With the latest announcements coming from Apple and Yahoo, introducing Ai into the inbox, we have to ask ourselves as an industry what does that mean for the marketing channel we all work to be noticed in?
"Who's to say how the Ai will interpret the content of your carefully crafted marketing email?"
- Filip Bisp, CEO & Co-founder, Alpaco
The lowdown
Ai is here to to stay, it's futile to even think we can fight it, and in every aspects of our lives Ai is going to be a factor going forward. Me personally, I welcome Ai with open arms, I love when things are able to be done "harder, better, faster, stronger" as the famous line goes in song from Daft Punk.
I welcome the fact that more users have the ability to segment emails into categories so it's easier for them to get an overview, It's been a fan favorite of mine ever since Gmail introduced it some years ago. Heck I even applaud the feature where they want to give an overview of unused coupons and deals, it's a great service for the end-user and potentially can mean more business you would otherwise miss.
What I don't like however is the Ai summaries and what it potentially can mean for your preheader text, your click-rate and ultimately your bottom line!
Preheader text may be generated by Ai!
This is venturing into speculations, I know, but it was kind of left out there to hang, without any specification, so here's where the fear is coming from.
Say you're a Marketer and you've taken great care to write your message, set it up nicely in your email template, taken great care to write alt-texts on your images and most importantly given it great care of your Subjectline and Pre-header text, the first and most important tool to get your recipients attention.
...And now you can see all that being thrown out the window, and Ai now determines what your recipients see first and you have no way of controlling that - you see where this is going?
If the whole differentiator of Email Marketing, compared to all the other channels, is that you can be personal with the recipient - Ai could come between that personal connection, if it's up to a machine to tell the recipient what's in the email.
Who's to say how the different Ai will interpret the content of your carefully crafted marketing email?
Seeing as each inbox is now getting their own Ai, will we risk seeing a completely different pattern of behavior from our recipients, depending on which inbox they have and how the Ai has interpreted your content this week?
What about all-image emails
It's no secret that Idon't like all-image emails. Personally I think it's a bit lazy and non-user-friendly approach to email marketing as a whole. As a recipient you can't tell the difference before you open the email but they will still be listed right next to your beautifully crafted email - it's a shame if the bad user experience from one email means they won't open your email... but i digress.
The real question here is; How will the Ai interpret all-image based emails?
If the Ai starts interpreting the images then those senders may be in the risk of getting poorer results, which I guess from our perspective you could view as a good thing, and then there is an advantage to the fact that Ai now is going to summarize the email.
Closing remarks
Sadly I'm not on first name with the big tech giant CEO's, controlling these inboxes, that are now seemingly creating a distance between us and our recipients. If I was I would appeal for them to leave the marketing emails alone from this feature, and use it for personal emails (even though that could also create a bit of a gap between people).
We risk losing the control over the message, and that's really where my fear is with this introduction, nobody can say how their email will be displayed at first glance, and that to me is throwing the work of Marketers into an unnecessary limbo.
We've seen similar trends in SEO where Google have taken excerpts from sites and delivering it on the search page. This has proven to give significantly lower click rates on many websites where the content has been excerpted from, meaning less traffic to the sites and subsequently less revenue.
Maybe there won't be a big disruption here, but I must admit the fear of loosing the direct line of communication because of Ai saddens me, not just specifically for Email Marketing, but in general.
This could usher in an era of downturn in performance for email marketing - or it could do the opposite - I'm not sure yet, but I do have my fears!
