The new Apple’s iOS 15 privacy features like the Mail Privacy Protection, will impact how HubSpot users approach their email marketing campaigns. Although these updates are a positive step for customer privacy, they do impact a company’s ability to provide personalized content to its audience.
Don't worry! This is not the end of email marketing. If you’re using HubSpot’s email marketing tools, here’s what you need to know to embrace the change to your business advantage, as a HubSpot user.
What is changing with Apple iOS 15?
The most significant changes relate toApple's Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection update, and their new Hide My Email feature.
Mail privacy protection
Users who opt-in, get their IP addresses hidden — preventing senders from linking it to other online activity, tracking email opens, or knowing a user’s location. It’s available for free to anyone running the Mail App on an iOS 15 device, while Macbook users can access these features when macOS Monterey launches later this year.
Hide my Email feature
Users with an iCloud+ subscription can choose to enable Hide My Email. This cloaks email addresses and allows users to furnish websites with fake ones. Your promotional emails may still find their way into your audience’s inbox, but you’ll not see their true address unless they share it explicitly.
What this means for your HubSpot email marketing
If you’re developing your email marketing strategy you’ll need to rethink how you track the success of your campaigns (or test them). Traditionally, open rates indicate whether or not your email subject lines are engaging, whether you’ve sent your email at the right time of day and whether your audience finds your content valuable.
The iOS 15 update will throw out your data in some of the following ways:
- Inflated email open rates as Apple effectively opens emails on behalf of the users that opt-in, by loading tracking pixels on their behalf.
- Inflated data sets, as one person’s activity, may be spread across multiple contact records. Hide My Email allows users to operate under fake, random email addresses — risking one person’s activity reading as a group’s.
- Less effective IP-reliant tactics. Without knowing a contact’s IP address, you’re unable to time your emails relevantly, risking dropping your latest content into their inbox… in the middle of the night.
How to minimize the impact and continue to skyrocket your email marketing
Thankfully, forewarned is forearmed. With the iOS updates, users have even more power to choose how, and when they engage with brands. This makes focusing on producing great content and delivering engaging experiences doubly important.
It’s also helpful to remember that not everyone uses Apple. In fact, Apple Mail and Apple mobile devices make up just 35% of the global email provider market share. So it’s worth checking which email clients your readers are using, in your HubSpot email reports. This will help you adjust your success metrics, as you’ll know how much of your database is affected.
Different features in HubSpot, like the Email Tracking tool, rely on email open tracking — establishing baselines with each of them will help you measure the impact of these iOS 15 changes, and ensure you evolve your strategy intelligently.
Further, you could drive decisions with different data. For example, instead of using open rates (which are now unreliable), you could use click and reply data.
Stay ahead of the changing privacy landscape
It’s tough staying up to date with constantly evolving privacy regulations. Changes are coming in fast, and they can be highly technical to understand or implement with compliance. But that’s what we’re here for: our team of HubSpot experts stays at the forefront of important changes so that achieving your business goals gets easier, not more complex.
Reach out to us with any questions about the Apple iOS 15 privacy update and how it might affect your marketing efforts.