How To Optimize Your Email Marketing Strategy After The iOS 15 Updates [2024]

With the new iOS 15 updates that rolled out on September 20, email marketers have come across a new reality. Among others, the update brought Mail Privacy Protection, a feature that allows users to protect their email activity, preventing third-party marketing services from collecting tracking data.

So how does this affect you? Well, if users enable it, you won’t be able to track your iOS users’ open rates and IP data.

Your open rate is one of the most important email metrics you can use to improve your strategy. So what happens now? Is your strategy ruined? Well, no.

In this article, we’ll see which aspects of email marketing have been affected by the iOS 15 updates and how you can adapt to the new reality. Let’s start!

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How The iOS 15 Update Affects Email Marketing

With the Mail Protection Policy, your email marketing strategy needs to go under certain optimizations to keep performing outstandingly. To do that, you first need to keep in mind that changes like this are bound to happen.

Moreover, neglecting to take action won’t be ideal for your business as iOS accounts for 53.66% of the market share, followed by Android at 46% in the US.

Before we check what steps you can take, let’s take a look at the aspects that are affected the most:

Open Rate and IP Data Collection

Understandably, the new feature has an immediate impact on collecting open rate and IP data.

Your open rate is among the most important email marketing metrics as it shows whether your audience is interested in your messages or not. More specifically, analyzing this data can help you optimize your subject lines and improve your email copy.

With the lack of open rate data, marketers can’t really know if iOS users interact with their campaigns or whether their subject lines resonate with them. Similarly, collecting IP data enables businesses to create different segments to improve their engagement and conversion efforts. By taking this away, IP-based segmentation becomes ineffective.

Automated Workflows

The new updates also had an impact on marketing automation. The reason is simple. Since your automated workflows require data to work, specific flows based on subscriber engagement won’t function properly. For instance, re-engagement workflows based on opens no longer work due to the lack of sufficient data.

As marketing automation is a powerful tool to streamline your business efforts, the change that the iOS 15 update brought was among the biggest challenges that email marketers needed to face.

Email Deliverability Optimization

Your email deliverability is the foundation upon which a high-performing and profitable email marketing strategy will be built. By taking away a big chunk of open data, deliverability monitoring was also influenced.

This metric is the most crucial indication that you need to improve your strategy and ensure that your emails reach the inbox.

Segmentation Based On Customer Behavior

Segmenting your list is a great practice to deliver valuable and relevant content. After the iOS update, a number of these segments relying on open and IP data stopped performing.

For instance, a segment created to target non-openers with personalized content can no longer function due to the limitations in data.

Live Data Usage

Another thing that the new update affected is live data usage. Marketers using countdown timers as part of their eCommerce email marketing strategy encountered problems as the feature was no longer functional.

Email List Cleaning

Last but not least, email list cleaning is a process that allows you to improve numerous aspects of your email strategy, including your deliverability, sender reputation, and conversions.

To perform an effective list scrubbing, though, you need to monitor subscriber engagement to remove inactive users. Again, the lack of data made this process harder to perform.

Now that you know how the iOS 15 updates affect you, let’s see how to optimize your email marketing strategy.

How To Adapt To The iOS 15 Updates

While the updates affect your open rate data collection, your click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe data remain intact! Here’s how to use all these to adapt to the new changes:

1. Run A/B Tests Before All Users Update to iOS 15

According to recent data, users are still updating to the new iOS 15, with the adoption rate currently being at 48%.

While this is almost half of iPhone users, you can take the opportunity to improve your email strategy before everyone has the new feature.

One of the things you can do is start A/B testing your subject lines. This process will let you find the variations that your audience likes. You can later use the data to craft headings that will resonate with them.

A/B Testing is among the most effective email marketing tips you can use to optimize your email marketing strategy! So after the full adoption of the iOS 15, keep running tests on your email copy to ensure that your recipients receive the most valuable and relevant content.

Now, let’s take a look at a few more tactics you can use to adjust your strategy.

2. Invest in Email List Management Tools

Managing your lists is a no-brainer to have high engagement and conversions. As a process, email list management will allow you to organize your contacts, understand their needs, and then deliver the right content to them.

While tracking your open rate is the best way to spot inactive subscribers, taking advantage of other indicators like your click-through rate will help you manage your iOS contacts more effectively. Then, you can start removing your disengaged users to improve deliverability and avoid getting flagged as spam.

To better manage your subscriber list, you need an email list management tool that offers you the right tools for the job. Services like Moosend and HubSpot already have an array of features to help you keep your contact lists up-to-date. Moreover, they integrate with various email verification platforms, allowing you to check the validity of your subscribers’ email addresses.

If you want to take advantage of Moosend’s advanced features and sender score (98%), make sure to sign up for an account!

3. Focus On Other Email Marketing Metrics

As mentioned above, there are more email metrics you can use to see if your audience engages with your email marketing campaigns.

Your click-through rate is an equally crucial indicator that isn’t affected by the updates. Monitoring clicks will help you find the subscribers who are actively engaging with your content. Then, you can easily compare the data with the number of emails sent to draw conclusions about user engagement.

Apart from your click-through rate, you can also monitor the traffic generated by your iOS 15 users and the conversion rate you had. Lastly, you need to pay extra attention to your bounce rate and unsubscribes.

These metrics will help you improve your email list hygiene and show you if your campaigns engage your audience. If these metrics are low, you need to focus on optimizing your content. We’ll see more on that later on!

4. Leverage Your Past Customer Data

Speaking of data, another great practice to improve your strategy is to use your past customer insights. You can analyze past reports, focusing on your historical open rate data to see how your iOS users interacted with your campaigns. For better results, you can generate reports on campaigns that presented high opens or clicks and use them as references for your next emails.

After you revisit your historical data, use them along with your bounce, unsubscribe, and click-through metrics to discover engagement patterns. Remember that understanding your iOS users better is the first step to targeting them with the right content.

So, now that you have all the necessary information, what’s the next step?

5. Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy

To engage your subscribers effectively, you need to focus on improving your content marketing strategy. Optimizing your content isn’t such a difficult task. What you need to remember is always to provide value and avoid being too sales-y.

Your best ally for the job is, as mentioned above, A/B Testing. Show your audience different value propositions and CTAs to see what they like the most. Also, along with your tests, try to find out what your audience loves through email surveys, polls, and more. Here’s a simple example by HappySocks:

Email campaign examples like the above are perfect for collecting more information about your audience. Then, you can use the data to create new segments, optimize your content, and increase your engagement.

Keep in mind that if you provide apt solutions to your subscribers’ pain points, they will open your emails, click on your calls-to-action, and, finally, convert.

6. Explore Other Channels

Now, email marketing may be among the most cost-effective digital marketing channels, but it’s not the only one you can use!

As your engagement and customer retention strategies will be affected by the iOS 15 update, taking advantage of SMS marketing and web push notifications will help you target your audience with relevant messages that matter.

Equally important is social media, a channel that you can use to power up your nurturing efforts! For instance, you can leverage Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature to connect with your subscribers and show them relevant content.

Whatever you choose, make sure that your iPhone users will receive the best experiences possible. And remember, a great email marketing strategy should be based on building value and trust, not on getting as many sales as possible.

How Moosend Can Help You Get Back On Track

To adapt to the new update, you need to take advantage of all the tools your email service provider (ESP) offers.

Moosend’s email marketing automation platform is equipped with numerous advanced features to help you overcome the obstacles and give you alternatives to succeed. Below, you can check some of the advanced features you can use to keep your email marketing strategy performing. Let’s see:

• A/B Testing Tools: Use Moosend’s A/B Testing capabilities to test various elements, including your subject lines, email copy, and visuals, to find the winning combinations.
• Past subscriber activity reports: Generate reports based on your subscriber’s email client, past activity, open rate, and more. Also, you can create individual reports per campaign to track engagement separately.
• Advanced segmentation: Segment your contacts based on specific web browsing data and email user behaviors to target your audience with the right messages.
• Performance by link: Check the analytics dashboard to see how your subscribers interact with your links.
• Scheduling tools: Create and schedule your campaigns for a later date. Also, take advantage of the timezone feature to deliver your messages when your audience sees them.
• Bounce rate monitoring: Track your bounce rate to compensate for the loss of open rate data. Check your soft and hard bounces to improve your deliverability and clean your lists more efficiently.

Selecting the right email marketing partner will help you overcome any potential challenges. So if you want to take advantage of Moosend’s features for the future, sign up for an account to start email marketing on the right foot.

Adapting To Change

Change is part of life so embrace it as soon as possible to find a solution that’ll combat any undesirable effects.

For your email marketing strategy, adapting to the Mail Protection Privacy is necessary to ensure that your processes will keep functioning at maximum capacity.

To do it, optimize your strategy by revisiting your data, checking your click-throughs and bounce rate to compensate for the loss of open rate data. Moreover, take the chance to polish your content marketing efforts and explore new channels like SMS or social media marketing!

As we like to say, teamwork makes the dream work! So choose your tools wisely to succeed long-term! And if Moosend is the right tool for you, don’t hesitate to give it a try!