Rewriting the Inbox: How AI Is Reshaping Email Engagement

With Gmail and iOS now using AI to generate email previews before a message is even opened, marketers are facing a new frontier. You can’t avoid or ignore these changes. They’re already here. And they’re reshaping how we think about content, strategy, and measuring success.

AI-generated summaries are often the first thing users see when they check their inbox. These previews aren’t just pulling the first few lines of your email. They’re interpreting your content, sometimes arbitrarily, and surfacing what they think matters most.

That means your carefully crafted narrative might be skipped. Your CTA? Possibly buried. Your brand story? Potentially misrepresented.

With this technology, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. AI previews are here to stay, and they’re already disrupting:

• User journeys: Links may lead to generic pages, breaking the intended flow.
• Attribution: If AI changes or replaces links, how do you know what’s working?
• Testing: A/B tests lose value if the preview (not the email) drives engagement.
• Monetization: Could AI previews become paid placements, like search ads?

Imagine opening your email app and seeing a summary of your inbox, not the inbox itself. AI could soon tell users which emails to open, which to ignore, and what actions to take before they even scroll.

This shift demands a new mindset: moving away from simply optimizing the look of the email, towards understanding how AI will interpret and summarize the emails, so you can ensure your message purpose is represented correctly, the new user experience is what you intend.

To thrive in this new landscape, marketers must return to timeless principles:

• Relevance is everything: One of my favorite quotes is from Stephanie Miller, email marketing industry thought leader, who says, “To be welcome in the inbox, you need to be relevant to most of your customers most of the time.” This timeless insight underscores the importance of personalization in every email campaign. Relevance isn’t just about timing; it’s also about delivering the right message, featuring the right product, to the right person. To achieve this, marketers leverage customer data to tailor content based on individual preferences, behaviors, and purchase history.
• Data quality matters: Inactive lists and outdated data hurt performance more than AI ever could.
• Intentional sign-ups: Don’t just say “Subscribe to our newsletter.” Tell people why they should care and deliver on that promise.

1. Audit how AI experiences your content: Pause to understand how AI interprets your content. Reflect on your content strategy, including where you need to be more specific or create new materials. Discuss where you trust AI to take creative liberties and the implications of those scenarios.
2. Test AI previews: Just like rendering tests in the past, you should preview and refine how AI summarizes your emails.
3. Optimize like SEO: Use clear and structured content that AI can interpret accurately. AI can help improve the clarity of your messages by making your CTA more effective.
4. Rethink attribution: Prepare for less direct tracking and more inferred impact.
5. Educate your team: Align content creators, strategists, and analysts around this shift. Bring your team together to discuss how to prepare for these changes and what that means for the overall marketing strategy and engagement programs you’re running across the business. Discuss how these enhancements by Google and Apple vary region by region, as AI and privacy-related regulations vary by jurisdiction. What is true for one country may be invalid for another.

AI isn’t breaking email marketing; it’s forcing us to do it better for the sake of our audience. The tools may change, but the mission for marketers should remain the same: deliver value, stay relevant, and respect the inbox. To do that well, you need more than good intentions. You need the right technology.

As marketers, it’s important to remember that our customers don’t think in terms of channels, so neither should we. Email is still the cornerstone of digital communication, but we need to make sure we reach our customers where they want us to reach them. And this means creating direct digital 1:1 engagement and bulk communications across push, SMS, mobile, and app to build and maintain meaningful connections with your audience. In a world where AI is shaping how we create and consume content, we must make it easier for our customers to get the information they want and need at the time and place they want it. Agility and omnichannel thinking are no longer optional; they are the foundation of modern marketing success.