Apple’s Mail Privacy Changes Mean Adjustments to Your Franchise Lead Generation Email and CRM Processes and Metrics
June 29, 2022 – Since the introduction of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features with the September 21, 2022 release of iOS 15, email marketers have been scrambling to adjust their marketing processes and expectations to the changes. While a comprehensive response is beyond the scope of this article, we are attempting a high-level summary for franchise sales teams that view email as an essential tool for initial contact and drip email campaigns to franchise prospects.
Note that these changes are in addition to Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency” and “silence unknown callers” options which have significant impact on franchise lead generation and contact rates, while contributing to soaring Apple ad revenues.
The issue is widespread – the percentage of email users employing Apple MPP now exceeds 50% according to email platform provider Litmus. As an example, 44.7% of our own Franchise Insights subscriber list used the MPP feature as of May 2022.
When users opt in to the MPP feature (offered on first use of the Apple email app after iOS update), mail sent to the account is automatically opened by Apple’s servers, and IP address tracking may be blocked if that option is selected. When a user opts in and uses Apple’s mobile email app (the default on iPhones), all incoming email is affected. Further, many users tie their Gmail or other email account to their Apple mail app even though they use the Gmail app, which means they can also be affected.
The net effect is that the MPP feature impacts Apple Mail app users the most, but all email clients to some extent. This can be seen by comparing email client share for Franchise Insights subscribers before (blue bars) and after (red bars) the iOS 15 release.
What does this mean? Here are some high-level considerations.
Open rates will be overstated in email metrics, and emails flagged as “opened” in CRM systems are less reliable. Some email marketing platforms and CRM providers may be able to detect and remove these “false positive” opens from “Privacy Protected” emails which means that true opens would be higher (by the number of Apple email users who actually open the email). In summary, open rates and flags are no longer reliable.
If you are sending drip emails to previous “opens”, you risk emailing to a large percentage of folks who did not actually open. Emailing to the user’s time zone will be less accurate by the percentage of users who select the location blocking (via IP address) feature.
If you employ best practices and do A/B testing of email subject lines and content, your results will be skewed by the false positive “opens.” This can be overcome by including only emails NOT privacy protected, if your email platform can detect them.
On the other hand, “clicks”, forms filled out, and web page visits are still reliable success metrics that should not be affected by Apple’s changes. Replacing metrics and process steps based on “opens” with these actions is recommended.
As promised, this is a difficult topic to address in a short article. The best advice would be to work with your email and/or CRM platform provider about how to adjust your practices to achieve the best results given these changes.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Tuesday, June 28th, 2022.