Apple iOS 18: The Most Important Changes for Marketers

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:

• We have never recommended brands try to game inboxes’ tab placement algorithms to get their promotional emails in the Primary tab. Not only does it not tend to have much of a down-funnel effect, inbox providers and their wider organization don’t generally take kindly to brands trying to circumvent their algorithms. With Apple adding yet another tab placement algorithm to the mix, the likelihood of squeezing gains out of tab trickery is even more in doubt.
• To the best of your ability, focus on down-funnel metrics such as clicks and conversions. In particular, measure key metrics over time, such as click reach, which is the percentage of subscribers who have clicked in the past 30 days, etc. Also, pay extra attention to your subscribers’ average time on list, as well as average subscriber lifetime value.

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:

• Continue to invest time and energy into writing solid preview text, as that will still be displayed for many of your subscribers. However, be wary of writing subject lines that rely too much on the backing of preview text. For example, it may no longer be wise to write a jokey subject line since you won’t be able to rely on your preview text to tell the punchline.
• Minimize your use of graphical text, and maximize your use of both HTML text and alt text. Doing this will not only make your emails perform better when images are blocked or are slow to load, but will also help inform better AI Summaries.

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:

• Have messages come from their brand name instead of a phone number, due to verified sender process
• Send messages with much more copy than the 160 character limit imposed on SMS messages
• Include multiple images that subscribers can swipe through
• Include interactive content like carousels and polls
• Include suggested replies, making it easier for subscribers to respond in a clear way
• Include suggested actions, such as opening a webpage or calling customer service

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:

• Review your recent SMS/MMS campaigns and understand how you might reimagine those as RCS campaigns. How would your messaging change? Your imagery change? Your calls-to-action change? 
• Review your existing SMS/MMS automations. How could they be improved as RCS campaigns?

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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