Apple’s Hide My Email: An added challenge to measuring purchase frequency

A guide to nativating the implications of Apple’s Hide My Email feature on measuring and increasing frequency.

Amanda Groth, 

21 June 2023



A Guide to Navigating the Implications of Apple’s Hide My Email Feature on Frequency 

In an era where the digital landscape is rapidly evolving and intertwining with every aspect of our lives, the need to safeguard our online privacy has unquestionably become paramount. As individuals, we value protecting our personal information and actively seek ways to enhance our online privacy. A practical solution in this regard is Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which empowers users to generate distinct, randomly-generated email addresses for various sign-ups and online interactions. This innovative feature reduces the risk of email spam and potential data breaches, providing an additional layer of privacy.

However, while Hide My Email offers significant benefits to individuals regarding privacy, it also presents challenges for businesses, particularly in accurately measuring purchase frequency and tracking customer behaviour. Effectively navigating the implications of Hide My Email is crucial for business owners and marketers, who must develop strategies to overcome the challenges posed by this feature.

In this blog, we will delve into the impact of Apple’s Hide My Email on measuring purchase frequency and explore effective strategies that can help you adapt to these changes. By understanding the challenges comprehensively and implementing the suggested strategies, you can confidently ensure the accurate measurement of purchase frequency and seamlessly optimise your marketing efforts, successfully overcoming the obstacles presented by Hide My Email.

The Impact of Hide My Email on Measuring Purchase Frequency

Hide My Email, a feature that allows users to generate unique email addresses for each interaction or purchase, can result in several challenges related to customer data, such as data fragmentation, incomplete customer profiles, and the linkage of purchases to customers.

  1. Fragmentation of customer data: The system separately records each interaction or purchase made using a different email address. This fragmentation makes it difficult to comprehensively view a customer’s purchase frequency across all interactions, as their data is scattered across multiple entries or instances, mainly if a business is using email as their primary (or only) customer identifier.
  2. Incomplete customer profiles: Since the feature generates random email addresses, businesses cannot access the real email addresses associated with individual customers.

Strategies to Mitigate the Impact of Hide My Email

Although Hide My Email presents challenges in measuring purchase frequency, businesses can implement strategies to adapt and mitigate its impact. Here are some strategies that can help overcome these hurdles:

  1. Customer Identification Methods: Implementing alternative methods for identifying customers can mitigate the impact of Hide My Email. For example, you can use a Single Customer View (SCV) which involves tracking customer purchases by identifying unique IDs like customer account numbers, loyalty program IDs, or device IDs. An SCV helps create a comprehensive record of customer interactions and purchases, enabling businesses to understand individual customer behaviours, preferences, and needs. By consolidating this information into a unified view, you can provide personalised experiences, tailor marketing campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer satisfaction and drive growth.
  2. Encouraging Account Creation: By motivating customers to create accounts before making purchases, you can improve accuracy in measuring purchase frequency. Streamline the account creation process, offer incentives, and clearly communicate the benefits to encourage customers to create accounts.
  3. Leveraging First-Party Data: Businesses can invest in data consolidation and integration solutions to address the fragmentation of customer data caused by Hide My Email. These tools can help consolidate customer information from various sources and create a unified view of each customer’s interactions. Focusing on data obtained directly from customer interactions on owned platforms (websites, mobile apps) helps overcome Hide My Email limitations. By analysing this data, you can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and purchase frequency, regardless of email addresses. We recommend implementing tracking tools and user registration mechanisms to capture first-party data to accurately measure purchase frequency and comprehensively understand data across all touchpoints. This approach allows you to gather accurate customer information directly, enabling a more thorough understanding of purchase frequency and facilitating informed decision-making.
  4. Continuous Adaptation: As technology and customer behaviour evolve, you should continuously adapt their strategies to address the challenges posed by Hide My Email. Staying informed about new developments in customer identification and data analysis techniques can help you stay ahead and ensure accurate measurement of purchase frequency over time.

Ultimately, CRM and customer marketing professionals can only measure and increase purchase frequency if they have a holistic, 360-degree view of the individual customer, and while Hide My Email can make this process more complicated, implementing these strategies can help your business navigate these challenges.

A Guide to Navigating the Implications of Apple’s Hide My Email Feature on Frequency 

In an era where the digital landscape is rapidly evolving and intertwining with every aspect of our lives, the need to safeguard our online privacy has unquestionably become paramount. As individuals, we value protecting our personal information and actively seek ways to enhance our online privacy. A practical solution in this regard is Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which empowers users to generate distinct, randomly-generated email addresses for various sign-ups and online interactions. This innovative feature reduces the risk of email spam and potential data breaches, providing an additional layer of privacy.

However, while Hide My Email offers significant benefits to individuals regarding privacy, it also presents challenges for businesses, particularly in accurately measuring purchase frequency and tracking customer behaviour. Effectively navigating the implications of Hide My Email is crucial for business owners and marketers, who must develop strategies to overcome the challenges posed by this feature.

In this blog, we will delve into the impact of Apple’s Hide My Email on measuring purchase frequency and explore effective strategies that can help you adapt to these changes. By understanding the challenges comprehensively and implementing the suggested strategies, you can confidently ensure the accurate measurement of purchase frequency and seamlessly optimise your marketing efforts, successfully overcoming the obstacles presented by Hide My Email.

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