5 Tips to Navigate the iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection Update

As you might know already, iOS 15 was released today. While iOS updates happen all the time, there’s something unique about this particular one: It includes the option for users to block the tracking of their email opens in the Apple Mail app. 

If you’re wondering what’s going to change, the answer is probably not a whole lot. Just like when your Instagram feed stopped being displayed in chronological order or when the home button on your iPhone quietly disappeared, we bet you’ll find it easier to adapt than you think. 

It might be intimidating at first, but we believe it’s another positive step towards giving everyone more control over their data, and more importantly, re-shaping what it means to be a small business. 

When opens fall away, it creates an opportunity to focus on what really matters most: building real engagement and serving your customers well (two things that Flodesk members do better than anyone else).

If you’re still feeling a little nervous, here are a couple of tips on what to do next:

We just released more ways to make it easy for you to better engage with your audience, serving more relevant content to the right people at the right time, with features like custom form fields, subscriber preferences, the Preferences Page and more. So don’t forget to promote your Preferences Page so your subscribers can explicitly tell you what they want to hear about or how often they want to hear from you. You can promote this periodically by encouraging subscribers to click “Manage Preferences” in any of your emails at any time.

You can also ask subscribers what they want to hear about by adding checkbox preferences to your Flodesk Forms, which allow you to personalize content from the start of your subscriber relationship.

To learn more, check out 3 New Ways to Hyper-Personalize Your Email Marketing with Flodesk Forms.

Add at least one button or link to every email so you can continue monitoring engagement via click rates.

Email quality score is a concept shared by Lucas Chevillard that shows you how many people are annoyed by your messages vs. actually enjoy receiving them.

To calculate your email quality score, follow this simple formula:

Unsubscribers (people who are annoyed by your message/no longer need your services) divided by Responders (people who enjoy your message as measured by unique clicks + unsubscribes) removed from 1 and then multiplied by 100.

To calculate this in Flodesk, navigate to the analytics section of an email and take note of your unsubscribes and unique clicks. To calculate your Responders, add unique clicks + unsubscribes. Divide unsubscribes by Responders. Subtract this number from 1 and multiply by 100. The result is the % of people who enjoyed your email.

For instance, let’s say you have 1 unsubscribe and 9 unique clicks. Your Responders is the sum of the two, which is 10. Divide your unsubscribes by Responders, subtract that from 1 and multiply by 100. 1 – (1/10) x 100 = 90% email quality score or 90% enjoyed your email. 

You might be wondering: How is email quality score different from click-through rate (CTR)?

CTR shows you how many people clicked through in your email, but this metric lives a bit in a silo. For instance, you might see that 5% clicked through on a particular email. Is that good or is that bad? It’s always good to track each email’s CTR and compare that to your benchmark (or the average CTR for all your emails). However, your email quality score adds another level of insight by putting clicks relative to unsubscribes to help add perspective. 

This is more important than ever to build connections and trust with your subscribers. People buy from people they know, like and trust. And one way to check all those boxes is to send emails consistently at whatever cadence works best for you.

Forget about what everyone else is doing. Think about your readers’ specific questions, fears and challenges and how you’re uniquely positioned to help them. Write it down, send it out and track those clicks.

Check out Jess Ekstrom’s Flodesk University course “Creating Content From Everyday Experiences to Fuel Your Email Strategy” for inspiration.

We know change is never easy, but here’s what we know for certain. You started your business because you have something amazing to offer. People still need what you have. And people will continue opening and enjoying your emails whether it’s being tracked or not. 

If you have more questions, please check out our iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection FAQs.