You can no longer rely on your email open rates as a marketing metric
Since Apple’s iOS 15 update in September 2021, any email opened using an Apple mail software (known as a ‘client’) will be pre-opened by Apple, giving any marketeers false positives.
About 25%-50% of users use an Apple mail software to open their emails (even if they are using Gmail or Outlook to send/receive their mails).
What can you do about it?
You need to identify who is and who isn’t using Apple software to open your mails. This can be achieved using the Echo React module of the Delivery Defender Software, which can add a pixel to every mail that goes out.
Now you can determine who the Apple people are. You can still rely on the open rates for the other people, but for the Apple users, we are going to have to rely on something a bit deeper, like a click, to know if they are actually engaging with the emails or not.
This is not the same as the ‘Deliverability.’ Deliverability refers to making sure that our email reputation with the servers is good; that Hotmail, AOL, Gmail will be happy to deliver our emails because they know that we are not spammers. It comes down to authentication, that is, only emailing people that have engaged within 90 days and making sure that our content/subject line isn’t spammy.
Adrian Savage has developed the Deliverability Dashboard and the Deliverability Defender. These serve to tag/isolate people, increasing the chances of emails to make their way into their inboxes. (Check out “The Science of Getting into the Inbox” for more information on this.) We can also find this in our Keap applications, and Active Campaign if you’ve got it. This software can tell us if people have engaged in a 0 – 90 day and beyond period. ‘Domain Tagging’ is another tool that can help us to know if we have a compliance problem with Microsoft servers. These are all very valuable mechanisms for those of you who use email marketing as part of your marketing strategy.
Head over to the Delivery Dashboard if you would you like to know more about about this ‘pixel’ that can go onto your emails, which will help identify who is opening on Apple devices.
Do you need more information about ‘Domain Tagging,’ or ‘Engagement Tagging,’ or setting up ‘Authentication’ to ensure servers can identify you as a ‘non-spammer’? Get in touch.
