Google's Awesome New Inbox ... Great for Consumers but A NIGHTMARE FOR ADVERTISERS??? (6)
Google's Awesome New Inbox ... Great for Consumers but A NIGHTMARE FOR ADVERTISERS???
Deliverabilty to into Gmail main priority view screen was already getting extremely tough ... well this tough game may have just gotten EVEN tougher.
Google’s New Inbox App Is Going To Really Annoy Advertisers
from http://www.businessinsider.com/how-g...#ixzz3GyWUe8It
Google just announced a new app called “Inbox” that has the potential to transform the way we email.
But it also looks like it’s going to seriously annoy advertisers as a result.
One of the key features of the Google Now-like app is “Bundles.” Basically, Inbox automatically bundles together certain kinds of messages like bank statements and purchase receipts so it’s easy to scan through them quickly.
Another feature likely to catch the eye of advertisers is “Highlights” which helps you find key information like flight itineraries and event info, but it also pulls in information from the web that wasn’t in the original email like the real-time status of your flight.
There also hasn't been any mention yet on how or if display advertising will be integrated into the Inbox app. On Gmail, Google scans the content of your emails to serve relevant banner ads.
The big immediate problem for advertisers is that all the key features we do know about are pushing their marketing emails further and further down the agenda in terms of priority.
Brand emails will be siphoned off into a “Promotions” Bundle, similar to the Promotions tab on Gmail. If Inbox really takes off, Bundles is going to start getting worrying for advertisers.
When Google introduced Tabs for “social”, “promotions” and “updates” last year to Gmail, many email marketers proclaimed it the death of email newsletters as we know it, as messages from brands were funneled into the baskets users check far less frequently.
Those proclamations were a tad dramatic, but were along the right lines. Research last year from MailChimp found the number of emails opened by Gmail users fell more than twice as much as any other service as they utilized tabs to ignore unwanted communications. However, Gmail open rates *did* start accelerating when it rolled out a feature that allowed images to be downloaded automatically, as prettier emails encourage more clicks.
Gmail accounts for 40% of all email on the web, ahead of the next biggest client Outlook.com with 23%, according to email testing and analytics company Litmus.
Advertisers consider Gmail an important advertising medium. But its move towards email that you don’t even need to open is troublesome (for them) — not least when they can't keep talking about “open rates” when trying to determine the success of their campaigns.
And all this comes at a time when consumers — or those in the US at least, according to recent Forrester research — are actually happier to read marketing emails than ever before. The industry thinks this is partly because we’re checking our mobiles more often (so more likely to browse emails to pass time) and also because brands are making their emails more interesting, targeted and relevant than ever before.
Just as they’re starting to get their acts together, it seems Google is trying to take one of marketers’ most valuable email assets away from their grasp.
I'd suspect as long as you have a good relationship with your list, it won't matter.
People were tripping about the promotion tabs a couple ago and it didn't change things all that much from what i've heard.
It does make me sad to see gmail have such large marketshare, because as a mailer I know they are the toughest to inbox anything with commercial intent.
On another note if anyone has an inbox invite, i'd gladly take one!
I was invited by the guy in charge of this INBOX thing @ Google, and I don't like it, I still prefer good old android EMAIL client on my phone.
We studied the effect of the GMail interface changes extensively at work, and more or less confirmed what was mentioned earlier by jennatalia, at least on our list (which is quite large). We didn't see a dropoff in open rates for our most highly engaged members, and the only real segment of our list which we noticed any measurable impact on was our most unengaged customers who frankly were not responding even prior to the Gmail interface change.
I think one other factor that contributed to this not being as big of a deal as originally thought is the rapid increase in people opening on mobile devices. Each year the % of email opened in webmail decreases, so the effect (so far) has not been more pronounced because more and more people are opening on mobile which does not feature the tabbed layout.
Originally Posted by iAmAttila
I had the same experience as you did, I switched to inbox for a while and switched back. The navigation and location of my emails just wasn't quite right.
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