Centered around Apple Intelligence, the updates and new product features in Apple iOS 18 offer some significant improvements for consumers, including a smarter Siri and a variety of AI tools. While most won’t have a noticeable impact on digital marketers, let’s talk about a few that will.
Apple Mail Inbox Tabs
More than a decade after Gmail pioneered tabbed inbox interfaces, and many years after other major inbox providers add tabs to their inboxes, Apple Mail has followed suit. While they’re last to embrace tabs, them doing so is a major boost for tabbed inboxes. That’s because approximately half of all emails are read in Apple Mail, according to Litmus.
Apple Mail will sort email into five tabs: Primary, Promotions, Updates, and Transactional. Their tab choices mostly align with Gmail’s.
The impact on marketers:
We know from our clients’ experiences with Gmail, which has had periods of inconsistency in their tab sorting algorithm, that having a promotional email landing the Primary tab generally boosts open rates by about 30%. However, those same experiences have taught us that down-funnel metrics like click rates and conversion rates are much less affected by tabbing decisions. So, getting more visibility in the Primary tab rarely translates into more intent.
At this point, consumers are incredibly familiar with tabbed inbox interfaces, so marketers shouldn’t worry that this Apple Mail transition will result in big declines in engagement. In fact, a consumer survey by Mailgun found that of the roughly half of Gmail users who have tabs enabled on their accounts, 79.7% check the Promotions tab at least once a week, and 51% check it every day.
So, while marketers will likely get fewer incidental opens, brands can rely on their subscribers to routinely check their Promotions tab—and, more importantly, to check their Promotions tab when they’re in the market to buy. And on the upside, having your promotional campaigns not in your subscribers’ faces all the time is likely to result in fewer opt-outs and longer list tenures, which should boost subscriber lifetime value.
One silver lining of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is that most marketers won’t notice the impact of tabs on their open rates. Hopefully that will avoid some unnecessary panic.
What should marketers do:
AI Summaries in Apple Mail
Similar to Google’s introduction of AI Overview summaries to search results, Apple Intelligence will use generative AI to read email content and provide summaries. Those AI summaries will appear in two places in the inbox. First, AI Summaries will replace the preview text that appears under subject lines in the inbox. It appears this will be on by default, but users will likely be able to turn it off, if they want.
And second, once an email is opened, subscribers will be able to get an AI Summary of the email with a click of a button.
The impact on marketers:
Today, most brands write thoughtful preview text to support and extend their subject lines. Sadly, Apple’s AI Summaries will undermine those efforts, as they will almost assuredly perform considerably worse for marketers than their planned preview text. And if Apple Intelligence is on par with Gmail’s AI-driven Automatic Extraction efforts, then it will fail spectacularly sometimes.
In particular, there are questions as to how well AI Summaries will handle two common situations. First, they will likely struggle with all-image emails, where the majority of the text is embedded in images. That will especially be the case when alt text isn’t used or is underused. And second, they’re likely to have trouble with emails with many content blocks about different subjects, products, product categories, etc.
All of that said, Apple’s AI Summaries are just another piece in the growing and long-standing need for marketers to write for both humans and machines. In the web world, writing for search engine optimization has been critical for decades. On top of that, marketers now need to think about how their web content is being used and referenced by GenAI engines like ChatGPT. In the email world, marketers have long obsessed over how their email content is viewed by mailbox providers’ spam filtering algorithms. Gmail’s Automatic Extraction and Apple’s AI Summaries are just the newest concerns over how their content will be perceived by machine intermediaries.
What should marketers do:
Worried that the poor accessibility of your email campaigns may negatively impact AI summaries? Oracle Digital Experience Agency can perform an Accessibility Audit Workshop to compare your current marketing against our accessibility standards, review the results, and create a plan to move forward. Talk to your Oracle account manager or reach out to us at OracleAgency_us@Oracle.com.
RCS Support in Apple Messages
While messages from Android users are still in green bubbles in Messages, Apple has adopted the basic RCS standard (RCS Universal Profile). This standard doesn’t include the end-to-end encryption that Apple-to-Apple messages enjoy, but it does mean pictures come through at much higher resolutions.
The impact on marketers:
RCS opens up new content possibilities for marketers. For instance, it allows brands to:
In addition to allowing increased functionality, RCS messages are less expensive to send than Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages. They also offer better engagement tracking, including read-receipts.
What should marketers do:
The Timing
While the new RCS functionality was live, none of the announced Apple Intelligence features were live yet, as of the publication of this post. The first AI features will appear throughout this fall, but many others won’t be released until 2025, according to reports.
In addition to that piecemeal rollout, Apple Intelligence features are only backward-compatible with the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, due to the hefty processing and RAM requirements. That means that Apple Intelligence uptake will mostly come with the sale of the new iPhone 16 lineup.
Because of those two facts, Apple Intelligence is unlikely to have much of any effect on marketers this holiday season, and may not have a significant effect until well into 2025. That means marketers have some runway to implement changes to adapt successfully.
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Pete Hall is a Senior Strategic Consultant on the Analytic & Strategic Services team at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. He has over 15 years of holistic digital marketing experience across the agency, brand, and consulting side. He loves to help connect the dots for your overarching marketing strategy, and can help get in the weeds across any channel.
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