Have you ever put together a killer email marketing strategy that landed you a significant client? Then you agree on the massive benefits of email marketing. Furthermore, open tracking is a fantastic tool to measure various KPIs and email metrics, including open rates. You also know the importance of marketing via a platform with many prospects and existing clients. Imagine the success of marketing via an operating system that has over 113 million users in the U.S? A lot. Right? Well, get ready—the iOS 15 is about to change your email marketing campaigns.
What is iOS 15?
On 7 July 2021, Apple announced the release of iOS 15 during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC2021). While initially available to developers for testing, the iOS 15 will be widely available in the fall of 2021.
The iOS 15 is the 15th major version of Apple’s mobile operating system that supports many devices, including the iPhone 6S and later models. For the iPads, you can download the iOS 15 if you have iPad 4 and later, iPad Air and later, iPad 5th generation and later, and all iPad Pro products.
iOS 15 has a ton of features. Which of these features is most likely to affect email marketing?
What is Mail Privacy Protection?
Mail privacy protection is a feature included in iOS 15 that has disabled open email tracking ability.
Previously, markets could embed untraceable tracking pixels in an email’s white space or attachments. Also, marketers could employ third-party tracking applications that captured numerous data such as if and when the recipient opened an email; any CTA has occurred and the user location.
When a user opts in to mail privacy protection, you can no longer:
- View email open rates, forward tracking, and timestamps
- Identify user device
- Track user IP address making IP-based segmentation impossible
- Track email deliverability
In short, iOS will affect most of your email marketing campaigns.
So, what’s the way forward?
iOS 15 Will Affect Email Marketing, But You Can Be Prepared
The fact is, mail privacy protection is here to stay, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. In the meantime, to stay ahead of your competitors, take the following steps to prepare.
Diversify Your Channels
With an ROI of 4200%, it’s understandable why 87% of marketers favor email marketing as their go-to marketing strategy.
There are a ton of other marketing strategies with impressive lead generation and conversions. For instance, stats show 73% of marketers are using social media marketing. Craft a superb social media campaign strategy to reach more than 223 million active social media Americans. Also, leverage SMS marketing. Stats show 97% of Americans have cellphones, and 87% have smartphones. It’s no wonder SMS has a 9.18 CTR and 98% open rate. Furthermore, 75% of clients favor SMS for receiving promotional content over email marketing. On the other hand, web push notifications can work wonders to reach your subscribers via their favorite websites.
You can also use other marketing channels, such as video marketing, content marketing, and SEO marketing.
Make Use of Other Reliable Metrics
For a long time, marketers have been leveraging open rate as the preferred KPI and metric to measure the success of their email marketing strategies. With iOS 15, this ability is no longer reliable as all the emails will be marked open by default.
In the absence of the open rate metric, other metrics you can use include:
- Click-through rate (CTR) to determine the percentage of users who clicked any of the links you had in your email.
- The conversion rate determines how many users followed the link and completed any particular action, such as purchasing or subscribing to a newsletter.
- Website traffic – URL tracking will still be possible. Reliable third-party software can track the amount of website traffic generated from a link you included in the email.
- List growth rate – how many more subscribers have joined your email list? You can determine this metric by comparing unsubscribes against new subscribers.
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Not All Users Will Opt-In
The excellent news is mail privacy protection isn’t mandatory to all iOS 15 users. After a user updates their devices to iOS 15, they get a prompt to opt-in. There’re those users who’ll choose not to opt-in.
Why?
According to Accenture, 83% of your customers favor receiving personalized content. So, they’ll offer their personal if it’ll promote their experience. But, they’ll retain control of the data, and you have to be transparent about how you use it.
Eighty percent of users will only interact with you to provide them with personalized content.
Ninety percent of users are willing to share their data for a more affordable personalized experience.
See, iOS 15 might curtail your email marketing strategy, but you still have some leeway.
Stay in the Loop and Notify Your Existing Subscribers
The news is out; iOS 15 is here to stay. Yes, some features will affect email marketing. But it’s still a bit early to know the actual effects on IP-based geo-segmentation and tracking. Customer preferences change by the day. Who knows, users might not favor these privacy features after all. The best course for a marketer is to stay in the know at all times. Stay tuned for more info on the iOS 15.
Go further and be transparent to your subscribers on how you intend to use their data, such as segmentation, personalization, and automation, to improve their experience. 86% of your customers want transparency. Assure them their data is safe with you as per data statutes such as the CCPA and GDPR. That way, you can build more trust with your customers.
Leverage Other Data Collection Tools
With mail privacy protection, any promotional emails you send will be rerouted through tons of proxies. Furthermore, any remote content you send to a user will download in the background. That way, you can’t track the user’s actual IP address. The feature will assign a random IP address based on the device’s location when receiving the email instead of the precise address.
If you can’t track the user’s IP address, you can’t leverage essential user data.
Enter subscriber profile center. This is a more reliable method of collecting user data. You can create a website where you collect zero- and first-party data from various users via forms. After sending a log-in link, these users can access and control their data at all times. So, before iOS 15 is rolled out, prepare a detailed subscriber profile center that will allow you to send email marketing campaigns to specific customers.
Build an Alternate Marketing Strategy With Notifii
Now you know you can leverage your marketing campaigns amid the changes brought by iOS 15. For optimal results, you need text and email software to boost your marketing campaign to reach your customers. With Notifii Connect, your marketing campaign will stay afloat and most successful. For more information on this fantastic product, contact us or book a demo today.
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