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How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

blog.mailchimp.com

41–50 of 223 posts

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#41
I'm really not surprised it's bringing down open rates. I find I'm ignoring far more emails in my inbox as they are out of view and in the promotions tab.

Ultimately, if I don't open the email, the content isn't that useful. Before I would quickly open and delete when done, just to keep my inbox clean.

Does it mean I pay less attention to the marketing messages? No.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#42
"The word on the street is that business owners and marketers are worried about this new layout, and I get that. You want your email above the fold, on the cover, with a huge headline. You want to stand out to your customer, and instead you’re on the Promotions page with all the other ads."

This blog post is like an ad for GMail. Sounds like the tabs feature works very effectively.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#43
post #39
post #28

Will the issue of arriving in the Promotions and Updates tab affect transactional emails sent through MailChimp (and comparable competitors)? For example, if I'm sending a "Here's your password reset email" via MailChimp, will I now have to worry about it not just potentially going into spam, but also under some tab that the user may not look. I'm only really concerned about the transactional email, whilst we send li…

Thus far we have seen our transactional emails also going to Promotions, as well as our standard marketing emails. This could be both good and bad. Bad because as you mention, the user won't see it immediately even if they requested it. Good because if the user actually uses and likes your service, they may start to take those transactional emails to their Priority inbox which could train it to also respect the marke…

Hmm.

I hope Gmail figure this one out... the transactional emails should always hit the inbox. I think most users would be fine if the marketing emails hit the promotions tab.

I'm not sure it should be all or nothing... but I know that every user would agree that the transactional emails that they explicitly want should hit their inbox.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#44
post #17

I really liked the idea of the new inbox at first but right now its overzealousness with the Promotions tab is tempting me to merge everything back into Primary. Daily VC news emails are not promotions; digests of roguelike updates are not promotions; emails from my grandmother to try a brownie recipe aren't promotions (well, I guess they sorta are.) (Yes, you can train it to send emails from X@Y.Z to primary by defa…

Just drag your daily VC emails into the primary tab and they should got here from now on. Not really any training involved, it only takes a few seconds.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#45
post #16

For some reason, this paragraph irked me more than it should have: If the subscriber has tabs but they didn’t opt to include the Promotions tab, Gmail will deliver to Primary instead. That’s good news. Other than that, we’re definitely testing the new inbox and trying to figure out how it works. My sense is that Gmail wants all marketing email to go to the Promotions tab. Even if we did find a tricky way into the Pri…

A lot of people think that their special snowflake of a spam is the one that users actually want to see. These people deserve to be tasered in the mouth repeatedly, but sadly that hasn't happened yet.

I don't understand this attitude; every email sent through services like MailChimp contains an explicit and obvious unsubscribe link, and their policies regarding unsolicited email are pretty strict.

If you don't want to receive these emails, then unsubscribe - or, better yet, don't subscribe in the first place.

This new feature seems excruciatingly pointless anyway. I want all of my emails to arrive into my inbox, with the exception of actual unsolicited spam. If I need to filter them, I can do it myself - I suppose the feature may be useful for Gmail users who aren't comfortable doing this. At least I can disable the new inbox or continue using IMAP for now.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#46
post #25
post #13

Am I the only person that had a "Promotions" filter added to their Gmail ages ago? I've also not got the new tabs, either. I'm wondering if I am in some lost zone.

Settings -> Configure Inbox -> Save That turned it on for me.

Just tried that and now I've got tabs in GMail. Thanks for the tip.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#47
To clarify what an 'open' is in terms of this post, it's when the recipient opens an email and has remote images load or clicks a trackable link. That's the only way you can be sure an email has been opened. If you open an email but don't load images and don't click links, then it hasn't been 'opened' in the eyes of the sender. So, for instance, folks who open and delete promotional mailings without loading images don't count as opening those emails. Basically 'open' doesn't mean what you think it means in terms of the way you use your email client.

The same way 'delivered' doesn't mean what you'd think it means. You, as a user, would think it means delivered to your inbox. It doesn't. It means it was delivered to the mail server. At that point, it could go in your inbox, your 'promotions' tab in gmail, your junk/spam folder, or be automatically deleted using a set of rules on your server/email client (bayesian, rbls, etc). So, when email sending providers talk about delivery rates, that's what they really mean. They have no idea if even the subject of the email was even seen by the recipient unless that recipient either opens the email and loads the remote images or clicks on a trackable link.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#48
post #17

I really liked the idea of the new inbox at first but right now its overzealousness with the Promotions tab is tempting me to merge everything back into Primary. Daily VC news emails are not promotions; digests of roguelike updates are not promotions; emails from my grandmother to try a brownie recipe aren't promotions (well, I guess they sorta are.) (Yes, you can train it to send emails from X@Y.Z to primary by defa…

You can also train it by dragging the email from one tab to another. Sometimes I end up dragging emails from my bank or phone carrier from Promotions to Updates tab.

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#49
post #35
post #16

For some reason, this paragraph irked me more than it should have: If the subscriber has tabs but they didn’t opt to include the Promotions tab, Gmail will deliver to Primary instead. That’s good news. Other than that, we’re definitely testing the new inbox and trying to figure out how it works. My sense is that Gmail wants all marketing email to go to the Promotions tab. Even if we did find a tricky way into the Pri…

THIS! Another quote from article: "I’ve heard a lot of people asking how they can get out of the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab." There is a reason why I enabled Promotions tab and I don't want you'r emails! If you will end up in my Primary by tricking me I will unsubscribe immediately to not see them at all!

I didn't even know there was a promotions tab until reading this article. I just enabled it. It's exactly where I want marketing emails to go and am really glad to see Google innovating in this space.

(BTW, I love how Gmail will attempt to unsubscribe you when you mark a marketing email as spam, which is also very nice)

Re: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

#50
post #16

For some reason, this paragraph irked me more than it should have: If the subscriber has tabs but they didn’t opt to include the Promotions tab, Gmail will deliver to Primary instead. That’s good news. Other than that, we’re definitely testing the new inbox and trying to figure out how it works. My sense is that Gmail wants all marketing email to go to the Promotions tab. Even if we did find a tricky way into the Pri…

I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. It's easy in tech to abstract things to "metrics" and "performance" when what you're really talking about boils down to tricking users and spam filters.
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