In September 2021, Apple released the new iOS15 Update that aims to bring new ways to stay connected with its users. It did so by implementing new features enabling users to explore and discover more using advanced digital intelligence. However, iOS15 also brought significant features and updates that affect the digital marketing landscape, such as the:
Hide-My Email
Mail Privacy Protection
Increased App Privacy Report
1. The Hide-My Email Feature
This feature allows users to create unique and random email addresses that will forward everything to users’ personal inboxes. That means that no tracking can be implemented for those “hide-my email” users.
For example, if someone subscribes to a newsletter, they will be prompted and can decide to use the “hide-my email” feature which will generate a random email. Whenever the users want to unsubscribe, they can simply delete that random unique email address and never be bothered again by the newsletter.
Through using this feature, when a user ‘unsubscribes’ from your newsletter, any further email to that unique email address would go straight towards your hard- or soft-bounce count, which negatively impacts marketers for ‘over-sending emails’. This feature would pressure businesses to be more accountable, listen to their customers and provide value to encourage them signing up for their newsletters using their real email addresses.
This feature can be a marketer’s nightmare because; if a user decides to unsubscribe, there will be no feedback as to why they did so. Additionally, they will also be receiving a lot of hard- and soft-bounces. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, such as HubSpot, will prevent anyone with too many hard and soft bounces from sending emails, hindering the quality of email marketing campaigns.
2. The Mail Privacy Protection Feature
A fancy name for preventing marketers from tracking the IP addresses of users opening emails. Previously, by utilising CRM tools like Hubspot, we would know if our clients had opened your email, when, and how many times they did so. But now, with the mail privacy protection feature, all these tracking privileges are gone.
From a marketing standpoint, you won’t be able to say:
“I’ve seen you have looked at my quote. If you have any questions, I am here to assist.”
“I know that you are interested in my product because you have been opening every newsletter we sent. I’ll give you this promotion code to motivate you to follow through with the purchase.”
Hence, taking away that active encouragement and engagement that are utilised to make campaigns work better. This feature also prevents marketers from tracking the performance of their campaigns; A/B tests will not be relevant anymore unless you can track your users after the purchase.
3. The Increased App Privacy Report
For applications that users download on their mobile devices, such as Spotify and Google Chrome, users can now see exactly what information these apps have access to. This enables users to monitor more granularly how different apps access their data, camera, location, microphone, and more.
This feature increases the transparency between the application and its users, enabling users to have more power in controlling their personal information and data. However, from a marketing standpoint, this represents more potential limitations preventing users’ tracking.
Let us know what you think of the new iOS15 updates! Get in touch with us for more!
