In the second half of 2021, Apple brought a feature called Apple Mail Privacy. All Apple Mail users could (and most did) opt into a privacy feature where Apple would mess up some tracking.
What happens with Apple Mail privacy?
Apple loads images, including the open-pixel themselves, so all emails to Apple Mail Privacy users would show up as opening your emails.
This is not great because people who don’t actually read your emails show up as opening 100% of your emails.
We don’t want to send our newsletter to people who don’t want it so we have daily automations to purge disengaged subscribers.
How to fix Apple Mail Privacy?
With Apple Mail Privacy, we had to add one more such automation, and this is what it looks like:
- We create a segment of people who’ve opened the last 40 emails and did not click any link. This means they have under 2.5% CTR.
- We send them a re-engagement email explaining why we are doing this, and asking them to click on one confirmation link so we know they still want our newsletter.
- On the next day, we remove all who did not click this link.
In our case, this segment isn’t too big and it’s clear that these users are not actually opening and reading our newsletters. Six months ago, they would have had a 0% open rate!
