Arm your email marketing against Gmail's issues, and probable changes at Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail (first of two parts).
Google's Gmail has received quite a bit of attention lately, but nearly all the focus has been on controversies surrounding privacy issues and what it means for Hotmail and Yahoo!.
There's been little discussion of what marketers should be doing in preparation for what will likely be a significant market presence. Undoubtedly, integrating contextual advertising of some form is being strongly considered by Yahoo! and Hotmail, the two clear leaders in the free email space. As a result, much of what's listed below will become concerns for your Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail subscribers.
Gmail is likely to be popular initially with your most Internet-savvy customers and expand from there. For email marketers, you should begin educating and preparing yourself now. After you read this article, you can be the judge of whether Gmail will be good or bad for you as a marketer.
Let the hype begin
While there are some interesting new features that Gmail is offering, much of the hype is simply due to Google being one of the world's hottest properties entering a relatively stable space -- free email. A "gmail.com" email address has already become a hot property, with people trying to snatch up their preferred email addresses (e.g., davechase@gmail.com rather than dave_chase148@gmail.com). There have been thousands of auctions for Gmail addresses on EBay.
To stay competitive, Yahoo! has already added several new Gmail-like features to Yahoo! Mail. MSN's Hotmail has announced dramatically increased storage limits.
If Gmail releases with its current feature set and customers rush to sign up as expected, Gmail will have strong repercussions for marketers. Image suppression is just one example -- it will reduce open reporting and could lower response rates. This will be particularly true unless marketers respond by sending text or mixed text/HTML messages.
The following Gmail feature areas are worth studying to determine your response as a marketer:
Suppressed images and tracking challenges
Gmail doesn't display images in an email unless users click on a link requesting to "display external images," so it's highly likely that email marketers will have substantially lower response rates and that clicks won't track as they have in the past. This is something that you should be testing now in preparation for Gmail's release. Already, image suppression and contextual advertising are fully functional in the beta version and affect emails. In Gmail's beta images don't render when a user opens their email unless they open the email and then click a link that says "Display external images."
What's worse for marketers is the fact that there is no global setting to cause images to display for all emails. Furthermore, clicking the link for an email does not cause the images to display in that same email if it's reopened later -- the link must be re-clicked. Images display in email templates as empty boxes with small image icons in the upper left corner of each -- Hotmail does the same thing for mails that go into the junk mail folder but not your inbox.
Since opens are measured by the HTML image rendering, image suppression creates tracking issues. Fortunately, images that are also links still function whether or not a user chooses to display external images. These issues may well be "fit and finish" items not yet released by Google. If not, they may get enough feedback on usability issues to change their approach (e.g., having no global setting is unacceptable in a commercial offering in this marketer's opinion). Gmail's ad features will drive smart marketers to evaluate how they want to deliver their messages as it's not simply a matter of primarily choosing text emails. Gmail's ad serving methods will make the choice more challenging.
Search extended to email with massive storage
Google's search function is extended to Gmail. Theoretically, this will change user behavior allowing your customers to do away with folders and sorting. Instead, users can quickly search the text of their entire inbox to find the email or email section they need. Not surprisingly, the search feature is very powerful and works as you would expect from Google.
Gmail also provides massive free storage, encouraging people to never delete another email since you shouldn't run up against storage limits anytime soon. In addition, Gmail automatically links email messages: when a new message comes, related messages in the thread go to the top of the inbox along with the new messages not unlike Outlook's "conversation" view, which can be very helpful in managing your inbox.
With the massive storage available, Google is encouraging people to not delete messages. As a marketer, this brings two items you should be aware of :
- Link-rot -- will a link work 6 months from now if your customer saves a message they later go back and read?
- Short-term offers that you'd rather people didn't see later -- e.g., a bargain shopper could track discounting patterns based on seasonality by looking through several months of email from a marketer.
Ads surround email you send
Google touts that rather than getting irrelevant banner ads, Gmail users will see relevant text ads ("sponsored links") and related web pages ("related pages") listed to the right of their emails. These ads will be determined by a scan of the content in each individual email. Gmail ads that sit next to emails will combine organic (i.e., results determined by Google algorithms) and sponsored results. This will have a dramatic effect on the number of ads sold via its AdWords program, which is the source of the lion's share of Google's revenue. In the beta, the sponsored links are at the top of the list.
Tomorrow: Examples from my inbox and what you must do now. Read part two.
Dave Chase is a partner with Altus Alliance which specializes in driving revenue traction for emerging businesses. Before joining Altus Alliance, Chase spent nearly 20 years in the industry with the last twelve years at Microsoft in various senior marketing and general management roles, including his role as MSN’s managing director for industry marketing and relations. In that capacity, he was responsible for MSN taking a leadership role within the interactive marketing industry to grow Online’s share of the overall ad market in concert with AOL, CNET, Yahoo!, Google and other market leaders.
Chase played leadership roles in launching several new businesses within Microsoft including Microsoft’s entry into the enterprise software and server business which is now an $8 billion business. This included co-leading Microsoft’s first vertical marketing efforts where he grew the Healthcare vertical market from virtually no presence to a market leading position. The healthcare business now represents over $400 million in revenue for Microsoft.
From there, he was integral in Microsoft’s entry into consumer Internet businesses that achieved both critical and financial success. These included Sidewalk, Encarta, and HomeAdvisor, which were among the first profitable consumer Internet businesses for Microsoft and heavily used email marketing to enable their growth.