It’s been about six months since Apple released the MPP to the public and went live last September. While we’ve learned a lot about this feature and how it works, email marketers also have a lot of questions.
What happened during that time? How many people choose MPP? How does it affect my metrics? How do Email Service Providers (ESPs) respond?
Marketers still concerned about privacy changes, and understandable. As more inbox providers release their own privacy-related features, it feels like we’re at the beginning of a trend that will continue to impact marketers for the foreseeable future.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s going on with MPP and how we’re responding to these changes in Campaign Monitor.
So, what is the state of the MPP?
A lot has happened since Apple released iOS 15 and Mail Privacy Protection in September 2021.
For those who don’t remember, Email Privacy Protection is a new feature in iOS15 that essentially does two things:
- Effectively disables open tracking, eliminating whether email marketers can reliably track
- Hides users’ IP addresses, eliminating email marketers’ ability to know their location
MPP disables open tracking by prefetching (or downloading) emails and email images to each device, regardless of whether the user opens and reads the message. The email image pixel used to track opens is included in this download, which means that the email will be considered “open” even if the user doesn’t open it.
After this feature was announced, the big questions for marketers were: HHow many people will choose to use this new feature? and How much will this affect open rates?
Six months later, we’re finally starting to figure these out.
How many people choose MPP?
It’s hard to get a raw number, but we do know 75% of Apple iPhone owners Currently using iOS 15, which, approximately 97% have adopted MPP.
As you can imagine, this already accounts for a large percentage of people. Although we don’t know the exact number, SparkPost estimates 40-50% of all emails opened now come from MPP.
Is MPP starting to affect open rates?
really.If nearly half of all open emails come from MPPs, we can be sure that not all of them are Actually Open these emails.in our 2022 Email Marketing Benchmark Reportyou can see that the open rate has been steadily increasing since the MPP was released.
Judging from the data, there was a slight rebound when Apple released the iOS 15 developer beta. And then there’s the public beta. Then, when the MPP is released to the public, the open rate rises sharply and continuously.
These metrics confirm that many email marketers (include us) Speculation – Open rates have become less reliable.
How we respond on Campaign Monitor
As an email service provider, we know that people like you rely on Campaign Monitor not only to send great emails, but to analyze your campaigns and understand what’s working. With that in mind, we’ve made some changes to our platform to help you navigate this new privacy-centric world.
Updated Traffic Metrics
Given the impact of MPP on open interest rates, Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) becomes less reliable. As a result, we’ve updated the “Clicks” metric on the summary page to show CTR instead of CTOR.
You can still view CTOR by selecting the info icon. CTOR can also be found in our detailed reports, including opinion and Compare campaigns.
Minimize the impact of unreliable location data
When we suspect a subscriber has a location, we no longer log it Influenced by Apple MPP. This means you may see more subscribers whose last known location is “unknown”, however, this will ensure that inaccurate location data doesn’t affect things like worldview, time zone sendor campaign report.
Apple Privacy Categories in Email Client Usage Report
This Email Client Usage Report (Campaign and Journey Emails) gives you a breakdown of the different clients and devices recipients use to view your emails. We added a new category, Apple Mail (Privacy Protection), to the section of the report that lets you know the Apple Mail Privacy recipients who opened your email. This new category applies to emails sent after February 2022.
Be careful – there’s more
As we said, user privacy is an ongoing trend.and Mail and Duck Duck Go Roll out their own privacy features, and we can expect more inbox providers to release privacy-focused features in the near future.
But don’t worry. Campaign Monitor is watching all this closely. We’ll keep you informed about what we’ve learned and the changes we’ve made to the platform to help you navigate this evolving privacy landscape.
