In case you didn't notice...
The email world's got a gatekeeper who decides whether your email will even be shown to the person it's meant for.
In the good old days of email, you'd send out an email, and it would land in your subscriber's inbox.
The subscriber opens the inbox, scans the subject lines (and if you did it right), they'd open your email and read it.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works anymore.
Before your subscriber sees a single word, an AI agent has already read your email, summarized it, and decided whether it deserves attention.
What's actually happening in your subscribers' inboxes these days
Apple Intelligence doesn't show your preview text anymore. It generates its own summary of your email and displays that instead.
Your carefully crafted preview text? That's being overridden.
Gmail went further.
In March 2025, Google replaced chronological email search with an AI relevance model. This year, they launched the Gmail AI Inbox, powered by Gemini, which reads, summarizes, and ranks emails before subscribers open them.
And as annoyed as we marketers are with Gmail's AI changes, research from Folderly has already found that up to 40% of emails reaching Gmail inboxes are being deprioritized by AI filtering.
They're not being bounced or sent to spam.
They're being buried.
The mistake costing your brand its rightful place in your subscribers' inboxes
And by placement, I don't mean your emails are going to the "Promotions" tab. If you're sending a promotional email, that's where it's supposed to land. (But that's a fight *cough*rant*cough* for another day.)
Most brands are following conventional advice:
- Optimize your subject line and preview text for AI summarizers.
- Writer clearer, keyword-rich openers (as if we weren't already)
- Make sure your preview text "works for AI"
The new gatekeeper of email inboxes (aka AI inbox agents or whatever-bad-word-you-want-to-call-them π) isn't reading your subject line and thinking "Ooh, intriguing. Let's put this at the top of the inbox."
It's looking at your email history.
It isn't evaluating today's email in isolation. It's evaluating the entire relationship between your brand and the subscriber.
Inconsistent sending, emails that don't get opened, content that subscribers scroll past or delete, lLow click rates, high unsubscribe rate from previous sends...
These signals compound into a sender reputation that gets your emails moved further down the pile.
The brands getting placed at the top of inboxes have the best track records β not the best subject lines.
How to secure a spot at the top of your subscribers' inboxes
As cliched as it sounds, the only way to stay at the top of the inbox is to do emails right.
The formula is simple:
- Build a solid foundation of lifecycle email sequences
- Consistently send emails that are relevant to your subscribers
- Earn subscriber trust and train them to engage with your emails
Every email that earns a click, reply, or forward sends a signal to the AI agents reading your emails before your subscribers.
The question is no longer, "Will this email get opened?"
The question now is:
Would an inbox that's received your past emails recognize your latest one as worth their time?
If the answer is no, we should talk.β
β Samar
P.S. What I find so fascinating is that none of this info is new.
Following this exact formula is how I helped Workamajig move 100% of its paying customers to a new platform without losing a single one.
We'd spent months building out their lifecycle emails and earning trust by sending relevant emails consistently. By the time the migration came, their users were used to opening our emails and taking action because we'd trained them to.
Email on your mind? I can help.
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Book an Email Consult and walk away with a clear game plan.
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The Email Conversion Sprint is where I dig into your email program, identify what's broken, and show you how to boost conversions β in less than two weeks.
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