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Forgotten about iOS 15? You’re not alone.

“Many people thought it was going to be a Big Bang event,” Chad White, Oracle Marketing Consulting’s head of research and the author of Email Marketing Rules, told MarketerHire. 

But Apple isn’t quite ready for its own tech. Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) seems to “have pretty dramatic effects on [Apple’s] backend servers,” White said. 

Don’t let the slow rollout trick you, though. White estimates we’re seeing 20% of the effects — like obscured open rates — that we’ll see late next year. 

Here are three things email marketers should do now to get ready. 

1. Don’t try to juice clickthrough rate.

“A lot of marketers are going to turn around and optimize for clicks,” White said. 

But if your audience loved your emails before MPP, they probably still love your emails now. You just can’t measure that love as easily. 

If you change your email design significantly and stuff emails with links, “you’re going to get more clicks,” White said, but “you’ve added friction into the process.” 

2. Measure behaviors beyond email. 

So if open rates are murky, and optimizing for clicks dings UX — what's the performance metric to watch? 

White’s suggestion: web or app sessions and purchases indirectly prompted by email marketing, White said.

Not click-through exactly, but… follow-through. 

Figuring out how to measure this could take time. White recommends building out email lookback windows ASAP, so you can see whether browsing and buying behaviors are influenced by your emails. 

3. Tweak automated email series.

Automated email flows based on opens may now be sending to people who haven’t actually opened your emails. 

Try automating emails based on clicks or replies instead. “There’s a lot of different options for how you can reconstruct them, but doing nothing is worse,” White said. 

Our takeaway?  

Apple may be taking MPP (relatively) slowly, but you should still modify your lookback windows, keep your links at bay, and update your automated series — or you could find yourself in the dark.

“[Apple’s] goal is very clear,” White said. “They want to obscure the activity of their users.”