Apple fixes email

2 minutes estimated reading time

Apple fixes email – despite millennials and social networks email is still the killer app of the web. But all is not good with email. I look at friends home screens and see thousands of unread emails in their inbox.  They use search to find what they need.
Email bankruptcy
It gives me heart palpitations just looking at the photo above. It was apparent for years that something needed to be done for email. Identity for e-commerce and social platforms still hinges on email addresses. For networks like Quora and LinkedIn, much of your interaction is driven in response to email prompts. Hence the need and why it has taken relatively simple actions to allow Apple fixes email for the time being.

Email is a mature technology that works across a range of platforms and generally does a good job. It’s searchable, it has a permanence. Alongside the address book app, its a database to many aspects of your life from concert tickets, friend’s news or interaction with the government.

There has been a renaissance in quality email newsletters such as Azeem’s The Exponential View or The Hustle. Email marketing continues to be an effective marketing channel for e-commerce businesses.

Apple’s iOS 10 and MacOS Sierra have tweaked the email experience on their default mail.app.
Ios10
Apple has managed to detect the unsubscribe function in many email newsletters and give users control over their subscription at the top of each email.

Using the beta version of Sierra and iOS10 I found that I unsubscribed from many marketing emails. This seems to hold out in some of the anecdotal feedback I’ve heard from friends as email campaigns have reported a surge in unsubscribes since it rolled out from beta to general availability. This has been the same on both b2b and b2c clients.

However many of these people will be unengaged subscribers who hadn’t gained sufficient momentum to cancel without Apple’s assistance. Google takes a different approach, Gmail masks these emails in a separate folder – out of sight, out of mind.

A second part of this was that I found I was prepared to take a chance on new interesting newsletter subscriptions. The content that I did have, I engaged with more because it was easier to get rid of meh content.

I think this is an exciting development, it is a palette cleanser, an opportunity for email marketers to raise the quality of content and engagement. An opportunity to get direct immediate feedback through subscriptions and cancellations. A confident email reading consumers is a fantastic opportunity for agencies and progressive clients. However this will only happen if they chose to look beyond the dip.