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How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates

blog.mailchimp.com

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

#131

Post by scott_s »

kbenson wrote: post #110
scott_s wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call unrequested "offers" spam, even if they have a valid unsubscribe link, and even if I gave the company my email address for other purposes.

Then you are most likely using the term incorrectly. When you have a business relationship with a company and you have not told them to not email you, the email is not entirely unsolicited, and thus not spam. It may be unwanted though, which is why Google is routing it to the "promotions" section. It's not necessarily spam though, which is why they don't immediately route it to the spam section.

I have not told to not email me. There's a big difference between that and telling them they can email me. They take the absence of their asking as implicit permission. So I still consider it unsolicited, and it's still spam to me.

Previous time I made a similar point on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5705769

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

#132

Post by blackysky »

Internet marketers are panicking right now. I've received a dozen of e-mails to teach me how to bring their "not promotions" e-mails back to my primary inbox...Hate it or love it but I think Microsoft Yahoo Apple are going to follow that trend too... Of course the system is not perfect yet but it is something regular people are going to love...at least my mom love it. I have 5 tabs up and running.I have more control over my inbox now. I can understand why internet marketers are mad because it is a new ball game to be next to Facebook updates versus in a box alone with other promotion e-mails... In the long term your brand your goodwill are your only and best weapons...Open Rates are just one metric because you can have one open and 5 conversions versus 5 opens and 0 conversions... the main difference here could be that one open leads to 10 shares on Facebook....This new UX is a non issue...it is really time to disrupt the e-mail system

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

#133

Post by fps »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #45
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

there are 7 billion people on the planet, and many of them pretend to be multiple people online. Am I supposed to click 10 billion unsubscribe links, most of which I've discovered are actually "subscribe me harder" links? The vast majority of mail I get from "reputable" mailers like mailchimp and constant contact is not something I ever signed up for. And those are the reputable senders that have offices and a phone number you can call. Most senders aren't using a service like that. So, "don't subscribe in the first place" is a complete bullshit solution.

Anything gmail can do to keep all manner of commercial solicitations out of my inbox is welcomed. I actually disabled the visibility of the "promotions/spam" tab, but kept the filter, and will happily never have to look at that crap again.

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

#134

Post by alberth »

Something about their analysis just doesn't sound right.

"I dug deep into our database and pulled every delivery to Gmail for the past year and half. That amounts to 12.5 billion emails".

Then he says

"As you might suspect, Gmail opens do follow these hourly, weekly, and seasonal trends, but on the whole they remain fairly steady. With that settled, I trimmed my data to a lean 6 weeks around the introduction of tabs. That’s about 1.5 billion emails, which is plenty of records for a good analysis."

So, 1.5 years = 12.5B Gmail emails

But last 6 weeks = 1.5B Gmail emails

That doesn't sound right.

Unless MailChimp is on some type of unbelievable (true) exponential growth rate in the past few months.

Edit: typo

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

#135

Post by snogglethorpe »

slg wrote: post #59
matthewmacleod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

The problem is that there are more than two buckets. Most MailChimp type emails are not spam, but they would probably fall in the bacn category. People generally don't want to unsubscribe, but they also don't need their day interrupted in order to see the latest marketing material as soon as it arrives. That is the purpose of the promotions tab. You can ignore those semi-relevant emails until you are ready to look at…

... and I find one effect of this (very nice, and seemingly quite accurate) categorization on me is that I actually end up viewing "promotional" emails in a more positive light.

Now they're not being shoved in my face, not obscuring personal email (which used to be a problem with the old single inbox: I'd miss email from my mom amongst a bunch of random low-value emails), and not sending me annoying alerts on my phone. I don't have to skip past reams of "promotions" when I want to open that email from a friend I got a few days ago. I don't think I see, or open, or "open" promotional email any more or less often than before, but now that it's more on my terms, my mood when I do so is better.

For companies that use promotional email in an honest and straight-forward manner, I suspect the net result of this change may be positive... it's not just about "opens", it's also about the impression your email makes and how that effects peoples' attitude towards your company/service.

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

#137

Post by petercooper »

na85 wrote: post #51

I'm glad that Open Rates are going down. I don't want your sales-funnel emails full of doublespeak and marketing buzzwords. You think your email is full of helpful info about your product but it's not. It's just spam.

Except that's not the only use for mass e-mail.

I have over 120,000 developers who subscribe to my e-mail newsletters and I suspect most subscribers would not consider them "Promotions." Hopefully those who care to read every week will drag them back into the main inbox but I imagine some will fall by the wayside. (Not that I'm panicking, I'm not noticing much of a/any drop in open rates at all.)

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

#138

Post by jedi_stannis »

alberth wrote: post #134

Something about their analysis just doesn't sound right. "I dug deep into our database and pulled every delivery to Gmail for the past year and half. That amounts to 12.5 billion emails". Then he says "As you might suspect, Gmail opens do follow these hourly, weekly, and seasonal trends, but on the whole they remain fairly steady. With that settled, I trimmed my data to a lean 6 weeks around the introduction of tabs.…

1.5 years is 78 weeks. 12.5B emails / 78 weeks ~ 160 million emails a week.

6 weeks * 160 million ~ 960 million emails.

So the last 6 weeks is 156% of the average. That seems like good growth, not unbelievable growth.

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

#139

Post by petercooper »

alberth wrote: post #134

Something about their analysis just doesn't sound right. "I dug deep into our database and pulled every delivery to Gmail for the past year and half. That amounts to 12.5 billion emails". Then he says "As you might suspect, Gmail opens do follow these hourly, weekly, and seasonal trends, but on the whole they remain fairly steady. With that settled, I trimmed my data to a lean 6 weeks around the introduction of tabs.…

12500000000 / 547.5 (1.5 years) == roughly 23m e-mails per day over the 1.5 year sample.

1500000000 / (6 * 7) (6 weeks) == roughly 35m e-mails per day over the past six weeks.

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

#140

Post by fps »

mindcrime wrote: post #112
cloudwalking wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Gmail is filtering based on content, not based on email service.

Well they're not doing a very good job of it. I disabled this tabbed nonsense right away, because the categorization is shit. They put all sorts of messages under "promotions" that were nothing of the sort, and same for "social". In fact, glancing through the tabs, there really appeared to be almost no coherence whatsoever between what appeared in one tab or another. As far as I'm concerned, Gmail tabs are totally us…

Gmail's filtering in this case seems to be 100% spot on for me. It's grabbed all the stuff I consider spam and hidden it away, and hasn't touched anything from people who I want to hear from. A few thousand messages have been properly sorted since I opted in.
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