How HubSpot's Email Team is Responding to iOS 15
By jpritikin@hubspot.com (Jordan Pritikin)
As email marketers, one of the key metrics we use to determine if our audience is actually reading our content is the open rate.
Tracking email opens allows us to determine whether our subject lines are resonating with our audience. If we can’t get them to open an email, we can’t get them to click and move further along the buyer’s journey.
With the rollout of Apple iOS 15’s new privacy protection features, our open rates are in jeopardy. But is that a bad thing?
Let’s start with some information about how this new feature will work.
How Apple’s Email Privacy Protection Feature Works
After updating an iOS device to iOS 15, upon opening the Apple Mail app you will see a popup asking whether you’d like to “Protect Mail activity.”
If you select the “Protect Mail activity” option, Apple will first route your emails through a proxy server to pre-load message content, including tracking pixels, before it makes it to your inbox.
What does that mean for you?
According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”
What does this mean for email marketers?
Mail privacy protection affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device, no matter which email service is used such as Gmail or a work address. However, this will not affect other email apps used on Apple devices like the Gmail app on an iPhone for example.
If you’re an email marketer, you might still be wondering how this change will impact your strategy. To help, we decided to highlight the steps our email team is taking to adjust our strategy and process around these email privacy protection features.
Here are a few of the steps we’re taking and we encourage you to join us
How HubSpot Email Marketers Are Responding to iOS 15
1. Take stock of current processes.
Before Apple’s iOS 15 changes went live, we audited all of our existing email programs.
To begin, we wanted to understand the potential impact this change was going to have on the business. Using HubSpot’s email reporting tools we were able to assess the portion of our database that uses Apple Mail clients. Understanding this number is important to gauge how big of an impact these IOS changes will have on our ability to see accurate email performance data moving forward.
Next, we documented which subject lines resonate best with each of our personas.
While we follow email subject line best practices, as most email marketers know that only gets you so far. Things like character count and action-oriented language are only guardrails used to guide our subject line writing. From there we’ve experimented heavily with language, structure, and yes — even emojis — to find what resonates with each of our personas.
This documentation provides my team with a …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
