Apple is predicted to release iOS 18 publicly this 12 months, and it includes significant changes to Apple Mail. That means big changes to email marketing strategies. Here’s a take a look at the brand new features, their likely impact and steps you may take now.
“I believe there are two big changes coming for folks using Apple Mail,” said Brian McKenna, vp of CRM at digital marketing agency DMI Partners. “The first is that artificial intelligence is coming to the inbox by way of, automatic reply suggestions, email summaries, and message categorization. And the most important change is that Apple Mail goes to get tabs.”
Don’t forget, iOS 18 affects anybody using Apple Mail on their iPhone, iPad or Mac, no matter email domain. This includes individuals 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 substantial reach.
iOS 15 and mail privacy protection
To get a way of the impact iOS 18 may have, let’s take a look at the disruption brought on 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 large introduction there was mail privacy protection,” McKenna said in a panel for The MarTech (*18*). “This really was the primary major disruption to measuring email opens. Anyone that opted into mail privacy protection, they were seen as opening essentially all the things. So open rates became inflated and opens became less reliable by way of metrics.”
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This shows that any changes to Apple Mail can have substantial and unintended consequences for email marketing.
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 will help with automatic reply suggestions, email summaries, and message sorting.
For marketers, probably the most significant change can be the alternative of preheaders with AI-generated summaries. Your fastidiously 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 might mean some summaries can be fallacious.
AI-powered automatic reply suggestions also pose a challenge for marketers. The suggestions may include unsubscribing. tThe easier that gets for users, the more likely they’re to use it. You should have already got 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 opposite latest feature you would like to concentrate on. They are similar to the tabs utilized in Gmail. The latest Apple Mail tabs are expected to be: primary, transactions, updates and promotions. While this will likely improve user experience, it raises concerns about potential reductions in visibility and engagement for marketers.
“One thing we will say for certain is that engagement rates can be negatively impacted for any emails that appear in any folder apart from the first inbox,” said McKenna. “Specifically, the 2 biggest pieces we expect to be impacted are open and click on rates.”
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This is especially 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: a rise in click-to-conversion rates. This suggests that users navigating to specific tabs, equivalent to Promotions, are more motivated to engage and make purchases. Hopefully, we are going to see the identical in Apple Mail.
“A typical query we hear from all of our clients is, ‘Will my emails find yourself within the promotions tab?’” McKenna said. ”Our common response is, ‘You’re largely sending promotional emails, and so yes is the reply.’ The longer answer is that this can be determined on a person email and a person subscriber basis.”
Which tab the emails go to is influenced by each the content and the subscriber’s past engagement with the sender. So, if content is king, then engagement is a minimum of a co-monarch. Subscribers who open, click, and forward emails from a certain sender are more likely to see those emails in the first or updates tabs. As ever, give attention to constructing strong relationships with subscribers. This will improve the possibility your emails go to the specified tabs.
What you may do now
You don’t need to know the ultimate 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 take a look at 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 status.
- Optimizing email templates: Prioritize live text over images in emails to improve AI understanding and summary accuracy. Clean up code throughout the templates to ensure clear and well-organized structure. Be sure to have an array of templates that effectively deliver each promotional and non-promotional content.
- Rethinking copywriting. Use subject lines that don’t depend on pre-header text for context. Adopt an AI-conscious writing style, specializing in clear and concise messaging. (Another thing you need to 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 provide help to to stay ahead of evolving trends.
There are a bunch of things we won’t know until iOS 18 is released and so, can’t prepare for them. Will all Apple devices support all the brand 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.
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