Gmail Announces New Priority Inbox System
If you are like me in the morning, this is my "drill"
- Open my email account
- Scan through my emails
- Immediately open the emails I feel are most important to me
- Go back and weed out the unwanted emails or emails I need to get to later
The new system which is due to roll out in a few days is similar to the current one which simply works by knowing which emails are important to you by your history with the sender/contact. The new program knows which emails you are interacting with by which ones you open and reply to and who you send to most often. It will also note key words that are commonly found in emails you read. So that if you are reading and interacting with email about flowers, future emails about flowers sent to you will most likely make it to your important email folder. The system is not perfect but learns more as times goes by with a little help from the user. Whether a friend's email was marked as spam or a spam email was marked as important, you can always correct it and the system will adjust to your corrections going forward. The user can also adjust importance by the icons shown that will add importance points or remove importance points by this icon 
or 
. The new inbox will have 3 categories; important, less important emails you flagged to come back to and then everything else. If there ever was a reason for engagement, this is it. As more major ISPs (Yahoo, Hotmail) migrate towards these types of systems, it is absolutely vital in ensuring marketers remain connected to their subscribers not by just sending them email but by sending them emails they will engage upon. Engagement just took another huge step forward in the mail industry and the batch and blast mentality many steps back.
Two keys points to consider when sending to subscribers:
- Get the user to engage with you immediately (time is of the essence)
- Encourage them to add you to their contact list as the challenge is shifting from getting into the inbox to getting into the right inbox now.
Chris Kolbenschlag
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
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About the Author
Chris Kolbenschlag, Bronto's Director of Deliverability, maintains Bronto’s high standards for deliverability in addition to providing leadership to clients on industry trends, relevant best practices, and related technologies. With more than fifteen years of experience, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge in ISP relations, CAN-SPAM compliancy, email deliverability best practices, and reputation monitoring to the Client Services team. He is actively involved in several industry groups, including EEC (Email Experience Council), MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group), and ESPC (Email Sender and Provider Coalition).
Thanks for putting this post
Thanks for putting this post out there, Chris. Following are my thoughts on Gmail's new Priority Inbox:
For me, there's still a lot of unanswered questions on this new priority inbox. For one, is the sender deemed "Important" by their sending address or their from name? I know, for instance, that friends and family sometimes send me emails from their work addresses and sometimes from their personal email addresses. Would I have to show interaction with both to get them moved up in priority? This is a concern for marketers that send from multiple addresses or from names and I would like to determine the implication. Also, how is Google determining engagement by open? Is it acceptable to open to delete or spending X amount of time with the message open or is an open scrolling through the message...? If a user stops opening and clicking on messages that reach the "Important" section, do they get moved down in priority? Finally, what about new senders? Do they automatically end up in the "everything else" pile? How would whitelisting impact this placement?
Right now, the email marketing space is a-buzz with the implications of Gmail's Priority Inbox, but it's important to remember that Gmail has had filters that act similar to this new inbox for a long time. This new feature is making it easier on the end users - which implies that more users will take advantage - but I just haven't seen concrete evidence that this will necessarily be the case based on the recent rollouts Hotmail and Yahoo have made (http://blog.bronto.com/2010/06/17/hotmail-gets-a-revamp-whats-the-impact/). It is true that Gmail users are a different beast, so it's possible it will be more widely adopted.
I'm also curious about whether users will deem any marketer's emails "Important". At best, I would imagine only their favorites would get opened and clicked with enough regularity to be moved into the "Important" section, but I'm not sure of the long-term staying power of such emails. Do marketers have a chance here? The average email subscriber doesn't open every email sent, so marketers must do what they can to deliver true value in every message sent.
The impetus is on marketers to beef up email programs and determine what subscribers really want - whether it's constant sales, lifestyle information or user-generated content - and deliver it consistently. This is the only shining hope to reach "Important" status.
-Kelly@Bronto
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