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More than a decade after Gmail pioneered tabbed inbox interfaces, and many years after other major inbox providers added tabs to their inboxes, Apple Mail has followed suit with its iOS 18 release.
But despite the laggard non-novelty of this change, Apple Mail's hefty market share has the email marketing industry working itself up into a froth again—and bad advice is resurfacing.
If the level of concern about email promotions tabs is rising at your organization, here are some things to keep in mind.
1. The Promo tab is not the spam folder
Deliverability experts will be saying so over and over in the months ahead, because all tabs are considered the inbox in terms of placement. More than that, it's functionally not the same, either.
The fear is that your subscribers won't see your promotional email if it's in the Promotions tab. The truth is that people check the Promo tab regularly.
Among Gmail users with tabs enabled, 79.7% check the Promotions tab at least once a week, and 51% check it every day, according to a survey by Mailgun.
That's a far cry from the black hole the Promo tab is often made out to be.
2. Many users will turn off Apple tabs
Many people have experienced tabbed inboxes from Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo; some don't like them, and so they turn them off. Lots of Apple Mail users will do the same.
That same Mailgun survey found that nearly half of Gmail users don't have tabs enabled on their accounts. After a period of adjustment, marketers should expect similar numbers of Apple Mail users to disable tabs and return to the monolithic inbox they're used to.
3. Because of MPP, Apple tabs should barely affect open rates
It's true that open rates tend to suffer when a brand's messages are moved out of the Primary tab and into other tabs. In recent years, Gmail has had periods of inconsistency in its tab-sorting algorithm, and from those experiences we know that having a promotional email land the Primary tab generally boosts open rates about 30%.
However, because of the incredibly high adoption of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and the auto opens it creates to obscure open rates, the shift to tabs should hardly register in most brands' open rate reporting.
That's actually a good thing for brands focused on driving deeper engagement because...
4. Down-funnel metrics are much less affected by Promo tab placement
Those same Gmail tabbing irregularities taught us that down-funnel metrics, such as click rates and conversion rates, are much less affected by tabbing decisions. So, although landing in the Primary tab can get you more visibility, it rarely translates into more intent, which is what most businesses want. (That, of course, is true of many attention-seeking tactics that treat email campaigns like advertising instead of marketing.)
Indeed, greater intent is what you get when subscribers go to the Promotions tab and find your emails. That's because they check the Promo tab when they're in the market to buy—or at least are open to the idea.
In an article back in 2013 when brands were initially freaking out over tabs, I compared being in the Promo tab to having your store in the mall, and being in the Primary tab to deploying "door-to-door salesmen that interrupt your subscribers' conversations with their friends and loved ones." I argued, "You'll surely be more visible, but also probably more intrusive and ultimately less welcome."
That's still an apt analogy today.
5. Gaming tab-placement algorithms is a losing game
Ever since Gmail introduced tabs, marketers have been trying to change their messages to trick tab-placement algorithms into sorting their emails into the Primary tab.
For instance:
Some brands have changed their sender name to a person's name instead of their brand name, even when that doesn't accurately match the message and even when the subscriber isn't familiar with the person's name. That tactic risks brand damage and sender reputation damage.
Some brands have adjusted the tone of their emails to be more casual, like a personal email. Besides not being feasible for many brands, such as financial services and pharmaceutical companies, that tactic risks damaging brand trust and your brand image, if done poorly.
Some brands have also abandoned images and HTML design in favor of the quasi-plain text emails that people send to friends, family members, and coworkers. That tactic sacrifices the visual communication, visual hierarchy, and scannability of HTML designs that have proven to be so effective.
Those kinds of tradeoffs are even more dubious with the arrival of Apple tabs, because all four of the major inbox providers have different tab systems and their own tab-placement algorithms. That will make it extra challenging to deceive these systems and get consistent placement in the Primary tab for your messages.
Even if you succeed, there are downsides:
First, with other brands' promotional emails routed to the Promotions tab, your promotional messages will stand out... as out of place. That will cause some of your subscribers to either re-tab your emails into the Promotions tab where they belong or to opt out in annoyance.
Second, your brand risks angering inbox providers—and their mega cap Big Tech parent companies—which don't appreciate organizations' attempts to trick or circumvent their controls. It's one thing to risk having your email campaigns junked because of efforts to trick tab-placement algorithms, but it's quite another to also risk having your search ranking downgraded.
And third, there's an opportunity cost to all of that manipulation. I once heard of a brand that had 10 people dedicated to keeping their promotional emails landing in the Primary tab. My first thought? Imagine how much better they could have made their email marketing program for subscribers if they'd tasked those people with building out automation, improving personalization, increasing segmentation, and other improvements that scale and can be built upon. What a huge misallocation of resources.
Still Concerned? Watch Your Metrics
Rather than being reactive to Apple's introduction of tabs, be responsive by watching your data and acting on that.
In particular, watch metrics that are focused on engagement over time, such as the following four:
Click reach: The percentage of your subscribers who have clicked at least one of your email campaigns over various time periods (the past 30, 60, 90, 180 days, etc.)
Conversion reach: The percentage of your subscribers who have converted from at least one of your email campaigns over various time periods (the past 30, 60, 90, 180 days, etc.)
Average tenure on list: The average number of days that a subscriber stays subscribed before unsubscribing, complaining, becoming undeliverable, or becoming inactive
Lifetime value: The monetary value generated by your subscribers on average, both directly attributable to your email campaigns as subscribers and attributable to any channel as customers
You'll likely notice stability in those first two metrics, and you may see gains in those last two.
Just as Apple's Mail Privacy Protection shifted marketers' focus from noisy surface metrics, such as opens, to more meaningful deep metrics, such as clicks and conversions, Apple tabs will shift marketers' focus from short-term campaign-centric metrics to long-term customer-centric metrics, such as lifetime value.
More Resources on Email Marketing and Promotions Tabs
Email Promotions Tab Hysteria Is Back! (Thanks, Apple)
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