In early June, Apple introduced the iOS 18, which includes three major changes to its Mail app user experience.
Once again, this announcement forces marketers to figure out how to deal with those new features, and how they’ll affect how emails show up in the inbox.
Here is what you need to know about the new features before they start being released next month.
Apple Intelligence and Preview Lines
The new operating system will include AI in many of its apps – including Mail.
One of the ways Apple Intelligence will demonstrate its abilities is by automatically summarizing emails for users and showing their gist in the preview line field. In other words, Apple AI will most likely replace preview lines with AI-generated ones.
For email geeks who use preview lines as a carefully crafted “secondary subject line”, or have used a custom code to show a blank space as a preview line until now, this is yet another challenge they’ll have to adapt to, test, and possibly find a way around.
There are still many unanswered questions here: Does not having control of preheaders mean that there’s no incentive for subscribers to click on an email? Does it mean that brands have to prioritize the visual experience even more to give subscribers a reason to click?
Priority Emails and Tabs
Another update Apple shared in its annual WWDC event is a new way for the Mail app users to arrange their messages later this year. Similar to its biggest competitor, the Cupertino-based tech giant will roll out four new inbox tabs, as well as a “Priority” view for emails that seem more time-sensitive.
The new tabs in iOS18 will be:
- Primary – for personal and time-sensitive messages
- Transactions – for confirmations and receipts
- Updates – for news and social notifications
- Promotions – for marketing emails and coupons
Will it be harder for brands to land in the coveted “primary” tab? Of course, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the promotions tab has many advantages. In fact, in Gmail, only about ⅓ of the users have enabled it in their accounts, and many of them are checking their promotions regularly.
(According to Litmus’s Email Market Share Report, nearly half of email users who own an Apple device read their emails through the built-in Mail app. But interestingly, most of them use another email service, like Gmail, as their inbox provider.)
Apple doesn’t disclose how exactly emails will be categorized, aside from the general description of each tab and what it’s supposed to include or mentioning that it’ll depend on “on-device intelligence”.
Apple did mention that Mail users will have the power to recategorize incoming messages depending on their preferences. We suspect that doing so will also train Apple AI and possibly develop and progress as users interact with it.
Digest View
Last but not least, a new feature called “Digest View” will group all the relevant emails (as Apple put it) from a single business together, so that users can scan emails coming from the same source faster.
That means that instead of users having to manually search for emails from the same sender or company, iOS18 will enable seeing all of these in one spot automatically, as well as allow maximizing and minimizing certain elements of any message.
Brands that will adapt to this Digest View and how users may interact with it could use this as an opportunity to highlight selected parts of their message, but just like any of these updates, it will include a learning curve.
So, What Now?
Once again, Apple puts itself at the forefront of advocating for its users’ experience, while sending the email community into a frenzy.
The iOS 18 will start rolling out in September 2024, but not all features will be released at once. Nevertheless, it leaves email geeks less than a month to plan and test their adaptation to these new challenges.
Will this be yet another opportunity for smart marketers to reimagine and improve their relationships with their subscribers, despite these changes? Or does the fact that marketers have even less control over their message means that it could worsen consumers’ experience altogether? We still don’t have answers to these questions now, but as always, we will continue to inform you in our blog and newsletter with our latest updates.
