The email cognoscenti are abuzz regarding Google’s rollout of its Gmail Priority Inbox. The bottom line, though, appears to be simple: Email marketers that follow best practices regarding targeted relevancy and engagement will likely benefit from the new feature.
What Priority Inbox is
Before you can determine what changes, if any, you’ll need to make to your email marketing programs to accommodate Priority Inbox, it helps to understand how the feature works. Basically it uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to take into account recipients’ behavior regarding previous emails so that it can prioritize new messages within the inbox.
Messages deemed important and welcome are sorted into the top portion of the inbox, labeled “Important and unread.” Other emails are placed in the “Everything else” section, which is on the bottom. Users can also tag messages, such as those that they’ve read but still need to act upon, as “Starred,” so that they appear in a dedicated section, between “Important and unread” and “Everything else.” Priority Inbox does not replace Gmail’s spam filter, which will continue to remove messages viewed as spam to a separate inbox.
If a recipient regularly opens and clicks through emails from John’s Widget Shop, Gmail will most likely deposit future messages from John’s Widget Shop into the “Important and unread” section. It might even do the same with other messages that have “widget” in the subject line or body copy. Conversely, if the recipient routinely deletes messages from John’s Widget Shop, future emails from that sender will appear in the bottom, “Everything else” section of the inbox, even if the recipient opted in to receive them. Other criteria for determining placement include whether the recipient frequently sends emails to the sender or archives or “stars” messages from the sender.
Because the technology uses a type of artificial intelligence, the sorting engine that powers Priority Inbox will “learn” from each recipient’s subsequent actions and modify its algorithms and choices as time goes on. Recipients can help fine-tune the accuracy of the sorting by tagging messages as “important” or “not important.”
Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop, a provider of engagement marketing services, describes the difference between Priority Inbox and inbox spam filters as a “huge shift: It doesn’t look at the sender but rather at the receiver.” As a marketer, your promotional emails might score top marks in terms of technical deliverability criteria, but if the recipient doesn’t find them compelling or engaging, those emails will be relegated to the bottom section of his Gmail inbox.
Relevancy even more relevant
Email pundits have been preaching the effects of relevancy and engagement on deliverability rates for some time now. And recent changes by Hotmail put additional emphasis on relevancy and engagement in terms of inbox placement. (See “The New Hotmail—Clean Sweep for Good Senders.”) But because of email’s relatively low cost and high return on investment as a marketing tool, many companies have hesitated to bother segmenting their files or building email preference centers that give subscribers options regarding how the types of content they wish to receive and the frequency.
In short, when it comes to email marketing, the mindset of many companies has been, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Gmail’s Priority Inbox, however, may reveal that their email marketing programs really are broken after all.
“Most marketers send email just to send email,” says Dennis Dayman, chief privacy and deliverability officer for Eloqua, a provider of marketing automation solutions. “This is going to force marketers to make a true relationship with their audience instead of sending just to be on top of the list.”
In fact, marketers could well find themselves penalized by Gmail for sending emails too frequently. Say John’s Widgets sends five emails a week, but the recipient opens only one a week, or 20%. On the other hand, Mary’s Magnets sends only one email every other week, but the recipient opens every single one, or 100%. The Gmail technology would probably consider John’s Widgets as less important to the recipient than Mary’s Magnets because only 20% of John’s Widgets’ emails are opened.
As a result, email marketers that typically increase frequency in the run-up to the December holidays or other major events—what Nussey calls “the send-more-to-get-more-attention strategy”—may want to rethink their approach. “In the pre-Priority Inbox world, that might have worked,” Nussey says, “but now more frequency may hurt placement.”
What’s more, the new feature’s emphasis on engagement will make reactivating lapsed and unengaged subscribers even more difficult, because new messages will be placed in the lower section of the inbox. This is all the more reason, Dayman says, for segmenting those who haven’t interacted recently and sending them, sooner rather than later, an email asking them why they haven’t responded in recent weeks and what your brand could do to engage them more.
You should also make a point of asking all the subscribers on your file who have Gmail addresses to “star” or tag as important emails you send, Nussey advises. This isn’t all that different from asking subscribers to add you to their address book or trusted-sender list.
Of course, you’re far more likely to be added to a trusted-sender list if you remind the subscriber at the point of registration or shortly thereafter rather than including a boilerplate reminder in the preheader or footer of subsequent emails. For that reason, the most important thing you can do in response to Priority Inbox is to include similar reminders as part of your welcome message to new subscribers. Nussey also stresses that you should focus on “making that first message, or the first two or three messages in a well-orchestrated drip campaign, so compelling that they’ll star you.”
Along the same lines, if you don’t already offer new subscribers options regarding the content and frequency of the messages they’ve opted in to receive, you should start doing so as soon as possible. “For renewal campaigns it’s a real challenge,” Nussey says, “but there are a lot of things that marketers can do out of the gate to get it right.”
Today Gmail, tomorrow… the world?
As of January 2010, according to email marketing software firm CampaignMonitor, Gmail had 5.74% of the email client market share. In comparison, Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express had a combined 27.7% share, Hotmail had 16.23%, and Yahoo! had 14.14%. Marketers may wonder why they need to concern themselves with a feature that’s available to only a modest sector of their audience.
Both Dayman and Nussey believe that it’s only a matter of time before other ISPs, and desktop clients as well, follow Gmail’s lead of automatically prioritizing inboxes. “Regardless of whether it’s a brilliant idea or not,” Nussey says, “it will be copied.”
Which isn’t a bad thing, as far as Dayman is concerned. He believes Priority Inbox will force marketers to actually implement those best practices regarding frequency and targeting that many have only paid lip service to. “If you’re reading the digital body language of your recipients… listening to your customers and giving them what they need, I think you’ll do pretty well with the program,” he says.
Or as Nussey puts it, “It’s encouraging and motivating marketers to think more and more about marketing—not about deliverability and algorithms, but about what customers want.”
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