MessageGears Preps Product Marketers for iOS15

It’s Happening!  

The marketing industry has been long awaiting (in marketing time) the official release for iOS15. For those not following along the Beta release cycle, iOS15 is introducing Mail Privacy Protection tools that are targeted to prevent senders from learning whether an email has been opened, and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or use it to build a profile on them. Additionally, users of iCloud+ are able to completely hide their email address through the iCloud Private Relay. 

MessageGears Can Help 

Observing email engagement metrics is heavily used to optimize the timing and language for an email delivery to improve user visibility. Measuring the open rate for a campaign is an industry-standard for the success of emails and has been influencing the structure and content of marketing campaigns for years.  

MessageGears offers two key capabilities (Send Time Designation and Subject Line Testing) targeted to help customers improve the engagement from their end-users. The Open metric on email campaigns will now have less influence on measuring user engagement when the user is leveraging Apple Mail on an iOS 15 device.

Industry Impact 

Starting with iOS 15, all messages delivered to the Apple Mail application will be processed at the time of delivery for caching images and media used to render the email. The result is requested to email tracking pixels and dynamic image content at the time of email delivery rather than the time of open. It means all marketers will detect an email open even if the email was never read or acknowledged. The impact to a traditional campaign will be a spike in tracked email open rates without the subsequent increase in click engagement.  

If you’re wondering how big of an impact this will have on the entire industry, the answer is HUGE, and the impact will come rather quickly. Approximately 42-45% of the entire Message universe of email addresses (billions), is impacted either directly or indirectly. Directly, if their main email client is Apple Mail, which is the case for many iPhone, iPad users. Or indirectly if, like most, they have multiple devices and use Apple Mail in a mobile scenario for critical message delivery and read the bulk of their email via a browser client in front of their computer. Regardless of the scenario, once the Apple Mail client receives the message, the open tracking pixel will be fired.

Industry Adoption 

In terms of timing, there is one thing Apple does exceptionally well, which is pushing new feature adoption. A look at previous years shows, within the first 100 days of an iOS launch, the vast majority of devices have been upgraded. It’s very early to look at iOS15 adoption rates, but looking at iOS13 and iOS14 you can clearly see within the first 100 days traffic within the MessageGears network has steadily adopted the upgrade.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is a great step to further protect user information from unscrupulous advertisers and people trying to take advantage of observed user behavior. It will require marketers to trust their brand power and leverage true brand engagement in the form of calls to action and subscription management. It goes without saying that marketers should only be messaging end users that are interested in receiving the message. At the end of the day, companies need to listen to their customers.

What does this mean for MessageGears? 

At MessageGears, we are 100% committed to protecting user information. Our platform is designed to not store personal information and to be a direct conduit for activity between the brand and the user they are marketing to. In terms of campaign performance, very soon MessageGears will be grouping all engagement activity to the origin source. 

In the case of iOS15, all email open activities will be isolated to empower marketers to make decisions on end-user engagement. The focus will shift away from simply whether a message was opened and to the number of users engaging with the brand based upon the message.  

In most cases, the focus on campaign performance will shift to click and user subscription changes based upon a message. However, since MessageGears provides 100% personalized messaging and transparent reporting, marketers can tie not only email engagement but also online/offline engagement to messages through our dynamic click tracking and offline event reporting services.  

Key Takeaway 

In the end, marketers need to listen to their customers, develop a strong brand, and provide value in their messages to customers, not just more clickbait. Got questions? Reach out to us at sales@messagegears.com. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help!