Apple has announced major privacy changes for iOS 15, and if your business has an online presence, then you need to know about them. These changes will limit the amount of insight we can gain into our audiences online, which means most B2B marketers will need to pivot their current approach to digital marketing.
Although these Apple’s changes will primarily affect Apple devices*, the industry tends to follow suit when Apple makes significant changes like this. Google has already released similar tools for Android and desktop including Google One VPN, along with tracking pixel blocking tools added to Outlook and Gmail. So let’s take a look at what’s changing, and how your business can adapt to the new analytics environment.
Key changes you need to know about
When iOS 15 goes live (at some point in the autumn), these are the main changes that will impact marketers:
Change #1: Your email campaigns will be affected by Mail Privacy Protection, which users can activate to prevent you from knowing when they open an email, and mask their IP address.
What it means for you: You won’t be able to see detailed analytics like a user’s location, or whether they have opened, clicked on or interacted with an email in any way, meaning that even users who engage with your emails on these devices you won’t know about it.
Change #2: Users will also be able to use Hide My Email to create unique, random email addresses that forward emails to their personal inbox, so they can control who reaches their personal email address.
What it means for you: You’ll still be able to reach these people, but you’re going to have much less information on them - you won’t know which company they work for, for example, if they use a random email address on your forms. It also means that you need to ensure your content is delivering value, as users will now be able to disable this unique email in a couple of clicks, ensuring you can’t reach them even if they don’t unsubscribe.
Change #3: It will also be more difficult for you to use tracking to build a profile of a specific person, because users can turn on Intelligent Tracking Prevention to hide their IP address and other identifiers from trackers. And the new iCloud Private Relay feature will make the biggest difference to your website analytics. Most users will now appear as though they are a different person each time they visit your website or app, and cross-device tracking is going to be much more difficult.
What it means for you: It will be hard to determine how many of your web visitors are returning users, how long they have spent on your site, their location etc.
Don’t panic - pivot instead
As a B2B marketing agency, we welcome these changes. Anything done to improve individual privacy is a step closer to ensuring a safer, friendlier and overall better online experience for everyone. And although marketers will face new challenges when it comes to driving insight from our data, we firmly believe that there’s now more opportunities than ever for ethical, customer-focused businesses to reach their audiences. You simply need to:
We will lose some of the campaign statistics we’re used to seeing, like the number of email opens, and the number of unique visitors to your website. But you’ll still receive some of the most important stats in any campaign - like which content assets are receiving the highest downloads, and how many new leads your activity is bringing in. You can use this data to identify what’s resonating with your audience and optimise your campaigns accordingly. Implementing server-side tracking and upgrading your dashboards and reporting is also key.
If you want to get to know your users, and build a true profile of them, you will no longer be able to rely on tracking - so it’s never been more important to get clever with your content. Creating a sector-based whitepaper, for example, will give you a good reason to ask for a prospect’s industry in the lead form. Remember, your audience can still give you their data if they would like to - you just need to create content that’s valuable enough for them to see it as worthwhile.
This is something we should all be doing anyway - constantly looking for new ways to engage our audiences and drive leads. Ultimately, these changes will impact marketers across all industries, and we will all need to experiment with new tactics and techniques to ensure our digital campaigns continue to deliver.
It’s now a better time than ever to have a fundamental review of your integrated marketing plan, digital infrastructure and activity is more key than ever in all industries, but is best complemented by an effective long-term full-mix marketing plan.
We’re here when you need us
We know that many B2B marketers have ramped up their digital marketing efforts in the past year - and achieved amazing results by doing so - which means these privacy changes might seem particularly daunting. But when you’ve worked in digital marketing for as long as we have, adapting to significant changes in the industry becomes second nature.
There are some great options to ensure you’re best prepared for the changing privacy landscape, so if you have any questions about these changes, or you could use some support to pivot your digital marketing strategy or review your infrastructure and training, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can email our Head of Digital at adam@themarketingpod.co.uk or call us on 01564 742848.
* Some changes are also expected to apply to users of iCloud Mail on other devices.
James Montgomery
