Email’s Evolution: How the Launch of Apple iOS 18 is Changing the Email Landscape
Authored by Edna Cheung
Listen to this article
What you’ll learn:
Email marketing is evolving with advancements in automation, personalization, and AI, requiring marketers to prioritize user protection, engagement, and relevance.
Updates to Apple iOS 18, including AI-generated pre-headers and inbox categorization, demand optimized subject lines, pre-headers, and content to ensure visibility and engagement.
To future-proof campaigns, marketers must create personalized, compliant content while leveraging AI, maintaining clean lists and collaborating with regulatory teams to adapt to platform changes.
Introduction
Email marketing has transformed dramatically over the past decade. Marketers can no longer rely on outdated tactics like mass emailing purchased lists or disregarding data privacy and compliance regulations, such as CASL, GDPR, and CAN-SPAM. With the launch of Apple iOS 18, more changes are on the horizon—especially for those of us in the life sciences space. What do we need to consider to navigate this environment in 2025?
What should we focus on in 2025? Let’s explore the current landscape, identify key forces prioritizing user protection, and share best practices to keep your emails at the top of your clients’ inboxes.
What Is Happening in the Email Landscape?
A decade ago, email marketing was simpler, with little emphasis on who the target audience was or their interest in the product. Today, email marketing has transformed through significant technological advancements and evolving consumer expectations. Here are the top five trends shaping the industry:
Marketing Automation Today, email marketers can save time and reduce costs with advanced automation tools. These tools enable timely, targeted messaging by leveraging behavioral triggers, such as welcome campaigns, cart-abandonment reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups. This targeted approach ensures timely and relevant emails, enhancing the overall customer experience.
Data Privacy and Compliance New regulations now require marketers to obtain explicit consent for email communications, ensuring transparency and fostering trust between customers and brands. In 2024, Google and Yahoo updated their platforms to enhance user protection. These changes include simplifying the unsubscribe process, enforcing sender authentication, and holding marketers accountable for deliverability and spam rates. With the release of Apple iOS 18, more updates have been made to protect the end user, requiring email marketers to focus less on just open rates and more on clicks and conversions.
Personalization Ten years ago, email personalization simply meant addressing recipients by name. Today, personalization encompasses much more. With data-driven segmentation, marketers can deliver highly tailored content based on user behavior, demographics, and preferences. We’re also seeing a rise in interactive emails featuring elements like embedded polls, in-email forms, and personalized shopping carousels. These innovations drive engagement and build trust by keeping content relevant and engaging.
Rise of AI Marketing automation platforms harness AI to help marketers align with their audience’s needs. With the rise of AI and machine learning, marketers now have insights into optimal timing, frequency of communication, and recipient-engagement levels—identifying when to scale back or increase outreach. AI-driven segmentation enables highly targeted campaigns that feel genuinely personalized for each recipient. Beyond segmentation, AI enhances subject lines, pre-headers, and email content to boost engagement and deepen brand connections.
Mobile Optimization Marketers once prioritized desktop email design, but with over 60% of emails now opened on mobile devices, user experience has become paramount. Responsive templates deliver seamless, optimized experiences across all screen sizes.
What Is Apple’s Role in Shaping the New Email Landscape?
In September 2024, Apple released iOS 18, introducing significant changes to email marketing. The update emphasizes user privacy, which impacts how marketers manage campaigns.
With Apple holding about 60% of the US smartphone market, these changes are substantial. The most notable update is the integration of Apple Intelligence, an AI system available on iPhone 15 Pro and later models.
So, what updates came with iOS 18? We have highlighted them and their impact to email marketers:
AI-Generated Pre-Headers Pre-headers are crucial for helping emails stand out in crowded inboxes. With Apple’s AI-generated pre-headers, emails viewed in Apple Mail now display summaries crafted by Apple AI, overriding the marketer’s original pre-header. All AI-generated summaries will be pulled from the email’s existing subject line, pre-header, and content in the email. Apple believes these AI-craft pre-headers will create a more personalized touch for end users. However, this innovation also shifts some control away from marketers, as they no longer fully dictate the initial messaging customers see, introducing a new layer of adaptability in email strategy. Email marketers should focus on crafting strong subject lines, relevant body content, and concise, impactful pre-headers. Apple Intelligence will first look to your existing pre-header to help generate its AI summaries, so make sure that your pre-headers remain concise and to the point.
Inbox Summary Apple’s recent updates to its Apple Mail application aim to streamline inbox management and enhance user experience. One notable feature is grouping multiple emails from the same sender into a single summary view, reducing inbox clutter. While this functionality has been used for applications such as Outlook and Gmail for some time, Apple now feels that it offers users a cleaner interface. Still, it may also lead to fewer individual emails being opened by that sender. For email marketers, this highlights the need for relevant, engaging, and personalized content to stand out and drive deeper recipient engagement.
Branded Mail Logos Are Now Available in Apple Mail Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) has existed since 2021. Gmail was the first to adopt it, followed by Yahoo and AOL. Apple Mail refers to BIMI as “Branded Mail" and allows email marketers to display their brand logo alongside their emails, signaling to recipients that these messages come from verified senders. From a marketing standpoint, “Branded Mail” presents a valuable opportunity to stand out in the inbox. Visually confirming sender authenticity builds credibility and reassures recipients that the emails are from legitimate, trustworthy sources.
Inbox Categorization With iOS 18, Apple has introduced a new categorization feature to its Apple Mail app, similar to Gmail’s approach. Emails are now organized into key categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, making it easier for recipients to locate the messages they need quickly. This streamlined inbox helps users manage their emails with greater efficiency and clarity.
How Does This Affect Our Clients at Klick?
It can feel intimidating when major platforms like Google and Apple implement changes that impact email marketing. However, these updates can enhance ongoing campaigns, helping to align strategies with evolving standards and improving overall effectiveness.
At Klick, here’s how we follow best practices so our emails stand out from the rest:
Send Engaging and Relevant Content
Tracking engagement metrics like opens and clicks helps assess whether your emails resonate with your audience. Adding interactive elements like polls and surveys boosts engagement and provides valuable feedback to refine future communications.
Strong subject lines are essential for driving opens, offering provocative messaging that promises relevant, valuable insights and evokes curiosity or FOMO. Additionally, with the shift in AI-generated pre-headers, the top portion of the email content becomes even more critical. Ensuring that key information is immediately accessible will enhance accuracy and engagement, optimizing how AI captures and presents key takeaways.
Medical, Regulatory, and Legal Considerations
Medical, regulatory, and legal review teams are critical in pharmaceutical marketing. However, with the growing adoption of Apple 15 Pro devices and increasing user opt-ins to Apple Intelligence, these teams may face challenges in controlling the pre-header text.
To proactively address these concerns, MRL teams must ensure that pre-headers continue to be developed for non-Apple users and that regulatory submissions are annotated, outlining the platform-level changes. This step will help maintain alignment with marketing standards within evolving technological constraints.
Unsubscribe Handling
Just as it is important to make signing up for emails or newsletters easy, the option to unsubscribe should be equally so. Klick always follows best practices, including recommending that the unsubscribe link be easy to find, not require sign-in to update preferences, and provide immediate confirmation of opt-out status. This approach respects recipient choices and ensures compliance with privacy and anti-spam laws applicable to the region where the emails are sent.
List Hygiene
There are two avenues to this topic:
Monitor Engagement: Regularly assess your target lists to distinguish between recipients who are actively engaging with your emails and those who are inactive.
Ensure Deliverability: Follow best practices by removing emails with a hard bounce. At Klick, we use the Everest Validity platform, which verifies the validity of emails on our list and monitors deliverability to see if our messages land in the inbox or spam. This proactive approach helps ensure our communications reach the right audience.
Conclusion
The email landscape is constantly evolving, with updates from platforms like Google, Apple, and Yahoo challenging marketers to adapt. Yet, these changes are opportunities, pushing us to refine our strategies and create more impactful, audience-focused communications. Staying aligned with these shifts ensures we deliver value through this dynamic digital channel.
References
New Year, New Email Deliverability Rules: Improve Your Email Sender Score [Webinar]. Salesforce, January 18, 2024.
Essential Strategies to Survive the NEW Yahoo and Google (Yahoogle!) Technical Requirements [Webinar]. Nine Lives Digital, January 9, 2024.
Author
Edna Cheung
Director, Technology - CEP Operations
With over 15 years of expertise in advertising, automotive, communication, and healthcare, Edna Cheung specializes in email marketing and marketing automation. She excels at creating personalized, technology-driven customer experiences and optimizing processes for efficiency and results. As Klick's Director of Marketing Technology, Edna leverages technology to transform digital marketing campaigns and elevate customer engagement. A trusted consultant for cross-functional teams, she bridges the communication gap between complex technologies and practical solutions. Edna’s extensive experience includes executing campaigns across diverse channels, including email, SMS, and digital platforms.
Related Content
Ready to Drive Life Sciences Forward?
Experience the transformative power of Klick Health, where deep industry expertise meets cutting-edge AI-driven wisdom.
As your trusted partners in life sciences commercialization, we combine a storied history in healthcare with the latest technologies to elevate every facet of your omnichannel strategy. From crafting engaging narratives to enabling data-driven decision-making, our integrated capabilities ensure you lead the way in transforming patient outcomes through digital health innovation.
Let’s create something transformative together.
