"Emails that you receive may include hidden pixels that allow the email's sender to learn information about you. As soon as you open an email, information about your Mail activity can be collected by the sender without transparency and an ability to control what information is shared. Email senders can learn when and how many times you opened their email, whether you forwarded the email, your Internet Protocol (IP) address, and other data that can be used to build a profile of your behavior and learn your location.
If you choose to turn it on, Mail Privacy Protection helps protect your privacy by preventing email senders, including Apple, from learning information about your Mail activity. When you receive an email in the Mail app, rather than downloading remote content when you open an email, Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote content in the background by default - regardless of how you do or don't engage with the email. Apple does not learn any information about the content.
In addition, all remote content downloaded by Mail is routed through multiple proxy servers, preventing the sender from learning your IP address. Rather than share your IP address, which can allow the email sender to learn your location, Apple's proxy network will randomly assign an IP address that corresponds only to the region your device is in. As a result, email senders will only receive generic information rather than information about your behavior. Apple does not access your IP address."
How will this affect emails sent through HubSpot? The majority of our audience (40-50%) opens our emails through Apple Mail, will open rates drop or fail to track?
Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?
SOLVE
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for your question. The short answer is, it is still too early to know exactly what impact this will have on marketers and the email industry as a whole, and HubSpot and our customers specifically.
That said, our teams are presently testing the latest developer beta release of iOS15 and the updated Mail App with Privacy Protection to learn more about how it might work. But there are two key words in that last sentence: “beta” and “might.” This is new and very early, so how it works very well may change between now and the general release that is expected this coming fall. In fact, I’d expect it to.
So back to your question: “How will this affect emails sent through HubSpot? The majority of our audience (40-50%) opens our emails through Apple Mail, will open rates drop or fail to track?”
If anything, this may actually cause open rates to increase due to Apple opening on behalf of recipients who do not actually open your emails. So for the percentage of your audience who use Apple’s mail clients, and who have updated to iOS 15, and who have this Privacy Protection feature enabled, their email might be pre-loaded by Apple. When each of these things happen, the email would appear to have been opened, when in fact, it might not have actually been.
So what does this mean for how our customers use open data today? I’d recommend you stay the course with your marketing, focus on great content that your audiences care about and want to read. Pay close attention to what you can measure now with the understanding that open data might become less reliable in the future. Our teams are watching this very closely on a daily basis, and we will be providing more guidance as we learn more by testing the new changes ourselves.
One more important point to make though, is we have no indication that this will have any impact on email deliverability. This is purely a privacy play. Deliver great content that your contacts opt-in to receive and actually want, and you will continue to get the engagement you’ve always gotten. You just might have to change your most watched metrics to clicks, page views, and replies.
Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?
SOLVE
Hi Jacob,
I recently stumbled across the same questions...
so 1) maybe HubSpot can switch to watch click activity on Apple Clients? I thought about sending a reactivation campaign just as the last mail HubSpot would use to render the contact "inactive". Maybe it helps. Otherwise it cleans the list.
2) Apple Mail was already a bit unsteady, because they preload images. So using "opened email" has been a bit unsharp so far. But it definitely will be incorrect in the future, as then all Apple Clients will look like opens. Email on Acid recently suggested to segment the list into those who you know use Apple and those who don´t. It will be a bit of work for us Marketers, but this will be the future...
We are aware of the recent update from Apple and the potential impact it may have on current ways you track data in HubSpot. Our Product team is exploring this and we will have an update on our plans soon. The Community team will make sure to let you know when we have more to share.
