Gmail’s Growing Popularity Not Necessarily Good For Marketers

While Gmail is still a distant third to Yahoo and Hotmail in terms of numbers of inbox holders. Google’s highly user-friendly free e-mail service is by far the fastest growing of the three, according to recent numbers from comScore.

Gmail’s rise in prominence is not necessarily good news for marketers.

In July, Gmail edged past AOL as the third most popular Web-based e-mail service, with 37 million unique monthly visitors compared to AOL’s 36.4 million, according to comScore.

The No. 2 Web-based e-mail service is Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors, according to comScore. And Yahoo Mail by far leads the pack with 106 million monthly unique visitors.

However, in an eye-popping statistic, comScore reported the number of Gmail inbox holders grew by 46% between July 2008 and July 2009.

During the same period, AOL’s inbox holders dropped by 19% and Yahoo’s grew by a healthy 22%, according to comScore.

Gmail’s growth shouldn’t come as a surprise, given its search-engine parent’s popularity and its user-friendly interface and features. However, one thing Gmail is apparently not — or at least not yet — is marketer-friendly.

“If you’re a marketer and you’re having deliverability issues, when compared to Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL, Gmail is the most difficult to communicate with and to understand why you, as a legitimate mailer, may be having your mail filtered or blocked,” says Deirdre Baird, chief executive of e-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity. “They don’t really have the postmaster group that’s willing to engage with the legitimate mailing community in respect to getting problems resolved.”

However, Baird says, Gmail addresses currently account for small percentages of most marketers’ house files. “They have a long, long way to go before they’re a force to be reckoned with from a commercial mailer standpoint,” she says.

But if Gmail does become a significant percentage of marketers’ house files, “it would be a frightening trend because it’s so difficult to remediate and get problems resolved when you have deliverability issues with Gmail,” says Baird.
KEN MAGILL