Apple just released iOS 15 and it brought some major changes to email marketing and the most commonly used metric to measure its effectiveness – open rate.
The question now is how will the latest update affect cold email and Woodpecker users? See what’s changing and how it can potentially impact your cold email campaigns.
How iOS 15 will impact cold email marketing?
The open rate is one of the most widely-used metrics to measure your email marketing effectiveness, and it just got hit in a big way.
Apple users are now able to:
- Turn off open tracking
- Hide their IP addresses
- Hide their email address
In a short way: you have to expect losing open rate metric and IP data for those prospects who use iOS emails. If you depend on deliverability and open rate as a way of measuring engagement, you will have to change your strategy.
Email marketers should now be aware of three key changes that will affect their ability to serve subscribers:
- Mail privacy protection eliminates the accuracy in tracking open rates.
- Private relay hides the user’s IP address while browsing online.
- Email allows users to mask real emails with fake ones.
How does this affect your Woodpecker account?
There are still many unknowns with iOS 15, but according to Ania, our deliverability expert, there’s no need to panic.
Here’s what we know: while 60% of consumers access emails via a mobile device, only about 33% of all emails opened in the US come from an iPhone. Of those, a certain percentage will not opt into Mail Privacy Protection (because their address book may contain sensitive information like credit card numbers or bank account passwords). We can work with this.
Secondly: assuming that the new Apple policy opens images or tracking pixels within the first 10 seconds of message delivery, the number of opens is not counted until the user opens the message.
From the user’s perspective, nothing changes, and iOs15 update has no negative impact on the use of our application.
What do you need to do next?
Cold emailing is a field that is constantly evolving (and far from dying out). So take a deep breath and focus on things you can actually do to make your campaigns work.
Here are some tips you can apply to your campaign workflow:
- A/B testing – experiment on different subject lines and message content you launch to prospects that are not iOS users, so you can confirm which one will perform better.
- Prospect List Hygiene – it’s important that you clean out your inactive contacts list now, since this will affect the open rates of future mailing campaigns.
- Add more channels to your outreach – like LinkedIn or SMS strategy. More touch points with your audience means booking more meetings, closing more deals and building a meaningful relationship quicker.
- Track clicks – if you really want to focus on measuring engagement, add links to your campaign.
Conclusion
Email is a great marketing strategy and still one of the best ways to communicate with your audience – that’s not going to change. Your goal is to add value with your campaigns and get more creative so you can still get great results.