From a reporting and campaign standpoint a lot of things will be effected
Apple servers will be opening the emails regardless or not of whether the user opens the emails. This will affect any real-time data or offers/personalisation
Makes Geolaction impossible.
Makes send time optimisation much harder.
Makes A/B tests harder to run. Historical data wil be different because the goalposts have been moved.
Apple mail is responsible for more than 46% of opens in 2020 according to Litmus data. This could be higher or lower for any given email listl It all depends on how many apple mail users you have subscribed. If your IOS share on Analytics is high then expect a bigger potential impact. Of course not all users of IOS will be using Apple Mail but the majority do from what we know.
Makes focusing on List Hygiene a priority so you dont have dead email addresses impacting on your results.
Audit your email campaign or content in your emails that rely on open rates because these will need to be re-evaluated!
You will need to eliminate any dependencies on open rate and move forward
Your overall strategy won't change. Personalisation and a healthy one on one relationship will still be important.
Focus on allowing your subscriber to have control of your relationship with them.
Strategically this change could shift marketing to have more of a focus on omnichannel marketing. highlighting the importance of overall engagement through any channel rather than just engagement through email. Offline purchases, SMS engagement, account activity, website visits, mobile app activity. All of these other data points can help to build a picture of which campaigns and initiatives are having the greatest positive effect.
What can you do?
Re- establish the new norms and benchmark levels for Open rate when the changes come about. Expect it to inflate significantly as a portion of your lists programes audience have their data fogged by Apples changes.
Establish how many of your subscribers are using Apple mail now so you can have an idea of the impact this change will bring.
Review your whole automated nurture campaigns. You are going to need to adjust anything in that which triggers or leverages on Open rates. These changes wont just change your base level Open rate but will also dramatically adjust click to open rate.
Focus on building segemnts of users who you know are not using apple devices. These could enable you to continue with Open rate testing
Adjust Focus on metrics outside of open rate. Click through rate and conversion rates wont be effected by these changes.
Plan to educate internally on these changes to help everyone understand what has shifted. You will need to reset expectations. Better to do this before the change happens rather than after the effect. It will save a lot of unnecessary expenditure of energy!
Use Cross channel data which isnt effected. SMS, Push notification, Video voice, in app messageing , sales calls, loyalty programes.
How about micro polls to see if people actually like the email? Simple thumbs up thumbs down polls can be very useful.
Think of this not so much as loosing the fun and learning of A/B testing subject lines but as an opportunity to embrace metrics that show deeper customer engagement.
Open rate wasnt really that great a metric when you think about it. There is so much more an email marketer can do to engage their users.
We have to go back to why marketers wanted to know the open rate in the first place!? It was a useful engagement metric. But there are other better ones if we think about it. Its certainly not a sure fire formula for making a sale! or even an indicator that the user liked the email. I open plenty of emails I have absolutely no interest in. Perhaps this opens up the opportunity to just work smarter!
It may even help sales teams not to chase up every email open. Thats certainly a team you will want to educate on these changes if opening of a sales email is b
Think of this not so much as loosing the fun and learning of A/B testing subject lines but as an opportunity to embrace metrics that show deeper customer engagement.
Open rate wasnt really that great a metric when you think about it. There is so much more an email marketer can do to engage their users.
We have to go back to why marketers wanted to know the open rate in the first place!? It was a useful engagement metric. But there are other better ones if we think about it. Its certainly not a sure fire formula for making a sale! or even an indicator that the user liked the email. I open plenty of emails I have absolutely no interest in. Perhaps this opens up the opportunity to just work
smarter!
It may even help sales teams not to chase up every email open. Thats certainly a team you will want to educate on these changes if opening of a sales email is being used to identify who the hot leads in the funnel are.