There’s No Reason To Panic About Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection

You heard, right? Apple announced this week that iOS 15 and Mac OS Monterey will introduce new email privacy options including pixel blocking.

For the newsletter newcomers, the way your email service provider creates an open rate report is by including pixels in images and counting each unique pixel view as an open. It’s never been perfect, because some email clients block images, so even if a subscriber opens, they may not be counted as an open.

Note: Curated currently tracks both pixel views and clicks as opens. This means that if someone has images blocked but clicks a link, they’re added as an “open.”

It seems we newsletter senders live and die by open rates. So, naturally, we’re all a little concerned that the metric we depend on (even if we know it’s a little fuzzy) is about to become much fuzzier because Apple Mail’s solution to blocking pixels is going to mean that if someone blocks pixels, they’ll count as an open even if they don’t actually open.

And it won’t just be outliers. Last month, Litmus reported that 93.5% of all email opens on phones come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac represents for 58.4% of all email opens (same report).

Now might be the time to start measuring beyond open rates, which makes me sad because it’s such an easy way to measure newsletter engagement, but I’m not anti-privacy and if this is the wave of the future then we’ll just have to find another (less invasive?) way.

In Will Apple end the newsletter boom?, newsletter writer and reporter Casey Newton interviewed email industry experts who advise newsletter creators to pause, chill, and look on the bright side.

“The advertising industry has addicted itself to tracking, prioritizing bottom of the funnel metrics at the expense of great content and creative. It’s tragic,” said Alex Kantrowitz, author of the free, ad-supported newsletter Big Technology. (He previously covered the industry for Ad Age.) “And it’s why people hate advertising and ad companies.”

“Pixel blocking makes placements like this more valuable and gives quality email newsletters a leg up on the junk clogging most people’s inboxes,” Kantrowitz said.

Casey reports that publishing industry executives told him writers “can triangulate reader engagement by plenty of metrics that are still available to them, including the views their stories get on the web, the overall growth of their mailing list, and — most meaningful of all — the growth of their revenue.”

The piece is worth a read and stays fairly unbiased, although he does speculate that Apple is implementing privacy policies with the intention of funneling ad money away from other platforms to its own.

theverge.com  

Did You Choose A “Top 10” Email Font?

Saffa Faisal provides a little font wisdom in this Unlayer article, which rounds up the “10 Best Fonts for Email Design in 2021.”

Is yours on the list?

I use Merriweather and Lato.

Discovered via Really Good Emails.

unlayer.com  

Newsletter Content The Axios Way

You may recall an article I curated last fall about what someone learned from analyzing 1,300 Axios emails.

This one comes from a different writer, but it’s a similar story. In this round of breaking down Axios newsletters, Arik Hanson focuses on 5 content lessons the newsletter powerhouse’s local issues can teach us.

They’re all solid ideas, but I’m partial to the curation one, which recommends following their Catch Up Quick list of stories readers might have missed.

Click through to see if you can implement any of these ideas.

business2community.com