 So what does this mean for you? That's the big question. What does this mean for you as a building product manufacturer? The big thing here is that we need to start to change the way that we look at the metrics in our marketing. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Popney Glove. And today we are talking about Apple, some changes they're making to their phones, specifically iOS 15. As you know, iOS is the operating system that Apple operates their phones on, which impacts all of us, especially marketers, because we use our phones all the time. And you're marketing to people on social media, on email, on your website, and any change that they're making to iOS as it relates to tracking, security, privacy is going to impact what you do as a marketer. So we want to break down this big change, what it means for you, and then look at the macro level of what's going to happen long term in the marketing space. We're going to talk a little about Google as well, and what this means to you. Yeah, so let's set some good context for what we're going to talk about and why it's important. Frankly, it feels like every third month there's a software update, and we shouldn't be reviewing all of them, because a lot of times they are just rather neutral. But just from a perspective standpoint, when we think about engagement on a mobile phone for things online, specifically email, which we're going to talk about today, it's typically the majority of traffic opening an email is actually on their phones. That's true even in the building materials industry, probably close to 60 to 65% of your emails are being opened on mobile. Online traffic is typically 60, 40, still desktop specifically in the building materials industry, which makes sense because architects said at their desk a lot, dealers and distributors are visiting your website from their specific dealer location, and also we've all been at home a lot on our desktops quite frequently over the last 18 months. So just to keep that in mind of why do I need to care, and also Apple iPhones are the world leader in mobile phones. Androids are great, lots of people have them, but they definitely own a minority of the market. Well, I think Beth, it's important for us to note too, we did an episode a few months ago about iOS 14, which iOS 14 was that massive, massive change that is causing this friction in the big tech space specifically between Apple and Facebook slash Instagram, because they're not allowing apps to track you from one app to the other. And if we look at we're going to break down from you the changes that's happening iOS 15. Apple's basically doubling down in the security area. They want to be known as this privacy secure organization, which I think there's differing opinions about it as marketers, it's going to impact you regardless. But we want to share with you what those changes are, as well as what you should be thinking about as these changes are rolled out. Cool. Yep. That's really good foundation. Okay, so let's jump right in. Number one, with the iOS 15 update, Apple has released a mail privacy protection option. So we're talking about Apple Mail, not all mail on iOS 15, just Apple Mail specifically, Apple Mail now allows users to opt in to mail privacy. So this is going to mask their IP address, it's going to block third parties from tracking email opens, other IP data, it's going to eliminate the ability to accurate accurately track open and click rates. When you email somebody with Apple Mail. So again, it's not going to impact like Gmail open and click rates or Outlook open and click rates. But this is an indicator of what could be to come for Gmail Outlook, even those of you still hanging on to your Yahoo email addresses. Apple leads the way. They typically are rolling features out when they see precedent or they see the beginning of demand. They see that there is going to be people asking for more privacy when it comes to their emails specifically. And that's why they've offered this option to Apple Mail. Now, the good news is from a building material standpoint, Apple Mail is actually typically very is not highly utilized. The majority of email servers that we see being used across the channel Outlook is usually number one quickly followed by Gmail. Apple Mail from a crop from a universal worldwide standpoint, they actually have 35% of emails addresses. But again, it's much smaller in the building products industry. Now, just to finally like just to wrap that up, this isn't something that we means your email newsletter metrics are immediately unreliable. However, if you do see something that just seems a little bit wonky in the next couple of months, or suddenly something's a spike is up or down, this would be something to look into to understand if this is potentially impacting that. And the second thing is just to finally reiterate, this is a predictor of the future. Gmail isn't rolling this out tomorrow. They haven't said anything about it or made any comment about it, but it is something to keep an eye on as privacy comes more to the forefront in the online world. I think it's a good point, Beth. If you look at what's happening in Apple, they're definitely trying to position themselves. But if this takes well and the market responds well to it, we're going to see other players like Google highly consider this, which is going to have an even broader impact. The second feature that they're rolling out, the second of the three is what we're calling like an iCloud plus subscription. Essentially, what Apple is doing is they're allowing a subscription within that enables an additional privacy feature that is like this VPN like private relay feature that prevents sites from tracking Safari users, aka like I'm viewing something on a website who opt in and allow you allows users to see which websites they're sending information to. So if you opt into something, they're going to allow you to see, well, who are they sending information to? Who's doing something with my data? What's important to note about this feature is that this is still in beta and there's ongoing conversations around whether or not this is going to damage users' experience by blocking access to certain products like Netflix or something like that. So this is something that if it doesn't work well, if it doesn't take well, we might see this thing actually rolled out. But either way, this is going to impact things like geotargeting as well as other ad services through IPs and the networks for companies like Google, for example, because they rely on GPS, they rely on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and other Google cell IDs or cell towers and databases. So it's not essentially going to be crucial for geotargeting users, but it will potentially have an impact for sure in how we market to people, specifically in geolocation areas. All right, Beth, what's the third one? Okay, so finally, as part of that iCloud subscription, they're offering a hide my email option. Honestly, I think this is a good idea. And this is really, this is a great idea. And it's not something to be worried about, but it is good to know if you start to see weird things happening. So what they're doing is if you enter your email, then they will give you kind of bogus emails that you can then sign up for things with. So instead of having to create a bunch of random emails so that you can just get the download that you want and then know that that person can't sell your email onto somebody else and give you a bunch of spam, they allow you to enter your email. So mine is bethadvenvio.com. If I had an iCloud subscription, I would put bethadvenvio.com as my real email. And then they would give me dummy emails like random one at apple.com. And I would be able to use that to get the tech specs, download the tech specs off of a manufacturer's website or sign up for your newsletter or something like that. So this keeps you from getting actual personal information about me, which is kind of a bummer from a lead contact and nurturing standpoint. But from a privacy standpoint, this is fine. Frankly, people have been doing this for a very long time. It's not the first time that somebody gave a bogus email to get exactly what they want. It just keeps it going to their one individual email inbox instead of them having to set up a bunch of random Gmail accounts in order to do it. I think this is a great idea. Nothing to be concerned about. It's not going to inhibit your metrics in any sort of way. But if you start to see wonky emails coming into your CRM, there's a possibility that that's what's going on. Yeah, that's important to hear, Beth, is that this is a subscription element, too. So people have to pay for this additional hide my email feature. But the impact to you as a marketer is that in your CRM or market animation tool, the same person who enters an email might have multiple different email addresses assigned to them. That's a good point. And you might not know that individuals true email address because they're masking it. So this is one area where Apple's most likely testing this out to see if it's going to work for long term. But for you as a marketer, this is just something for you to be paying attention to in your CRM. If you start to see a bunch of different wonky email addresses or strange email addresses, it's because potentially of this. But to Beth's point earlier, this idea has been around for a while. You can go to different websites and grab a random email address. Apple's just trying to connect that dot a little bit more closely to their operating system. It's not a windfall of iCloud subscriptions. Just like stampeding to get this type of privacy. This is simply a, hey, this is something that we need to have our eye in for one, two, three years down the road as digital marketers to understand what kind of temperature is Apple taking from the expectation of privacy as they roll out. We all know Apple does things before people even want them. Like, did anybody want them to get rid of the headphone jack? No. But now we're all super glad that they did and we love that we love our AirPods. So that's kind of what's happening here from a privacy standpoint is they see that this will go from a, oh, that would be cool to like, I'm literally not going to get a phone or interact with something without this. So what does this mean for you? That's the big question. What does this mean for you as a building product manufacturer? The big thing here is that we need to start to change the way that we look at the metrics in our marketing. So instead of open rates, for example, we will begin, and this is something that will happen over time, we need to begin to shift to other metrics to gauge success of an email campaign specifically. This is all targeted email metrics like clicks, site traffic, click maps, and unsubscribe rates can be other indicators that you should be looking at. But we'll also use things like surveys and customer interviews to gain additional information about what readers are looking for and responding to. The other point about this thing that's important to know here too is that the use of URL parameters, UTMs, which if you're in marketing, it's like a tool that helps you understand how, you know, if someone clicks on something, what campaign that's tied to are going to become even more important for connecting browser activity, aka site visits and conversions with specific users. So if you're not using UTMs as a part of your campaigns, which is something we always do, we recommend to everybody, you need to absolutely be doing that because that is going to tie that user activity across multiple sessions more directly because you might see that disconnectivity between people because they're changing their email address or masking it for some reason. Beth, what are some of the other impacts that people are going to run into? Yeah, so this all can sound very scary, especially if you are a marketer who is responsible for the success of your email. And what we would encourage is to start digging deeper into how people are truly engaging with your email. Opens are going to be the number one impacted result from this new privacy rollout. Are you getting hundreds and thousands of people that are reading your content or do you have a pretty decent click rate, but a very low click through rate? Click through rate meaning they actually click on something and then go on to read whatever you've delivered to them, whether it's product brochure information or leading them to your blog and your newsletter or anything like that. That's where you're still going to be able to get fairly reliable data. And if you have good content, you don't need to worry because people aren't going to magically stop reading your emails just because these privacy roll, uh, privacy's are rolled out. But if you have just kind of been spamming and getting away with it, this additional privacy stringency is going to hurt you. But if we're honest, that's kind of a good thing because nobody means to be spammy. And it's never a bad thing to take a pause and look at your strategy. Well, I mean, another thing to hear too, Beth, is that Google's going to be rolling out or phasing out, excuse me, phasing out cookies on Chrome browsers in 2023. So if you look at that, like, that's a reason why we should be taking these privacy shifts more seriously, why we should be getting ahead. Because, and for marketers, we go, Oh my gosh, like, what are we going to do? They're, they're moving cookies or moving some of these, these, the trackability of emails, for example, I actually think it's going to be a positive result because we're going to shift our attention from things that look like vanity metrics like, Hey, what are my open rates? Open rates don't necessarily matter for an email. What matters is, does someone click in that email and then convert on your website? Exactly. We're still going to attract those kinds of things, but we're going to have less insight into those vanity metrics like a ka open rates. So what does this mean for you as a manufacturer? You know, you need to take these privacy concerns, these privacy shifts seriously, you need to start to think about how you can leverage UTM parameters and UTM codes more effectively. And you need to make sure that you're doing a good job of delivering value because at the end of the day, if you deliver unique value to your customers, if you're telling that story that's unique to them, if you're giving and not taking as much, you're going to position yourself as that leader in your industry, you're going to continue to garner the attention of your audience. Hopefully you all found this helpful. We know this is a little bit more of a technical episode, but we did want to cover it because it's impacting marketers and those across the industry. If you want more content, we're also going to be linking to a few articles about this on our website. If you go to mv.com slash podcast, you'll see this episode there with a few links at the bottom of this post. One of the things we want to ask you for is if you enjoy our podcast, we put a ton of effort into it. Make sure you go to the Apple podcast store and give us a strong five star rating. We will thank you for that. We're always looking for people to give us feedback. So if you enjoyed this episode, if you enjoyed other episodes, we would really, really welcome and appreciate any kind of positive views. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Pompnyglove. Thanks everybody.