Ever since the first ping that sang “You got mail,” email marketing has been a powerful tool for marketers and small businesses. Through this soft-sell marketing technique, senders can keep their targeted audience up-to-date on new products and services, as well as assist with lead generation, brand awareness and customer relationship building. It’s also long been an affordable marketing option, and a trackable one – marketers can see the open rate of their emails and the demographics of the recipient. 

However, when Apple launched the iOS 15 update in September, that changed significantly, as the update introduces several major changes to email in light of Apple’s new focus on data privacy. Here’s what marketers need to know. 

1.    Your open rates will no longer be accurate

Since the iOS update, have you noticed that your email marketing open rates have skyrocketed? Unfortunately, that’s because the rates are no longer counted as they were prior to the update. Before the update, an open rate was counted when an image embedded in an email code was loaded after an email was actually opened. But now with a new mail privacy protection feature, that image and code is pre-loaded when an email is simply received, leaving marketers in the dark to wonder which of their recipients actually opened the email. 

2.    IP addresses will be hidden, making it difficult to geographically target customers

The new update prompts users to choose to hide their IP address and load their content privately, a choice that many users will likely accept. Unfortunately, without knowing users’ IP addresses, there’s no way to know where they are physically located. Instead, marketers will need to find other ways to discovers users’ locations, such as by asking for it in sign-up forms and other means that require customer participation. 

3.    You could be labeled as a ‘spammer’

With the update, users will be able to hide their real email addresses when corresponding with a business, such as through a form-fill. A fake email address will be sent to the business instead, but this could cause problems for a business down the line. A fake email address is an inactive one, and the more inactive email addresses a business interacts with, the more likely it is that a mail system labels it as spam. Later, even active users may not see the emails in their main inboxes. Businesses will need to frequently clean their subscriber list to avoid this. 

Next steps

With the new Apple iOS 15 update and focus on data privacy, the future of email marketing, once a beloved tool for businesses, can seem frightening. However, with the right marketing team behind you, you can work around these issues and continue to reach your customers in meaningful ways, just as you always have. 

Mint Zebra offers email marketing strategies to engage customer bases despite these recent changes. To date, we’ve helped countless businesses create comprehensive marketing strategies to drive strategic growth. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help. To share these tips with your followers, click the ‘Share’ social icons below.