Email Marketing Tool

DennisLooijenga
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Apple announced new mail privacy functionality coming up in iOS 15: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/10/ios-15-mail-privacy-protection-tracking-pixels/.

 

This is how Apple describes the feature in full:

"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?

1 Solution acceptée
TomMonaghan
Solution
Équipe de développement de HubSpot
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

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.

 

-Tom

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25 Réponses
elraaxho
Participant | Partenaire solutions Diamond
Participant | Partenaire solutions Diamond

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Hi!

 

Any news if this will affect personalization tokens and smart modules in emails? 

0 Votes
TWalsh6
Membre

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Are you apple to differenciate within hubspot apple users from other operating systems?

0 Votes
philmanger
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

No you can't, but I have suggested this function here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Device-level-tracking/idi-p/500088

0 Votes
elieppman
Membre

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

How will these new settings impact the Hubspot 'unengaged' list as that is based of criteria that involved # of emails opened?

AdeleTib
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Looks like HubSpot started a new discussion on this topic. Might be a good idea to move these ideas to that thread. (I'm looking at you @sarahcocos  😉 )

0 Votes
sarahcocos
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Tagging onto @Matt_Ericksen s suggestion: It would be great if we could create lists to segment contacts by email client or operation system to get a better idea of email performance as a whole by eliminating the muddy waters of the apple mail users. Is this being considered in contact features and hubspot property functionality at all? 

Also, considering HubSpot's criteria for eliminating graymail based on unengaged metrics (the 'do not send' list for email suppression), how is HubSpot going to pivot since 'unengaged' users could technically all now look engaged with false apple open rates? Would love to know if this HubSpot metric will change on the backend so that we can ensure we're not sending emails to unengaged contacts as much as possible. 

sarahcocos_0-1632342590933.png

 

The blog article released today doesn't provide any updates on the data and logic behind HubSpot that will be changing due to these privacy updates. Would love more actionable information for our marketing automation efforts. 


If anyone has any properties that they're using to help measure activities/engagement that look like they'd circumvent this privacy update, I'm all ears. Thanks!
-Sarah

 

 

AdeleTib
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

@sarahcocos Agreed. We had a similar thought to your proposed option (since the data is already housed in HubSpot and viewable on the individual email level). Another option would be to provide the ability to build/run a report that shows open rates by email client or OS. Even if we can't see who they are, we'd at least have the high-level data to estimate the overall impact and a way to estimate using what still know to be valid. 

ridingforlife
Contributeur de premier rang

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Apple's event is on September 14th. We can assume that shortly after that, iOS 15 with MPP will be released.

0 Votes
vanessa2
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

There may be detectable patterns in how quickly the email is opened and cached. Similar unresolved problem:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Marketing-Tool/Are-Bots-Affecting-Your-Email/td-p/302428

0 Votes
cameronburns
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

What about automation in general. If Apple shows an email as open that will send most automation down a path that may not be a good one for the marketer. How will Hubspot fix this? Is this the beginning of the end of marketing automation as we know it? 

ridingforlife
Contributeur de premier rang

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

It's not the "beginning of the end of marketing automation as we know it?", but your marketing automation strategies will need to adapt and use other non-opener cues, like clicks, website activity, purchases, etc. Opens have already been estimates/not 100% reliable for years.

TomMonaghan
Solution
Équipe de développement de HubSpot
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

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.

 

-Tom

elieppman
Membre

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Hey Tom! Following up on this, how will these new settings impact the Hubspot 'unengaged' list as that is based of criteria that involved # of emails opened?

0 Votes
JLSB
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Thanks @TomMonaghan cc: @CTOD

Now that this feature has been pushed live by Apple, I was hoping you could answer a few more specific questions about this:

1. I posted a feature request for email throttling on the Ideas Forum in December 2019:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Make-Throttling-Available-for-Email-Newsletter-Sends/...

Since the “send based on recipient’s time zone” feature is going to be severely compromised by the Apple IOS update, is there a plan to allow for email throttling (or something similar) to limit the send volume on IP addresses?

2. For the purposes of segmentation, what is the best way to know which contacts have this feature enabled? Does the “Apple Mail (iOs)” section of the “Opens by email client” metric accurately reflect all the contacts who will be affected by this?

3. In this video from Hubspot YouTube Marketing Manager Tory Bullock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp_bEKjBoeE), he recommends utilizing text as another way to reach clients. Is there a plan for add a native text feature into Hubspot Marketing Enterprise?

Any info you can provide on the above (as well as any suggestions on how to handle list management / removing inactives moving forward) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

EGopaul
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Hi @TomMonaghan  and @natsumimori , is it possible to get an updated response on this matter? Thanks kindly!

Matt_Ericksen
Membre

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue
It would be very helpful if we could segment our data by operational system or email client so we can set benchmarks now on Apple mail users and non Apple mail users. I haven’t been able to find a way to do this but I know the data is there because I can pull a report showing it. Any thoughts?
RonakShah
Participant

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Thanks for sharing this!

0 Votes
DSleeper
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

The tracking pixels are traditionally 1x1 correct? So is one of the possible solutions just to adjust the size and dimension of the pixel? I'm imagining Apple must be adding code to search for pixels like this and weed them out. 

YvonneK
Contributeur

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Hi DSleeper,

as far as I am informed, Apple just preloads all images, no matter the size, and then delivers them to the customer. So tracking pixel or any other image loaded, it will always look like everybode on Apple opened the mail 😕

Cheers,

Yvonne

jaah
Participant | Partenaire solutions Platinum
Participant | Partenaire solutions Platinum

Apple announced mail privacy protection, how will this affect emails sent through HubSpot?

Résolue

Hi Tom,

 

Thank you for sharing this. I have a couple of follow-up questions:

 

1) Do you know anything about how this will affect the tracking of inactive recipients? Could this mean, that recipients using Apple mail will never be flagged as inactive?

2) In workflows and when sending campaigns, we sometimes use inactivity as a trigger for sending a follow-up. Do you have any idea of whether this will still be possible for recipients using apple mail?

 

-Jacob