not changed.
This could be problematic when suppressing unengaged contacts. If someone with MPP enabled opens 14 emails in a row but doesn’t click, they’re technically engaged, but HubSpot will believe they are unengaged thanks to Bot Filtering.
How to Handle This
Plenty of features in HubSpot – and other email services – rely on “opens”, especially workflows. Triggers or properties that rely on open rates are going to be less effective at measuring engagement as MPP adoption increases. As such, it might be best to move away from “opens” and focus on other engagements such as clicks or page views.
Additionally, cleaning up email lists is more important than ever. It’s best to remove truly unengaged contacts before it becomes more difficult to identify whether people are actually opening your emails or not. Beyond this, we will have to see what email services come up with. Klaviyo, for example, is planning on flagging users with machine-driven opens so you can segment them and include or exclude those measurements as necessary.
Since HubSpot can apparently identify these users as well, it is possible we at PIC can do something similar with our own statistic analysis. Also, we can use this as a reason to suggest HubSpot or Klaviyo to clients over services like Mailchimp. Mailchimp does not appear as prepared to handle MPP users though this may be changing as adoption of iOS 15 increases.
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