Does MPP solve a problem that didn’t exist… or worse?
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) sounds like a good thing, yes? I mean who wouldn’t want to protect their email privacy? Over 89% of Apple iPhone users are on iOS 15 or above and according to Campaign Monitor over 97% have adopted MPP. You’d have to be mad not to want Apple to help you with that!
MPP represents a juxtoposition of ideas
Well this email marketer might just be howling at the moon because as I see it Apple hasn’t really fixed anything. Nothing was broken. All that was happening was machines were keeping track of which emails you opened so that marketers could use that data at a macro level to offer you more and better stuff or new and better deals. They could determine which email addresses were disengaged. That information could then be used to either stop marketing to you (probably a good thing if you are no longer interested) or they could incentivise you to re-engage with them. That means bigger and better offers. Surely you’d be mad not to want that? Now those two views are juxtaposed.
They’re behind you
Masking your IP address means the marketer doesn’t know where you are. Now, this is a good thing only if you owe them money and or are stepping out on your partner who happens to also be an email marketer. Otherwise all masking your IP address does is stop the marketer sending you deals for a coffee at your local Starbucks, other coffee establishments are available.
There’s gold in them there emails!
Email marketers have a choice – ignore the open mail stats as the soft metric they are or ignore MPP. Guess what? The key goals haven’t changed. At its most basic, email has one job – to drive traffic and ultimately revenue. Email marketers are still tasked with the basic KPI’s they had before MPP. So which of the two options do you think they took?
If it helps, email is a cheap commodity with a ridiculous ROI. So, tasked with the same targets, they have ignored MPP and now if you opened your email or if Apple did it for you, they’re sending you the follow up. I’m guilty of it myself. Our automated campaigns go on a time-sensitive basis starting from the opening of an email, whether MPP did it or the user did it. The result is more users are getting more email, not less. And that email is less targeted because it often relates to an email you didn’t open yourself. The marketer doesn’t know that. Rather than risk losing those that did open the email, and that will be on average maybe 20-30% of the MPP users, they’ll email them all.
The right to forget who you are
Guess what some of the more responsible marketers do? They follow best practice in order to keep their data set clean. That means removing people who haven’t opened an email in a fixed time period. That might be 3 months, 6 months, or perhaps a year. No one who has adopted MPP has been removed by these people in the last year. That’s not because they don’t want to. But how can they tell who actually is engaged and who isn’t?
Summation
So I’ll continue to howl at the moon and thank Apple for thinking this through and solving a problem… that didn’t exist. Be careful what you wish for, people!