How to Use Apple’s Auto Opens Safely

The most disruptive element of Mail Privacy Protection is that Apple creates a mountain of fake auto-generated open signals to obscure the real opens generated by your subscribers. With MPP adoption at greater than 95%, that mountain is pretty big, especially for B2C brands.

Brands’ email marketing programs have been affected differently depending on how many of their subscribers use Apple Mail on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. However, for many brands, their unadjusted open rates (known opens + auto opens) have tripled. For a small, unlucky group that has the vast majority of their subscribers using Apple Mail and relatively modest pre-MPP open rates, their open rates have more than quintupled.

That’s a lot of noise, which is why Oracle removes auto opens from its reported open rates. Doing so provides a much cleaner signal of engagement, and makes fluctuations much more meaningful and therefore actionable.

That said, even though we remove them from this top-level calculation, we do factor auto opens into other calculations and even provide individual-level auto open data. We do this because auto opens can provide some value in certain situations (at least for now). Let’s talk about those situations.

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog