You spent hours on that gorgeous appeal email. The case-study story is sharp and emotive. Your single ask is clear and personalised. Your light dusting of emojis cheered up the marketing team. The CTA button is exactly the right shade for your colleagues in brand.
And your supporter may never see any of it. For reasons that are often unrelated to your glorious copy.
How we engage with and use our inboxes is changing fast in 2026. That means things are dynamic for our supporters too. As we refreshed our email guide, The Anatomy of an Effective eDM, three shifts stood out. Each is making itself known now and most fundraising or digital teams haven’t caught up with them yet.
1. In some inboxes, AI is rewriting your content
Apple Mail now shows an AI-written summary in place of your lovingly crafted subject and preview lines. Siri’s AI twin reads the missive before your supporter. Sneaking a peek and then generating its own version for your supporter.
What to do:
Don’t bury the lede. AI summarises what it finds first, so your key message needs to appear early in the email itself. Write your subject line, preview line, banner copy and H1 as elements of one statement, because each part now feeds both the inbox summary and the supporter.
And test reality: the same email can present very differently in Apple Mail vs Gmail, so check in tests in both before you hit ‘send’.
2. ‘Delivered’ is not the same as deliverability
We recently tested a large email contact list for a client whose open rates had declined. Their ESP reported 98% of emails had been delivered. Yet supporters on Gmail and Google Workspace weren’t receiving them in any folder.
Inbox placement testing told the real story: 100% of sends to Google addresses were being spam-blocked before they ever reached a supporter.
With Gmail representing a strong proportion of personal email addresses (higher than 50% for some clients) that’s a massive potential loss hiding behind a healthy-looking dashboard.
What to do:
Health-check your deliverability with inbox placement at least once a year. Treat unexplained dips in your metrics as a bright, flashing warning light.
Engagement plays a huge role in sender reputation. Google’s spam screening increasingly weighs how supporters have engaged over the last 90 days, which makes year-round stewardship a necessary deliverability strategy, not just good fundraising manners. Set up Google Postmaster and consider segmenting big sends by recency.
3. Escaping the Promotions tab
Apple Mail and Gmail are increasingly filing charity emails under Promotions. This means your award-winning waffle could be seen late, or never. The common culprits: HTML-heavy design with too many images and links, retail-flavoured language (‘discount’, ‘urgent’, ‘free’, ‘now’), generic senders like info@ or noreply@, and identical content sent to a huge list.
One to watch especially: matched giving campaigns. Time-limited, double-impact copy can drift close to ‘buy one, get one free’ territory as far as filters and AI reviews are concerned.
We’ve seen that balancing the urgency with cause-led copy gives the match more context and reduces the chance of it landing in Promotions.
11 vital signs; 1 guide
These three trends join eight timeless tips in the refreshed Anatomy of an Effective eDM — 11 vital signs to monitor in your next eDM campaign. Grab your guide now.
Learn more about the art of a great email…
We’re proud to be sponsoring, and presenting at, the F&P Fundraising Forum in Sydney, from 25 to 27 August.
Our team will be there each day, keen to hear your IG, RG, P2P or social acquisition woes.
And if your appeals or nurture journeys aren’t performing as you’d like, ask us about a quick health check.
We love a challenge!