Apple iOS updates come and go, but until recently, they have largely left the Apple Mail app alone. This might have been a case of if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. However, that’s all about to change with the rollout of iOS 18.2 (scheduled for early December 2024), with Apple promising its biggest-ever re-design of the Apple Mail application.
With approximately 45% market share of the US email inbox ecosystem, this is big news to the email marketing community. This update will impact how your subscribers receive and engage with your emails.
So, what can we expect from the iOS 18.2 Mail update, and how should we react?
A Brand New Look for Apple Mail
Apple has completely re-designed the Apple Mail app. The inbox now resembles its messaging app, with lots of color and photos/images replacing the previous text-heavy environment.
Businesses can now upload their corporate logo to Apple Business Connect to appear alongside their emails, boosting brand awareness and visibility. This will also help email recipients better identify spam and phishing attempts. Logos will also appear on the Phone app, the Apple Pay app when making contactless payments, and on Apple Maps.
Categories Will Change How the Inbox Works
Apple Mail is also introducing an intelligent inbox organization system that automatically sorts your emails into four distinct categories, making managing and prioritizing your messages easier.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each category and what you can expect:
1. Primary
- Purpose: The primary category contains your most important and relevant emails. Here, you’ll find personal communications, direct messages, and anything Apple Mail deems high-priority.
- Content: Messages from friends, family, colleagues, and other personal contacts are routed here, ensuring that the emails you care about most aren’t buried under less relevant content. The Primary inbox helps you stay focused on essential interactions while keeping distractions at bay.
2. Transactions
- Purpose: The transactions category is tailored to manage purchases, financial activities, and related notifications.
- Content: This includes receipts, order confirmations, invoices, shipping updates, and delivery notifications. Emails are neatly grouped by the sender, making tracking your purchases and finding order details easier without sifting through unrelated emails. Apple Mail’s smart categorization ensures you always have quick access to your recent transactions.
3. Updates
- Purpose: The Updates category acts as a hub for informational emails and digital bulletins, keeping you informed without cluttering your primary inbox.
- Content: Expect to see newsletters, system alerts, account notifications, and other non-promotional updates here. It’s a place to stay in the loop without overwhelming your primary view, making it ideal for reading material that you want to browse at your leisure.
4. Promotions
- Purpose: The promotions category is designed to capture marketing content, special offers, and advertisements from businesses you follow, allowing you to easily explore offers without overwhelming your personal inbox.
- Content: This category includes promotional emails, discounts, deals, product recommendations, and updates from brands you recognize. It’s perfect for discovering sales or news from your favorite companies when you’re ready to shop or explore.
As emails arrive, they’re automatically sorted into the appropriate category. Within each category, messages are further divided into two sections: ‘New Messages’ and ‘Older Messages’, making it easy to distinguish recent emails from those you’ve already seen.
Reducing Inbox Anxiety
A handy feature that could help reduce inbox overload and associated anxiety is the ability to customize how the notification badge displays new messages. You can choose to have the badge only show the number of new emails in your Primary category, helping you focus on what matters most. Alternatively, you can keep the traditional setting, where the badge reflects the total count of all unread emails across your inbox.
Customizing Apple Mail to Sort Emails According to Your Preferences
If recipients don’t like how Apple categorizes their emails, they can “train” the system to customize where specific emails are sent.
There is also an option to turn off this feature completely and revert back to the pre-iOS 18.2 settings.
Apple Mail Digested View
How do you feel about Apple summarising your email content? Get used to it, because it’s happening in the iOS 18.2 update. The Digested View feature in Apple Mail is designed to streamline the email experience by consolidating and summarizing related emails. This view groups emails with similar themes or from the same sender into a single, condensed format, providing a quick overview of your messages without overwhelming your inbox.
Key Features of Digested View:
- Grouped Emails: Emails that are part of the same thread or category, such as newsletters, promotions, or updates from a single sender, are combined into a single entry. This reduces inbox clutter and makes catching up on similar content easier.
- Summary at a Glance: Instead of displaying each email individually, the Digested View provides a summary or snippet of the grouped emails. You can expand the group to read individual messages or keep them collapsed for a more organized look.
- Focus on Relevance: The Digested View prioritizes the most relevant information so you can quickly scan the content. It is particularly useful for sorting through low-priority emails like promotions, newsletters, or updates.
- Efficient Inbox Navigation: The Digested View makes navigating your inbox faster and more efficient by minimizing the number of visible emails and grouping similar content. It helps you quickly identify essential messages while keeping other categories neat and accessible.
What Does This Mean for Email Marketing?
The introduction of features like Digested View and enhanced categorization in iOS 18.2 has several implications for email marketers. These changes aim to improve the user experience, but they also require marketers to adapt strategies to stay effective. Here’s what these updates mean for email marketers:
1. Increased competition for attention
- With the introduction of categories and the Digested View, promotional and non-essential emails may be grouped together or placed into secondary categories (like Promotions or Updates). This means marketing emails might not land directly in the Primary inbox, increasing competition for visibility.
- The Digested View could result in promotional content being condensed into a summary, potentially leading to less engagement if your content isn’t compelling enough to stand out.
2. Greater focus on subject lines and preheaders
- Since Apple’s categorization and Digested View can group similar emails together, crafting attention-grabbing subject lines and pre-headers becomes more crucial than ever. These elements may be the first—and sometimes only—content a user sees in a condensed view.
- Subject lines need to be precise and engaging to encourage users to click and open emails from a summarized list.
3. Impact on metrics and engagement tracking
- As more users rely on the Digested View, open rates might decrease for lower-priority emails that get grouped together. Metrics like click-through rates (CTR) will become more important in measuring actual engagement.
- Understanding which categories your emails fall into can help you adjust content and targeting strategies. If your emails consistently end up in promotions or updates, testing different approaches may be needed to increase engagement.
4. Increased personalization is key
- Apple’s sorting emphasizes emails that are most relevant to users, so personalization is more critical than ever. Using segmented lists, dynamic content, and tailored offers can improve the chances that your emails appear in the Primary inbox or are given priority by the user.
- Personalization based on user behavior, preferences, and past interactions can help emails feel more relevant and avoid being grouped into less important categories.
5. Potential benefits of quality content
- High-quality content that consistently engages users may be more likely to end up in the Primary category. Therefore, creating value-driven, informative, and useful content will be crucial to building a positive sender reputation and increasing the chances of being prioritized by Apple’s algorithm.
- Ensuring that your content delivers genuine value can help reduce the risk of your emails being ignored in condensed Digested Views or being filtered to less prominent categories.
6. Notifications and badge counts
- Since users can customize notification badge counts to show only new messages in the Primary category, promotional and non-priority emails might not trigger immediate notifications. This underscores the need to capture user interest without relying solely on notification alerts.
- Consider integrating a sense of urgency or exclusivity in email content to encourage users to check for updates rather than actively waiting for notifications.
7. Greater emphasis on engagement-based segmentation
- With Apple’s machine learning playing a role in categorizing emails, maintaining a clean email list and high engagement rates is essential. A lower engagement rate can impact how your emails are categorized over time.
- Segmentation based on user engagement can ensure that you’re sending targeted, relevant emails that encourage interaction and increase the chance of being placed in a primary inbox.
8. Testing and adaptation
- The changes in iOS 18.2 emphasize the need for ongoing A/B testing and adaptation. Experimenting with subject lines, email timing, and content format will help determine what resonates best with your audience.
- Monitoring how your audience engages with your content post-update is crucial, as this will inform necessary adjustments to keep emails visible and engaging.
Learn More
IOS 18.2 pushes email marketers to create more targeted, personalized, and high-quality content. A strong emphasis on providing value, optimizing engagement, and fine-tuning email strategies will be crucial to staying effective in a changing landscape.
To learn more about how iOS 18.2 will impact your email marketing efforts and how you can adapt your strategies to meet these changes, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
