AI is summarising your emails, are you doing everything right to make sure it really shows what is in your email?

In May 2024 at the Google I/O conference the demo showed how Gemini could summarise your emails, Apple launched ‘Apple Intelligence’ at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, sharing how this would look at the Apple event on September 9th, announcing iOS18 and email marketers again had something to freak out about! (I mean if you could leave email alone for one year Apple - please 🙏). At the exact same time Apple Intelligence was announced, Yahoo published a press release to bring a cleaner and simplified mail experience to Yahoo Mail Desktop integrating one line email summaries (replacing the preview text), action buttons and email summaries!

How does this affect your email marketing?

Preview text

Something that really caught our eye and the attention of a lot of others was the iOS18 AI summary replacing the preview text of an email. Something that over the past 10 years since Salesforce added a preheader element and six years since Jaina shared the ‘Preview text hack’ at Litmus Live has become an essential part of the email envelope; the from name, the subject, your logo and the preview text.

As this is only in iOS Mail and Yahoo desktop for the moment, I don’t think this will be the end of preview text, however it could be the beginning of the end.

Important things to consider:

Does your subject line work by itself? We often use the subject line and preview text together to tell a story.

In the example above, would we have just combined everything into the subject line? What if you have an offer in your preview text, or need it to back up a clever subject line, like the Pokemon email below:

For the majority of your recipients, they will still see both, so it is a great idea to find cool ways to use them in conjunction. But another thing to think about!

Summaries

Along with summarising your email for the preview text, Apple intelligence, Google’s Gemini and Yahoo Mail all have integrated AI summaries for  

Is AI any good at summarising my emails into a couple of lines?

That is a big question and there could be a lot of factors that go into this:

1. Following best practices, such as short and clear emails, with one specific subject, will give a better chance for AI to summarise it correctly. 

2. Will you need to be a bit smarter with the content of your emails, to ‘prompt’ or engineer the summary text? Similar to writing a blog post with SEO in mind?

3. Making sure your email has text in it! We’re not seeing AI pick up on alt text of images, so if you are sending all image emails, there won’t be a summary:

Credit: Lesley Higgins

How big of an impact will this be on my emails?

Apple is rolling it out with iOS18 - so only those users will see this. It is also something you can opt into, or out of - but we are not sure what the default will be currently. The preview text summary is only shown in the ‘Primary’ tab, so it may only impact personal or transactional emails that land in the inbox, but when testing any marketing emails in the primary tab did also get a summary. 

iOS18 will only work on iPhone XR (2018) and later, whilst Apple Intelligence only works on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. So only users who have adopted the latest Apple phones will see the AI changes.

All image emails

We’re not going to get into all the reasons an all-image email may not be the best practice, but what we can share is that the AI Summaries are not currently looking at alt text, or analysing text in images. Those emails have summaries like:

This message is too short to summarise

Other summaries have been so short that it includes some elements you probably don’t want highlighting! 

Unsubscribe or manage your email preferences here

(This was the only text in the email) 

Another example from Brian Kerr @Resend - The only text in the email was pulled through in the summary:

Next steps and advice

For most email marketers already out there following best practices; using live text in email, crafting well thought out content and sending to an engaged audience - the only thing you may want to do is look at how you structure your subject lines and preview text to ensure they work well with the summaries. 

If you are sending all-image emails - If possible, start making moves towards including live text elements in your messaging. 

Resources

Apple Intelligence overwrites pre-headers on Apple Mail? - Al Iverson - Spam Resource

AI Generated Summaries - Kimberley Huang - Litmus