Apple iOS 18: Is the Sky Falling for Email Marketers?

Apple recently announced changes coming in iOS 18 – many of them to the Apple Mail app. Should email marketers be concerned? Here’s my take.

Enhancements to Apple Mail in iOS 18

From the Apple press release (image and copy):

“Mail also features a new digest view that pulls together all of the relevant emails from a business, allowing users to quickly scan for what’s important in the moment.” 

Bottom-line: After Apple iOS 18 is installed, Apple’s Mail app will:  

• have tabs, similar to Gmail
• ‘roll up’ all promos from a single brand for readers

Lessons Learned from Gmail Tabs

Gmail launched tabs back in the summer of 2013 – more than 10 years ago. At the time, there was a bit of a dust-up in the email industry – marketers were concerned that being relegated to the promotions tab would kill email marketing for good.

It didn’t.

When I speak at conferences or on webinars, I still get questions about how marketers can get their email delivered to the ‘primary’ inbox tab in Gmail, instead of the ‘promotions’ tab. The short answer is “You can’t.” The longer answer is “You can’t, and you shouldn’t be wasting time on this.”

Google defines its inbox categories like this:

• Primary: Emails from people you know and messages that don’t appear in other tabs
• Promotions: Deals, offers, and other promotional emails

Side note: although email marketers focus on these two tabs, Gmail actually offers a total of 5 tabs; the 2 above as well as tabs for social, updates, and forums.

Crashing the primary tab with your promotional email is akin to crashing your recipient’s summer pool party. All their friends are there, they are catching up with each other’s lives, enjoying each other’s company – and suddenly you walk in. You want to pull the host away from their guests to talk to them about your product or service. Even if you have a great deal to offer, this probably isn’t going to end with a sale.

So why would you do this?

But what if it’s a newsletter, not a stand-alone promotional email, you may ask? Shouldn’t that belong in the primary tab?

Well… no.

Because although the definition of the promotions tab talks about content, the definition of the primary tab talks about relationships.

So while you could argue that an email newsletter is not a deal, offer, or promotional email – it’s also not an email from someone the recipient knows. And as for that last part of the primary tab definition, ‘message that don’t appear in other tabs, ‘ you could try to argue that this means newsletters should go to the primary tab – but that’s not really in the spirit of what Apple’s trying to offer with their tabbed inbox. In fact, I’m surprised there’s not an ‘other’ tab to hold these types of messages.

Let me say it again: Gmail tabs didn’t kill email marketing.

And neither will these new tabs in the Apple Mail app.

Digest View: Rolling Up Promotional Emails

This has gotten less press than tabs, but it’s still an important element to consider.

Apple is saying that in ‘Digest View’ it will roll-up all the messages from a single brand; it sounds like the results you get when you search for a brand in your box.

This is new. Many mail apps will create ‘threads’ that link messages with the same subject line for each reading. Apple is going to do this by brand.

The name of the game here will be to optimize the ‘digest view’ of your email messages, so that readers have a good chance of getting the information they are looking for without having to scroll too much.

When I read about this, my mind immediately went to a common email practice that I actually DON’T use with my clients.

Resending to non-openers.

Now, yes, I know that in 2021 Apple began rolling out Mail Privacy Protection, which renders an open on each email that is received by the Apple Mail app. I wrote about MPP at the time.

But I also know that a lot of platforms are filtering out MPP opens and not reporting them to senders.

So let’s say that you are resending every email you send to non-openers, as defined by your platform. In digest view, each email will appear twice (once for the send, once for the resend), usually one right after the other.

Is this the best reader experience? In that limited space before the scroll, would you like to see these resend duplicates? Or would you rather they see a list of the latest emails you sent them – without duplicates?

And yes – this is another reason that my strategic resends tactic – where you resend to the small group that clicked but did not convert – is better than the traditional resend to non-openers activity.

Wrapping Up

The email marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Email marketers don’t have much if any say about what tools inbox providers offer to their customers to manage the messages they receive.

Apple tabs aren’t going to kill your email marketing program.

The real threat to your email marketing program is the segment you are (or aren’t) using, the quality of the content you’re sending, the relationships that you are (or aren’t) building with your email subscribers, and a host of other things that are under your control.

So work on improving what you can control and stop spending time worrying about what you can’t control.

And if you’re looking to boost the bottom-line performance of your email marketing program, give me a call.

Until next time,

jj