There’s an uninvited guest hanging out in your Inbox, and its name is “AI.”
You’ve probably seen AI bots popping into your inbox, offering auto-generated summaries of your emails, like a nosy stranger. Worse yet, it’ll even auto-generate a writeup for how it thinks you should respond to those emails.
Thank you, AI, but I think I can handle reading and responding to a single-paragraph email from my mom.
Between surveillance concerns, and inserting AI into personal communications between humans for the sake of our go-go-go(!!!) culture, there’s so much that is unsettling about this experience. But today, let’s talk about what’s actually happening with AI summaries and why they’re a problem for small business owners.
One of the inbox AI’s tasks is 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 your email doesn’t make sense to AI, it might not even end up in your audience’s inbox.
Even if you do make it past that hurdle, there’s still another looming concern: what happens when AI misinterprets your email?
AI could incorrectly summarize your email and give your audience inaccurate details, or even miss important points entirely. How you order the information in your email, and the language you use, matters most to AI summarizers like Google’s Gemini.
What’s AI looking for? In short, AI picks up on clear calls to action, dates and deadlines, an offer, or niche topic that the reader has shown previous interest in.
What gets deprioritized by AI? Longer emails with “emotional” language, storytelling, and multiple competing messages can make it harder for AI to choose key points for an email summary.
How to write marketing emails that an inbox AI will handle correctly
- Frontload 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.
- Structure helps AI read your emails. Formatting options like headings, a bulleted or numbered list, bold or italicized text all help AI bots navigate your email with greater ease.
- 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, and the AI may be unable to determine what your email is about.
Keep these strategies in mind if you notice your email open and click through rates suddenly dipping. Or better yet, get out in front of these concerns by making these changes now.
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!
