mpp
On April 4, 2022, the Certified Senders Alliance invited Yahoo’s Marcel Becker and yours truly (Al Iverson) of Spam Resource to “embark upon a discussion of domain reputation” where we also talk in length about open tracking, how it wasn’t that accurate to begin with (bots mostly talking to bots) but now, with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), it’s even less accurate than before. That doesn’t mean you should never rely on open data to make an informed decision about an audience segment — but it does mean that you should never trust an “open” even tracked at the subscriber level, when making any sort of decision on what to do with an individual subscriber. Meaning, don’t use opens as part of your drip campaign logic to decide who gets what email — it won’t be accurate. But, for myself, I’ll continue to say that there’s a place for open
Over on the Oracle Blog, Clint Kaiser, Daniel Deneweth, Jason Witt note that we’re at the one year anniversary of the launch of the Apple Mail Privacy Protection functionality. How did it impact marketers? How does it impact analytics, email deliverability, live content, and email design? The smart gentlemen from Oracle answer these questions and more … read it all here.
More fun, more webinars, more info, all about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, aka MPP!If you’re curious about the current state of Apple MPP and how it impacts marketers, my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I presented a live webinar on this very topic recently. Head on over to the Kickbox blog where you can read a recap of the webinar and view the webinar recording.
Here’s a great article from Sella Yoffe over on the Webbula blog, where he provides an overview of Apple’s “Hide my Email” functionality and helps explain the challenges this functionality presents to email marketers: Apple Hide My Email – A Burner Phone for Email: How Does Apple Hide My Email Affect Email Marketers.Want to learn more about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)? Don’t forget to check out the Apple MPP section here on Spam Resource. And stay tuned for a recap and recording link for the recent Apple MPP webinar I co-presented! Coming soon.
If you haven’t figured it out just yet, I’m trying to do webinars more often nowadays, because it’s a very useful way to share information, and people always seem to be interested in learning more about deliverability. The topic this time around is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). You know, that thing screwing up the open detection pixel your email service provider platform uses to help you
Here’s a quick and simple post where I take a moment to share with you the stats from my Spam Resource email newsletter sends — you might have already seen this in the CSA webinar I just did with Marcel Becker from Yahoo. But if not, here you go! As you can see courtesy of the pac-man-like thing above (please don’t sue me, whoever owns pac-man), just a hair under 18% of my tracked opens seem to fall into the Apple MPP category, based on the referrer. (I know that going off of referrer alone is slightly inaccurate, but that’s the easy way to do it and I’m lazy.) This “about 18%” number seems to be pretty static from week-to-week of late. The net here is that my data is a lot different than the data from Sparkpost and others. Their data isn’t wrong — indeed, Sparkpost’s data is a lot more…
Okay, they’re not really opens. They’re proxy-based, false positive pre-loaded opens. Don’t think of them as opens. Think of them as something you want to get out of the way so as to not inflate your campaign tracking. I know, I know… Apple is not the only one proxying opens today. But they’re the big one — over the past few weeks, Apple MPP “opens” have been 25-30% of my opens tracked for each Spam Resource newsletter. And if you’re a typical B2C sender, your percentage is likely even higher.So let’s say you run an email sending platform and you want to give users an option to suppress these opens from tracking. How do you do that?Look for any open that has the very generic referrer of “Mozilla/5.0” with nothing else. This is probably low effort, but keep in mind that it is imperfect. In my testing, 95% of the…
Yeah, I know. Apple blew up open tracking. Other things have been gnawing away at it for a while, but where we’re at now is that for anybody who reads their email messages on a modern iPhone, whether or not they opened the message is no longer something an email sending platform can track accurately. Sparkpost points out that we’re basically at the saturation point: 45-55% of all opens are now now via Apple MPP-enabled users (and thus cannot be trusted).But you know what Apple didn’t break? Your ability to identify (most) of the unengaged. If you’re looking to segment out your unengaged subscribers, those who haven’t opened or clicked in months, proceed as you would have prior to MPP. There’s a margin of error that wasn’t there before — you won’t catch all of the unengaged — but truly, people who show as never having registered? They’re still very…
Is this every possible blog post or FAQ page explaining Apple’s MPP changes aka the death of open tracking? No, probably not. But here’s a bunch. Some I found myself, others were shared with me by many kind folks in the deliverability space. If you want to work your way through all of the guidance to see what you can glean from it, here you go.Act-On: What Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Means for the Modern MarketerAct-On: Apple MPP Adapt Series: Data AcquisitionAweber: Apple iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection Open Rate TrendsBraze: 9 Smart Ways Email Marketers Can Respond to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection FeatureCampaign Monitor: A Marketer’s Guide to Apple’s Mail Privacy ProtectionConstant Contact: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Impacts Email MarketingCordial: Will iOS 15 break the internet?Emma: Deliverability Insights: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will impact the 2021 holiday seasonHubSpot: How HubSpot’s Email Team is Responding to iOS 15Kickbox:…
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…