After reading last week’s lead story, “Is Google Feeding Your Customers to the Competition?” the folks at e-mail deliverability company Return Path decided to run a few tests to see if the article’s main assertion—that Gmail’s image blocking combined with its contextual ad program could result in e-mail recipients getting diverted from the original message to a competitor’s ad— is panning out.
According to Return Path, not only is Google’s contextual ad program not adversely affecting advertisers, Gmail address holders respond better than subscribers to other services.
“The overall response rate for our mailings sent out in May across all clients, all campaigns, and all ISPs/domains was just under 2%. The response rate for our mailings in May to Gmail users, on the other hand, was about 3.5%, a whopping 75% BETTER,” wrote Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg on his blog at http://onlyonce.blogs.com/onlyonce/2006/06/gmail_as_compet.html
“Even more stunning is the comparison of response rates in the same time period for subscribers who have joined Postmaster Direct in the last 6 months. That’s probably a more useful analysis, since the number of Gmail subscribers has grown steadily over time. On that basis, our overall response rate for May mailings, again across all clients, campaigns, and ISPs/domains, is just over 2.8%. Howerver, for mailings in May to Gmail users, average response rates were about 5.6%, or 100% BETTER,” Blumberg continued.
“I’m not sure what to make of this,” Blumberg wrote. “My theory about this at the moment is that Gmail users are generally more sophisticated and therefore are better about keeping their inbox clean and only full of solicited offers, so therefore the user base is more responsive.”
So, as distasteful as it is to think of competitors’ ads running next to messages to your customers, Blumberg’s advice is don’t suppress those Gmail addresses. However, it will be interesting to see what happens as Gmail gets more popular among less sophisticated Internet users and Google addresses start accounting for more significant portions of marketers’ e-mail files.
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