Please enjoy part 1 of 3 of an article series written by Mary Charleson, a marketing consultant and speaker at www.fiveminutemarketing.com. Subscribe to our email newsletter to be notified when Part 2 is released - just email marketing@travelsmg.com with the subject "newsletter".
How AI embedded iOS18 from Apple with impact newsletters
Personal connections build trust. Nobody knows that more than travel advisors. But this personal connection is also going to be incredibly important in having your newsletter stand out against the deluge of AI generated content, and in particular with changes coming with Apple iOS18.
Did you know that roughly 46% of all email today is read on a mobile phone using the Apple mail app? That’s a very important statistic when you consider a change that Apple is making in the fall of 2024.
Changes are coming on fall 2024
This fall Apple will roll out of their AI-embedded iOS 18 operating system. They’re calling the AI “Apple Intelligence” but let’s face it, much of the help it will provide is based on capabilities of AI – artificial intelligence. There are numerous things that new Apple Intelligence will help you with, but one very important change for those of us with newsletters, is how the update will handle incoming emails.
With the change, Apple will automatically route incoming emails, relegating them to one of three buckets: primary, social and promotions.
Apple will route brand email and newsletters to the dreaded black hole of promotions. That is not where you want to be.
The change is not unlike what Google did a while back with Gmail, and I would expect that the Apple change will allow users to control their route settings and re-route emails incorrectly flagged to a particular bucket. But it’s still a potentially disruptive change if you are not fully aware of the potential consequences.
In beta testing research leading up to this change, it seems that newsletters that come from an individual person within a company and are written in the tone of a human being will stay in the primary box.
Yes, coming from a person, not the company is a critical first step, but that second one is the big one to pass muster into the primary box. That email newsletter needs to sound personable and from a friend (since presumably AI will scan the content for hints of that).
I’ve long been a proponent of writing a newsletter in a very personable tone, but this change from Apple is a whack on the side of the head. I’ve always considered my Sunday morning marketing tips newsletters like “writing a letter to a friend.” I use conversational tone that sometimes breaks writing rules, but sounds like a person speaking. I drop in anecdotal bits about life and what I’m up to. I share business examples and stories based on personal experience. It’s deliberate, but also a style which I’ve found to be one I can own. And it keeps open rates high, and write back even higher. (See what I did there, starting a sentence with “and”? My grade 12 English teacher Mr. Berg would shutter.)
If you’ve yet to get the memo about being personable in your newsletters, now is the time to introduce it into your style. Start by sharing an anecdotal story that only you could tell in your copy. I’m not sure how AI is being trained on this, but that is one thing that you can distinctively own that differentiates you as human from a machine churning out copy based on prompts.
Mary Charleson is a marketing consultant and speaker at www.fiveminutemarketing.com where she advises members of the travel industry on marketing trends and strategy. She is also a travel writer and content creator at www.carryonqueen.com Subscribe to her weekly Five-minute marketing tips newsletter, delivered fresh every Sunday morning here.