What We Know Now about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, What To Do Next & Predictions For The Future: Webinar Recording + Q&A

Now that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is out in the wild, has it impacted email marketing like we thought it would? What should marketers be doing differently? What does this tell us about the future of email?

To answer these questions, we recently chatted with April Mullen (Director of Brand & Content Marketing at SparkPost), Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective), and Chad S. White (Head of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting) to learn the latest on MPP and where they believe things are headed.

Didn’t get a chance to catch the conversation live? Check out the webinar recording and read the Q&A below.

Q&A

Here’s a recap of our answers to the most popular questions. Have more? Ask us in the comments below.

How exactly are we able to identify which users are opting in to MPP?

We can’t necessarily see who is and isn’t opting in to MPP, but we can see iOS 15 users. Because we expect more than 95% of iOS 15 users to opt in to MPP, knowing exact MPP usage is kind of a moot point. Follow the advice of our panel to deliver a great subscriber experience, and you’ll be in good shape.

Can we still use things like countdown timers effectively?

They still work for your non-Apple Mail audience, but for your Apple Mail folks, we wouldn’t totally rely on it. However, it may still be worthwhile. We’re seeing that emails are getting pre-fetched as much as two weeks after an email has been sent. Since most emails are opened within 48 hours, there’s a decent chance that most real-time content will function as it should. But it’s still a very fluid thing right now and hard to predict one way or the other.

How are ESPs treating MPP opens for the purposes of reputation and audience engagement?

Fortunately, mailbox providers don’t really use opens to determine email deliverability, so we recommend focusing more on engagement metrics such as reads, clicks, and inbox behaviors. If you do that, you shouldn’t have to worry about MPP impacting your sender reputation.

Have there been any changes to the user agent string generated by Apple Mail?

Nope! We’re still seeing Mozilla/5.0.

How much have open rates increased so far?

The increase is still really small at this point. For most people, if you’re seeing a lift in opens, it’s less than 10%. This is because Apple hasn’t started pushing their latest updates hard yet. We expect this to change closer to the holidays and into next year.