How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates
blog.mailchimp.com
blog.mailchimp.com
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.
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.
* require an email address to create an account to use their service
* without stating this, automatically assume that they now have permission to send you whatever email they want - admin emails, special offers, partner promotions etc
* assume that because they provide an unsubscribe link, those emails are automatically not spam.
It's those sites which I'm really glad Gmail automatically filters them out. Providing an email address because that's a requirement to have an account is not the same thing as giving approval to receive all your marketing and promotion spam.
Tracking image loads and clicks would be a much more effective method of determining that an address is valid for both legitimate mass emails and spam.
How many people do you think load images versus click Report Spam on an ISP with a feedback loop? And which group do you think would be a better target for future messages?
There are laws regulating e-mail solicitations. People can be sued for SPAM, and incur criminal charges. Basically, if any mail provider notices that lots of its users complain about SPAM, they have legal standing to bring that person before a judge. Sending out a warning of possible legal repercussions is the first step.
Presumably, the spammer is contacted via e-mail with a strongly worded message, since it's very clear that they have the ability to interact via e-mail.
In theory, you as an individual, could run your own mail server, and if you received spam, you could threaten to sue or press charges. At some point before you actually do that though, you'd probably try to contact the person first. When cmwelsh uses the word "ping", that's just a euphemism for making contact, and not a specific technical term of any kind.
Among the consumer-grade ESPs, Mailchimp has a reputation for being extremely strict about anti-spam enforcement.
No, but it's VASTLY more likely not to be (if the unsubscribe link is real and working).
> There are countless sites whose default behaviour goes like this:
> * require an email address to create an account to use their service
> * without stating this, automatically assume that they now have permission to send you whatever email they want - admin emails, special offers, partner promotions etc > * assume that because they provide an unsubscribe link, those emails are automatically not spam. > It's those sites which I'm really glad Gmail automatically filters them out. Providing an email address because that's a requirement to have an account is not the same thing as giving approval to receive all your marketing and promotion spam.
Well, if it's in their TOS (and on most the sites it probably is), then it probably is okay, and you have nobody to blame but yourself (as do we all). The current state isn't optimal, but it's what the public wanted. The race to low cost/free services subsidized by advertising has led to this.
If you really want to not be contacted for a promotion from a company, put your money where your mouth is and choose services where their business plan doesn't require pestering you to use them more.
edited to lighten the accusatory stance of "blame", as it didn't convey my real intent accurately
Just because its hidden in the fine print instead of explicitly disclosed at the point of collecting the email address does not make it "okay."
It might make it legal but that's not at all the same thing - a defense that falls back on legality means they have an adversarial relationship with that customer which generally means they've lost any future business from them. That's the last place a smart company wants their customer relationship to end up.
Similarly, attaching promotional materials to my receipts and other transactional mail is an abuse of the relationship.
Email is a means of personal communication. I trust that when I give out my email, it will only be used for the promised purposes - such as giving me order receipts, or establishing an account. Giving out this email for one purpose is not implicit permission to use it for another purpose.
If you gave them your e-mail address obviously for another purpose (for example, as an account ID, or to receive a confirmation message when your order is dispatched or your card is charged) and they then use it for general marketing then that's so clearly an abuse of trust that IMHO they deserve and should expect to be treated as a spammer.
As far as what the law says, here in Europe, you might get away with sending marketing to such addresses under PECR if you still collected the address at the time of a sale or in connection with a genuine sales enquiry. However, it's a fine line, and one mis-step in any of several conditions will put you the wrong side of the law. Also, the preceding comments relate to the specific EU anti-spamming regulations, but there are more general laws regarding harassment etc. in most jurisdictions as well.
There's a pretty simple test for your situation, really: if you want to send people marketing messages but aren't willing to ask their permission explicitly because you think they'll say no, your messages are probably spam and you're probably a spammer.
This isn't a conversation about "SPAM", it's a conversation about companies managing customer contact responsibly, and customers responding responsibly to the contact, which in some cases means not overreacting.
> There's a pretty simple test for your situation, really: if you want to send people marketing messages but aren't willing to ask their permission explicitly because you think they'll say no, your messages are probably spam and you're probably a spammer.
But that's begging the question, since you already put the reasoning in place. What if it's as simple as testing shows that customers will overwhelmingly opt-out initially, but then there's a steady influx of evidence that customers would benefit from some level of contact (i.e. support requests that say as much, forum posts, etc), such as noting when a previously charged for service is now free, when service outages are scheduled to happen, etc.
In the end, is it really so hard to see how a company acts in it's correspondence before vilifying it?
Sure it is, but some things are the wrong side of that line for most users. That's why there are laws against them.
Does that mean everyone needs to deal with no email communication by default just because a few people feel it's too hard to find a (legally required) opt-out link in the first email they receive?
As I said, if you're worried enough that you aren't willing to ask people to opt in instead, you're probably a spammer.
"Dealing with no email communication by default" is not what we're talking about. No-one here is saying you shouldn't send e-mails for the purpose that someone actually gave you their address, for example.
If you actually meant "dealing with no marketing email communication by default" then I'm pretty sure most people would "deal with" that just fine. When was the last time you heard someone complain that they didn't get spammed enough today, or their browsing experience was suffering from not having enough ads cluttering the pages they wanted to read?
This isn't a conversation about "SPAM"
I'm pretty sure it is. It's right there in the quote from the article in the first post of this thread, and in numerous further posts between there and here.
But that's begging the question
No, it wasn't. If I'd written "If you want to send people marketing messages that they don't want, you're a spammer", that would indeed have been a tautology. But I left you another option, finding out whether they want them or not by asking first.
In the end, is it really so hard to see how a company acts in it's correspondence before vilifying it?
No, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a company that specialises in sending bulk e-mail discussing the possibility of actively circumventing measures intended to stop users having to read marketing mails they don't want. Again, it's right there in the quotation at the top of this thread.
(Your other examples weren't unreasonable, but they also clearly weren't marketing mail assuming they related to people actually using the service you were sending the information about.)
Make each bit opt-in. Problem solved. These emails really should be off by default.
Previous time I made a similar point on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5705769
Why should I have to? Promotional mail is not like banner ads that a site may be depending on for most of its revenue (and many people are comfortable filtering those out despite that); it's just an annoying extra, which can always be opted out of with a few clicks anyway. But if I don't want to do that for whatever reason - perhaps I do want to receive the mail but not clutter up my regular inbox with it, perhaps I'm just lazy - as a user, I am perfectly within my rights to automatically classify it into its own section.
Of course you are. That was meant as a call to arms. If people want less commercial email, supporting businesses that make that a priority is the first step.
Complaining publicly about unwanted behavior in commercial companies and then continuing to use the services of those companies when alternatives exist (which they may not always) is hypocritical. OTOH, complaining to the companies about those practices is beneficial.
You usually only find out they are spammers after you sign up though? At which point, even if I leave the service, I still have to deal with the spam.
In short, stop using SPAM to mean "unwanted promotional email from a company I signed up with and have or have had in the recent past a business relationship with." They aren't the same thing, and don't deserve the same response.
It doesn't matter if I have a business relationship with the company. A 'business relationship' is what keeps them from violating the laws related to spam, but it's still spam.
Only when I purposefully and explicitly tell a company to put me on a mailing list is it not spam. If I'm making an account for other purposes it's not the same thing. If I make a purchase it's definitely not the same thing.
The CAN-SPAM Act defines commercial messages as those
that primarily advertise or promote a commercial product or
service. The FCC’s ban does not cover “transactional or
relationship” messages -- that is, notices to facilitate a
transaction you have already agreed to -- for example,
messages that provide information about your existing
account or warranty information about a product you’ve
purchased.
If you don't want that, opt out.
If you don't like how they handled the email process, complain to the company.
If you still don't like it, stop using the service.
Anything else just means that they have no way of notifying you about anything unless you visit their site. In some cases, I sure as hell want to know if they are offering free services or other promotions. In others, I opt out.
>If you have an account with them, and it's informational, even if it's just about a new service you can take advantage on that account you already have, they can contact you about it.
They can but they shouldn't unless I asked.
> If you don't want that, opt out.
If it's opt-out then the company loses a lot of points.
> If you don't like how they handled the email process, complain to the company.
Even better, I can warn potential customers about the way the company acts.
> If you still don't like it, stop using the service.
See above.
> Anything else just means that they have no way of notifying you about anything unless you visit their site. In some cases, I sure as hell want to know if they are offering free services or other promotions. In others, I opt out.
They can notify me all they want about the actual transactions I am performing with them, monetary or other. But when it comes to solicitation they should have a very explicit opt-in process.
The truth is I think we are probably that far apart in what we believe is acceptable. I think that having all communications not specifically pertaining to an actual transaction on an existing account be opt-in explicitly is unworkable, but only slightly. I think it's great in theory, but that it breaks down in the face of reality and what people find they really want and find acceptable.
Really my point here is to fight back against people re-labeling "unwanted commercial emails from companies I do business with" as spam, as unwanted is not the same as unsolicited.
I've fought the real battle here; I was an admin at an ISP and maintained mail servers, dealt with spam filters, deployed new spam solutions, and had to deal with the constant misuse of the system to send spam through compromised accounts. Having people use the label of spam just to pull along the emotional reaction of the reader really seems to get me worked up.
It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?
Somehow everyone decided that even though companies were being annoying they would put up with it to get the service, and here we are.
My point is that complaining publicly while not changing your behavior is pointless. If enough people actually DID choose a social network that wasn't as aggressive in it's emails, not only would there then be more people on those networks, but the others would change as well.
> It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?
And what happened with that? People took action, and either avoided those sites or used blockers so they were ineffective. If it still worked we would see more of it.
Personally, I consider any promotional mail that was not double-opted-in (that is I had to take some affirmative action to receive a confirmation link, and then I confirmed it) to be spam. I also consider any promotional materials stapled to transactional mail to be spam. I know I am not unique in this opinion.
Citation needed. Mail Chimp strongly recommends double-opt in, I think it's the default. I very much doubt its "almost always" single opt-in.
Now they're not being shoved in my face, not obscuring personal email (which used to be a problem with the old single inbox: I'd miss email from my mom amongst a bunch of random low-value emails), and not sending me annoying alerts on my phone. I don't have to skip past reams of "promotions" when I want to open that email from a friend I got a few days ago. I don't think I see, or open, or "open" promotional email any more or less often than before, but now that it's more on my terms, my mood when I do so is better.
For companies that use promotional email in an honest and straight-forward manner, I suspect the net result of this change may be positive... it's not just about "opens", it's also about the impression your email makes and how that effects peoples' attitude towards your company/service.
Anything gmail can do to keep all manner of commercial solicitations out of my inbox is welcomed. I actually disabled the visibility of the "promotions/spam" tab, but kept the filter, and will happily never have to look at that crap again.
My Gmail spambox already contains 40-50% legitimate emails that I have to rescue manually, so I already know I can't rely on Google filtering things properly...
I don't think I've had the same issue with MailChimp, but if I do, I'll do the same with them.
Unfortunately not all companies are as virtuous as MailChimp. What I've found is that despite unsubscribing various things happen like the unsubscribe link takes you to a 404 or 500 or the company doesn't actually unsubscribe you.
Why does it take "up to a week" for some companies to unsubscribe you anyway? Are the batch processes that long for something like unsubscribing? There should be some kind of global business rule that suppresses emails to non-subscribers instantly.
I can easily figure out who's spamming me, and who's sold my email address to others (or, perhaps, has been compromised and my passwords should be changed -- or the existence of the account rethought).
If I had been more diligent about setting up folders and email filters, of course, I would've filed these kinds of mails into their own folder already, like I already do with mailing lists. But they crop up often enough (every time you do business with a new company) that it's tedious to keep up. So I like that Google is helping me out in helping to auto-sort them.
It's the same with the Updates tab. I get that Facebook and Twitter are really noisy. But I want the updates I'm currently getting to go in my inbox. That's why I haven't unsubscribed from them.
It's all filters I could have set up myself, but the default filtering pretty closely aligns with my preferences, so for me at least it's working. And so far, Google has actually never moved out of my Inbox any email where I've opted in to receive the email. The only things getting filtered are things I never asked for.
Most of the time when checking email, I only want to know if something urgent and personal has come up. I can read the mailing lists and newsletters once a week when bored.
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)
cite: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-eas...
As far as I'm concerned, Gmail tabs are totally useless.
Once in a while I drag a message elsewhere to train it, but no more than once a month...
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.
Mixpanel is one of the worst offenders of faux-personalized email. "I see you logged on today - were you able to accomplish what you wanted?" "I noticed that you were checking out the funnels feature. Can we set up a time to chat?" Go away.
[1] https://www.taskrabbit.com/sf-bay-area/search?search=handwri...
If you were on the other side of the equation, how would you deal with trying to get real feedback about your product? To me, it's fair to thing a company that's goes through the expense and effort to have a real person (taskrabbit or not) contact me deserves just a bit more consideration.
Funny results of this are the fact that I'll be working on something over the weekend, trigger one of these automated messages, and email a response: "Oh yeah, I had a question, thanks for noticing!" Naturally I don't hear back until some time the following week.
It is always hard getting real feedback about your product. But a message like "Hey, you just joined, and I think you could do a better job with the way you structure your sales data" - because a human had looked at our business, looked at the way we used their product, and spent a moment trying to come up with a way to be helpful - would be way cooler to me than an automated tripwire.
For me, part of the reason the handwritten notes (shifting away from email for a moment) resonate with us is because we feel like an employee of the company - a grateful, hard-working employee - decided to spend their time painstakingly writing me a personalized note. That's why we write cards to our loved ones over the holidays.
But when you can pay someone to do that, then the CEO doesn't care - they're just factoring it into the customer acquisition cost. Which is totally okay. But it is equivalent to saying "I don't mind paying higher prices for Apple products because the unboxing experience is so great."
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.
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).
For example, if I'm sending a "Here's your password reset email" via MailChimp, will I now have to worry about it not just potentially going into spam, but also under some tab that the user may not look.
I'm only really concerned about the transactional email, whilst we send list mail too I think it's reasonable that is classified however the user and the user client deems fit (if they wish to receive that at all). But when it comes to an email that the user has explicitly requested and expects immediately, not having it go straight to their visible and main inbox is an issue.
This could be both good and bad. Bad because as you mention, the user won't see it immediately even if they requested it. Good because if the user actually uses and likes your service, they may start to take those transactional emails to their Priority inbox which could train it to also respect the marketing type e-mails as Priority as well. Again, this would only happen if the user actually likes your service.
Transactional email deliverability is more important than marketing emails to me. If needs must, I'll host my own again... but I really like not managing email servers and fighting blacklists.
I hope Gmail figure this one out... the transactional emails should always hit the inbox. I think most users would be fine if the marketing emails hit the promotions tab.
I'm not sure it should be all or nothing... but I know that every user would agree that the transactional emails that they explicitly want should hit their inbox.
No implication that this is the reason for the change, but it probably means more spending on traditional web advertising.
"I’ve heard a lot of people asking how they can get out of
the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab."
EDIT: Also, many users might feel like Promos is the right tab. For example, Weight Watchers emails me recipes, which is a bit like a developer getting Javascript tips. This also goes in Promos, and that seems like the right place for it, even though it's useful/actionable information.
That turned it on for me.
I use lots of filters and labels to categorize my mail already. I have label 'Shopping' and have a bunch of filters set to skip inbox, so I only see it if I click the 'Shopping' label. This works well for sales emails I am subscribed too, but doesn't help for new sales emails, although most of that ends up in the Spam folder.
They're lucky Google even deliver them to any tab - based on their own figures it's almost a 90% chance of their email being binned by end users (OK, not opened but that's pretty much the same thing). On systems I administer that's way above the threshold I'd consider for blacklist/auto-reject.
Without trying to disparage their business, Mailchimp and associated 'services' are rarely providing 'quality' email in my experience and I don't get customers calling me up asking me to make sure such emails come through. Quite the opposite.
It's hard in the mass email business because most people (e.g. almost 90% it seems) think the emails are crap and don't want them or open them. If that's upsetting then don't complain. You need to look for a different business where you'll feel more loved and appreciated. Mass email is not it and never will be.
I don't want your sales-funnel emails full of doublespeak and marketing buzzwords.
You think your email is full of helpful info about your product but it's not. It's just spam.
I have over 120,000 developers who subscribe to my e-mail newsletters and I suspect most subscribers would not consider them "Promotions." Hopefully those who care to read every week will drag them back into the main inbox but I imagine some will fall by the wayside. (Not that I'm panicking, I'm not noticing much of a/any drop in open rates at all.)
But with the Promotions tab, I check the titles, and if they're not interesting, I mark them together as read without opening it.
So, my reading behaviour hasn't changed even though tracking my open rate with tracking pixels will now show different results. If it's an interesting email, I'll read it. If not, I won't.
This is actually a really important UX/CX thing to keep in mind when creating newsletters or other emailed publications with actual content as the product. My Pycoder's Weekly ended up in Promotions tab. Since I don't look at it every day, my initial thought was I didn't receive it.
In order to have it show up in Primary, I had to create a rule on the sender. We'll see if this actually works.
Granted, Pycoder's Weekly is ad-supported, but that's what I opted in for.
For others creating similar subscriptions, it's probably worthwhile to mention this gmail behavior in an FAQ or some other instructions.
"I dug deep into our database and pulled every delivery to Gmail for the past year and half. That amounts to 12.5 billion emails".
Then he says
"As you might suspect, Gmail opens do follow these hourly, weekly, and seasonal trends, but on the whole they remain fairly steady. With that settled, I trimmed my data to a lean 6 weeks around the introduction of tabs. That’s about 1.5 billion emails, which is plenty of records for a good analysis."
So, 1.5 years = 12.5B Gmail emails
But last 6 weeks = 1.5B Gmail emails
That doesn't sound right.
Unless MailChimp is on some type of unbelievable (true) exponential growth rate in the past few months.
Edit: typo
6 weeks * 160 million ~ 960 million emails.
So the last 6 weeks is 156% of the average. That seems like good growth, not unbelievable growth.
1500000000 / (6 * 7) (6 weeks) == roughly 35m e-mails per day over the past six weeks.
I have an acquaintance who had an online account compromised, his shipping address changed, and stuff ordered... He didn't notice the change/receipt emails because of all the garbage emails he receives from said vendor.
It's a serious problem. I feel the same way about technical recruiters for the most part now too... I get maybe 3-5 emails a day, and 3/4 are either out of state, and/or well below what I make now... I'm not interested in either generally speaking. That doesn't even count all the "connect with me on linked in" requests from people I don't know, and the emails that go with them.
Hell, even twitter is in on it all now.
Ultimately, if I don't open the email, the content isn't that useful. Before I would quickly open and delete when done, just to keep my inbox clean.
Does it mean I pay less attention to the marketing messages? No.
I feel like the fact that they're now explicitly tabs is a compromise that allows a marketer to still get the user's attention without filling up the "inbox" with what might be considered spam.
At home I use an IMAP client anyway.
News flash: you don't own my inbox.
If you'd like to disable the tab interface in GMail, here's how you do it: Log on, click the gears in the top right corner - below your user profile icon. Select "Configure inbox" and de-select "Social" and "Promotions".
I first thought it was impossible to do this when I found this configuration page, because the first option is "greyed out" and unclickable.
This seems like the first time you're allowed to not eat the Gone Google Again-bullet - which is good for me as a user! Sometimes I really don't want to get your new feature or design.
Are you e-mailing your users to tell them about a new feature? Why not show them an in-app message instead, when they are logged on and engaged? Are you e-mailing a custom offer to a certain segment of your user base? Show them the offer when they're on your site.
Obviously, if you are contacting users that are not visiting your site at all, then e-mail is still king.
Personally, I am glad to see Gmail implement this kind of separation so well.
Full disclosure/plug: I work for Evergage (http://evergage.com) and we provide this behavioral-driven in-app messaging.
Edit to add analogy: it's like saying JCrew does not need to send catalogs because they have great signage in their stores.
But I'll run with your analogy. JCrew can send me a targeted 20% off coupon, for example because I am a store cardholder or it's my birthday month. However, the purpose of that coupon is not solely to drive return visits. I might frequently stop by a JCrew while in a mall to look at merchandise, but I might be much more likely to convert if I knew I had a coupon.
However, when I am actually at JCrew in a mall, JCrew won't have signage with my coupon and won't recognize it's my birthday. It sure would be nice though.
Nevertheless very insightful, and I appreciate the use of data as opposed to many of the anecdotal reviews of Gmail's new inbox swirling around HN these days.
It is however much much more useful for Google from a business perspective.
Lower openrates mean less eyeballs and revenue, which will in turn translate into more adwords and display placements. Obviously not directly, and probably not in most cases, but it should, even if it's only a few percent or less, translate into more revenue for Google. How much is anybody's guess.
If I were an E-Mail marketer or a big brand though, I'd be furious and try any other channels but Google's. In my eyes, it smells like Google using its market power to bully their own customers. They pulled a classic Facebook with this one ;)
This, even without any further context, describes what 99% of Gmail users would consider an overwhelming positive.
Want to increase your rates? Send your email to the user's facebook account. Those get read almost instantly.
A standard open rate (across email clients) is between 15-30%. However it's possible to consistently hit a 50-60% open rate, if you know what you are doing, basically meaning using correct techniques and content / offers that are really relevant to your recipients. BoringCo sending emails titled "March newsletter" will get 5-10% typically.
(Amusingly it put an old girlfriend's "my new page is at" in promotions.)
[1] http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en-US/features.html
(I added "Financial" and "Sales" labels later)
Edit: apparently it was turned on but not displaying any tabs. In the settings gear I found "Configure Inbox" where I disabled these.
And I'd venture to guess that those who know don't know how to set up a mail client.