Is inbox AI tanking your email performance?

Whether you like it or not, you’ve probably seen AI bots popping into your inbox, offering auto-generated summaries of your emails like an awkward party guest nobody invited. Worse yet, it’ll even auto-generate a writeup for how it thinks you should respond to those emails.

I mean, thanks, emailBot, but I think I can handle reading and responding to a two-line email from my mom. 

We're grappling with looming surveillance concerns, the constant callouts pushing AI "enhancements," and just the mere idea of having an LLM serve as our go-between for the sake of "optimization." There’s already a lot about this that's annoying at best, but it could also be sending your marketing emails into a black hole.

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening with AI summaries, and why they’re a problem for small business owners. 

AI in your inbox may filter out or misrepresent your emails

An inbox AI’s primary tasks are deciding for your audience ahead of time whether or not your email is worth reading, and summarizing what your email’s key points are. This means that, if the AI doesn't detect the right pieces of content, it could simply shuffle your email into a Promotions tab or a Spam folder, and skip over your audience’s inbox.

Even if you do make it past that initial hurdle and land in someone's inbox, there’s still another looming concern: is that AI-generated email summary accurate?

Depending on how your email is written, or how you order the information in it, an inbox AI like Google's Gemini could incorrectly summarize your email. That may not sound like a big deal, but we know that LLMs can "hallucinate" things into being, so an AI-generated email summary could easily be giving your audience inaccurate details, or even missing important points entirely.

What does an inbox AI look for in your marketing email?

Email inbox AIs generally pick up on clear calls to action, as well as dates and deadlines, and offers you include. You'll consistently notice those details in the summaries it offers.

One positive: it will also potentially prioritize emails about niche topics that the reader has shown previous interest in. So, at least there's something that could work in your favor.

What gets deprioritized by AI? An email AI will often deprioritize longer emails with “emotional” language or storytelling. This isn't exactly surprising--inbox AIs are being created by people who value efficiency above all else. It is a real irritation, however, for anyone who wants to make their audience feel something... which is precisely what marketers are trying to do.

Additionally, if your email contains multiple competing messages, that can make it difficult for AI to determine key points for an email summary. So, there's even more value in keeping your emails focused and concise, both in terms of the topic and how much ground you cover.

How to write marketing emails that an inbox AI will handle correctly

Whether you've noticed your email open and clickthrough rates dipping, or you just want to get out in front of these concerns, there are some best practices you can weave in to help your email get past the AI bouncer and into The Clerb.

• Front-load the first 100-200 characters of your email with the most important information. If you have links, deadlines, offers to talk about, get those mentions out there early.
  
• Consider repeating your key message in both the subject line and preview text. While this feels like it defeats the point of having preview text at all, it does help AI identify the key point you’re trying to get across.
  
• Use formatting to guide the reader. Giving your email visual structure with headings, a bulleted or numbered list, or bold or italicized text will help AI bots navigate your email. Better yet, it'll also make the content easier for your readers to digest, too, and isn't that who we're really here for?
  
• Use relevant keywords, and add alt text to your images. Keywords and alt text are important online marketing best practices across all of your channels, and they still apply in your email marketing, too.
  
• Don’t rely too heavily on images. Too many images can potentially signal that your email is lacking in information, making an inbox AI unable to determine what your email is about.

By now, it’s fair to say that we’ve had a lot of practice with navigating algorithms, and we’ll all learn to work around this one, too. It certainly doesn’t make it less of a pain, though!