For some reason, this paragraph irked me more than it should have:
If the subscriber has tabs but they didn’t opt
to include the Promotions tab, Gmail will deliver
to Primary instead. That’s good news. Other than
that, we’re definitely testing the new inbox and
trying to figure out how it works. My sense is that
Gmail wants all marketing email to go to the
Promotions tab. Even if we did find a tricky way
into the Primary tab, they’re smart over there,
and they’d more than likely address any reasonable
workaround.
The Promotions tab is there so I don't have to see your emails. The fact that you straight-up claim to try to bypass that makes me put you on the same level as the V1agra spammers in my mind.
I'll skim my Promotions tab when I want to. Stay out of my primary inbox.
A lot of people think that their special snowflake of a spam is the one that users actually want to see. These people deserve to be tasered in the mouth repeatedly, but sadly that hasn't happened yet.
I don't understand this attitude; every email sent through services like MailChimp contains an explicit and obvious unsubscribe link, and their policies regarding unsolicited email are pretty strict.
If you don't want to receive these emails, then unsubscribe - or, better yet, don't subscribe in the first place.
This new feature seems excruciatingly pointless anyway. I want all of my emails to arrive into my inbox, with the exception of actual unsolicited spam. If I need to filter them, I can do it myself - I suppose the feature may be useful for Gmail users who aren't comfortable doing this. At least I can disable the new inbox or continue using IMAP for now.
If it's spam, then it belongs in the spam folder, not in any part of my inbox. If it's not spam, I want it in my inbox; that's why I'm subscribed to the list.
As a GMail user, if you drag an email from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab, it will ask you if you want future messages from the sending address to go to Primary. This is the right way to do it. Users should be in charge of categorizing their email, not marketers.
But I already had everything working the way I wanted and then GMail randomly decided some (but not all) of the newsletters and automated message I get belong in a new tab.
There was no way to decline this change and no obvious way to opt out. (Yes, you can go into the settings and delete all the tabs except Primary -- not intuitive.)
THIS!
Another quote from article: "I’ve heard a lot of people asking how they can get out of the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab."
There is a reason why I enabled Promotions tab and I don't want you'r emails! If you will end up in my Primary by tricking me I will unsubscribe immediately to not see them at all!
I didn't even know there was a promotions tab until reading this article. I just enabled it. It's exactly where I want marketing emails to go and am really glad to see Google innovating in this space.
(BTW, I love how Gmail will attempt to unsubscribe you when you mark a marketing email as spam, which is also very nice)
Dear Google, can I have an ads tab in my browser so all ads get collected there? I will skim this tab when I want to, but stay out of my primary content tab.
I don't consider language/framework/library group lists, local developer groups/meetups, security/vuln announcement lists, and my family's discussion list to be promotional. But they can all be sent through MailChimp and other services that also send promotional mails.
I enjoy the format of email newsletters and several use Mailchimp. For some reason, the email newsletters I have purposefully subscribed to and want to read are going to the Promotions tab. I can see how that would be a problem.
I understand the negative reaction to the word "marketing", but anything I don't want to see shouldn't show up in my Inbox at all as it should be flagged as Spam.
Maybe you should re-read that? They are saying they won't try to trick gmail into bypassing the Promotions filter. This is probably in response to customers asking them to do that.
I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. It's easy in tech to abstract things to "metrics" and "performance" when what you're really talking about boils down to tricking users and spam filters.
I think you mis-read it. The author was implying that there's little use in trying to hack your way into the inbox since Google would probable figure it out quickly. MailChimp is overly conservative on stuff like this.
To clarify what an 'open' is in terms of this post, it's when the recipient opens an email and has remote images load or clicks a trackable link. That's the only way you can be sure an email has been opened. If you open an email but don't load images and don't click links, then it hasn't been 'opened' in the eyes of the sender. So, for instance, folks who open and delete promotional mailings without loading images don't count as opening those emails. Basically 'open' doesn't mean what you think it means in terms of the way you use your email client.
The same way 'delivered' doesn't mean what you'd think it means. You, as a user, would think it means delivered to your inbox. It doesn't. It means it was delivered to the mail server. At that point, it could go in your inbox, your 'promotions' tab in gmail, your junk/spam folder, or be automatically deleted using a set of rules on your server/email client (bayesian, rbls, etc). So, when email sending providers talk about delivery rates, that's what they really mean. They have no idea if even the subject of the email was even seen by the recipient unless that recipient either opens the email and loads the remote images or clicks on a trackable link.
True, but probably not relevant to this artice. The "read" vs "loaded images/clicked link" ratio is probably the same before and after, so its exact meaning isn't important. But thanks for the clarification.
It does call into question the representativity of the findings, though.
For example, people who always show external images are overrepresented; the influence of the new design on open rates of other users is not predicted reliably.
Or, from another angle, I am more likely to load external images in emails that are important to me. The influence of the new design on the open rate of emails that are important to me (which get counted) is probably different from the influence of the new design on the open rate of emails that are NOT important to me (and that don't get counted even if I open them).
I figured I'd clarify the terminology as some folks in the comments here were saying things like they used to open up multiple mails and delete them as opposed to now where they just select and delete them within the Promotions tab without opening them. I wanted to ensure folks knew that this wouldn't affect the numbers the way they were expecting unless it was all from senders you'd specifically allowed remote images for.
"For marketers who are trying to establish a personal relationship with their customers..."
Isn't that kind of an oxymoron? How can the relationship be "personal" when one side of it (the marketer's side) is really just algorithmically-generated (and by that I do not necessarily mean "computer-generated") and the conversation is one-way?
To give an example, pretend I'm a coffeeshop with a MailChimp list of ~200 subscribers.
1. I send out an email to my subscribers saying "Hey, what do you guys want to see improved with your Uptown Coffee experience?"
2. Customers respond with responses ranging from things like "cheaper coffee lol" to "I really like the atmosphere but I get frustrated because sometimes there isn't anywhere to sit!"
3. I can respond personally to these emails and get more information, at which point I get to make business decisions that result in happier customers and (hopefully) more revenue.
To me an email survey is not personal. If you actually wrote an email to me, saying "Hey Joe, I see that you're doing x, y and z. What can I do to make your experience better?" which is written to me for me and not generic, that's establishing a relationship. I've gotten a hand written card from Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg which I've kept because that is personal.
I get what they're saying. I run a weekly newsletter, and often my "call to actions" are asking people to reply. Of the 6.5k people on my list, I've probably chatted in one way or another with at least 20% of them.
It's definitely relationship building at scale, and while I know it's "write once, send N-times", myself and most of the people on my list see a distinction between my newsletter and a grid of items on sale.
These algorithms really do stand out when I order stuff for friends and relatives who aren't computer literate, which means I get all their marketing emails. The accounts that order infrequently are showered with discount codes and special offers, whereas the regular purchasers get nothing.
I had the exact same sentiment when I read that line. If marketers were typing each email instead of doing a generic name substation, then I could understand this, but they aren't.
While I would generally agere with you completely, there are marketers with whom I have a very personal relationship.
What sticks out to me (because they sent me an email today discussing gmail's new layout and how to ensure I kept getting their emails) is my comic shop. They go through effort to know what I like, what to recommend to me, etc., etc., and are super friendly to boot (not affiliated plug, Third Eye Comics in Annapolis are AWESOME).
I genuinely want the emails they send me, even their most basic one-way emails provide me active value, and the relationship does transcend a more traditional marketing relationship, like the one I have with Amazon.
In short, it would not surprise me to know that there are other businesses that share more personal relationships with their customers than the merchant-customer model.
I genuinely want the emails they send me, even their most basic one-way emails provide me active value, and the relationship does transcend a more traditional marketing relationship, like the one I have with Amazon.
If you drag those messages from Promotions to Primary, Gmail will ask you if you want to do the same thing for all messages from that sender.
Hacker News audience, developers or/and internet workers population in general are very sensitive to commercial newsletters. There are lots of comments that read "commercial newsletters = spam".
But reality is that for many online businesses email is the primary sales channel or a very important one. Lots of commercial newsletters are sent, but they main reason for this is because they work. Plain and simple. Lots of "normal" people (not too tech savy that will never hear about Hacker News in their whole lives) use commercial email as on their primary ways of ecommerce browsing. Just as setting up a beatiful and atractive front shop one hundred years ago made a difference in your bottom line, email is an element of crucial importance. Furthermore, lots of ecommerce companies have invested tons of money in developing this channel. Hey, maybe your salary is paid by one of this ecommerce giants! So three things:
1) Commercial email works. Many people don't bother receiving lots of commercial email. In fact, they love it. Google knows this, so:
2) one of the main reasons for Google making this change is to create an effective channel to deliver their own ad impressions in the format that people loves and use. But,
3) in doing so they may be invading a space in which lots of companies have invested a lot (and those same companies surely have already invested in other Google products).
Its a similar pattern with SERPs: you invested in SEO but now the first page is only made up of Google products or paid positions.
Commercial newsletters are not a problem - and having tabs for Promotions and Updates made them more friendly.
This way, users can review and maybe-read the newsletters once a week, instead of having them mixed with actually urgent emails from their family and "server is down" alerts.
"The word on the street is that business owners and marketers are worried about this new layout, and I get that. You want your email above the fold, on the cover, with a huge headline. You want to stand out to your customer, and instead you’re on the Promotions page with all the other ads."
This blog post is like an ad for GMail. Sounds like the tabs feature works very effectively.
I really liked the idea of the new inbox at first but right now its overzealousness with the Promotions tab is tempting me to merge everything back into Primary. Daily VC news emails are not promotions; digests of roguelike updates are not promotions; emails from my grandmother to try a brownie recipe aren't promotions (well, I guess they sorta are.)
(Yes, you can train it to send emails from X@Y.Z to primary by default, but at that point what advantage is the split inbox offering me?)
Just drag your daily VC emails into the primary tab and they should got here from now on. Not really any training involved, it only takes a few seconds.
I quite like it, but I'm having to do some work to train it to send some ebay junk into promotion and send some useful ebay stuff from promotion into primary.
I do wonder if Google is using my training data to help other people?
And if they are, should that be scary? Because a lot of people are idiots and I'm not sure I want them to have much influence on my inbox. (See, for example, Google dropping the + operator in search because so few people used it, and even less people used it correctly.)
You can also train it by dragging the email from one tab to another. Sometimes I end up dragging emails from my bank or phone carrier from Promotions to Updates tab.
My primary gripe with the new tabs is that the 'unread message count' is not displayed on each tab and I've to go to each of them every time to see if something new has popped up.
do you have the updates tab turned on? my inbox is pretty good about filing digests and updates under the 'updates' tab and actual marketing under the promotions tab.
it works really great for my usage, where the primary tab is the only one that makes my phone beep. i want to read brownie recipes from grandma and digests of bad updates, but not immediately. Gmail does a great job of sorting out things you need to be notified of into the primary tab, and putting other things in the other tabs.
Overzealous is an understatement. Looks like its categorizing everything from ESPs as promotions. Things like my Newrelic alerts to our servers alerts are being improperly put into promotions. Its an easy fix but there's always possibility i'll miss an important email that gets sent rarely.
They should be glad for the Promotions tab. Now that promotional emails aren't gumming up my primary inbox, I'm much less likely to unsubscribe from them. I don't mind having coupons for stores I rarely visit, or newsletters for projects I'm vaguely interested in, since I don't have to deal with them every time I open my mail.
"Forcing" is a bit much. When it is rolled out to a user, there is a popup asking which tabs the user wants to enable. It's technically opt-out, but it's literally one click (no digging through menus) to say "I don't want this."
Gmail new tabs is an incredibly cool feature for people receiving tons of mails. The Gmail team realized that there is spam that's not spam, and is the promotions email, it is awesome to see them away from my inbox...
> The Gmail team realized that there is spam that's not spam
That is a very good way to put it, and is just how I feel. It's too bad they were criticized that the tab move was just all about more effective advertising (it may be a little bit true, but doesn't negate the fact that this is a really good innovation on the email management front).
I hope the backlash isn't enough to force them to change it. I think people misrepresented the (mostly positive) changes to get some google hate blog views.
Readit News
I'll skim my Promotions tab when I want to. Stay out of my primary inbox.
If you don't want to receive these emails, then unsubscribe - or, better yet, don't subscribe in the first place.
This new feature seems excruciatingly pointless anyway. I want all of my emails to arrive into my inbox, with the exception of actual unsolicited spam. If I need to filter them, I can do it myself - I suppose the feature may be useful for Gmail users who aren't comfortable doing this. At least I can disable the new inbox or continue using IMAP for now.
There was no way to decline this change and no obvious way to opt out. (Yes, you can go into the settings and delete all the tabs except Primary -- not intuitive.)
There is a reason why I enabled Promotions tab and I don't want you'r emails! If you will end up in my Primary by tricking me I will unsubscribe immediately to not see them at all!
(BTW, I love how Gmail will attempt to unsubscribe you when you mark a marketing email as spam, which is also very nice)
You can drag the first few emails into the appropriate tab to teach Gmail to do the same for future messages.
I understand the negative reaction to the word "marketing", but anything I don't want to see shouldn't show up in my Inbox at all as it should be flagged as Spam.
The same way 'delivered' doesn't mean what you'd think it means. You, as a user, would think it means delivered to your inbox. It doesn't. It means it was delivered to the mail server. At that point, it could go in your inbox, your 'promotions' tab in gmail, your junk/spam folder, or be automatically deleted using a set of rules on your server/email client (bayesian, rbls, etc). So, when email sending providers talk about delivery rates, that's what they really mean. They have no idea if even the subject of the email was even seen by the recipient unless that recipient either opens the email and loads the remote images or clicks on a trackable link.
For example, people who always show external images are overrepresented; the influence of the new design on open rates of other users is not predicted reliably.
Or, from another angle, I am more likely to load external images in emails that are important to me. The influence of the new design on the open rate of emails that are important to me (which get counted) is probably different from the influence of the new design on the open rate of emails that are NOT important to me (and that don't get counted even if I open them).
Isn't that kind of an oxymoron? How can the relationship be "personal" when one side of it (the marketer's side) is really just algorithmically-generated (and by that I do not necessarily mean "computer-generated") and the conversation is one-way?
1. I send out an email to my subscribers saying "Hey, what do you guys want to see improved with your Uptown Coffee experience?"
2. Customers respond with responses ranging from things like "cheaper coffee lol" to "I really like the atmosphere but I get frustrated because sometimes there isn't anywhere to sit!"
3. I can respond personally to these emails and get more information, at which point I get to make business decisions that result in happier customers and (hopefully) more revenue.
It's definitely relationship building at scale, and while I know it's "write once, send N-times", myself and most of the people on my list see a distinction between my newsletter and a grid of items on sale.
What sticks out to me (because they sent me an email today discussing gmail's new layout and how to ensure I kept getting their emails) is my comic shop. They go through effort to know what I like, what to recommend to me, etc., etc., and are super friendly to boot (not affiliated plug, Third Eye Comics in Annapolis are AWESOME).
I genuinely want the emails they send me, even their most basic one-way emails provide me active value, and the relationship does transcend a more traditional marketing relationship, like the one I have with Amazon.
In short, it would not surprise me to know that there are other businesses that share more personal relationships with their customers than the merchant-customer model.
If you drag those messages from Promotions to Primary, Gmail will ask you if you want to do the same thing for all messages from that sender.
Dead Comment
But reality is that for many online businesses email is the primary sales channel or a very important one. Lots of commercial newsletters are sent, but they main reason for this is because they work. Plain and simple. Lots of "normal" people (not too tech savy that will never hear about Hacker News in their whole lives) use commercial email as on their primary ways of ecommerce browsing. Just as setting up a beatiful and atractive front shop one hundred years ago made a difference in your bottom line, email is an element of crucial importance. Furthermore, lots of ecommerce companies have invested tons of money in developing this channel. Hey, maybe your salary is paid by one of this ecommerce giants! So three things:
1) Commercial email works. Many people don't bother receiving lots of commercial email. In fact, they love it. Google knows this, so:
2) one of the main reasons for Google making this change is to create an effective channel to deliver their own ad impressions in the format that people loves and use. But,
3) in doing so they may be invading a space in which lots of companies have invested a lot (and those same companies surely have already invested in other Google products).
Its a similar pattern with SERPs: you invested in SEO but now the first page is only made up of Google products or paid positions.
This way, users can review and maybe-read the newsletters once a week, instead of having them mixed with actually urgent emails from their family and "server is down" alerts.
This blog post is like an ad for GMail. Sounds like the tabs feature works very effectively.
(Yes, you can train it to send emails from X@Y.Z to primary by default, but at that point what advantage is the split inbox offering me?)
I do wonder if Google is using my training data to help other people?
And if they are, should that be scary? Because a lot of people are idiots and I'm not sure I want them to have much influence on my inbox. (See, for example, Google dropping the + operator in search because so few people used it, and even less people used it correctly.)
it works really great for my usage, where the primary tab is the only one that makes my phone beep. i want to read brownie recipes from grandma and digests of bad updates, but not immediately. Gmail does a great job of sorting out things you need to be notified of into the primary tab, and putting other things in the other tabs.
That is a very good way to put it, and is just how I feel. It's too bad they were criticized that the tab move was just all about more effective advertising (it may be a little bit true, but doesn't negate the fact that this is a really good innovation on the email management front).