Identifying ‘Real Opens’ Is Key to Adapting to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection

Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection features will have widespread implications for email marketers. Why? It’ll affect everything from email analytics and deliverability to email strategy and design in a significant way. That’s because these changes, which debut this fall, will prevent email senders from seeing Apple Mail users’ open behavior, IP address, location, and device information.

In particular, the lack of visibility around opens will be a challenge.

Apple will pre-fetch every email’s content at the time of delivery. That will not only make open times inaccurate, but will make it appear that nearly 100% of your emails that are received by subscribers who use Apple email clients are opened, whether they actually are or not.

It’s no small problem, since about half of all email opens occur on Apple Mail currently, according to Litmus data. The false opens generated by Apple will dramatically inflate overall email opens, which marketers have traditionally used as a signal of engagement for a variety of purposes.

However, there’s one solution that can help address several of the challenges caused by Apple’s new privacy protections. That is to segment out Apple Mail users. How can you do that? By using device identification. Let me explain…

>> Read the entire post on the Litmus Blog