For decades, email has been a cornerstone of digital marketing strategies. But recent changes from Apple are undermining the effectiveness of this once-reliable channel. While marketers continue to invest time and resources into sophisticated segmentation, creative design, dynamic content, and hyper-personalization, the reality is that fewer people are even seeing your efforts, let alone engaging with them.
So what’s happening, and how can you future-proof your performance? Let’s break it down.
The Unseen Disruption of Email Marketing
Apple’s iOS Mail app has introduced several UI changes that are causing significant decreases in marketing-based email performance. While designed to enhance user experience, these changes are making it much harder for marketers to get emails opened, read, or clicked on.
1. Automatic promotion tab filtering. Similar to Gmail’s categorization, marketing emails are automatically routed to a “Promotions” tab. By filtering these emails out from your customer’s primary inbox, marketing emails are more prone to being out of sight and out of mind, no matter how relevant or personalized they are.
2. Email stacking. Email campaigns that share the same “friendly-from”name that precedes the email address (e.g. Rado Radinov <info@vibes.com>) are now stacked together. If your brand sends multiple email campaigns per day or even per week, your customers will only see one stack - reducing your brand’s visibility.
3. Outdated pre-headers. The pre-header text shown at the top of an email stack isn’t from the most recent email you sent. Instead, it is either pulled from an older email or is generated using Apple AI. This can mislead your customers about what the latest email is promoting.
4. Hidden content. Once your emails are stacked, most of the email content itself is hidden until your customer taps into the individual email within the stack, making the act of casually skimming available promotions much more cumbersome.
5. Oldest-to-newest sorting of unread emails. Apple also displays unread emails in order of oldest to newest, which can lead to your customer opening a week-old promotional email and thinking the offer is still valid.
These changes are lending to the steadily-declining performance of email, resulting in a 16% decrease in click-through rates overall, and a whopping 25% CTR decrease just on iOS. These plummeting engagement rates are naturally resulting in diminished email-attributed revenue, and all of that work you did on personalized subject lines, segmentation, dynamic content, etc.? Wasted.
Rebuilt Your Strategy with Mobile Marketing
It’s time to adapt. Mobile marketing channels – particularly SMS, RCS, and Mobile Wallet – are powerful tools for reclaiming attention and driving engagement across the customer lifecycle.
Here are some recommendations on how you can supercharge a mobile program.
Put SMS enrollment front and center.
First thing’s first: build your SMS database! You can do this fairly quickly by promoting how to sign up for your SMS program prominently on your website, social media, in-store signage, and yes – even via email.
And the less friction, the better, which is why we recommend one of two tactics:
- Use QR codes for instant sign-up. They’re perfect for receipts, posters, packaging, and product inserts.
- Implement tap-to-join functionality in your online promotions, which pre-populates an opt-in within a mobile device’s native messaging app. All your customers have to do is hit send to join, making signing up a breeze – it’s no wonder Vibes customers who use this tactic see an average +90% opt-in success rate.
For a more comprehensive guide on SMS acquisition, be sure to nab your copy of Vibes’ 10 Tactics to Build an SMS Database that Clicks and Buys.
Weave SMS into your digital marketing strategy.
SMS shouldn’t operate in a silo. Coordinate your sends with email and social campaigns to deliver a consistent message across touchpoints. Unlike what’s happening in email, SMS marketing messages are displayed in a clear, chronological order within your customer’s native messaging app.
Since SMS has high engagement rates consistently, you should prioritize text messages for time-sensitive offers, promotions, reminders, and other alerts that require action to be taken quickly. For instance:
- A last-minute Valentine's Day dinner offer to help get empty tables filled. When your message must be simple, needs to get to the recipient quickly, and requires immediate attention, we recommend SMS.
- Flash sales. When it comes to time-sensitive offers, don't risk it getting buried in an already-busy inbox - go with SMS.
Boost engagement with SMS tactics that are consistent and creative.
A little creativity goes a long way for standing out from the inbox. Tactics we recommend include:
1. Create a cadence of branded campaigns. Activate a weekly SMS campaign with a branded theme like "Your Sunday Savings." A regular cadence trains your customers to expect and engage with this type of campaign.
2. Break up the copy monotony. A few things you can do to avoid all of your SMS campaigns blurring together include:
- Using line breaks to create rhythm and emphasis
- Adding bullet points to highlight key offers or features
- Adding MMS to your messaging mix to elevate engagement with rich, vibrant visual content like images or GIFs
Start sending RCS messages.
Imagine SMS and MMS that’s even more interactive and more visually exciting – say hello to RCS, the channel built to engage even more meaningfully with your customers. RCS delivers, among other innovations:
- Richer image and video visuals, with carousels of up to 10 rich cards your customers can easily scroll through
- Interactive, suggested one-tap actions and replies, giving your customers an app-like experience without the extra app download
- Branding by default with your logo and name clearly displayed, helping you build instant trust and authority
Vibes customers who are using RCS as a channel are already seeing 3x higher click-through rates than their standard SMS messages, as well as a 30% boost in attributed revenue thanks to the ease of interaction.
Use Mobile Wallet to drive more foot traffic and conversions.
Consumers love using Apple and Google Wallet – it’s native to all smartphones and used to easily organized and access their digital coupons, loyalty cards, tickets and gift cards in their Mobile Wallet, and enables your brand to stay top of mind.
Once your customer saves a mobile wallet pass to their phone, you can set up geolocation notifications that will automatically pop up on their lock screen when they are 100 meters or less from one of your store locations (or any location you choose). This real-time relevance is exactly what helps retailers, for instance, see as high as a 60% increase in redemption rates compared to non-Mobile Wallet coupons or offers.
Final Thoughts
The landscape of email marketing is changing significantly. If you have noticed your email metrics dipping, it’s not your imagination: iOS changes are disrupting visibility of and engagement with your brand.
The solution is to modernize your mobile-first strategy, making mobile channels central to your larger digital marketing efforts in order to stay relevant and reach customers where they engage most often.
By growing your SMS database, integrating messaging across channels, testing creative tactics, and embracing RCS and Mobile Wallet, you can not only offset the losses from email, but also build stronger and more effective customer engagement than ever before.
Interested in bringing revenue-driving mobile campaigns into your marketing strategy? Get in touch with us today!
