How Apple Mail 'Privacy Protection' Will Change Email Content

TL/DR

  • Apple announced an option for its mail app nominally aimed at blocking tracking pixels.

  • Expectations are that all email images will be proxied, IP addresses hidden, and cached on-device.

  • Time-based content changes are dead; countdown timers, scheduled content and in-the-inbox updates will become a thing of the past.

Apple’s focus on giving users control over privacy has come to email. At their 6/7/21 WWDC, Mail Privacy Protection was announced, with a target date of Sept 2021. Features include:

  • 2-step proxying to mask IP addresses

  • All remote http images will be fetched at some point between send and open.

  • Images will be cached for all Apple devices for each recipient

Data from Litmus and other sources indicate that Apple email clients are a very large audience — nearly half email opens. The ripple impact of this announcement affects email open measures, deliverability measures, and of course, real-time content.

I’ll be candid: this kills some of the capabilities Campaign Genius has brought to email marketers, and others on the development roadmap. But, surprisingly, not that many!

Our aim hasn’t changed; help email marketers be more visual and personal. Time-based changes were promising, but they never really got mainstream traction. Nearly everything else remains “on the table”, driven by first-party data rather than http-request data.

Personally, I’m happy to see countdown timers hauled off to the gimmick pile. I’ve always been suspicious that their impact had as much to do with motion as time. So, thanks Apple, now we can move the animation environment from the Campaign Genius authoring platform into the more mainstream Real-Time Toolbox, and give marketers decent animation + personalization tools.

Personalization and visual communication was always the raison d’etre for Campaign Genius; real-time changes were just an aspect of that.

We have to grapple with changing the charging model for Campaign Genius. The use-based approach may stick around, but with Apple shouldering more of the content caching-and-performance burden, we’ll revisit the rate structure.

Metrics values will change, but that’s a positive step in many ways. I think more attention to content and creative, and less attention to suspect metrics, will be a long-term benefit. When big-budget Hollywood studios started tailoring movies to test audiences, I think their “product” got worse, not better. Open rates were always a knee-jerk measure at best.

May the best content win. Watch this space for amazing new tools to help.

—Matthew Dunn, CEO

Matthew Dunn