May 13, 2025
When Apple iOS announced their update in September, most email marketers received the message that there was nothing to see behind the curtain. It was a simple upgrade to add in categories and to work closely with the placement that Gmail uses for their system.
Now that it’s in the world, email marketers are experiencing the back lash with how deep the upgrade actually is. For many email services, it’s going to knock revenue and engagement down drastically without a chance of climbing back up to the top of the Inbox.
More importantly, it’s going to change the face of how we approach email marketing in the future and strategic decisions we make with sending practices.
The hawk eye view of Apple’s update makes it look like an easier way to sort and work with messages. It also highlights the incoming AI, a feature we all know is going to start shaping the future of email.
The releases in December included:
AI-Powered Email Categorization: The Mail app now automatically sorts incoming emails into four categories:
This feature leverages Apple's AI capabilities to streamline email management.
Digest View: Introduces a new Digest View, allowing users to receive a summary of categorized emails, enhancing the ability to manage and review emails efficiently.
This means that when you send, it prioritizes in someone's Inbox based on "last engaged with" information instead of the newest send. It also means that if information is too closely related, AI determines exactly where it will place underneath it.
The big change is categorization - right? Nope. Wrong. The big update is the way that AI is handling each email send. It’s completely twisting and changing the deliverability algorithm, forcing the hand of email marketers to think about their approach to email and what is used to send to this specific group of individuals.
Over the years, email has become a fragment of expertise, specifically with a combination of specialization and saturation of sends. Frequency increases, promotions, and the special access to someone’s personal information has worked together to create an explosion of email systems.
Apple’s new release hands over the saturation to AI, telling it to take over the sorting of millions of emails hitting one’s Inbox every day. And as a result, Inbox placement is transforming at the speed of light.
Email marketers can no longer think in a silo when it comes to sends. A combined expertise of deliverability, creative, and technical personalization are required to work together in relationship to the customer lifecycle. If you’re working with anyone who’s siloing these out instead of staying ahead of the curve, your Inbox visibility is going to suffer.
What this means is every automation, broadcast, and extra send has to follow specific best practices and rules that are required by providers. It also means that email marketers have to recognize that marketing in the digital age is not just to an audience. It’s also to the robots. If we don’t consider AI in our sends, we’re going to get pushed to the bottom of the Inbox and revenue will suffer.
The highlight of the iOS update came with a bleeding account that broke almost immediately after the role out of iOS. With 28% of users shopping through Apple iOS, was a steep decrease in revenue, declining profitability by 15% within 2 weeks.
After a loss of $350K in revenue, the email channel was required to make fast pivots to both make up for lost revenue and to put staples in place of what had to be an absolute solution to conform with the new best practices that iOS put into the mix of what they were calling “categorization”.
In 1 week, those changes led to a 24% increase up to plan and continues to stabilize and track upward, despite the changes in Inbox placement that Apple provided.
After one month of testing and continuing to make changes, Apple iOS users now have a 50% higher engagement and performance than regular audience members, showcasing that the update can work in your favor when following the compliance that the iOS Inbox is interested in.
Even though categorization was the roll out, it’s the features in AI that are creating the deepest movement. The flags that are being used for AI are asking the system to force placement. Email marketers often tend to change placement by sending at different times of the day or by frequency.
“Not enough,” saith Apple.
Deliverability now has extra flags that are going to change your placement. The bundles, or digest view, that Apple rolled out means that there is a new deliverability hierarchy that pushes emails to the bottom of a bundled list based on engagement and uniqueness of each email.
What does that mean? Engagement rules are taking best practices in email to an entirely new level of getting things to read through AI.
We have a new gatekeeper. The AI machine is now our first reader and one that we will need to comply with in order to stay in the front of Inboxes and growth.
Email marketers, at the root level, are being forced to comply with best practices. Anything that falls short will knock you out of the loop and won’t allow you to get in front of your audience. This includes creative, deliverability practices, and technical configurations that add more data into the mix.
Deliverability Changes
The categorization and bundle feature of Apple determines your placement, only allowing users to change where the information is going to land.
To continue to comply, get to the top level of deliverability and make the following updates:
1. Make sure you are completely branded with name, logo, etc.
2. Add in your logo to the DNS on your hosting. Do this by doing the following:
3. If you aren’t placing, consider changing your “from” user name. If your brand name isn’t an exact match each time, it will start a new bundle for your users.
Creative Changes
An Apple update that busted open the doors of change were linked to best practices with creative. This is being done so AI can read all the information in the email and determine how legitimate it is to the user. It’s also taking over preview text, which many are saying is inefficient in determining interest by audience members because AI overrides it.
Here’s what your creative and technical team can do to comply:
1. Include personalization in your subject lines and rotate what that personalization is
2. Image to text ratio is important. Add in live text as a summary to each email. If you have modules, make sure there is some text that summarizes what each section is about.
3. Anything that is unique gets bundled and categorized the same. No longer can email marketers use “something similar to last year”, or “that creative worked, let’s repurpose it.” AI doesn’t like it.
Unique. Authentic. Individualized. Different. Anything you can do with your live text and conceptualization that stands out is going to get you noticed and will allow the robots to let you pass go.
But Until It’s Technical…
If you aren’t pushing and driving custom data, using personalization, hyper-segmenting, or using a CDP - now’s the time to get into the game.
As AI roles out at a deeper level, it’s going to force technical data to come first and everything else is going to become secondary.
The strongest changes we made with our client who faced iOS problems was to add in a hierarchy of personalization. That means we had one, sometimes two, levels of data and personalization with every send.
1. Subject Lines. Personalize as many subject lines as possible. If you have more advanced data, don’t just use the first name, it will no longer look unique. Use products purchased, categories browsed, profile attributes - anything you can get to make your subject line to shine will make a difference.
2. Banner Switches. If you can personalize by audience or attributes, add in top level personalization. Different offers, different messaging, anything that targets smaller groups of audiences is going to bump up your accessibility. AI is going to read from the top down, meaning any personalization you can add at the top of emails is going to make a difference.
3. Above the header. Below or above every text box, make your header unique. Same offers, same messaging, is no longer going to work. Not only do you want to make sure your creative sparks out, but also make sure that any layers of personalization you can add here works.
4. Product grids and body content. The best place to add personalization is in the body of the content. What AI is going to read is a combination of uniqueness per send in tandem with uniqueness with bundled sends. Any dynamic layouts and technical pieces you can use to flair your email is going to drive incremental revenue and placement.
In the tests we had with our client, it was the layered personalization that worked best. Going narrow, targeted, and specific is what led to results. Even though we were sending to large audiences, this was our key to unlock the AI gates.
The iOS update may experience some backlash now, but as these new flags become standardized, other Inboxes will find ways to let AI take over Inbox placement.
That means email marketers will want to get ahead of the curve now. Thinking about data, personalization, best practices, and deliverability compliance are the key terms to change the way email marketing is done.
Those that don’t use these practices are going to fall off the ladder. Similar to the “Google Algorithm” updates, this change is designed to sort top to bottom and bottom to top. If you aren’t staying relevant and at the very top of the Inbox by AI standards, you’re going to get lost in the noise and completely disappear.
Email marketers won’t be able to increase their noticeability with more sends, frequency updates, or changing times of day. That will become an obsolete strategy while hyper-targeting, data for personalization, and audience work is going to become the driver of success.
Speak to the robots and the audience at the same time and you will continue to experience being at the forefront of your email marketing program.
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