If you’re an entrepreneur or established business owner, it’s likely email marketing is one of your many strategies to attract new clients and expand your reach. Email marketing is critical because even though you don’t own your social media followers (they can all disappear in an instant at any given time), growing your email list is a more secure way of collecting your customer’s contact information.

Open rates are one of the key metrics we all use to measure email success rate, and unfortunately, with the new iPhone iOS 15 privacy feature, that is going to get a lot harder. While it’s great news for the users, it’s not so great for businesses who rely on email marketing and its metrics, specifically open rates and results of A/B testing.

Whether you’re a diehard Apple fan or a devoted Android user, you can’t deny that at least half of your target audience is an iPhone user. And while not all iPhone users will opt-on to the mail privacy protection program, it’s likely most will, as the two options are worded in a way that would convince you to pick one over the other.

1. Protect Mail activity – Hide IP address and load all remote content
2. Don’t protect Mail activity – Show IP address and load any remote content directly on your device.

If these users opt into the feature, Apple will mask IP addresses and block third parties from tracking email open rates.

If you’ve solely relied on email open rates in the past, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Instead of getting hung up on your open rates, start looking at other metrics, like click-through rates and conversions. While your open rates may never look the same again, this doesn’t mean you can’t pivot your strategy to ensure you’re adapting to the ever-changing features of technology.

This is an opportunity for you, as a business owner, to re-think the way you communicate with your client base. Build more meaningful relationships and strategizing beyond the subject line. Your links, images, and call to action will be more important than ever, so spend some time thinking of what that should look like.

Overall, the new iPhone iOS 15 feature is a step up for user experience. Users are now in charge of the data they share, and as a consumer and entrepreneur, I think that’s amazing and a step in the right direction.