AI Killed Your Email Marketing Strategy

What can you do about it?

Author

Jo Lambadjieva
September 05, 2025

In partnership with

TL;DR: The Robots Are Reading Your Emails First

Apple Intelligence and Gmail's AI now decide which emails humans see, reducing your campaigns to bland summaries like "Retailer sale notification." They prioritize useful emails (shipping updates, boarding passes) while burying promotional content, and can summarize threads without users opening them. Your open rates are becoming meaningless, email sequences collapse into bullet points, and those fancy HTML templates? Worthless.

In today’s article we look at what the new email marketing reality in the age of AI looks like.

AI Killed Your Email Marketing Strategy (And I'm Not Being Dramatic This Time)

Okay, we need to have a serious conversation about what's happening to email marketing. And no, this isn't another "email is dead" thinkpiece that you'll hate-read and forget by lunch. This one's actually different because Apple and Google just fundamentally changed how emails reach human eyeballs.

Here's what's actually happening: AI is now the bouncer at the inbox door. Not just spam filters that check for Nigerian princes—I'm talking about AI that reads your entire email, decides what it means, summarizes it into three words, and determines if a human should even bother. Your carefully crafted marketing message? It might never make it past the robot.

Think about this for a second. Apple Intelligence can now turn an entire promotional email—hero image, compelling copy, call-to-action buttons—into a bland summary like "Retailer sale notification." All that A/B testing, all those design iterations, all that copywriting magic? Compressed into the email equivalent of a shrug emoji.

Google Summaries

The New AI Overlords of Email

Apple's Priority Messages feature is basically a VIP velvet rope for emails. The AI automatically pushes "urgent" stuff—boarding passes, same-day appointments—to the top while everything else gets buried in digital purgatory. Your promotional emails? Not on the guest list.

Meanwhile, Google's being equally brutal with their "Manage subscriptions" feature. It's like Marie Kondo for inboxes—showing users every promotional sender, sorted by how often you bug them. With one-click unsubscribe now front and center, the days of surviving through subscriber inertia are officially over. (RIP to all those lists we built in 2019 and never cleaned.)

The kicker? Both platforms can generate summaries without users opening emails. So that beautiful narrative journey you crafted to guide customers from awareness to purchase? It's now three bullet points.

The Metrics Black Hole

Here's something that should terrify every email marketer: your metrics are about to become fiction. When someone reads an AI summary of your email and decides to visit your store later, you get... nothing. Zero signal. They absorbed your message, acted on it, but your dashboard shows another ignored email.

For Amazon sellers with elaborate email sequences where message #3 references message #1 to create FOMO—those sophisticated psychological triggers collapse when AI aggregates everything into a single summary. Your carefully orchestrated campaign becomes word soup.

Quality Is the Only Currency Now

Look, I'm going to be brutally honest: we've been getting away with "spray and pray" because sending another email costs basically nothing. Those days are over.

These AI systems are trained to recognize patterns of what users actually want versus what they reflexively delete. They're essentially digital bouncers with perfect memory who never forget when you sent that sketchy "URGENT: 5% OFF" email for the 47th time.

The weird part? This might actually be good for us in the long run. (I know, I can't believe I'm saying this either.)

What Actually Works in the AI Era

Some brands could try what I'm calling "summary-first" emails. Imagine starting every email with a robot-friendly paragraph containing just facts: sale type, discount, products, deadline. Then pivot to your usual human voice below. Would it be jarring? Absolutely. Could it work? Maybe that's exactly what we need.

Others might go full "quality over quantity." Instead of daily promotional bombs, what if brands sent weekly actually-useful emails? Picture an outdoor gear company sending Sunday emails with weather-appropriate product recommendations, gear maintenance tips, and local trail conditions. Would people actually look forward to that? (I mean, I would, but I also get excited about new spreadsheet templates, so grain of salt.)

The transactional email loophole is real. Order confirmations, shipping updates, restock alerts—these clear the AI filters because they're actually useful. Sneaking subtle upsells into these? chef's kiss

The Omnichannel Reality Check

Apple Intelligence Summaries

Remember when email was THE channel? When we could run entire businesses through Mailchimp? Those days are as dead as my hopes of inbox zero.

Apple's visual intelligence now lets people point their camera at products and instantly find where to buy them. So that email showcasing your new product line? It's not driving direct sales anymore—it's just planting seeds for later discovery through other channels. The email planted the seed, but takes zero credit for the sale.

This isn't email's fault. It's just the new reality where attribution models are having a nervous breakdown.

The Bottom Line

Email marketing as we knew it is dead. The playbook we've been running since 2015 is now as useful as a flip phone at a TikTok convention. But email itself isn't dead—it's evolving into something we don't fully understand yet.

The brands that survive will stop fighting the AI and start working with it. That means:

  • Summary-proof your content with clear, hierarchical information up front

  • Embrace transactional emails as your new conversion vehicle

  • Choose quality over quantity (and actually mean it this time)

  • Accept that email is now a supporting player, not the star

  • Get weird with value—birthday reminders for pets, watering schedules for plants, whatever actually helps

Is it scary? Absolutely. But we've survived iOS 14.5, the death of third-party cookies, and that time Facebook randomly decided to tank organic reach. We'll survive this too.

The AI overlords are now managing our inboxes. We can either adapt or become another casualty in the great email marketing extinction. Choose wisely.

P.S. - If you're still sending "You left items in your cart" emails every 4 hours, the AI sees you, and it's not impressed.

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About The Writer:

Jo Lambadjieva is an entrepreneur and AI expert in the e-commerce industry. She is the founder and CEO of Amazing Wave, an agency specializing in AI-driven solutions for e-commerce businesses. With over 13 years of experience in digital marketing, agency work, and e-commerce, Joanna has established herself as a thought leader in integrating AI technologies for business growth.

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