Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, is credited with saying “The only constant in life is change.”
If you’re an email marketer, and you’ve been following how Apple and Gmail are changing the inbox experience, this quote may ring all too true.
Here’s the latest: Apple Intelligence, available in the native mail app on iPhones with iOS 18.1, is now out there in the wild. In addition to assistance prioritizing incoming messages and crafting outgoing messages, Apple’s AI will allow users to “view summaries that automatically appear in your inbox.”
Lot of thoughts here. As email marketers, we’ll have to be smarter about the copy we use in our email communications. Clarity and being concise will be even more important — we’ll want to make sure that our key messages will be understood, whether our reader is a human or an AI.
It’s another consideration with copy, but I have a feeling that most email marketing teams won’t need to make a lot of changes to make this work. Unless, of course, you’ll sending all-image emails. Because here’s the rub:
The AI won’t be able to read your email content to summarize it if all your copy is embedded in images. And even if you’re using alt tags on your images (which is important for accessibility but which I don’t see being done on a consistent basis), is that copy what you want AI basing a summary on?
I’ve been advising against all-image emails for years. Here’s why:
Many email clients still block images by default. And here’s what an image-only email looks like when images are blocked or disabled, and when they’re not.
I understand that if you are selling a visual product you need images in your email, that’s fine. The issue is when you embed your copy in images. And this email is an especially egregious example — there’s really only one product image — everything else is copy. Copy that can’t be read if images are blocked.
So how to make the change?
I’ve done a lot of A/B split testing with clients to see if a rich-text-and-image version of their messages will perform the same or better than their image-only emails. Spoiler: they usually do. Here’s one example:
Which do you think won?
That’s right — the rich-text version drove a 64% increase in revenue, measured here by revenue-per-thousand-emails-sent (RPME; $160 vs. $97).
The conversion rate was roughly the same — but those who got the rich text version had an average-order-value (AOV) 74% higher than the group that got the control all-images email.
Read the full case for details.
So, what will show up in the new Apple Intelligence summary if you send an all-image email? My colleague Elizabeth Jacobi, MochaBear Marketing, received an all-image email to her Apple email app and the AI summary in the inbox was all about unsubscribing, because that was the only copy in the email not embedded in an image — and the only copy that the AI could read.
One more note… the AI summaries appear right below the subject line and they take the place of the preheader text. So that offer you included in the preheader? If you’re sending an all-image email It could be replaced by a summary of your unsubscribe mechanism, your offer fine print, or some other copy from your readable footer.
I spoke to an acquaintance in the email industry about this — he said ‘well, eventually, I bet the AIs will be able to read the copy embedded in images.’ I suppose so, but why risk having your pre-headers replaced with language about your unsubscribe in the meantime?
If your team is still sending image-only emails, now’s the time to test a rich-text-and-image version and see if it maintains or boosts your bottom-line performance.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes…
Until next time,
jj
