If recent iOS changes have made your life as an e-commerce owner or a marketer more difficult, then this post is for you.

If recent iOS changes have made your life as an e-commerce owner or a marketer more difficult, then this post is for you.

The bad news is that there’s, unfortunately, another tsunami wave coming this fall.

So, what do you need to know about iOS 15?

The changes introduced by iOS 14 have already seriously disrupted the marketing landscape.

iOS 15 will be no different, but it’ll impact email marketing exclusively.

Most of its new features will focus on privacy, data tracking, and user security.

Two features in particular: “Mail Privacy Protection” and “Hide My Email”, will make the lives of many online business owners harder.

Specifically, it’s going to impact activities such as:

- Blocking the sender’s ability to track opens and forwards

- Optimizing list health by removing unengaged contacts

- Split testing your campaigns

- Targeting re-engagement campaigns

- Tracking IP addresses that determine physical location

- Respecting privacy by identifying and deleting

unengaged contacts

- Triggering sequential emails in an automated nurture

flow

- Optimizing send time to maximize open rates

- Real-time personalization

By default, iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection is not enabled. Users have to opt in. Now, although the feature to hide an email address has been introduced before, Apple will soon be promoting it more so that increasing numbers of users are aware of this feature.

Inevitably, this will make lots of people choose it as their default.

And no wonder.

It’s a great “innovation” for individual users...not so great for marketers and e-commerce stores relying heavily on that channel.

On the flip side, this change creates an opportunity to improve your emails.

Better privacy for consumers could require marketers to do a better job of understanding and segmenting subscribers.

How?

The main issue with the new update is that marketers won’t be able to tell if someone with an iOS device has opened an email or not.

The reason for that is that an invisible tracking spy pixel added by Email Software Providers such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp or Active Campaign will not be loaded anymore.

And by the way, this isn’t a novelty because anyone can already do this in just about any email client. You just need to turn off loading images automatically.

As of now, opens are primarily a way to measure list health and subscriber activity.

They also help segment your list based on the engagement.

Access to open metric also helps clean your list of all the disengaged users. This improves your domain reputation, and a higher domain reputation leads to higher deliverability.

However, the new policy will force us to look at a click rate instead of an open rate to evaluate the performance of an email.

We can choose to look at it as an opportunity for a few reasons:

- Clicks and conversions are better at measuring

subscriber value

- Clicks are better for subject line optimization

- They are more accurate than opens

What To Do To Prepare Ahead Of Time

In the months to come, you should find new benchmarks of healthy engagement that are not based on open rates.

An overall better subscriber experience should compensate for the loss of visibility of specific metrics.

So our advice is to test open rates before this fall. Hide My Email will likely impact deliverability. Keep an eye on those rates and make sure your ESP removes hard bounces promptly.

Create before and after benchmarks for:

- Subject lines

- Pre-headers

- Time of day

- Day of week

- “From” lines

Another opportunity the new policy creates focuses on channels beyond email marketing, such as SMS, using push notifications and social channels.

SMS, for example, offers many ways to measure user engagement. You can track Open Rates, CTRs, Conversion Rate, Return On Investment, Earning Per Message, and Unsubscribe Rate.

It is important here to use UTM links within every text. This is particularly helpful for Google Analytics to eliminate the overlap between SMS and email.

Like email, SMS also lets you segment your subscribers based on their stage in the customer journey: Subscriber, Purchaser, Clicker, Instagram Follower.

Based on that you can send them more personalized and effective messages.

You can also A/B test your messages to find out which CTA works best; you can test SMS vs MMS or the best time of the day to send a message.

To Panic Or Not To Panic, That is The Question

The answer is obviously to keep cool! As it’s been since ancient times, marketers will always find a way to adapt to the new rules.

Research has shown that most consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience. Buyers also expect to receive personalized and relevant content as part of their trust in your brand.

So the bottom line is that it may not be as bad as we might think.

At the same time, it could be much worse, too, LOL.

So the best bet is just to do whatever it takes to prepare and mitigate the risks. Then, optionally, you can send some prayers to Steve, hoping that his spirit will haunt the new CEO and bring Apple back on the right track.

We have no data though, whether this method works or not.