Apple released iOS 18 publicly this year, and it includes significant changes to Apple Mail. That means big changes to email marketing strategies. Here’s a look at the new features, their impact and steps you can take now.
“I think there are two big changes coming for folks using Apple Mail,” said Brian McKenna, vice president of CRM at digital marketing agency DMI Partners. “The first is that artificial intelligence is coming to the inbox in terms of, automatic reply suggestions, email summaries and message categorization. And the biggest change is that Apple Mail is going to get tabs.”
Don’t forget, iOS 18 affects any one using Apple Mail on their iPhone, iPad or Mac, regardless of email domain. This includes people with Gmail, Yahoo or other email addresses who use Apple Mail. Because Apple Mail accounts for nearly half of all email opens, these changes have a considerable reach.
iOS 15 and mail privacy protection
To get a sense of the impact of iOS 18, let’s look at the disruption caused by iOS 15 in 2021. Its Mail Privacy Protection pre-downloaded email images, including tracking pixels, thereby obscuring open rate data.
“When iOS 15 was released, the big introduction there was mail privacy protection,” McKenna said during a presentation for the MarTech Fall Conference. “This really was the first major disruption to measuring email opens. Anyone that opted into mail privacy protection, they were seen as opening essentially everything. So open rates became inflated and opens became less reliable in terms of metrics.”
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This shows that any changes to Apple Mail can have substantial and unintended consequences for email marketing.
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Game changers: AI and inbox tabs
iOS 18 will impact email marketing strategies via two AI-driven features in Apple Mail.
To make email management easier for users, AI helps with automatic reply suggestions, email summaries and message sorting.
For marketers, the most significant change will be the replacement of preheaders with AI-generated summaries. Your carefully crafted preheader text to entice email opens? Gone. Instead, Apple’s AI will generate summaries based on the email content. Anyone who’s done anything with AI knows this could mean some summaries will be wrong.
AI-powered automatic reply suggestions also pose a challenge for marketers. The suggestions may include unsubscribing. The easier that gets for users, the more likely they are to use it. You should already have the processes in place to manage unsubscribe requests initiated through automatic replies. If you don’t then say hello to subscriber churn and goodbye to accurate email lists.
New and improved inbox tabs
Tabs are the other new feature you need to be aware of. They are similar to the tabs used in Gmail. The new Apple Mail tabs are expected to be: primary, transactions, updates and promotions. While this may improve user experience, it raises concerns about potential reductions in visibility and engagement for marketers.
“One thing we can say for certain is that engagement rates will be negatively impacted for any emails that appear in any folder other than the primary inbox,” said McKenna. “Specifically, the two biggest pieces we expect to be impacted are open and click rates.”
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This is particularly concerning given the already unreliable open rate data due to Mail Privacy Protection.
When Gmail introduced tabs, it initially cut click-through rates. However, an interesting trend emerged: an increase in click-to-conversion rates. This suggests that users navigating to specific tabs, such as Promotions, are more motivated to engage and make purchases. Hopefully, we will see the same in Apple Mail.
“A common question we hear from all of our clients is, ‘Will my emails end up in the promotions tab?’” McKenna said. ”Our common response is, ‘You’re largely sending promotional emails, and so yes is the answer.’ The longer answer is that this will be determined on an individual email and an individual subscriber basis.”
Which tab the emails go to is influenced by both the content and the subscriber’s past engagement with the sender. So, if content is king, then engagement is at least a co-monarch. Subscribers who open, click and forward emails from a certain sender are more likely to see those emails in the primary or updates tabs. As ever, focus on building strong relationships with subscribers. This will improve the chance your emails go to the desired tabs.
What you can do now
You don’t need to know the final shape of iOS 18 to prepare for it, said McKenna. Here is what he suggests doing:
- Segmenting your audience: Segmenting based on engagement levels is crucial. For highly engaged subscribers, increase email frequency to capitalize on their interest. For moderately engaged ones, use strategies to nurture interest and move them into the highly engaged category. Reduce email frequency for at-risk subscribers and try with different messaging to re-engage them. For the non-engaged, pause regular sends. Try re-engagement campaigns or remove them from your lists to avoid hurting sender reputation.
- Optimizing email templates: Prioritize live text over images in emails to improve AI understanding and summary accuracy. Clean up code within the templates to ensure clear and well-organized structure. Be sure to have an array of templates that effectively deliver both promotional and non-promotional content.
- Rethinking copywriting. Use subject lines that don’t rely on pre-header text for context. Adopt an AI-conscious writing style, focusing on clear and concise messaging. (Another thing you should already be doing.) Use a less promotional tone, and replace it with educational content and value-driven messaging. Your content planning has to have more non-promotional content. Measure, measure, measure. Adapt email content and copywriting strategies using data and insights. This will help you to stay ahead of evolving trends.
There are a bunch of things we still don’t know and so, can’t prepare for them. Will all Apple devices support all the new features? Likely not, as newer models are designed for AI. Can users opt in or out of certain features? This could significantly influence tracking and personalization strategies. Finally, we don’t know the impact of the AI-powered email summaries. In other words, stay tuned for more changes.
