Best Practice on How to Handle Inactive Email Addresses After Apple Mail Privacy Update

After Apple's Mail Privacy Protection initiatives (described in this article), you may expect to see a change in the number of recipients that are flagged as inactive in Agillic. The inactive setting in Agillic currently relies on a combination of number of emails received and a number of opens within a certain date range. 

As mentioned in the article, you will generally see an increase in the number of opens on emails that are sent to recipients, who use Apple mail as their preferred mail client. Besides a general move towards doing reporting based more on clicks and actual customer journeys, you might want to change the way you calculate inactive recipients.

This article is for you who are using the inactive feature in Agillic and are wondering what you can do instead to surpass the Privacy Protection Initiatives.

What impact Mail Privacy Protection has on your inactive email addresses

Generally, you can expect the number of inactive recipients to decrease as the open rates go up. This means that over time, you will send to some recipients that are in fact not opening your emails.

What can be done

Because of this, you might want to change the way you calculate inactivity in your marketing automation and also the way in which you have implemented the INACTIVE_EMAIL Person Data field in your target groups. 

From our standpoint, you have three operational possibilities which we will explain below

1. Take no action.
2. Flag current recipients as inactive before the privacy update.
3. Ignore the Fixed Person Data field INACTIVE_EMAIL and create your own Person Data field

1) Leave the inactive setting as it currently is

You can choose to take no further action and keep your usage of the inactive feature. As described, if you choose this option, you will see a decrease in recipients flagged as inactive over time, and you will possibly activate more recipients.

The amount of how big an impact this will have on your recipient count and UAR (unique active recipients) can vary depending on how many of your recipients use Apple Mail. 

2) Flag current inactive recipients before the privacy update

You can also choose to flag all your recipients that are currently marked as inactive in order to "keep" these in an inactive segment and in order to avoid that some of these are wrongly activated. 

You can do this by following these steps:

1. Create a new Person Data field (of type boolean), for example called INACTIVE_BEFORE_UPDATE
2. Setup a target group with the condition INACTIVE_EMAIL = true (if you do not already have one)
3. Create a new flow
4. Insert a data step
5. Set side effect on that data step to update INACTIVE_BEFORE_UPDATE to "true"
6. Attach your target group to the flow
7. Publish the flow to production
8. Execute the flow manually on production

In this way, you can use the new Person Data field INACTIVE_BEFORE_UPDATE in a target group that you can either filter out from future sendouts or combine with the fixed Person Data field LAST_CLICK_FROM_EMAILS. This will "activate" inactive recipients if they suddenly clicks in your email. 

3) Setup your own logic for inactive recipients

As part of this privacy update, we encourage you to look into how you are actually validating your recipients' level of inactivity. Is it still enough that recipients open an email in order to be evaluated as being active?

In addition to this, you can choose a third option which is to circumvent the current standard inactive feature in Agillic (based on opens) all together and create your own Person Data field, which is your "custom" inactive field.

You can then taylor the criteria for becoming inactive to accommodate your business completely. This could, for example, be a combination of the fixed Person Data field, LAST_CLICK_FROM_EMAILS, or certain events that you use in your communication (has the recipient actively interacted with your communication). 

You can also update the field via API/File import if you have some behavioural data in an external system that might add to this image. (Has the recipient purchased something in-store for instance.)

We are aware of the potential shortcomings of the current inactive email setting and will evaluate adjustments to this feature once we have evidence for how the actual update on iOS will be.