Adapting email for AI-powered inboxes and zero-click journeys

AI is reshaping email marketing, starting right in the inbox. Clicks are becoming optional — sometimes unnecessary. That’s convenient for subscribers but potentially disastrous for marketers.

Zero-click marketing is emerging as the response: content that delivers value instantly, whether through snippets, previews or summaries, without requiring a click.

Instead of spelling the end of email, these changes could make it more valuable — if you adapt in time.

What is zero-click marketing?

Zero-click marketing uses content designed to deliver the goods immediately, without requiring the customer to visit another page. Things like:

• Featured snippets in search results.
• Carousels in email, social posts or search results that reveal key product info.
• Social posts that teach, entertain or solve problems within the post itself.
• Emails that summarize, persuade and inspire action even without an open or click. That’s the nudge effect. 

Email has always driven awareness by keeping your brand visible in the inbox. Zero-click takes that visibility further, creating impact without the click.

In this new reality, marketers no longer optimize only for clicks. We optimize for impact through brand recall, direct traffic, offline conversions and assisted sales.

How AI affects email

AI-powered platforms extract and present information before your customer acts, bypassing the click altogether. Here’s where this is happening in email.

Gmail

Gmail’s Promotions tab uses AI to auto-extract promotional details like discount codes, images and expiration dates from your email. Some can show viewers your offer without needing them to open the message. Or, it can pull irrelevant content, like your contact information.

This turns the inbox into a mini-landing page. Often, these upend everything email marketers have done to persuade recipients to open and act on their messages or to personalize them.

Other email clients

Similarly, clients like Yahoo Mail use preview panes, content summaries and schema-enabled content to pull information from the messages into the inbox. 

Email clients are doing this to give their customers better experiences. And, not inconsequently, to retain more of them and keep them active. But for you, it introduces two critical problems:

• You lose control over what’s shown.
• You lose the click, which is still the most basic method of measuring and tracking subscriber engagement.

Email still drives sales, sparks intent and creates value, even if traditional metrics no longer clearly show it.

Dig deeper: Apple and Gmail make it harder for email campaigns to get to the inbox

Use schema to take back control

Schema markup, also called structured data, is familiar to search marketers as code providing clear information to search engines to parse senders’ content. In email, schema markup is code you add to your emails so that Gmail interprets them as specific kinds of content.

Google’s Promotions annotations allow you to add actions like these to your emails: 

• Define the exact offer headline to pull into the inbox or interior summary.
• Specify valid discount codes and expiry dates.
• Select the correct product or promo image to highlight.

Without schema, Gmail guesses what information is most important to reveal. It often guesses wrong. Gmail might reveal a secondary offer, pull out an irrelevant image or extract boilerplate text instead of your strong call to action.

Schema markup allows you to preserve message integrity, drive more accurate impressions and maintain brand trust — even in a zero-click environment.

Dig deeper: 3 keys for better email engagement in Gmail

Clicks are down, but email still delivers

Even with Gmail’s zero-click features, email still triggers action. The difference is that the action doesn’t always look like a click.

Actions like these show how email continues to influence behavior:

• A subscriber reads your subject line and types your brand into Google.
• They receive an email and go directly to the website by typing the URL into their browsers.
• They click a PPC ad after searching for your brand, nudged by the email. 
• They screenshot and share the email on WhatsApp.

None of these are tracked as email conversions. But they’re all driven by your campaign through the nudge effect.

4 steps to lessen the attack on attribution

We’ve long known email gets under-attributed. Gmail’s automatic extraction of offers and content makes this even more challenging to track now.

What could this look like? There will likely be no spike in opens or clicks, but there will be a big jump in sales, direct web traffic or branded search on days when you send email campaigns.

Email is still the spark, but it doesn’t get the credit. You can’t fix attribution overnight, but you can detect the hidden signals that reveal your email’s performance. Here’s how.

1. Check Google Analytics for spikes in direct traffic

Look at the same-day and next-day traffic following your campaign sends. Is there a noticeable spike in direct traffic? That’s likely email-driven, even if GA doesn’t specifically attribute it to email.

2. Layer email dates on sales dashboards

Overlay email send dates on your ecommerce or CRM dashboards. Look for short-term revenue lift or increased activity, even without tracked clicks.

3. Use assisted conversion reporting

Platforms like GA4 or attribution tools show multi-touch journeys. Email often appears in assists, not as the last click.

4. Educate your internal stakeholders

Ensure your email team leader, brand managers and even your CMO understand why last-click reporting understates email’s contributions. Start reporting on influence, not just attributed revenue.

Dig deeper: Why your emails still miss the inbox even if you’re ‘in compliance’

Get help from other departments

You will likely need help from people beyond the marketing team to get the most from zero-click marketing. Now is a good time to launch email collaboration beyond the marketing team through group meetings, lunch-and-learns and even internal communications.

Here’s how inter-department cooperation can help:

• Implement schema markup for all promotional emails. Your development team should be able to adapt your email templates for this.
• Monitor indirect indicators. These include direct traffic, search volume and assisted conversions. If other teams track and manage your metrics, they need to know what to look for.
• Update reporting frameworks to include influenced performance. If you use a reporting service, can it accommodate this new performance indicator?
• Keep creating valuable email content, whether read in the inbox or extracted by AI. This one is on you and your email team! 

Email still rules!

AI is not blowing up email — just remodeling the entryway. That doesn’t mean we can be complacent. 

Zero-click marketing gives us the tools to respond to disruptions like automatic extraction. But we must be willing to once again adapt to the changes outside sources have forced on email. Moving to zero-click marketing can give email the new structure, clarity and flexibility it needs to thrive. 

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