Gmail Releases New ‘Inbox’ with Improved Automated Sorting of Marketing Messages

Remember when Gmail added tabs to their inbox and began sorting your messages? Inbox is like that, but redone for mobile and with improved features to ‘sweep’ and ‘bundle’ messages for easier inbox management. With the new Inbox app, Gmail is going to highlight your most important emails and help you hide the rest. Like with all Google products, this is great news for users and not so good news for marketers.

Inbox May Be Bad For Email Marketers

Inbox Zero is a organizational philosophy for your inbox. Plainly put: organize and manage your email so that there are zero emails in the inbox. The Zero-er will take an action on every email, whether that’s moving an email to a To Do folder or the trash, it just can’t stay in the inbox.

This is the philosophy of Inbox. There are more tools for managing the emails, like Snooze, Pin and Sweep. Snooze allows you to set a timer for when you need to pay attention to the message. Pin allows you declare a message important, so when you Sweep your inbox, only the Pinned messages are left.

This is the danger for email marketers – the more tools for winnowing the inbox, the more likely our newsletters and special offers will be swept aside, or pre-determinedly bundled up with other marketing messages and ignored forever.

Inbox Good News – The Savvy Will Stand Out

A list of emails is not the most exciting thing to look at, but that changes with Inbox. Now you can stand out by programming in call to action buttons and images that will appear directly in the list of emails. Now we’ll be able to ask for a review right from the subject line. Or include a click-inducing image.

Using Schema mark-ups, marketers can have recipients submit reviews from a drop down menu right in the subject line. Currently this is only available for movies, restaurants and products, but eventually we’ll be able to make great use of this feature.

Right now we can start taking advantage of the Snooze button. Let’s say you’re hosting an injectable therapy event in two weeks and you have an RSVP form. Getting a subscriber to fill out the form when they open the email is tough, but telling a reader to use their Snooze button to remind them to take action later can improve your conversion rate.

As other email programs adopt similar inbox management strategies, creating great emails becomes more and more important. Subject lines will have to be more enticing and the emails themselves will have to be content rich to keep your readers wanting more and not relegating your campaigns to their “marketer” bundle.

A/B Test for Effective Subject Lines

Not sure what the perfect, attention-grabbing subject line is? A/B test it. REVENEZmail.com not only features the only templates designed exclusively for the aesthetics industry, it also is one of the few that offers A/B testing. Simply enter two subject lines when you create the campaign and REVENEZmail will send out a test to a portion of your list. The subject line that induces the most opens wins, and the email campaign with the winning subject line is sent to the rest of your list, maxizing your opens.

For more information on REVENEZmail, please visit REVENEZmail.com.