Apple’s ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence, branded as Apple Intelligence have begun rolling out. If you’re an iPhone or Mac user, you’ve probably already started seeing them. The most immediately obvious changes are Siri and Notes now featuring integration with ChatGPT.
Look beneath the surface though, and there’s some key changes that will impact how marketers engage with users on Apple devices, especially in regard to email.
The updates are designed to improve privacy, relevance, and the user experience. It’s important to understand what you’re working with before creating your next set of campaigns. Here’s what to look out for.
How is email changing?
This has the potential to be a massive change, and we haven’t heard many people talking about it. It’s why we decided to write this blog.
Apple is introducing smarter email categorisation in its Mail app, similar to Gmail’s tabs, which sorts emails into Primary, Updates, Transactions, and Promotions. This feature, part of iOS 18, launched in January on iPhone and is coming to Mac in April. The headline news is that it makes promotional emails less visible.
There’s already some speculation as to how Apple decides on which emails belong in which inbox. It’s fairly obscure right now. But here’s what we do know.
- Emails are sorted based on a users’ interaction history with emails from the sender. If you’re sending a lot of campaigns without high open rates, expect a further drop off.
- Emails with time-sensitivity will consistently show up in the primary tab, think same-day events or boarding passes for a flight.
- The Mail app now provides a summary of the email content under the subject line, overriding the featured snippets provided by email services like Mailchimp.
Why have Apple changed Mail?
The main reasoning is privacy and user experience. On their support blog Apple writes “The Mail app automatically sorts your email messages into categories to help you find and manage messages quicker”. It’s a change Gmail already made a while ago to help users find the most important messages first.
How will it affect marketers?
One big change is that more data is being processed directly on devices rather than shared across servers. This means less access to tracking tools like pixels or detailed open rates. Here’s a few other trends we expect to see.
Open rates for purely promotional content like newsletters may drop, especially for organisations with a consumer audience.
marketers will need to shift towards broader engagement metrics, like click-through rates and conversions, as well as find creative ways to gather audience insights – think surveys or personalised feedback loops.
Your segmentation strategy is going to be hugely important. Because categorisation is managed by past interactions, understanding customer’s previous behaviour with your emails is going to be crucial to maintaining engagement.
Avoiding being flagged as spam is now an absolute priority. You need to make sure you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC policies in place to authenticate any and all sender domains you use.
How should marketers respond?
Apple’s updates set the bar higher, but they also open up opportunities for smarter, more impactful campaigns.
Apple Intelligence is designed to highlight the emails it believes matter most to users, meaning generic promotional emails might slip through the cracks. As HubSpot highlights, hyper-personalisation is already critical in email marketing, and these changes only make it more so.
Your content needs to clearly demonstrate that it’s been personalised to the recipient’s needs. That means more merge tags, smaller segments and punchier copy.
Because you can no longer rely on a custom preview of your campaign in people’s inbox, instead having to rely on Apple’s AI-generated summary, your email content needs to be on point.
Your data is now even more crucial. The more bounces you end up with, the higher chance your campaigns get filtered into the wrong categories permanently. Keeping inactive subscribers on your list will hurt your sender reputation at an alarming rate. Cleansing your data will be as if not more important than the content you send when looking for a return on your campaigns.
Taking a renewed look at your analytics is also a good idea. Mailchimp, and other email providers allow you to view and target subscribers based on their email client. It’s not an exact science, as users who disable images in emails won’t be tracked. Even so, it’s a good way to identify trends in your subscriber base. If you’re seeing a drop-off in open rates from users with Gmail and now Apple Mail clients, it could mean you’re running into issues with categorisation, and need to alter your strategy accordingly.
TL: DR, Why should I care?
Apple’s new AI Intelligence features have changed how marketing emails are received in their Mail app. Here’s how to adapt:
- Step up your content: Make every email answer a question, solve a problem, or offer a clear benefit.
- Focus on smarter metrics: With less access to tracking, prioritise meaningful engagement signals like click-through rates and conversions.
- Filter your data: Personalisation is key, you’ll get a better return from a smaller, well-crafted data set.
- Get your house in order: Make sure your sender addresses are approved before starting any campaigns.
If you focus on quality, hone your message, and build a quality dataset, email marketing is still a hugely valuable tool, and Apple might’ve just helped filter out some of your less savvy competition.
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