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Apple Mail categories: how they affect email marketing

Imagen Apple Mail categories: how they affect email marke

Gmail users have been used to being able to organise their inboxes automatically in tabs for years. They were followed by Yahoo! and Outlook users, and now Apple users have been using inbox tabs in their email management software since iOS 18. As email marketers, it is important to know how they work to assess how much it affects our strategy.

What are Apple Mail categories

In the inbox of those who use this manager has appeared a functionality to categorise messages and have a more direct access to them in a thematic way and get a more efficient reading. The tabs offered by Apple Mail are:

Main: includes the most relevant messages, which are usually personal messages, urgent notifications and communications addressed only to that account that are not sent massively.
Updates: includes newsletters, subscriptions and social media messages.
Transactions: includes invoices, notifications and tracking of packages or online purchase orders.
Promotions: includes offers and marketing campaigns from companies.
All mail: displays messages from all categories, like a traditional inbox.

This classification is an improvement in the organisation of messages, although it can be a challenge for senders. It is very similar to Gmail or Yahoo and again users can disable it and move emails between categories to reassign senders to the tab they prefer to read them in.

It also adds an interesting new feature for email marketing: urgent messages can appear in the Main tab. It's a smart filter that Apple Mail applies to all categories so that the user doesn't miss anything that might expire, such as notifications to reset passwords, double-check alerts or registration confirmations. To make this urgency more obvious, an icon is displayed next to the subject line in the mobile app.

What impact Apple Mail's inbox tabs have on your campaigns

A couple of preliminary considerations to avoid panicking about this new feature.

Experience with Gmail tabs tells us that users already know how to use them and check them frequently, even the Promotions tab.
Deliverability is not diminished because all tabs are considered inboxes.
They are not dangerous places like the mail folder that no one checks or only checks occasionally.

To find out how much impact Apple Mail categories really have, you should look at:

Contact list: what percentage uses this email manager? If you add them to those of Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, you will see that it is quite high because they cover almost the entire market. However, it is difficult to know for sure who uses the tabs, as they can be deactivated in Gmail and Apple Mail, and you can also use the option to view all mail.
Metrics: which ones are you using to measure your campaigns? Open rate is perhaps the most straightforward way to find out if users are checking their manager tabs, but remember that Apple's Mail Privacy Protection can distort your conclusions.
Types of messages: can everything you send be classified in the same way? The Promotions tab is not as bad as it sounds, but it is likely that some of your messages will go into other tabs, for example words like ‘order’ or ‘receipt’ may be considered transactional and “urgent” or ‘expire’ may have priority.

Finally, it is possible to try to optimise the sending, for example using a person's name as the sender instead of a generic name, reducing the formatting to just text as if they were personal messages or asking the user to move the message to the Main tab, but you can never check if it works because there will always be users who apply filters or do not have the tabs activated, making it difficult for you to reach accurate conclusions.

It is advisable to look at a more realistic metric, such as CTOR, conversions or subscriber retention rate, rather than openings in order to optimise for the reality of your business.

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