Gmail Trying to Trouble Marketers: Introducing a New Inbox.

After the ISP conference where Gmail announced his multi-layered filters, they still don’t seem to be happy with how marketers are troubling their users with a rush of emails. Result – yet another attempt to put users back in control.

Let’s reconstruct what this internal discussion at Gmail would have been:

Product Manager:
We have around 1500 algorithms but our 400 million subscribers still end up receiving a rush of emails which is troublesome.

Senior VP:
This is exactly the reason why we see one user using multiple email addresses. One for promotional, other for transactions and some more for social media, alerts etc.

Executive Chairman:
I just have 10mins, can we brainstorm on the solution instead of talking about things we know.

CEO:
What if we provide the user an option of all these categories mentioned by executive in one email address?


Product Manager:
Do you mean an extension to the concept of Labels?

CEO:
Exactly my friend, we decide category of emails and create tags like:
a) Primary Inbox
b) Social Media
c) Forums
d) Notifications
e) Personal

Some more tags, if you can possibly think of; and based on predefined details we categorize these emails and obviously on the level of ENGAGEMENT + IP’s reputation.

Executive Chairman:
Great thought, I think we should go live with this concept. How much time will it take to go live?

Product Manager:
Shouldn’t take more than a week; but we won’t force it to the user, we will first launch it and to use this feature users will have to manually configure the settings.

Executive Chairman:
You seem to like these marketers, I was thinking of a forced change for everyone; that would teach a good lesson to marketing heads and ESP’s who think they can tackle our algorithms easily. Anyway let me listen to you for a change.

Everyone laughs out loud and moves out of the conference room. “I will get a blog posted by tomorrow announcing this”, says the Product Manager while moving out.

Now that’s exactly what Gmail would be launching in the coming few weeks, wherein they are going to start marking every email with tags like: Social, Notifications, Personal, and Forums etc.
Could this possibly be the biggest impact to the Email Marketing industry?
Let me know your thoughts on the impact of this change.

Stay tuned for more on such new happenings on Gmail.

The author is part of Email Marketing Experts Consultancy Group at netCORE. To understand how netCORE can help tackle such changes feel free to connect with Avadhoot Revankar.