Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s iOS 15 Privacy Updates

Customers may wish to use random email addresses when signing up for your services, which will limit them to accessing your services via Safari, as this option will not be supported on other web browsers or custom apps (unless developers proactively add it or customers keep track of it separately).

As such, the use of random email addresses is most likely going to affect services that provide low utility to a customer, such as using an email address to access a coupon code. It is unlikely that customers will use a random email address when registering for companies that provide high-utility services and long-term engagement, as this will reduce their ability to interact with that brand across multiple devices. After all, even as consumers want greater privacy, they also want even more personalized brand experiences.

At Blueshift, we’ve always encouraged brands to use first-party data with customer consent, as well as providing multiple high-value offerings when requesting personal information so customers are incentivized to use a single email address across brand interactions.

Another important by-product of using random email addresses is the reduced likelihood of syncing audiences to your brand’s social and paid media platforms since the random email address will not be associated with your customer’s profiles on those platforms.

Apple will introduce Mail Privacy Protection — anticipated this fall — which will prevent senders from using invisible pixels to track open rates and mask the user’s IP address to prevent senders from knowing the user’s location. This feature will only apply to Apple’s native Mail app on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Though the Mail Privacy Protection feature will not be turned on by default, it will be highlighted as an option when upgrading to iOS 15.

Mail Privacy Protection will significantly impact open tracking accuracy, which can have several side effects on other downstream processes and decisions. Many marketers use a combination of opens and clicks to measure engagement and refine email distribution lists. This is an important step in email list hygiene, as sending to unengaged customers can wreak havoc on your deliverability and cause your emails to end up in spam. Marketers will need to rely more on click data and other downstream data (such as time on site, transactions, etc.) to determine accurate engagement stats.

Now that Apple will be masking customers’ location information, marketers won’t receive location data from any image loads in Apple’s native Mail app. Marketers who use this data to show relevant image ads in emails will need to adjust their course.