Delivering to Gmail

Gmail is a challenge for even the best senders these days.
With the recent Gmail changes there isn’t any clear fix to getting open rates or inbox delivery back up. Some of it depends on what is causing Gmail to filter the mail. Changing subject lines, from name, from address may get mail back to the inbox in the short term, but it only works until the filters catch up.
What I am seeing, across a number of clients, is that Gmail is doing a lot of content reputation and that content reputation gets spread across senders of that content.  That means you want to look at who is sending any mail on your behalf (mentioning your domain or pointing at your website) and their practices. If they have poor practices, then it can reflect badly on you and result in filtering.
From what I’ve seen, these are very deliberate filtering decisions by Google. And it’s making mail a lot harder for many, many senders. But I think it is, unfortunately, the new reality.

Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email
Outlook 365 having a bad day

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Gmail's new inbox tabs. News at 11.

Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords.
While I do appreciate many of us don’t like change, I can’t quite jump on the histrionic bandwagon. This change isn’t Google declaring war on marketers. Google is, at the end of the day, a marketing company. They live and die by marketing dollars. And before you ask, I don’t really think email marketers can organize a boycott that actually has any real impact on Google’s bottom line and causes them to change their interface.
There are a lot of reasons I don’t think this is the actual end of the world and that marketers should just take a deep breath and chill.
The tabbed interface is really just Priority Inbox v. 2. Priority inbox was rolled out a few years ago and there was quite a bit of noise about how that was going to make email marketing more difficult. While getting email to the inbox at Gmail is a challenge for many marketers, I don’t think Priority Inbox is the underlying reason. I think Gmail has gotten a lot stricter on filters, particularly content filters thus making it harder for borderline mail to get to the inbox instead of the bulk folder.
The tabbed interface is just another way of organizing mail in the inbox. Mail is not moved to any different folders, it’s still in the inbox. Users can enable or disable the settings as they desire and all of the mail stays in their inbox.
New Gmail Tab configuration The interface is not on by default. Users have to actually go in and turn on the setting. For users who don’t set up filters anyway, it’s unlikely they’re going to take advantage of the tabs. I did take a look at the configuration settings. Gmail tries to make it clear what kinds of mails will end up in what tabs by telling you what From: addresses currently in your inbox will end up in a tab if you enable it.
Overall, I don’t think this is really going to cause horrible repercussions to email marketers. In fact, this does seem to offer some benefit to email marketers that use consistent branding. According to Mickey Chandler at Exacttarget, the interface “not only display[s] the number of new emails in the tab, but [also displays the] names of the brands whose mails are in that tab.” This is a good thing for marketers, who now have the chance to get their name in the inbox interface.
One thing I did notice, too, was that when I enabled tabs, Gmail presented me with more advertising in the “promotions” tab and provided no advertising in any other tabs.

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Are the new Gmail ads email?

I’ve seen lots of opinions over the last few weeks about whether or not the new ads in the Gmail promotions tab are email or not.

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Delivery and marketing part 2

A while ago I wrote some thoughts about the conflicting requirements of delivery and marketing. I posted something similar over on the Only Influencers list, too. My thoughts generated a very interesting discussion, one that helped me clarify some of my somewhat random thoughts from earlier.
Marketing is about finding mindshare. One way you get mindshare is repetition. But people tune out repetition pretty quickly. Sending the same offers, the same copy over and over again means recipients start to tune things out.  When recipients start tuning out mail, they may not bother opening it, they just read the subject line.  If too many recipients start relying on the subject line then delivery can suffer.
Effective marketing relies on getting mail in front of the target audience. That’s the delivery component. Without inbox delivery, even the best marketing will not work.
No one will see marketing if it is in the spamfolder.
I don’t think you can cleanly separate delivery strategy from marketing strategy, but it’s important to realize they have different constraints and different pressures. When I talk about delivery with a client, I’m talking about getting mail into the inbox. And, most of the time, they’ve come to me because they’re not getting into the inbox and they have to make changes. The genius of their marketing is irrelevant, because no customers see it.
But once mail is in the inbox you can’t just ignore delivery, either. Sure, it becomes less of a pressure on the copy and the marketing strategy, until such time as the mail isn’t getting into the inbox any longer. Then it’s back to working on delivery and maybe having to implement some aggressive data hygiene. Back in the inbox and you can be aggressive on the marketing again.
Successful email marketing requires balancing the constraints of good delivery against the constraints of good marketing.

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