How Apple's New Privacy Feature will Affect Sugar Market Users
Overview
To meet the demand for consumer privacy protection, Apple is about to release an email privacy-protection update that will prevent senders like you from tracking email opens and other web activity. While this change will affect the way marketers measure their campaigns in all marketing automation platforms, incorporating new metrics in your Sugar Market practices can ensure you continue to effectively manage your campaign metrics.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection Feature
When using marketing automation platforms like Sugar Market, emails sent through campaigns include small, invisible pixels that load when the recipient opens the email, identifying the message as opened in your platform's metrics. Beginning on Monday, September 20, 2021, Apple users will be prompted to enable the new privacy feature through a notification on their Apple devices. If users enable Apple's mail privacy protection feature, as we expect most users will do, image links (including the invisible tracker pixels) will then be pre-loaded by Apple before the message is delivered to the recipient, making every message appear to have been opened and therefore obscuring actual deliverability metrics. Additionally, the user's IP address will be hidden, removing the ability to track their location and web activity.
How This Change Affects You
Since a significant percentage of all email opens are on Apple devices, this change is impactful to how you should monitor your email campaigns. We anticipate this change will impact the following in your Sugar Market campaigns:
- Campaign metrics, including open rates and click-to-open rates
- Segmentations based on last open
- Nurture campaigns and SugarBPM automations based on open rates
- A/B emails using an open rate performance indicator
In addition, you may notice some other effects such as:
- Maintaining clean lists of engaged leads will become increasingly difficult
- Emails that reference external CSS may no longer work
- Your email recipients may receive unwanted email since engagement will become difficult to measure
How is Sugar Market Responding?
Because this is a global shift for all marketers using any marketing automation platform, the entire community is rethinking campaign monitoring. We will continue to explore any updates that may be needed in response to this change and will keep our customers updated. While there may be some future modifications in Sugar Market to accommodate this shift in email tracking, there are currently no immediate planned changes. If you need any assistance, your SugarCRM Customer Success Manager or your Sugar Market consulting partner is available to help.
Suggestions
The increasing demand for consumer privacy is not going away, and is, in fact, likely to become more pervasive. It's not all bad news though! Shifting your focus to tracking link clicks instead of email opens is a good practice since it provides a better representation of your leads' engagement. Plus, the way Apple is implementing the mail privacy protection feature means that you can be assured the emails sent to the Mail app are valid email addresses.
We suggest making the following modifications to your email campaigns to ensure continued success with Sugar Market:
- Update email and nurture campaigns to track link clicks instead of opens.
- Update nurtures to remove email open steps. If you are still using the legacy Nurture Builder, we strongly suggest you consider moving to Nurture Builder 2.0. Please refer to the Converting Legacy Nurture Campaigns page in the Sugar Market User Guide and this quick video to learn how to easily convert your legacy nurtures.
- Update scoring profiles to use click scores instead of open scores.
- Review your segmentations.
- Update any custom reports that include email opens.
- Focus on click metrics instead of opens in the Email Dashboard.
- Ensure you are employing best practices for email marketing.
For More Information
This change will take effect with the September 20, 2021 release of the following OS versions: iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, watchOS8. Please refer to apple.com for more information. If you need assistance during this transition, please contact Support or your Client Success Manager.