Fort Lauderdale, November 1st, 2021: Email marketing has become harder and less useful for Fort Lauderdale businesses over the last few weeks, thanks to a major security update by Apple.
The tech giant introduced something called Mail Privacy Protection. It’s currently on iPhones and iPads and will arrive on Macs soon.
It means anyone who reads their email using Apple’s Mail app can hide their activity from the businesses who sent the emails. It’s thought up to 50% of all email is opened in Apple Mail.
“Up till now, a business doing an email newsletter broadcast could monitor who was opening which emails, when and where,” said local technology expert Cesar Avila, of IT support company AVLA.net IT Solutions.
“They could then use that information for targeted follow-up marketing. Mail Privacy Protection removes the ability to do that.
“It’s great for people who don’t want anyone tracking what they open in their email. But it weakens a powerful marketing tool for local businesses.”
It doesn’t matter which email service is used to receive emails, such as Gmail or Outlook. The protection is there so long as the email is read in Apple’s Mail app. This protection is off by default and has to be switched on.
Normally email tracking works by embedding a one-pixel transparent image in the email. When someone opens the email, it requests the image from the marketing software that sent it. That’s how it knows when an email has been opened.
With this new protection, all email images will be automatically pre-loaded by Apple. It will seem as if all emails received on Apple Mail will have been opened… whether a human sees them or not.
Cesar added: “Apple’s been cracking down on tracking and increasing privacy for some time.
“All businesses around here really need to keep a close eye on how technology is affecting marketing, so they can stay on top of the constant change.”
AVLA.net was formed in 2000, and specializes in data security for local businesses in the Fort Lauderdale area.
