In this article, we’ll cover privacy updates made to Apple Mail that make open rates unreliable for all email senders, including Foureyes Prospect Engagement. We’ll talk about the scope and impact of these updates and what Foureyes is doing to respond.

Key Questions:

With the release of iOS 15 and Mac OS Monterey, users of Apple Mail can now enable a feature called Mail Privacy Protection, which prevents email senders such as Foureyes from identifying whether the user has opened an email.

Any Apple Mail user with this feature enabled will appear to have opened every email they receive, artificially inflating key email metrics like open rate and click-to-open rate that are calculated based on open data.

We expect the adoption of the feature to continue to rise and other email platforms to release similar privacy features, so open data will be increasingly inflated in the months and years to come.

Yes, every email vendor is affected by this update. You can expect to see inflated open rates and click-to-open rates from any email vendor or campaign you use to engage your prospects or customers.

For now, all major email vendors are continuing to report on open rate without any change to how it is calculated. Many are now recommending that marketers shift their focus to click rate, which remains reliable.

Foureyes recently released a new filter on the Prospect Engagement Email Log allowing you to filter out the “machine opens” or “bot activity” produced by the Apple Mail privacy feature. This filter gives you a more accurate picture of your email open rates and the impact of Apple Mail Privacy Protection on engagement reporting.

As other vendors continue to report on open rates, Foureyes will continue to display standard open rate in the Prospect Engagement Reporting Dashboard to allow you to compare performance to other vendors head-to-head.

To start, we recommend focusing your performance evaluation on click rate, which tells you how frequently subscribers are clicking through to your inventory listings from a Foureyes Prospect Engagement email.

Click rate has always been the strongest indicator of email engagement and relevance, and it hasn’t been affected by the Apple Mail privacy updates.

We recommend supplementing click rate data with the website traffic and activity data shown in the Prospect Engagement Reporting Dashboard, as well as each subscriber’s Profile Page.

Prospect Engagement was built to keep customers engaged with your inventory, driving them back to your VDPs to get them ready to buy, so traffic and activity data should be a key factor when evaluating impact.