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Three things are inevitable in life: death, taxes, and change. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) falls into that third category. For email marketers, that means we'll have to adapt (again), but there are some things we can do now to prepare and adapt.
One way is to use the clients and devices that continue to track and report opens as a proxy for open rate performance and A/B testing. In other words, identify real opens.
In just three steps, Litmus helps you create a reliable email open audience to counteract the effects of MPP and any future unexpected email client changes.
1. Determine how many subscribers use Apple Mail
Every time you pull a metric, you're measuring a point in time. The number of Apple Mail users will change over time, but knowing how many of your subscribers currently use Apple Mail will help you better estimate the impact MPP will have on your email programs.
If you have access to Litmus Email Analytics, you can create a new tracking code or leverage previous tracking codes to see what percentage of your subscribers use Apple Mail to open emails.
Your Analytics overview shows total opens, reliable opens, and MPP-impacted opens for Litmus tracking codes active in the last 30 days, as well as a breakdown of Apple light and dark mode usage, total percentage of MPP-impacted opens by month, and your top 5 email clients for the last 30 days.
Don't have email analytics? Litmus' Email Client Market Share provides a monthly evaluation of the most popular email clients and devices based on millions of opens around the world. This gives you a good, general idea of what your email audience might look like. Note: Apple Mail has the largest share.
In any case, you should pay special attention to the data for Apple iPhone, Apple Mail, And Apple iPad– the mobile, desktop and tablet versions of Apple Mail.
2. Create a list of non-Apple subscribers
Device identification analysis allows you to build subscriber lists for third-party email clients. If you are a Litmus Plus or Enterprise customer, you can do this with Email Analytics.
In the Analytics Dashboard, select Tracking Code Manager from the left navigation. Then select the tracking code of any email you want to use to build your list. We recommend starting with a code that the majority of your active subscribers have received (for example, a newsletter) so that it is more representative of your overall email audience.
Your tracking code's analytics report shows you similar content to your analytics overview, but focuses on the results of a specific tracking code.
Go to the left menu and select export. The export page offers several options. For this report, use the first option: Data at individual levelClick on the Generate CSV export to start the export. Select the user who should receive the CSV report and then select Export my tracking data.
Please note: This file contains very detailed information and can contain millions of rows of records, resulting in a large file size.
Your exported report will include data such as mail client, rendering engine, and read seconds. Use the mail_client column to find users who don't use Apple Mail. You can sort and filter to create a new dataset.
3. Import into your email platform
Import your list of non-Apple Mail users into your email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform (MAP) to create custom open lists for non-Apple users. Use the custom_id in the report to match the data to the right people in your database based on their unique identifier in your email sending tool (for example, this would be the Lead ID in Marketo).
Be sure to mark or label this list so you can easily find and reference it later.
And that's it! Now you have a reliable audience of opens that you can use to benchmark your program and drive your email marketing campaigns – even in the age of Mail Privacy Protection.
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Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
