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Summary / TL:DR: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has created new challenges and opportunities for email marketers, by changing how Apple devices and software report email opens back to senders. This article will give you an overview of what MPP is, how it will affect the world of email marketing, and some suggestions for how to mitigate the impact of MPP on your email program.

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MPP: An Overview

The What, and some Why: As described by Apple, MPP “stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

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14West’s Deliverability, Newshift and Data & Analytics teams have taken steps to minimize the short-term impact of Mail Privacy Protection on our clients.

First: We know because of the user-agent string returned by Apple, we can identify users who have opted into Mail Privacy Protection. So for the purposes of segmentation and list hygiene efforts, we will ignore opens from anyone who has opted into MPP. Opens are still being recorded for the purposes of reporting.

Second: When a customer registers the first MPP open, an attribute is now added to their Blueshift profile to identify them an MPP user. This allows you to identify and segment any known email addresses that have opted into MPP.

Third: The Deliverability team has access to data through Everest that can break down the number and type of pre-fetch and proxy opens (including Apple MPP, Google and others) occur in your mailings. For more information about how this affects your open rates, please submit a ticket to the Deliverability team.

The Blueshift Response to Mail Privacy Protection

Blueshift has made a variety of features available, including reporting on Pre-Fetched messages and new segmenting options based on that data. From Blueshift:

In response to Apple’s iOS15 update and its new Mail Privacy Protection Policy (MPP), we’re making updates to our reporting so you can slice and dice different types of opens in your reports. Our Insights reporting and dashboards allow you to filter and group “Open” events by the “Opened by” attribute – you can now see the open count source – whether it’s by mail client using prefetch, by a proxy server or a real human (user). You can also view this information in campaign activity reports under the “extended attributes section.”

In order to help you stay on top of Apple’s iOS15 update […] we’re expanding this support to Segmentation. This means that you can now segment users based on how the email was opened via pre-fetch, proxy or by a real user. You can then run a campaign specifically targeted to this segment of users. One caveat on this is that this feature isn’t available for historical data, you can use this feature for data collected from 2/11/22 onwards.

For more information about these updates:

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Wrap up

Although Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is already having an impact on how email marketers read engagement data, it’s not the doomsday scenario for tracking opens that many expected it to be. 14West has stayed ahead of the curve and is already taking action to ensure our clients continue to receive actionable mailing data.

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  1. https://wordtothewise.com/2021/09/apple-mpp/

  2. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/sparkpost-product-updates-apple-ios15/

  3. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/impact-of-ios-15-update-on-open-tracking/

  4. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/4-insights-on-ios-15-mail-privacy-protection/

  5. https://www.validity.com/blog/apples-mail-privacy-protection-is-here/

  6. https://blueshift.com/blog/ios-15-updates-keep-adapting-to-mail-privacy-and-proxies/

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