What did Apple announce?
Apple announced that it will continue its leadership in the space of consumer privacy with two major changes as it relates specifically to the data you can collect from email campaigns.
IP address information will become hidden within Apple Mail, Safari, and iCloud. This will limit the ability to deliver personalized content that relies on IP such as weather and location.
Tracking pixels within Apple Mail will no longer be allowed. This will impact the ability to track email opens.
When will this go into effect?
The changes are slated to happen in the fall to coincide with its iOS 15 updates. Exact date TBD.
What users are impacted?
Only users of Apple Mail accessed through the native app will be impacted by this current update.
What % of users will this impact?
According to Litmus Apple Mail accounts for about 13% of the email client market.
Will this impact my ability to build audiences and target using Tinyclues?
The answer is no. The beauty of Tinyclues is that we use many signals both explicit and more importantly implicit found within your 1st-party data. 1st-party data is now more important than ever, and we can still ingest and optimize off of the data you send us.
Since we can identify the implicit signals that other technology misses to predict buying intent, our model will still work just as effectively even without the ability to use open rate as a signal. Our AI will still work just the same and the announcement will have no negative impact on your ability to drive revenue through our platform.
But does Tinyclues use open rate to optimize?
Tinyclues does take open rate into account as a signal, but our model has found that it isn’t even the strongest predictor of intent to buy. The implicit signals that our AI is designed to identify are much stronger predictors of buying intent.
What if we are using open rate as an outcome to optimize towards?
You may have to rethink the outcomes you are optimizing towards. There is still some time before the changes go into effect and it doesn’t impact that entire email client market. However, we do anticipate that other email clients will react with similar privacy initiatives.
We recommend that you start thinking about building a strategy that goes beyond open rate and looks at metrics more closely tied to revenue. This could include CTR or better yet conversions. These are outcomes that Tinyclues is designed to optimize towards.
If you think you will need to evolve optimization strategy, your Tinyclues Customer Success Manager would be happy to work with you to make sure you are future proofing your CRM strategy and are fully ready when these changes take place.