Your email marketing stats are about to become rubbish

An upcoming Apple privacy change is going to make your open rates unreliable. Here’s what you need to know, and do.

Open rates are one of the basic metrics that email marketers follow, but that number is about to go wonky. Apple’s update will allow iOS users to hide whether or not they open an email from email senders.

Apple considers this a privacy issue. Whether or not a person opens an email is that person’s business, and if he doesn’t want to share that information with the sender … shouldn’t he be able to choose that?

Apple thinks so, and a lot of Apple users will probably agree. The result will be that “open rates” for iOS users will become meaningless.

How “open rates” work

To understand what Apple is going to do, let’s look at open rates for a moment.

Let’s assume you sent an email last Friday, and your list included a prospect named Mary. When the email arrived in Mary’s browser, she saw the sender information, the subject line, and some preview text. She had a few options: she could delete it, mark it as spam, or open it. If she opened it, the tracking pixel in the email would notify your email service provider (ESP), which allows you to see open rates for the campaign.

How does that work?

When you type “krehbielgroup.com” into your web browser, your browser sends a request to my server at Bluehost, and my server replies with all the text, images, css, javascript, etc., that live on my home page. My server logs all those requests, so if I look at those logs, I can see some basic information about what kinds of requests have come to my server. I can see the IP address, the type of browser, and some other information contained in the request.

The same basic idea applies to an email (unless it’s plain text). Any images in your email have to be downloaded from a server somewhere. A couple decades ago, some clever fellow realized that these requests are a goldmine. The ESP can tag an image in the email with information about the recipient. Then, when the server gets a request to display that image, it’s a fair bet that the recipient has opened the email – otherwise, why did the email browser request the image?

(I tried my best to make that simple. If that’s not clear, give me a call and I’ll explain it.)

The whole scheme is a little tricky, right? How many users know they’re providing that information to the sender simply by opening the email?

Apple has decided to intervene and protect the recipient’s privacy. They’re going to throw a spanner in the works by downloading / caching all the images in the email. This means that your ESP will think that everyone (on an iOS device) has opened the email, because they’ve all requested that little tracking pixel.

This change will make open rates unreliable.

Let’s do a little simple math to make this clearer.

Assume your market is 50% Apple and 50% something else (Android, Windows). And let’s assume you have an average open rate of 20% across your market.
Once this change happens (assuming everyone on an iOS device opts in to this new program), your open rate will skyrocket to 60%.

Why? Let’s make it easy. You sent your email to 100 people, 50 of whom are on iOS. All 50 of those iOS recipients requested the tracking pixel – because of Apple’s update – which your ESP interprets as an open. 20 people actually opened the email, but we’ve already counted half of them. Add the other 10 to the 50, and your ESP will report that 60 of the recipients opened the email.

“Glorious. Marvelous. Our open rates have gone through the roof!” you say. Yes, they have, but only because the way you measure opens has been sabotaged. Your ESP says 60 people opened your email, but only 20 actually did.

What can you do?

Let’s back up a moment and consider why open rates are important in the first place.

As a general rule, open rates measure the value of the subject line, and click rates measure the value of the creative.

Think of it this way. You get an email with the subject “How to stop identity theft,” and … doggone it … you’ve been getting strange emails about applications for student loans, and you suspect somebody has stolen your identity.

You open the email because the subject line is relevant to you.

Then you read the copy, and it doesn’t do much for you. It doesn’t address your needs, so you don’t click the call to action. (“Save 20%!”)

This campaign gets a good open rate, but a poor click-through rate.

The clever email marketer looks at those numbers and realizes the subject line was on target, but the creative didn’t follow through, or didn’t provide the right incentive to get the recipient to click on the call to action.

Once this iOS update takes effect, your open rates aren’t going to mean much, which means you won’t be able to evaluate your subject lines the way you used to.

But … wait a minute. Maybe your ESP knows who’s on Apple and who’s not. Or maybe you can get that information by marrying your email stats with web profiles from your Customer Data Platform.

(If you’re curious about Customer Data Platforms, and what they can do for you, give me a call.)

Anyway, the point is that overall open rates are going to be useless, but if you can back out the iOS people, you can still measure your subject lines against the behavior of the Android and Windows recipients.

Here are two ways to approach that.

1. Call your ESP and see if they have the ability to separate the iOS “opens” from everybody else.
2. Import your email send data into your CDP and separate out the iOS people.

What’s the long game for Apple?

While Apple is making this change to protect the recipient’s privacy, there’s a possible long-term effect they might not have considered. By hiding the email open behavior of iOS users, email marketers will have to rely on the behavior of Android and Windows people.

Is there a difference? Do iOS people have different opening habits than non-iOS people? I’m not sure, but if they do, their preferences won’t be taken into account.

Is that a problem? I don’t know, but I suspect there will be some minor distortions as a result. Although it’s possible the other platforms will follow Apple’s lead, in which case open rates will go the way of dial-in connections, and you’ll lose a valuable tool for evaluating your subject lines.

Downstream effects

What other messes might the demise of the open rate cause?

Email marketers know about this change, and they’ll factor it into their reports, metrics and all the downstream conclusions.

But what about Harold in accounting? He built some fancy ROI calculators in the BI tool, and the board uses those reports in their annual meeting. I have a bad feeling that “open rate” is buried somewhere down in some of these calculators, and no one will know that the suddenly rosy results aren’t from renewed interest in the product, but from Apple messing with your stats.

What to do now

You have a short window before these changes take effect, so you should get a baseline right away.

Talk to your ESP and find out if you can separate iOS results. Going forward, you’ll have to rely on the open rates from your non-iOS recipients.

You should also prepare for the worst. Assume Android and Windows will eventually follow Apple’s lead, and open rates will become a thing of the past, which means you’ll no longer be able to rank subject lines by open rates and creative by clicks. You’ll have to look at the entire package, i.e., the subject line and the creative together will be measured against clicks.

I hope you found this post interesting and helpful. Please feel free to comment, and please pass it along to other people who may find it useful. And by all means give me a call if you have any questions about this email, or about anything in the marketing / technology / publishing space.

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Special thanks

This post came out of a discussion on Joanne Persico’s “Bold Minds Mixer,” which is a fun group that discusses issues related to publishing, events and other topics. Contact Joanne if you’re interested.

My friend Jeanne Jennings and her pals at “Only Influencers” put together a video on these changes by Apple. If you want more of the details, take a look. OI Pixelgeddon Webinar 2021 And if you have geeky questions about email, Jeanne is your gal.