Apple recently announced new privacy features for Apple Mail users. Those measures will affect the accuracy of open tracking for the emails sent by all email marketers, including emails sent from DonorDock.
What privacy changes have been implemented by Apple?
Apple recently released IOS 15, which gives users some additional options for privacy. In effect, these options would disable "open tracking" for DonorDock and all email marketing tools, specifically for users who connect their email to "Apple Mail" and enable the new privacy settings.
How does Apple’s new privacy measures affect email sending from DonorDock?
Changes to Apple Mail are having the same effect for all email sending services, including DonorDock. For emails sent to users of Apple Mail, you may no longer be able to track if emails have been opened. Email click tracking will continue to work the same way as always.
These changes means that the accuracy of "open tracking" will diminish for some email recipients, with more false opens, and more unrecorded opens. it is impossible to determine which email addresses are connected to Apple Mail's new privacy features, but early data from leading email architecture firms like Sendgrid and Litmus shows that we could expect somewhere between 7% and 30% of emails may be affected by this change, with numbers varying depending on the unique attributes of your marketing list.
What should we do about these changes?
Your email marketing strategies will need to continually evolve with the changes happening in our world. Our recommendation would be to more closely monitor click tracking as your best, most accurate metric for engagement. DonorDock tracks clicks for your emails, so you know who is engaging with the messages you send. DonorDock users are uniquely prepared for these types of changes, since email data is integrated with other forms of engagement on each contact profile. That means you can use the full picture of your engagement with your contacts to determine which marketing messages they should be receiving.
The bottom line: be informed and prepared for changes
We hope this article helps inform you of coming changes affecting email marketing across the industry, especially regarding the decreasing reliability of email open tracking. By staying informed, and utilizing the broad spectrum of information available to you through DonorDock, you can modify your strategy to ensure you take these changes in stride, and implement new strategies for monitoring and growing relationships via email.
Further reading:
- How engagement statistics work in DonorDock
- A more technical breakdown of the future changes
- Announcement from Apple on new privacy features
