How Will the iOS 15 Update Affect Your Email Tracking?

This might not be something you are even aware of yet but there is a new iOS 15 update. iOS is Apple’s operating system used on their phones and iPads. This new update allows users to say that they don’t want their emails to be tracked which means for anyone using email marketing systems, such as MailerLite, Convertkit and MailChimp, that your email tracking may not be as accurate anymore.

So, if you are seeing a drop off in your open rates and click rates, don’t panic. This may not have anything to do with you.

According to this post on Hubspot, Apple Mail and Apple mobile devices account for about 35% of the email market so already that’s a significant percentage of your audience who may have decided to set their privacy settings so you can’t get data on whether they have opened their emails or clicked on your links. But there’s still a greater percentage who you can still track and so your data is still useful to see whether your subject lines are working and your content is interesting to people.

What We Did When We Updated to iOS 15

Others may follow Apple’s lead and start introducing similar privacy settings but not everyone will accept them and when we updated to iOS 15 the other day, we chose to allow our emails to be tracked. As business owners ourselves we understand how beneficial getting this data is. We want to help other business owners and we aren’t clicking on anything we shouldn’t be, so we have no qualms about anyone taking a look and knowing that the emails we opened this week were about Halloween decorations and a sportswear sale.

As a consumer we personally think it’s nice to support businesses in this way, mainly so they stay around! We also felt it was a bit weird how Apple suggested they would be protecting us. It seemed they would be opening our emails first in a way that couldn’t be tracked, and although they wouldn’t be reading them this felt more invasive to us.

Our Advice to Business Owners

Keep Using Email Tracking with Lower Expectations

Our advice for you as business owners is to keep using email marketing and keep using email tracking but expect to see a bit of a drop in open rates and click rates. If you prepare for this you won’t feel demoralised and if you’re already seeing a dip, keep working hard to improve it but recognise it might not be anything you’re doing.

Start Conversations Through Your Emails

It’s always been a good idea to encourage engagement through your emails by asking questions or telling your reader they can reply to your email to ask you questions but it’s going to be even more important now to see how engaged your audience is. You could ask fun questions that require very little thought to reply to. You could ask for ideas for future blog posts or even just ask if they enjoy your emails.

The more your email readers get used to you asking questions, the more likely they are to start replying so it’s worth starting now. Also, the more you engage and build up a genuine relationship with people, the more likely they are to buy from you down the line. So, whether you are worried about what might happen to your email tracking with the iOS 15 update or not, starting actual conversations with your subscribers is a great idea anyway.

Keep Building Your Email List

Don’t let this put you off using your website to build an email list. Email marketing will still be effective. Keep driving traffic to your website and continue to make it really easy for people to connect with you so you can nurture that relationship and turn them into clients.

If you haven’t got an email list because you aren’t sure what you would send to it, then this blog post we wrote recently will give you some ideas!

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash