It’s been eight months since Apple disrupted the email marketing world by including a new Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature in its iOS15 update. Suddenly, open rate, a core metric for evaluating email performance, was launched on a path toward becoming an obsolete KPI.
Why is it such a big deal? According to Litmus Email Analytics, devices with Apple MPP had just over a 50% share of the email client market. The closest competitor is Gmail at just below 30%.
All of those email marketers who earlier this year were boasting to their bosses about their great open rates have had to gently begin walking back their claims of brilliance.
Brad Gurley at MessageGears reports that “the percentage of opens generated by iOS 15 appears to have stabilized for now, currently representing 60-70% of all opens.” He says “some senders in our dataset have seen 50% or less of their opens coming from iOS 15 devices thus far, while a few others saw closer to 90%.”
So what does this mean for you?
1. Be sure you are closely tracking the performance of every email you send. Feel free to reach out if you’re needing an easy-to-maintain template tracking chart for your team. This will allow you to easily see how your open rates have changed over the past eight months.
2. Every email you send should have a clickable action for people to complete. You will need them to click on a link for you to have an accurate measure of your email performance.
3. You should be relying even more heavily on clickthrough rate and action/conversion rate along with any action-specific metric to gauge the performance of your email. Yes, keep tracking open rate, but realize that its accuracy has been compromised.
Rubenstein Impact Group, LLC helps nonprofit organizations and companies drive greater engagement with their audiences - volunteers, members, employees, customers and partners - to deepen relationships, run successful campaigns and strengthen their brand.