6 Cold Email Strategies Now That Apple Mail Privacy Protection Breaks Open Rates
Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2024 4:20 am
Apple Mail Privacy Protection is here to mess with your open rates. At least a little bit.
A quick dive into the back story of Apple Mail Privacy Protection…
In September 2021, Apple released iOS 15 for iPhones and india phone number material iPads. The next month, they introduced macOS Monterey for computers. And both releases featured Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection in their Mail app — with privacy turned on as the default.
With Mail Privacy Protection, whenever a Mail app user receives an email, Apple pre-loads a version of that email to their own proxy servers sometime within a few minutes or a few hours. That triggers the open tracking pixel for that email.
Which means: If you send emails to people using Apple Mail, your open rates will be 100% from those recipients, regardless of whether or not they actually go on to open the email. Apple, in essence, “opened” the email for them behind the scenes.
The ramifications extend beyond open rates as well. You also won’t be able to get reliable data on open times, device data, or IP address-based geolocation from those opens.
For cold emailers and email marketers who rely on open rate data for A/B testing, measuring the efficacy of campaigns, and improving future campaigns, this isn’t great news.
After all, it’s hard to A/B test which subject line is getting better open rates if Apple is obfuscating the data. It’s hard to send a hyper-specific follow-up campaign to people who opened an email but didn’t reply if opens are inaccurate.
Open rates are a key metric for pro email users… and now they’re less reliable than before.
So what’s a cold emailer to do?
Step one: Don’t panic. Step two: Think about some changes to the ways you interpret and rely on open rate data. We dug into Apple Mail Privacy Protection to see what kind of impact it’s really having on open rates. We also put together some strategies you can employ now that open rates aren’t quite as reliable as they used to be.
GMass Is the First Cold Email Platfo
A quick dive into the back story of Apple Mail Privacy Protection…
In September 2021, Apple released iOS 15 for iPhones and india phone number material iPads. The next month, they introduced macOS Monterey for computers. And both releases featured Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection in their Mail app — with privacy turned on as the default.
With Mail Privacy Protection, whenever a Mail app user receives an email, Apple pre-loads a version of that email to their own proxy servers sometime within a few minutes or a few hours. That triggers the open tracking pixel for that email.
Which means: If you send emails to people using Apple Mail, your open rates will be 100% from those recipients, regardless of whether or not they actually go on to open the email. Apple, in essence, “opened” the email for them behind the scenes.
The ramifications extend beyond open rates as well. You also won’t be able to get reliable data on open times, device data, or IP address-based geolocation from those opens.
For cold emailers and email marketers who rely on open rate data for A/B testing, measuring the efficacy of campaigns, and improving future campaigns, this isn’t great news.
After all, it’s hard to A/B test which subject line is getting better open rates if Apple is obfuscating the data. It’s hard to send a hyper-specific follow-up campaign to people who opened an email but didn’t reply if opens are inaccurate.
Open rates are a key metric for pro email users… and now they’re less reliable than before.
So what’s a cold emailer to do?
Step one: Don’t panic. Step two: Think about some changes to the ways you interpret and rely on open rate data. We dug into Apple Mail Privacy Protection to see what kind of impact it’s really having on open rates. We also put together some strategies you can employ now that open rates aren’t quite as reliable as they used to be.
GMass Is the First Cold Email Platfo