Gmail Enables Inboxes to Become Personal Again

In March, Gmail, Google's free email service, released an innovation that may likely serve as a watermark for email marketing. When Gmail released Smart Folders as a labs feature, it enabled consumers to filter all email that doesn't come from actual people into a separate folder outside of their inbox. All email marketing messages that come from an Email Service Provider (ESP) can now go into a separate folder and never make it into the user's inbox.

Smart folders mark the start of a new major challenge for email marketers. With the rising adoption promotional emails and bulk mail notifications from social networks, our inboxes are being flooded. Users are looking for ways to reduce noise and smart folders are likely one of many coming tools that will create friction for email marketers.

Marketing Takeaway

Filters like Smart Folders aren't going to change email marketing overnight. If users begin adopting these tools, however, more companies will face the challenge of being filtering out of the inbox. As a marketer, you should start planning for these potential changes now:

1. Go Beyond Email - It is clear that email and other online platforms will continue to evolve. In response to their evolution, you should start thinking like a financial investor and diversify your lead generation portfolio. If you are relying only on email to bring you leads, now is the time to start leveraging other channels like blogging and social media. 

2. Increase Email Marketing Enagement - The reason mail clients start sorting out bulk emails is that many messages don't provide any value or don't offer engagement opportunities. If your recipients engage with your emails by clicking on them and sharing them, it is more likely that your messages will stay out of the bulk mail folder and land in the inbox.

3. Set Expectations at Opt-in - If a person doesn't know to look for your messages and offers, it is likely that they will be relegated to the bulk mail folder and ignored. However, if you are clear with subscribers about how frequently they will get emails from your business and why these messages will be valuable to them, you increase the odds that your emails will be seen, even if they are trapped in a Smart Folder.

Read Original Article