SpareMyTime VA & email marketing specialist, Lizzie Mathews, gives her top tips for getting around the iOS 15 privacy settings
Now you know all about iOS 15 & the impact on your email marketing success, what can you do about it?

1. Evaluate & test to inform future campaigns
Get started on evaluating your old campaigns and metrics to see what worked (those sent pre- September 2021). You could begin by looking at how many of your subscribers even use Apple Mail—if the number is low, you might not have to change much at all.
In MailerLite for example, you can see this in the campaign reports. Looking back at campaigns you ran before 20th September (when iOS 15 launched) will show you the percentage of openers that were using Apple Mail in some form.
Also, look back at what send day and time generated the best open and click rates, and then look at what subject lines worked better than others. The type e.g. questions, quirkiness etc, plus what topic areas.
2. Measure other metrics
This could be great for your campaigns. After all, how many times have you opened an email only to close it immediately? Click-thru rate (CTR) and conversion rate are much better indicators of engagement.
Spend a bit of time a few days to a week after you’ve sent each campaign to really analyse the results. What kind of bounce rate are you getting? What are subscribers clicking on? How does the CTR compare with your previous campaigns? Which type of content and link works best –
image, button, text or video, for example? If your email platform has a click heat map in the reporting, utilise this, as it’ll help you to see exactly what and where people are clicking.
Also consider using A/B tests for different content, for example, the wording on your call to action (CTA) buttons to optimise clicks. Keep your emails short and to the point. Put a long piece of content onto your site as a blog post, and link to it instead. Make sure you’re always linking back to your website.
Other metrics that you should consider are:
- Return On Investment (ROI) – Are you generating your target ROI or above? Or could it be better? Your emails might need some work to be optimized for conversions/sales.
- List growth compared with unsubscribe rate – Do you gain more subscribers than you lose? If so, it means you’re doing something right! If not, it might be time to re-evaluate your content. You can also carry out surveys to find out what subscribers want to see.
3. Create data segments based on interests
Targeting subscribers with content based on their interests is likely to lead to much higher engagement with your emails – more clicks and ideally more customers/clients. You can do this in a number of ways:
- Start to collect data on your subscribers based on what they click on – some email platforms allow you to tag them or add them to a group if they click on a specific link.
- You can also do this by asking subscribers what they’re interested in – not only does this fulfil GDPR requirements, but it also means that you can start to serve up some content of interest. You could do this through dynamic content sections in the email (where each segment sees a different version of the content), or by only sending certain emails to that segment.
Need help with your email marketing?
If you need help getting started with email marketing, making sense of your campaign reports, or improving your weekly newsletter, get in touch, we’d love to help! Email us at info@sparemytime.com for more details.