Email Tracking - Could this be the end?

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Jacob Styler

Digital Marketing Director | Infinity Digital AgencyI am a multiskilled Digital Marketing Professional based in Pershore, Worcestershire. I have recently launched a start-up digital marketing agency called Infinity Digital Agency, whose mission is to offer a one-stop-shop solution for all things marketing and PR. My journey started as a young, eager apprentice for a print firm where I experienced the agency life for the first time with a range of offline clients, as well as, being tasked with growing the agency through various forms of digital marketing channels. Fast forward a few years and I have been super proud to work for a construction and engineering group, where I gained my Certified Digital status with the Digital Marketing Institute. My skills are ever growing but range from web design, social media management, and multi-channel campaign strategy and implementation. I’m truly passionate about my work and always eager to connect with other marketers and salespeople. While I enjoy all aspects of my job, I think my favourite stage of a project is working with the client to understand their business and seeing how digital marketing can create an impact on their goals and objectives. As we go through that collaborative process, the ideas start to flow and that’s always the fun part in my opinion.
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Could this really be it? Tracking your open rates, clicks and location-based reporting from your very sexy email campaigns might be coming to an end…

Well, when iOS15 is released that will definitely be the case for some users. Apple have released some new privacy changes that will change up the way us marketeers rely on this data for future planning campaigns.

A recent article has been published on Vox.com explaining these new privacy changes but it appears that Apple users will have to pay for these privileges via their iCloud subscription. The particular change I am interested in is the new ‘Hide My Email’ feature, which allows you to create a fake email address for the websites out there that ask you to enter one email to access, subscribe to emails or read content.

Those emails will then be redirected to your usual inbox but won’t show the company/website owner the real email address, so us marketers will not be able to see who has opened an email and where they opened it. There are limits to this as Apple have shown that it only appears to work on Safari, Mail and with your iCloud email address only.

So, we may be panicking over nothing but there are so many privacy changes that are happening in the digital marketing world right now it’s getting harder to keep up!

Our Agency, Infinity Digital Agency, recently gave some insight in one of our social media posts into how third-party cookie tracing will be eliminated by Google over the next 12 months. We’ve already seen Facebook spring into action with tracking updates on ads within Ads Manager following the iOS14 update, so it leads me to question… what is going to happen next?

Let me know what you think about all of this in the comments section. I am keen to see people’s reactions to this…