Zero-click Email Marketing – Now What?

Part 2 of “AI Has Changed the Click: Why Zero-Click Marketing Is the New Normal”

In Part 1, we explored how platforms are using zero-click design to adapt to consumer behaviour and drive it. Thanks to AI, users now get what they want (answers, offers, content) without clicking a single link.

Nowhere is this more obvious or overlooked than in email.

While platforms like Google and Instagram have embraced the zero-click mindset publicly, Gmail has quietly rolled out updates that turn 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 personalise them.

And yet, email still works. It drives sales, sparks intent, and creates value, even if traditional metrics no longer show it clearly.

Let’s unpack what this means, and what marketers need to do now to thrive in the age of zero-click email marketing.

Gmail’s Promotions tab just became a store window

If you send promotional emails, there’s a good chance Gmail is already presenting your offer before a subscriber opens your message.

How? Through automatic extraction.

Gmail’s Promotions tab now pulls key information into the inbox, including items like these:

• Offer headlines
• Discount codes
• Expiry dates
• Hero images

Gmail compiles and displays them in an inbox-level carousel or card. This gives users a browsable, scan-and-shop experience. They might never open the email or even know who sent it. All that time you spent optimising your inbox experience – overridden.

This is Google’s AI working in the background, attempting to “improve” your customer’s email experience. But for you, it introduces two critical problems:

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

Is this the death of email? Absolutely not. But you must accept the challenge and work on new concepts to counteract the challenges platforms like Gmail, Yahoo and others are putting in your way.

Use schema to take back control

The solution? Schema markup for email. Schema markup, also called “structured data,” is familiar to search marketers as code that provides clear information to search engines so they can 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

Why this matters:

Without schema, Gmail guesses – and it often gets it wrong. It might surface a secondary offer, mismatch the 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.

Why Zero-Click Email Marketing Demands a Shift in Strategy

As inboxes become interactive storefronts, email marketing must evolve. The era of zero-click email marketing challenges us to think beyond opens and clicks—and build influence from the inbox preview alone.

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 behaviour:

• 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 directly 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. Also, as I mentioned in Part 1, these actions are all part of a phenomenon unique to email, called the “nudge effect.” These refer to email’s ability to prompt an action just by showing up in the inbox.

Attribution is already broken. This makes it worse

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

What could this look like? Most likely no spike in opens or clicks but 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.

How to prove email’s hidden impact

You can’t fix attribution overnight, but you can detect the hidden signals that reveal your email’s true performance.

Here’s how:

1. Check Google Analytics for spikes in direct traffic: Look at same-day and next-day traffic following your campaign sends. A noticeable spike in direct? 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: Make sure everyone on the marketing team and beyond it (your team leader, brand managers, even your CMO) understands why last-click reporting misses so much crucial data, especially email’s contributions. Start reporting on influence, not just attributed revenue.

Email isn’t broken. Measurement is.

Email’s power hasn’t disappeared. But how it works, and how we track it, has changed.

We’re in a new marketing world now. Even two years ago, who could have predicted any of the following?

• Gmail opens your message before the subscriber does.
• Customers view offers without engaging with them.
• Revenue occurs without a recorded click.

To stay effective, we must rethink our strategies, content, and metrics to align with the new reality of zero-click email marketing. Here’s a top-line list of actions that will help us respond:

• Adapt our emails to work inside this AI-powered environment
• Track indirect signals that prove performance
• Shift the narrative around email’s role in the customer journey

What to do next

This list goes from the general to the specific. You will most likely need help from people beyond the marketing team to achieve some of these. That’s why email education, through courses, group meetings, lunch-and-learns, and even internal communications, is so important.

1. Implement schema markup for all promotional emails. Your development team should be able to adapt your email templates for this.
2. 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.
3. Update reporting frameworks to include influenced performance. If you use a reporting service, can it accommodate this new performance indicator?
4. Keep creating valuable email content – whether it’s read in the inbox or extracted by AI. This one is on you and your email team! We will cover this topic in Holistic Email Academy courses. You’ll also find ideas on the Holistic Email Marketing blog.

Final thoughts: Email in the age of AI

Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels. But it’s now living in an AI-filtered, zero-click world. You can resist it, or you can work with it.

Your best path forward?

Design for the preview. Mark up for the machine. Track beyond the click.

Your email isn’t just being opened by a subscriber anymore. It’s being opened, read, and evaluated by Google, Yahoo and others too.

Give it the structure, clarity, and flexibility it needs to thrive.