In a press release dated June 7, 2021, Apple inc. announced new Mail Privacy Protection policy:
In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email and masks their IP address so it can't be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.
What does this new policy mean?
At the moment when a subscriber opens the Apple Mail app → Apple caches email content to the proxy server, including tracking pixel → And since the pixel loading is the basis for calculating the 'Opens' metric our system counts this event as a usual 'Open', although a real 'Open' might not have taken place.
In other words, when the user actually opens the email (for the first time or not), he always receives a cache version of the email, so we do not receive the opening event.
How does this affect Piano ESP publishers?
These innovations make it impossible to distinguish the opening event from the tracking pixel we should keep in mind that interpretation of the 'Opens' metric for Apple Mail on iOS, iPad, macOS would be changed at the following statistics graphs:
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Performance report
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Opens per location report
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Usage rate by the email client report
Such changes cannot pass without leaving a trace for the email marketing community. And since the data for Opens metric is becoming uncertain, we recommend you to shift your focus and pay more attention to high-quality content in emails, to get more clicks and referrals to your website.
Also, the good news is that in order to pick up actual content for recommendations in emails, Piano ESP learns user's behavior on the website and finds the most relevant to individual reader interest based on reading history. Thus, these changes will not affect the mechanism for selecting stories.
As for sending time optimization, it also remains without changes, in the good sense of the word.