How Apple iOS 15 Updates Affect Email Marketing Open Rates

Email Marketing: Then and Now

For years, email service providers (ESPs) like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and even ServiceTitan traditionally tracked email campaigns sent to customers by embedding a tiny, invisible pixel image in the email. Once customers opened the email, the invisible image also downloaded, triggering the ESPs to track the open email directly to an active campaign.

Tracking information also informed ESPs about what type of device (i.e., desktop, smartphone, or tablet) customers used to open the email, as well as the location and IP address from which they opened it.  

"There was a lot of data that ESPs were receiving," Attarian explains.

As a precursor to this year's Apple update, Attarian says about five years ago Gmail and other email providers began hiding personal data like the user's IP address and device information. They also started opening up the images in the emails through proxies.

"You would still see which subscriber opened it, but you wouldn't know anymore which IP address it was," Attarian says. "So, a lot of the demographic data started getting lost."

As the most popular email platform with over 1.8 billion users worldwide, the Gmail changes set the stage for more user privacy updates from Apple, which ranks close behind Gmail in market share and may even overtake it when considering all iterations of Apple Mail (i.e., iPhone, iPad, etc.). Globally, Apple Mail and Apple mobile devices make up over 35% of email provider market share.

Apple Mail can be used in app form on almost any iOS operating system, including other email providers such as Gmail, Outlook, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, and iCloud—the email service most commonly associated with Apple Mail.

But rather than simply hiding IP addresses and location information, Apple Mail email tracking pollutes the process even more by opening all of the images in the emails, whether the email subscriber actually opened the email or not.

The Apple iOS 15 update features Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device when users opt in. Consumers gain more privacy to shield them from online tracking activity with the ability to:

• Hide their IP address

• Hide their location

• Hide when they do/don't open emails

With email tracking for Apple Mail, the MPP routes emails through a proxy server to preload message content—including tracking pixels—before serving the email to readers, even if they don’t open the emails. Once the proxy opens the tracking pixel, the ESP thinks the email has been opened.

Say, for instance, you send emails to 10,000 customers and 20% use Apple devices or are Apple mail users. The new MPP feature falsely shows all 2,000 customers opened that email, but in reality it's only about 500 customers, Attarian explains. 

"They're preloading all of the images in the emails, kind of like caching it on their end," he says. "It looks like the images loaded, the emails opened. The metric becomes no longer valuable because you can't really tell who opened it or who didn't open it."

New Features Affect Email Marketing Workflows

While some marketers debate whether open rates serve as a vanity metric or a key performance indicator, digital marketing efforts often relied on this information to track subject line A/B testing, same-time optimization of preview text, and creating personalization for email clients.

"The subject line leads to the preview text, and the preview text leads to the content of the email," Attarian explains. "Your subject line should always be connected to the content and intent of the email. Your preview text should be further connected and give more details about the content of the email."

Email marketers often tested which subject lines resonated with customers, then adjusted the content based on those preferences—all of which was based on email open rates.

"Open rates are almost 100% reliant on having a good subject line and preview text," Attarian says. "It's almost like the subject line is the one factor we call in the industry that sells the open. People open the email due to the subject line and preview text. 

"And then the content itself sells the click, which is the most important part from a marketing perspective," he explains. "You want people to actually click inside the email. I don't care what subject line you have, what open rates you're getting, if someone opens your email and doesn't take action, you may as well not have sent that email."

Click-through rates may be lower than open rates, but they provide a stronger and more reliable signal for positive customer engagement. 

"This has now forced people to think about content," Attarian says. "They know, based on the click rates, which content was relevant."

Think about your company's marketing goal when creating an email list and what benchmarks you're trying to achieve. Are you trying to book more jobs? Sell more memberships? Grow conversions by closing unsold estimates? Or educate customers about the benefits of recurring services?

In any of those scenarios, the open rates don't matter if the customer fails to engage by clicking through to your website, reading your blog, or converting to a booked job or sold estimate.

"Our customers should literally be keeping an eye on their click rates," Attarian says. "The unsubscribe rates are still very relevant. If people are unsubscribing at a much higher rate, then you know they don't like what they're receiving from you, your content is less relevant.

"Your open rates aren't going to do much if your content is bad and people aren't converting," he adds. "You might have a really high open rate, but a very tiny click rate. But what did you really achieve with that email? If I can get the high click rate and a high percentage of people to go to the destination and convert...I will always take that over anything else.”

How Contracting Businesses Can Navigate iOS 15 Email Tracking Updates

While your customers get to be in charge of the data they share as a result of the recent privacy updates, these email deliverability updates also require home services companies to get to know their customers better to encourage more click activity and increase click rates. To do so, the ServiceTitan email marketing experts suggest taking the following steps:

• Scrub your contact list now—delete any customers who haven’t opened your emails in the past 18 months to two years.

• Double your segmentation efforts for increased relevancy—think customers with open estimates only, customers targeted for membership renewals, or customers who need to schedule maintenance services.

• Add automation for campaigns based on triggers—send content relevant to their current behavior or current actions.

• Opt for a multichannel approach—think email combined with direct mail and SMS texting, or segment which customers get an email followed by a text, or which customers get an email followed by a direct mail piece.

• Be more value-minded than sales-minded—personalize the content in your email to help customers understand the benefits of your services, instead of simply trying to sell something.

• Add layers to your campaigns—encourage customers to click on unsold estimate links, read blogs for more information, or to visit your website to see specific product pages, discounts, and offers.

• Survey your subscribers to learn what content they want to see from you.

"Content is the most important part," Attarian says. "It just forces people to focus more on creating really good and relevant content, and an easy way for the subscriber to understand what your email is about and take quick action.

"The average consumer has only a time span of three seconds when they open an email,” he adds. “So, you have three seconds to get their attention, keep their attention, and get them to do what you want them to do."

Are you capturing their attention right from the start, or do they need to keep scrolling through your email before getting to the meaty part?

For instance, ServiceTitan revamped its unsold estimate template for email campaigns after testing the way the content presented to the customer.

"We moved up the most relevant part almost to the top, where we started talking right away about the unsold estimate, linked the email directly to the unsold estimate link, where they could go and see the estimate, click on it, and approve it or not," Attarian says. "The click rates were astronomical compared to any other email."

Rather than wasting time reading about your company's history or why you're the best company to do the job, customers can go directly to the unsold estimate and take action. The idea is to develop more concise emails with fewer but more prominent calls to action.

"That's what they really want," Attarian says. "They want to look at the estimate and get the job done. They can still go back to the email and read further why your company is the best to do the job. But this requires a lot of content thinking to convert from focusing on open rates to click rates."

That's where ServiceTitan Marketing Pro gives companies an advantage over other email marketing platforms, with specifically made templates for unsold estimates, membership renewals, recurring services, special offers, and more. 

"Because we have all the data, we're able to look at this and deploy the best converting templates to our customers—without them worrying, 'What do I send now? How do I design my email? And where do I go to even look at what kind of content to create?'" Attarian says.

Powerful multichannel marketing helps tie everything together into one campaign and shows email marketers all the metrics they need to know to create a successful digital marketing campaign.

"Everyone has kind of painted their own opinion on which direction things are going, but they all converge towards content, clicks, and conversions. The focus is all about content and the relevancy, and that's it," Attarian says.