Keep your eye on the prize as Apple makes changes to tracking email opens

Apple’s announcement about moving to limit visibility into which customers are opening your emails in the Apple Mail app was foreboding, and a little vague. I sat down with Chris McGreal, Cordial co-founder and Head of Product, to understand: what do we know, what might change, and what will stay the same?

What we know: for the Apple Mail app, “they are talking about disabling the ability to track opens…exactly how. There’s a lot of speculation and conversation.”

What might change: “we just need to prepare ourselves that there will be a change to the accuracy of open reporting in the future,” and opens are the denominator in a helpful statistic (Click-to-Open-Rate) to understand the efficacy of your calls to action.

What will stay the same: “it’s keeping your eye on the ultimate prize…which for a retailer is revenue. Looking at what is the revenue per message, what are the total orders from the campaign – the marketer needs to shift their focus a little bit lower in the funnel from the open all the way to the conversion.” 

Chris also talks about how the product team has never “hard-coded… any KPI to a specific test… you might think ‘well why would you want to test something other than opens for a Subject line?’ Well, we’ve talked to marketers and they’ve given us some pretty good reasons, so we’ve… always left that as an a-la-carte menu.”