Google’s roll out of their new inbox tabs has raised a new industry debate. Here’s an outline of the changes and how you can navigate them.

Inbox tabs

Gmail inbox will sort emails into five different tabs – the most important of which is called ‘Promotions’. This is where all commercial email is sent.  A green box with the number of new emails is displayed to encourage regular clicks on the tab. Order confirmations will go in to the Primary tab, so marketers can rest assured their transactional messages will be seen straight away.  The tabs have also been added to the Gmail mobile app.

Key changes to the Gmail inbox

How should these changes be managed?

Some retailers have sent emails to their database advising subscribers on how to move emails from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab. However we do not recommend taking any action because:

1. It is too early to tell what impact it is having, whether positive or negative Article update: see below

2. Order confirmations and notification messages are still delivered to the primary tab

3. Google themselves are putting their own promotional messages in the promotions folder and they would not do that if it harmed their business.

The key thing to remember when looking at the data is that open rates are likely to be affected, but this may not necessarily impact revenue or other key performance indicators of your email programme. Given that email addresses can be integrated with email addresses from other domains, the best way to check the impact of the Gmail inbox changes on subscribers who have opened your emails is via device tracking. We will continue to monitor to see if there is a response curve for opens and clicks and where available, conversion metrics, to keep you informed of any changes.

In the meantime, if you would like us to analyse the trends in behaviour of the Gmail subscribers on your database, contact us here.

Article Update: Since writing this article, data on the impact of Gmail tabs has emerged. Return Path’s ‘ The Tabbed Inbox’ report uses data from its Inbox Insight tool to monitor the behaviour of Gmail users and found that subscribers are actively searching out commercial mail in the Promotions tab and reading them at almost the same rates as they did prior to the tabs rollout. In addition it found that ‘Move Me’ campaigns encouraging subscribers to move the sender to the Primary tab resulted in a 0.1% increase in messages being delivered there. The report can be downloaded at http://landing.returnpath.com/gmail-tabs-marketing-impact-analysis-report.

Last updated: Oct 17, 2016  admin

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