The Gist
- Tab concerns. Apple and Yahoo’s tab additions may alter email visibility and engagement, impacting marketers’ strategies and consumer interaction.
- AI previews. Automated summaries threaten email marketing efforts, undermining carefully crafted preview text and brand messaging.
- Diluted branding. AI-generated summaries may push content below the fold, weakening brand voice and potentially introducing inaccuracies.
Marketers have reasons to be concerned by the upcoming inbox changes that were announced by Apple on June 10 and Yahoo on June 11. Those changes entail Apple adding tabs to Apple Mail, and both Apple and Yahoo adding AI-generated summaries to emails.
Let’s talk in more detail about each and what the concerns are.
The Addition of Tabs
Ten years after Google pioneered tabs, and many years after Microsoft and Yahoo adopted them, Apple has finally followed suit. Expect to see tabs in future versions of Apple Mail. All of the major inbox providers use slightly different tabs from one another. Apple Mail’s four tabs will be Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions.
You might be wondering why this is a concern. And regular readers of my CMSWire columns may recall I wrote an article marking the 10-year anniversary of Gmail Tabs, where I concluded by saying that the “Promotions tab isn’t worth fussing about.”
So, what’s changed?
Well, in that same article, I talk about how Gmail has been automatically applying Email Annotations to some commercial emails in the Promotions Tab that don’t include that coding. Essentially, Gmail has been hijacking the code of marketers’ emails to achieve its own goals, which presumably includes making their in-line ads less distinguishable from the emails surrounding them.
Google calls it Automatic Extraction. This year, they’ve become much more aggressive in applying it. The higher frequency of use has also made it evident that Automatic Extraction routinely degrades the email experience crafted by brands, creating disconnects between their subject line and the preview content imposed by Gmail. In some cases, legal questions around misrepresentation and false advertising are being raised, with Gmail occasionally pulling discount amounts from disclaimers at the bottom of emails and promoting them in the preview content, falsely asserting that it’s the featured discount in the email.
I have zero concerns about inbox providers creating Promotions tabs. Neither do I mind them using the Promotions tab as a venue to display ads, even placing them in-line among emails. That’s a reasonable way to generate revenue for their inbox business.
However, putting marketers’ emails in a different tab where the preview content of their emails is changed without their consent in ways that they would never do to personal emails is a serious problem. I’m glad to see Apple follow Google’s lead on tabs, but I hope they won’t follow their lead on changing marketers’ email content.
AI-Generated Previews & Summaries
The other big change that’s coming is the addition of generative AI-powered previews and summaries for both Apple and Yahoo.
In the case of Apple, they’ll be replacing preview text of emails with a generative AI-written preview. All of the examples shown were personal, but presumably this will be applied to commercial emails, too. It’s unclear if this functionality will be on by default, or if it can be turned off by users.
And once you’ve opened an email, Apple will give you the option to have generative AI summarize the email with the tap of the Summarize button.
In what Yahoo Mail is calling “one of the most significant updates to its desktop experience in nearly a decade,” they’ve streamlined their user interface and added generative AI previews and summaries. Both appear to be on by default, and it’s unclear if they can be turned off.
The AI preview is similar to Apple’s, which again replaces the typical preview text that’s pulled from the email’s body content. However, unlike Apple’s AI summary, Yahoo’s appears to be done automatically.
The other difference is that Yahoo’s summary appears as a series of bulleted items, rather than a paragraph-style summary. It will also include proposed actions, tasks, or responses needed, according to Yahoo.
The concern with AI previews is that they undo marketers’ preview text optimization efforts. While it’s true that most personal emails aren’t written by communication experts and therefore have less helpful preview text, that’s not the case with marketing emails.
The concern with AI summaries is similar, especially if they’re applied automatically to marketing emails. While some marketing emails can be long, when that’s the case, it’s almost always because the email is composed of many content blocks about multiple subjects. AI summaries are unlikely to do that justice. Indeed, given how little actual text is in many marketing emails, the summary may largely reword the marketing text, potentially introducing inaccuracies in the process.
Regardless of how good the AI engine summary is, the summary will have two negative effects on marketers:
- It will push more of the email’s content below the fold.
- It will dilute the brand’s voice and filter its message.
Mediating Between Senders & Recipients
Email’s not perfect. There are plenty of things that could be better besides the long-standing problem of spam, against which inbox providers have been vigilant fighters. The new functionality they’ve rolled out over the years highlight some of the other things inbox providers think could be better about email.
The challenge is there’s little agreement among the major inbox providers on which issues to prioritize. The result is:
- A lack of critical mass of support for AMP for email, CSS-based interactivity, Annotations and schema, and BIMI.
- Inconsistent implementations of dark mode, plus other rendering inconsistencies.
- A deliverability requirement that brands only send to engaged subscribers, while some inbox providers block senders’ visibility into opens, the most frequent sign of engagement.
Considering all of the helpful advancements that inbox providers could agree on, it’s unfortunate that what they seem to agree on is that preview text should be overwritten and body copy filtered and summarized by AI — particularly, it appears, if the message is commercial. Put another way, it seems the problem they’re trying to solve is that people are writing the emails.
By Chad S. White
Chad S. White is the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Digital Experience Agency, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle. Connect with Chad S. White: Twitter
