In the fourth blog post in the series Demystifying Delivery Rates, we will learn about Apple’s email privacy protection features and their impact on email delivery rates.To learn about the rest of this series, check out our post Strengthen your email marketing, Robot click, with Bimi.
The peak email marketing season of 2021 is approaching. Holiday decorations are on the rise, and just as quickly, email marketers are sending Black Friday products to their subscribers.
As at this time of the year, global email traffic will increase in the coming weeks. With this, mailbox providers will face the pressure of a surge in the number of management.
For email marketers, this can be a stressful time, and Apple’s email privacy protection (MPP) adds additional complexity. Not knowing the full impact of this feature on email deliverability may cause serious concerns for email senders.
But not afraid Fear is the soul killer! In this article, we will study the email ecosystem, changes in MPP, and factors that affect your delivery rate this holiday season.
A quick overview of the email ecosystem
In order to win the very competitive inbox game (especially at this time of the year), we need to understand the rules of email and other players in the game.
For simplicity, we will consider four main players.
- sender: The person or organization sending the email
- Email Service Provider (ESP): A service used to send emails, such as Campaign Monitor
- Mailbox provider (MBP): A service that provides mailboxes for individuals or organizations to receive their emails, such as Gmail or Yahoo
- subscriber: The individual who received the email
Subscriber’s power
In October 2021, the average exceeds 90 billion spam emails It is sent every day. MBP is responsible for protecting its users and reducing the risk of unwanted and unsafe emails entering the inbox. This is why MBP uses strict anti-spam filters to protect its users.
MBP relies on their users and how they interact with emails to train their anti-spam filters on how to handle future emails from the same sender. In fact, user engagement and sender reputation are the factors that have the greatest impact on inbox placement.
The more a subscriber interacts with and participates in an email—MBP refers to this as a “positive signal”—the email from that sender will enter the inbox. The lower the audience’s participation in emails from specific senders, the more likely they are to filter these emails into spam folders (or block them altogether).
These positive and negative signals help build your domain’s sender reputation. A domain can also have different reputations on different MBPs. This means that Gmail’s score may be slightly different from Yahoo, so your domain’s sender reputation may be slightly different. It is not a single, universal score, but a combination of many factors.
In other words, because engagement is the most important factor in measuring deliverability, marketers must put user engagement and subscriber experience at the forefront and center of their marketing strategies.
It’s also important—especially in this season of mass-transmitting—to monitor your Delivery and participation indicators Periodically for each MBP. This way, you’ll know if you’re having trouble accessing any particular inbox.
How does iOS 15 affect the delivery rate of emails?
In September 2021, Apple released iOS 15 to the public, and with it came a new privacy feature called Email privacy protection.
we have already Learn more about MPP here, But a quick summary of the function is this:
MPP obscures the ability of senders to track open rates, which means that the future of open rates and the way in which this metric is used to measure success is changing in real time.
This feature caused a huge sensation in the email world (understandably!). Since the announcement earlier in the summer, marketers have been preparing for MPP and its impact on email.
In other words, we are still understanding how deep the impact of this feature will be. Although iOS 15 has been out for a few months, the adoption rate is still relatively low.
That being the case, it is difficult to predict what impact (if any) MPP will have on this holiday. Even if the adoption rate is higher, it is important to remember that just because users choose to join MPP does not mean that MBP will treat incoming emails differently. In a real sense, the delivery capability has not changed with the release of Apple Mail Privacy Protection.
However, it means that when monitoring delivery and engagement metrics, you must change the way you view engagement.
MBP still uses the same signal to determine how to filter incoming emails. The sender still needs to follow the email rules and follow best practices. In order to maintain the best delivery capacity this holiday season, please make sure you do the following:
- Get a clear opt-in when collecting lists. Sending to a fully opt-in list means higher participation. In turn, this shows MBP more active user activity.
- Manage and segment your list. Sending to active subscribers means more engagement and more inbox placement. Sending to an old and unused list means lower open rates, higher bounce rates, and more spam complaints-all of which are negative signs for MBP.
- Pay attention to list hygiene. The permission to send emails is not an evergreen tree, and monitoring list hygiene is an ongoing process. If the participation metrics for a subset of the list are not good, consider trying to re-engage that particular group. If this doesn’t work, please feel free to say goodbye to the dormant contact completely.
wrap up
The sender still has time to review their marketing plan and prepare for the holiday. Even if your vacation planning has begun, it is still not too late to follow these deliverability best practices.
Be sure to check our The ultimate guide to holiday email marketing in 2021 as well as. It is full of useful tricks for marketers who will increase email output in the next few months.
And, as always, make sure to interact with your audience in an honest, respectful, and clear communication style. By doing these things, you can get through this season smoothly.
