Gmail Makes another Change for Email Marketers – Find out what?

Gmail comes up with another change and this time it’s about how they would be handling images both on the desktop and the Mobile devices; is it surprising? Not at all! It’s Gmail; amendments are bound to happen.

Here is what Gmail has done:

Gmail will now cache all the images in an email, which would mean they’ll be downloaded once from the original server, but hosted on a Gmail proxy server thereafter.

In easier words, we would not see “Display Images” option anymore, Gmail will do an Auto display of all images in the email.

Netcore looks at it as a positive impact for marketers, since now every user opening the email campaign can be tracked as it is an “Auto display” image. Marketers should soon observe an increase in the number of “Unique Opens” from their email campaigns.

However, now that Gmail is caching images, open from a specific user can be tracked only once, which eliminates the concept of “Total Opens”. But, this might not be that big an impact, since this metric is not much referred by the marketers.

Also, Netcore’s platform already tracks ‘Unique Opens’ with a separate pixel image for every individual user, thus, the tracking of opens wouldn’t get affected.

The flipside to Gmail’s image caching is that from an email open a marketer now would not be able to track Geographic Location of the user and nor would they be able to track the device from which the email is being accessed. So now this data can only be tracked based on user clicks.

But, the catch is – the device tracking wouldn’t stop immediately since the images on Tablets and Mobile phones are not being cached right now by Gmail and would only be done in mid-January 2014. So, for brands who aren’t tracking the device accessed by their subscribers should ideally get it done since, they just have a few weeks of admittance to the mobile data of Gmail subscribers.

The bigger message is, it’s a positive change for marketers where we can now track all the users who end up opening the email. Expect your Unique opens to increase in the coming days, we would have industry statistics posted in our comings posts. Stay tuned!