Hiding any disclosure information within images or dense body copy will hinder LP engagement with AI inbox scanners at work.
TL;DR: state an email’s message and purpose clearly.
As we already know, AI-generated summaries are being rolled out by the big-time mail clients including Apple Mail, Outlook and Yahoo, looking to crunch down messaging to email recipients. It means AI summaries may overwrite carefully crafted preview text, or reduce in-depth updates to a mere sentence.
Helpfully, a test conducted by Twilio and Inbox Monster reveals that Apple’s summaries were shaped mostly by the subject line and the live text near the top of the message. Images and alt text contributed little, on the other hand.
With fund marketing’s email templates often being image-heavy – conveying headline numbers within graphics across factsheets and quarterly letters – it is unnerving that the machine will not read such information, nor convey it properly to allocators it is working ‘on behalf of’. Instead, it will often default to whatever text it can find: a boilerplate, a disclaimer fragment or the unsubscribe footer.
If a firm cannot control how a third-party AI tool presents a firm’s message, financial promotion rules can become knotty. However, fund marketers can at least control what the AI can work with. Plain language opening lines, and performance context and caveats being live text rather than an image will be less susceptible to misrepresentation.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can skew open rates too, and AI summaries can add another layer in that they give a general gist to an investor before they ever click on an email. Engagement has to rely across many signals than opens alone, including report downloads, replies, and follow-ups booked with investors.
Finally, here are some recommendations for producing AI-readable emails:
- Lead with the single most important message (strategy update or event date) in the first two lines of HTML text.
- Use subject lines as (compliant) self-explanatory summaries in themselves.
- Text emails in Apple Mail and Outlook accounts with summaries applied, and screenshot the results for compliance files.
- Keep risk warnings, disclosures and performance caveats where machines can find them – not within screenshots or other images!
Source
Audience Bridge, “Your Newsletter Has Two Readers Now” (via TLDR Marketing)
