Understanding the impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Initiative on Agillic Features

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection initiatives, launched September 2021, will make it possible for users of the Apple Mail application to increase their control over privacy.

In short, the initiative will load remote email content automatically upon delivery, registering emails as opened in Agillic whether they are opened or not. Content will as well be loaded without revealing device type. The initiative is further described in this article.

The initiative will have an impact on a number of Agillic features and this article will provide you with information about what you can do to surpass it.

Please note that the impact of this will depend on the amount of your recipients that use the Apple Mail client for opening your emails. Please also note that there are some of the same initiatives in place already within other email clients. This means that your actions in relation to these features should also be based on an evaluation of how much impact this will have on your customer database.

In this article you will find more information about:

• Open Conditions
• Reporting
• Subject Line Testing
• Send Time Optimisation

Open Conditions

As emails will be registered as opened in Agillic regardless of whether the recipient opens the communication or not, conditions built around open conditions might be unreliable.

This goes for both the Email condition within the condition editor and for some Fixed Person Data fields that utilize Email Opens.

For the Email condition, you might be using this for reminder emails in your current flows in order to see what recipients opened a specific email. Consider if you can use the operator “Clicked” instead of “Opened”, in order to make the reminder based on whether recipients actually clicked in the email.

The Fixed Person Data fields that will be impacted by this are:

• EMAILS_OPENED_TODAY
• EMAIL_OPENED_WEEK
• LAST_EMAIL_OPENED
• LAST_OPEN_CLIENT
• LAST_OPEN_DEVICE
• LAST_USED_APP_FOR_EMAIL

As the initiative will hide all information regarding the device and client the recipient uses, these data fields in Agillic will change to either be blank or to incorrect values for Apple users. For example, the LAST_USED_APP_FOR_EMAIL will not be able to detect whether the email was opened from the Apple Mail client.

As an alternative or complement to these fields, depending on how you use them today, consider if you can use the CLICKS_FROM_EMAILS or LAST_CLICK_FROM_EMAILS Person Data fields, as these count the clicks instead of opens.

Reporting

Data conducted in a report based on event types as Opened and Opened Unique will not be reliable for Apple Mail users. As Total and Unique clicks will stay the same, you can use these event types to report on instead, in order to get the most reliable insight in the open rates. As an industry wide tendency, click through rates are most likely to be a more useful parameter for reporting.

In general, you must expect to see an increase in the number of email opens in the Reporter module, so you should consider whether you want to put more weight on the number of clicks in email sendouts. 

Subject Line Testing

By default, Subject Line Tests are calculated on open rates, and therefore the built-in Subject Line Test in Agillic might also be affected by the initiative.

In theory, a valid Subject Line Test can be completed with unreliable open rate data. In a large test pool, the spread of Apple Mail app users should be about 50/50, so unreliable open rate data will be distributed equally. However, there is no way to ensure an equal spread of Apple Mail app users between the two groups, so the data can not be reliably compared. The larger the test pool, the more reliable the data will be.
However, you are able to do Subject Line Testing based on either click or open and click rates. By conducting the test on these parameters instead, you’ll be able to eliminate the unreliable open rates as clicks aren't affected by the initiative.

Send Time Optimisation

If you have a process for calculating Send Time Optimisation based, this is oftentimes calculated by using timestamps for opens and clicks. Again, these opens will also be impacted by the initiative, since emails will be marked as read as soon as the inbox is loaded.

Agillic is not automatically calculating the best send time, but if you are calculating this yourself based on Agillic data you should consider whether you will keep on relying on the open rate as a parameter for this calculation. As with the open rates, the calculation will be relatively affected based on the distribution of clients, so you might still have an indication based on the open rates.