Apple iOS 15: How It Impacts The iOS Development Industry & iPhone App Marketing and What To Do About It?

Apple’s next iOS 15 update is officially here. It brings a range of new features and enhancements to your iPhone, including a comfortable way to use Safari, preconfigured modes to change your home screen setup instantly, and massive upgrades to FaceTime. 

In addition, Apple introduced an array of updates, emphasizing App Store Optimization, offering mobile marketers and iOS app development companies more opportunities to improve their product pages. For marketing specialists, iOS 15 is a major update that will impact their paid user acquisition strategies. 

Those who have been following Apple’s latest updates already know that the company is immensely focused on privacy. Previously, with its iOS 14 update, the company provided users a preference to opt-out of tracking for third-party apps like Facebook.

The update had a massive impact on Facebook ad performance, with marketers no longer being able to access critical conversion data. But, as expected, a study showed that 96% of US users opt-out of app tracking. In addition, the new iOS update further improves users’ privacy, concentrating on email marketing, App Store Optimization, and a range of other updates.

iOS 15 Features

iOS 15 – Product Page Optimization (Focused on Organics)

This is the most significant iOS 15 feature that will drastically boost marketers’ opportunities to drive more traffic to their product pages on the App Store. The newest iOS 15 update will split the app store into two groups – Paid and Organic, which means you can modify the content based on your audience on your product pages.

Now, with custom product pages and product page optimization, marketers will have the capability to fundamentally A/B test their pages and find out what clicks. For example, you can change screenshots, app icons or highlight particular features to see if that drives conversions or multiplies downloads in specific categories.

iOS app developers can create a maximum of three different treatments, or variants, over your default product page and evaluate them for the best results. You can also acquire complete App Analytics from App Store Connect and run tests for up to 90 days. While tests are live, you can inspect the performance of impressions, page views, installs, and conversions for each variant.

For each test you run, you can also define the amount of traffic you want to allocate. The best part is that each test can be limited to different audiences so that you can track and collect user behavior learnings from various societies and countries.

Google’s Store Listing Experiments is intended to provide iOS developers the choice to optimize their product page effectively and understand their audiences. All metadata that you expect to test must be submitted for assessment. Variants that include app previews and screenshots can also be submitted for review without being bound to a version update.

iOS 15 – Custom Product Pages – Focused on Paid User Acquisition (UA)

One of the major announcements of the latest iOS 15 update was Custom Product Pages. iOS developers can build up to 35 versions of your App product pages to highlight particular app features for specific audiences. Marketers will have complete liberty to modify the promo text, screenshots, and the app preview video and drive audiences to unique URLs.

For ages, marketers have had trouble aligning their message with the commitment of their audiences. With the latest iOS 15 updates, iOS developers can build a product page that attracts your target audiences. Modifying the message to your audience’s intent could considerably drive up conversion rates.

You will be able to check and evaluate analytical data linked with each product page, including downloads, conversion rates, impressions, and more in App Analytics. In addition, for each Custom Product Page mobile app developers create, you can also see the average revenue generated per user, giving marketers rough insight to optimize their product pages for their audiences.

iOS 15 – In-App Events Are Now Searchable

In-app events are what they sound like – limited-time events that are not a part of the everyday experience. For example, a movie premiere or a limited-time expedition could earn some unique loot in a game. Earlier, you could only notice these events while in the app itself. Marketers can now feature these events on product pages, and Apple will curate the most significant events in the App Store.

Users can tap on the event details to better explain the event and the app itself. They can also share the event straight from the product page to others on messages or social media platforms. Users who don’t have the app or game can also download it straight from the event card and be promptly directed to the event section in the app or game.

In the perspective of performance marketing, this opens up new opportunities for marketers to arise with attention-grabbing creative and events and see how they can bring in more users. Earlier, in-app events were only appropriate for driving engagement for existing users. But now, an iOS application development agency will want to align its marketing strategies when building new possibilities to boost discovery and downloads.

Apple Email Meets Apple’s Privacy Policy: iOS 15 and Email Marketing

Another feature of the new iOS update is Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which will profoundly impact email marketers. This Apple attempts to give its users more control over how companies track their digital footprints across different platforms. 

MPP can be permitted in the Mail app from any Apple device. Once a user allows it, this will prevent marketers from sending pixels via email that can be utilized to acquire more information about their behavior. MPP prevents email marketers from the following:

• • Recognizing when an email was opened
  • Tracking online activity and location by masking their IP addresses
  • Finding a user’s email address if they have enabled Hide my Email.

The new Apple email policy will have a massive impact on marketers, especially when considering that 93% of all mobile email opens are related to Apple products. In addition, the pixel blocker will stop marketers from getting actionable data that they can utilize to optimize and create segmentation strategies and re-engagement campaigns.

Email marketers need to work overtime to assess the portion of their audience likely to be impacted by the update and create a new strategy that familiarizes the changes expected to roll out. Unfortunately, marketers’ worst possible thing right now is to react wholly and impulsively shift their email marketing focus to a half-baked strategy that hasn’t been tested.

By focusing more on inventiveness, such as optimizing landing pages and customizing their activities at the bottom of the funnel, marketers can get more precise signals about how audiences react to different components.

Implications For Email Marketers

Email personalization strategies are expected to grow into a challenge for email marketers to implement. Not only do users anticipate obtaining highly personalized emails and marketing messages, but they also want to receive them. Furthermore, email marketing is an exclusive marketing channel because users have to receive marketing emails, implying that email recipients want to hear from the brands and mobile app development companies that provide their email addresses. 

With the iOS 15 privacy updates, it will be progressively difficult for iPhone app development companies to send valuable information and content to users who want to receive it. Moving further, email marketers will have to regulate their understanding of deliverability metrics and how the success of an email campaign or workflow is evaluated. 

To start, open rates will no longer specify email list health. So while Apple will know which users will be involved with specific emails, email marketers will no longer be aware of this information. Therefore, it will be vital for email marketers to evaluate varying engagement indicators to determine overall account health.

Conclusion

Apple’s announcement is not the only privacy pivot that’s impacted, digital marketers. Although the world might be shifting in a way that poses some challenges for digital and email marketers, that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to revolutionize your mobile app strategy to meet prospects or audiences where they are. The essential feature is to find a solution that suits your business’s needs. 

Try to embrace the challenge of getting ahead of iOS 15 so that it never becomes a problem for your brand. Remember to test, segment your database, evaluate your results and repeat until you find what works. While open rates are undoubtedly important, there are various other ways to get to know your email subscribers, learn from KPIs, and continue to create great content for them.