Gmail’s new inbox automatically triages incoming emails into five categories: primary, social, promotional, updates and forums. Instead of a single inbox with all incoming mail, the new inbox is separated into these five tabs (or fewer, if you choose).
Though users will be able to manually move messages between the categories, Gmail will automatically filter them as they come in.
When I got the new Gmail inbox, I panicked a little. I run a blogger network that connects online influencers with nonprofits and socially responsible businesses.
We depend heavily on email marketing to keep in contact with our bloggers, and we’re pretty good at it – our emails are regularly opened by a relatively large percentage of our network members.
But now these messages are being shuffled off into the shadows of a separate “forums” or “updates” inbox.
Will our messages ever see the light of day? How will users interact with the new inbox and how should marketers react?
Before assuming we’re all doomed, let’s remember Priority Inbox.
In 2010, when Gmail’s Priority Inbox was introduced, marketers were similarly worried.
Priority Inbox pushed what it believed would be users’ most important emails to the top of their inboxes.
Marketers feared that their emails would be pushed to the bottom of the inbox, never to be seen. However, this worry turned out to be largely unfounded.
If a user made a habit of opening an organization’s emails, those emails were deemed important by the algorithm and pushed to the top of the inbox.
Gmail’s new inbox is somewhat similar, though blast emails still get pushed to a non-primary tab, regardless of how much a user loves the content, until the user filters the message to be sent to the primary inbox.
The key takeaway for marketers is not new or groundbreaking, though it is more important than ever before. Email content must be engaging, relevant, and interesting to users. I love the community I find in my listservs. If those messages don’t appear in my primary inbox, I’m going to go hunting for them in the other tabs.
To the extent that Gmail’s tabbed inbox does interfere with email marketing, it will render social media more crucial than ever, as curated content on users’ social feeds constitutes a new inbox of sorts.
(Morra Aarons-Mele is the founder of Women Online and The Mission List. She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog.)
