Apple’s iOS 15 privacy update hits hard

Mail Privacy Protection is bad news for email marketeers using services such as Mailchimp

iPhone emails are much harder to track now (Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash)

Brace yourself if you’ve built a business around email marketing: Apple’s just made it a whole lot harder to keep tabs on your audience.

Apple iOS 15, which is beginning to roll out today, brings in something called Apple Mail Privacy Protection. In short, if your customer enables this optional feature — which they will be encouraged to by Apple — it’s going to be much more difficult to measure the impact of email marketing campaigns.

One of the biggest email marketing firms out there, Mailchimp, has posted an FAQ on how Apple Mail Privacy Protection will affect its tracking. It makes pretty grim reading if you live or die by your mail campaign stats.

If customers switch on Mail Privacy Protection, Mailchimp may no longer be able to tell if:

• Your email was opened
• Where the person was when they opened the email (ie. rough geographical location)
• The type of device and email client they used to open the message with

Not being able to tell whether a customer has read the message or not also kills one of Mailchimp’s other features — the ability to re-send…