Abstract
- Concerns about tabs. The addition of Apple and Yahoo tabs will change email visibility and engagement, potentially impacting marketers’ strategies and interactions with consumers.
- AI preview. Automated summaries threaten your email marketing efforts, undermining your carefully crafted preview text and brand messaging.
- The brand value has faded. AI-generated summaries can cause content to appear above the fold, weakening your brand voice and resulting in inaccurate information.
Marketers have several reasons to be concerned about the inbox changes announced by Apple on June 10 and Yahoo on June 11. These changes include Apple adding tabs to Apple Mail, and both Apple and Yahoo adding AI-generated summaries to emails.
Let me discuss each one in more detail and the concerns I have.
Adding a tab
Ten years after Google first introduced tabs, and years after Microsoft and Yahoo adopted them, Apple has finally followed suit. You'll see tabs in upcoming versions of Apple Mail. All the major inbox providers use tabs a little differently. Apple Mail's four tabs are Primary, Transactional, Updates, and Promotions.
You may be wondering why this is a concern. Regular readers of my CMSWire column may remember that I wrote an article celebrating the 10th anniversary of Gmail tabs. In that article, I concluded that the Promotions tab wasn't worth worrying about.
So, what has changed?
The same article explains how Gmail automatically applies email annotations to some commercial emails in the Promotions tab that don't contain such coding: Essentially, Gmail is hijacking the code of marketers' emails to achieve its own ends, which presumably include making inline ads less distinguishable from surrounding emails.
Google calls this automatic extraction, and this year the company has been applying it more aggressively. Its increased usage has revealed that automatic extraction is routinely degrading brand-created email experiences and creating a disconnect between subject lines and the preview content that Gmail presents. In some cases, Gmail has pulled discount amounts from disclaimers at the bottom of emails and promoted them in the preview content, falsely claiming that they are the email's featured discount, raising legal questions around misrepresentation and false advertising.
I have no qualms about inbox providers creating promotions tabs, and I'm also perfectly happy to use the promotions tab as a place to display ads, including placing them inline within your emails, which is a sensible way to generate revenue for your inbox business.
But putting marketer emails in a separate tab and altering the email preview content without consent in a way that they never do with personal emails is a real problem. While we're pleased to see Apple following Google's lead on tabs, we hope they don't follow Google's lead when it comes to altering marketer email content.
Related article: Gmail Promotions Tab: 10 Years of Email Marketing Myth
AI-generated preview and overview
Another big upcoming change is the addition of AI-powered generated previews and summaries across both Apple and Yahoo.
In Apple's case, they plan to replace preview text in emails with previews created by generative AI. All of the examples shown are personal, but this will presumably apply to commercial emails as well. It's unclear whether this feature will be on by default or if users will be able to turn it off.
Once you open an email, Apple gives you the option to let the generative AI summarize the email for you by simply tapping the “Summarize” button.
The update, which Yahoo Mail calls “one of the most significant desktop experience updates in a decade,” streamlines the user interface and adds generative AI previews and summaries, both of which appear to be on by default, but it's unclear whether they can be turned off.
The AI preview is similar to Apple's, and it also replaces the regular preview text extracted from the body of the email, but unlike Apple's AI summarization, Yahoo's summarization appears to be automatic.
Another difference is that Yahoo's summary appears as a series of bulleted items rather than a paragraph-style summary, and Yahoo says it will also include a suggested action, task, or required response.
The concern with AI previews is that they will make marketers’ efforts to optimize their preview text go to waste. While it’s true that most personal emails aren’t written by communications professionals, making preview text less useful, that’s not the case with marketing emails.
There are similar concerns about AI summarization, especially when applied automatically to marketing emails. Some marketing emails are long, and in most cases that's because they're made up of many content blocks on multiple subjects. AI summarization may not be able to fully express that point. In fact, many marketing emails contain very little actual text, so summarization could significantly change the wording of your marketing text, introducing inaccuracies in the process.
No matter how good an AI engine’s summarization is, summarization has two negative effects on marketers.
- This pushes much of the email's content below the fold.
- It dilutes your brand’s voice and filters its message.
Related article: Inbox creases: hard lines, soft lines, or imaginary lines?
An intermediary between the sender and the receiver
Email isn't perfect. There are many ways it could be improved beyond the long-standing spam problem. Inbox providers have been working hard on this issue, and new features they've rolled out over the years highlight some of the other ways they think email could be improved.
The challenge is that there is little agreement among the major inbox providers about which issues they should prioritize.
- There is poor support for AMP for email, CSS-based interactivity, annotations and schemas, and BIMI.
- The dark mode implementation is inconsistent, as is other rendering.
- Although there are delivery requirements that require brands to only send to engaged subscribers, some inbox providers block senders from seeing opens, the most common sign of engagement.
Given all the convenient advancements that inbox providers can agree on, it’s unfortunate that they seem to agree that preview text should be overwritten and body text filtered and summarized by AI, especially when the message is commercial. In other words, it seems like the problem they’re trying to solve is that humans are writing emails.
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