Gmail’s Priority Index impact Email Marketing

On August 30, 2010, Google announced that it is launching a new mailbox priority system within its Gmail email platform called “Priority Inbox”. This brings Gmail more in line with the recent launch of Hotmail’s Sweep functionality that was announced in late July. It also continues the trend by the anti-spam and ISP industry to move to a more relevancy-based reputation and filtering model. The new system is still in beta but will be available to all customers by the end of the week.

Priority Inbox provides users with even more control of the email they receive and how it is viewed in their inbox. The new Gmail inbox will be broken down into 3 basic sections:

• Important and Unread: Contains one-to-one communications and messages that recipients interact with the most.
• Starred: Messages that Gmail users have specifically marked as Starred and intend to come back to at a later time.
• Everything Else: Contains messages that users have not interacted with or that are deemed less important by Gmail’s system. Gmail users can train the system manually by marking messages as “Important” or “Not Important” and/or rely on Gmail’s system to determine how to filter messages based on the users’ previous actions with those messages.  This means Gmail will be using data from user interactions with individual messages and senders to determine how Gmail recipients most likely want their emails filtered going forward.

For more information on Gmail’s Priority Inbox, please see the official Google blog announcement below:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html

What does this mean for email marketers?

The industry has been pushing email marketers to drive relevancy and user engagement in their marketing programs for quite some time. This is even more critical now because the way a user perceives your email or interacts with it will directly determine how or if the user sees your messages in their inbox in the future.

Think of it as a filter for mail that is not spam, but is also not important enough to the recipient for them to take an immediate action to ensure it remains easily visible to them.

What should you do to mitigate the possible negative impact on your messaging?

It’s important to continue to follow best practices, or start now if you are not currently, because the same principles will apply to Gmail’s Priority Inbox placement that apply to good delivery and inbox penetration among all ISPs – you will simply have to be better at it. If ISPs are heavily monitoring customer interaction with your messages, then you have to work harder to engage your subscribers. Make sure you are sending email that your customers want to open and look forward to receiving.

However, there are a few important action items you should take to optimize your emails for Gmail’s new inbox priority system:

Optimize your subject lines and snippet/pre-header text

In addition to your subject line, Gmail displays the first few words of your message depending on the length of your subject line – about 70 characters total.  This means that your snippet text, also known as a pre-header, is just as important as your subject line in getting your subscribers’ attention because it will be the text displayed in the Gmail inbox immediately following your subject line.

Incorporate unique calls to action for Gmail users.

While asking subscribers to add your sending address to their contact lists is a good idea across all email platforms, it’s especially important for Gmail users, to ensure that your message reaches the inbox in the first place, let alone the Priority Inbox.  Additionally, consider Priority Inbox users’ ability to “star” messages to read at a later time, and suggest that they do so for messages that are long in nature and require more time to read.  Not only will you improve your reputation with Gmail, you’ll build more trust with your subscribers.

Pay attention to keywords

The Gmail algorithm will use frequently used keywords included in the copy of your emails to determine the importance of your message. For image-heavy emails, create a version that incorporates HTML text to ensure that your message is crawled properly, and be sure to add the appropriate keywords in your image alt tags to describe the images you are using.  Treat your email copy as you would a page on your website that you’re trying to optimize for search engines, and if you have someone on your team that specializes in SEO, it might be a good idea to consult with him/her when drafting your messages.

Avoid “batch and blast” emails

While this best practice has been encouraged for quite a long time, it is more important than ever to send the right messages to the right people at the right time.  Use advanced segmentation and lifecycle messaging tools to identify your most engaged subscribers and target them with highly relevant messaging to ensure high open rates.  You might end up sending less email, but you will improve your reputation with Gmail (and other ISPs) as a result – which will ultimately increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and drive greater ROI.

Always be optimizing

This goes for all of your subscribers, but it will be increasingly important to revisit your email marketing tactics over time and make necessary changes according to your engagement metrics.  What subject lines and/or snippet text performed best?  What types of messages in general are you seeing higher engagement with? Do you see any trends that may have resulted from keyword optimization?  Be sure to segment your Gmail subscribers and keep a close eye on their level of engagement separately – you may want to create separate versions of your emails for this group depending on their behaviors.

We encourage you not to look at this as a negative change in the community or an additional hurdle for email marketing success. Instead, look at this as a great opportunity to set your brand and email marketing apart from your competitors and raise yourself to the top of your customers’ “Important” mail. If you do this successfully, this change will have nothing but positive impacts on your email marketing program because there will be less noise from fewer messages to compete for your subscribers’ limited attention span

Reference from: http://www.bluehornet.com/articles/full/gmail-priority-inbox