Are we living in the age of AI insights for email? March 31, Gmail announced AI Inboxpromising to free users from having to access Inbox Zero again. Just as Google started answering search queries before people clicked a link, Gmail now wants AI to decide which emails are important before people even scroll through their inbox.
It even shows promise in making access to Inbox Zero a thing of the past. This is a big deal, given that Gmail users account for more than 25% inboxes around the world. That’s maybe half of Apple’s market share, but if you’re doing email marketing, that’s no big deal.
I asked six email marketers and operators I respect what this type of inbox AI update means for us. Here’s what they said.
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What Gmail’s AI for Inbox Could Mean for Marketers
Manu Cincathe founder of Stacked Marketer, believes that email is becoming about discoverability rather than just deliverability.
“After Gmail introduced the different tabs, landing in Main or Updates performed better on average, so deliverability was key,” he says. “With AI Inbox, your email will be one of many emails that Gemini will embed in a digest. So it’s all about convincing Gemini to show your email and your content to the user. Because if Gemini becomes the gatekeeper, you may no longer have a direct connection with a subscriber.”
Tyler Cookthe founder and head of email marketing at Hypermedia Marketing, agrees.
“Content and context are going to play a bigger role in the future. In terms of content, we will eventually be able to ‘chat’ with our inbox to find information. Brands will need to think about their content pillars, so that when a subscriber searches for information on a topic, their brand appears in the results.
“Context will be a game changer because AI could theoretically surface a marketing email that appears to be related to their job tasks.”
Read Gmail’s announcement and you will see that it is obvious that Gmail intends to organize, prioritize and present emails to readers based on their relevance and function.
Gabby Kustnersenior growth marketing manager at Customer.io, says marketers will need to be unequivocal when writing emails.
“We will need to carefully frame our language so that an agent understands what is a high or low priority for the reader of the email. We won’t necessarily be able to rely on the right and left sides of the human brain connecting the dots between visuals, headlines and CTAs on what is most important to pay attention to, if we don’t make it explicit.”
Matthew Galfounder of Kaizen Blitz, supports this.
“There will be more pressure to be clear, direct and easy to understand so that the reader and the AI can understand what is important.”
Dave SchoolsCEO and co-founder of Singulate, believes that AI Inbox will also change deliverability.
“You may arrive in the inbox, but the AI will determine how visible it is to the recipient. Gmail’s new AI inbox means that differentiating between “a deprioritized generic blast” and a “relevant and important message” has never been more important. Deliverability will have nuance. It will no longer be a pass/fail.”
However, all is not gloomy. Mark Thomasfounder of Positive Human, said this could be good news for marketers.
“I think Gmail’s AI inbox will, in some ways, benefit from good email marketing and continue to punish bad email marketing,” he says. “This effectively highlights the good information, the information you should have been sending all along, and relegates the poor information or purely promotional information to a ‘potluck’.
This means a better inbox experience for marketers and better results for experienced marketers running great email programs.
My takeaway: Since Gmail’s AI inbox prioritizes tasks and topics to catch up on, I imagine that functional emails will have a higher priority, while promotional emails will be buried or deprioritized. After all, Gmail wants users to enjoy and actively use its products.
Now, if people get their way, the Main tab could end up being just another Inbox folder, much like Promotions and Social.
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In fact, it could potentially become more generic than that, as the Promotions and Social tabs are still intent signals. If you visit them, you are looking for products or people and you are more likely to click on them.
Is this the end of email as we know it?
Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
Cook cautions that “there are still a lot of unknowns about how this feature will actually work. The AI inbox will definitely change behavior, but it’s hard to guess in what way.”
“Many online marketers overestimate how quickly this will actually change user behavior,” says Matthew Gal. “We’re all pretty involved in this, but most people aren’t keeping up with AI updates on a daily basis. On top of that, Google hasn’t always been great at informing users about new Gmail features, so adoption will likely be slower than people expect.”
Aside from adoption, Gal also believes it’s very likely that “the majority of users will continue to check their inbox the same way they always have. From what I see, it doesn’t really change much in the short term from a revenue perspective.”
My takeaway: AI Inbox is currently only available on Gmail’s most expensive tier, $250/month. That in itself is a significant barrier to entry, so I don’t think we’ll see immediate, widespread adoption.
I’m also inclined to agree with Gal: marketers are deeply interested in AI. Most people outside of marketing are not.
Gmail AI Inbox does not replace the primary inbox. It’s basically another tab. So even if AI inboxes and related products are offered to users, there remains a big question mark over how many people will actually use them.
Certainly, “agent inboxes are here to stay,” as Kustner points out, so it’s worth updating your email marketing strategy regardless. The question is, how?
What Marketers Can Do to Prepare and Adapt
Gal may have reservations about the overall impact of AI Inbox, but he still thinks it should change the way we write and structure emails.
“We’ll probably move towards native text emails, so every image will need alt text so the AI can understand the content of the email.”
Kustner recommends passing the flow template instructions from Google Studio to your email tool or AI tool of choice, and giving them your email copy to see how they can improve. “When I forwarded the instructions to Claude Google Studio, he made suggestions for the CTAs I had in the emails,” she said.
A lot of email marketing advice is to “send more emails.” Does it still hold?
Thomas says yes. “You should send more emails, but you should send emails that are genuinely useful to users and also provide value, while extracting them.”
As schools have highlighted, one way to deliver this value is through personalization.
“Can your content eliminate filler content and deliver obvious value immediately at the contact level? Gmail’s AI prioritizes concrete, actionable information for its users over emotional language or marketing fluff, so content personalization strategy will likely become your best deliverability signal.”
My two cents: Sender reputation and engagement history have always mattered, but they matter more than ever, especially for contacts using AI inboxes.
If Gmail doesn’t recognize a positive engagement pattern between you and a recipient, your emails may never appear in the first place, so create welcome, follow, re-engagement and nurture flows, gain consent through opt-ins, and regularly clean your lists and CRMs.
What Marketers Should Not Do
Cinca predicts that some marketers will get creative by making their emails look like a task, an invoice, an event, or whatever Gemini considers important.
Kustner tells me this is already the case.
“This morning I received a cold email with the subject line “Action Required: Pause Campaign.” You won’t be surprised to learn that there was no action required or a paused campaign for me to review.
Please don’t do this.
“You can get to the top of an inbox once with a trick like that,” Kustner warns, “but it’s a fast track to the spam folder and it’s not a sustainable tactic.”
The inbox becomes algorithmic
Whether or not agent inboxes radically change user behavior, one thing strikes me: You no longer truly own your list like you once did. Now you need to earn inbox placement.
ISPs are to email marketing what algorithms are to social media. Plan accordingly.
