Will Gmail Tabs Improve Legitimate Visit Metrics?

Since Google launched its new Gmail inbox featuring the Tabs functionality in May 2013, the email marketing world has been scrambling to understand the impact on visitor characteristics and web metrics.

According to eConsultancy, this is what your tabs would contain:

·        Primary: Messages from friends and family, as well as any other messages that don’t appear in other tabs.

·        Promotions: Your deals, offers, and other promotional emails.

·        Social: Messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, gaming platforms, and other social websites.

·        Updates: Notifications such as confirmations, receipts, bills, and statements.

·        Forums: Messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists.

The impact on promotional email marketing

Of course, this introduction of Gmail’s tabbed layout caused a lot of worries among email marketers. What does this new layout mean for commercial and promotional email campaigns?

Does this mean a decrease in opens, clicks and eventually revenue? The introduction of this new feature has upsides and downsides and can be seen differently based on what your goals are and what you are measuring. In fact different browsers and clients show very different results as seen from Litmus:

Silverpop is beginning to see changes in Gmail subscriber engagement, but it’s not clear whether or how much Tabs is driving this. Return Path and Litmus (both Silverpop partners) found mixed results when studying Tabs’ effect on email engagement.

ReturnPath’s study from August 2013 said “read rate” in the first week or so after Gmail Tabs went into general rollout went up 2.1 percent among highly engaged readers. Inbox placements rates also went up both for medium- and low-engaged customers. However, the read rate plunged nearly 80 percent among lowest-engaged readers, from 2.2 percent before Tabs to 0.42 percent after. Litmus’ study found that Gmail opens fell 18 percent from mid-May to mid-August 2013.

However, Litmus also found Gmail opens had declined overall by 13 percent since July 2012. In the approximately six weeks following the Gmail Tabs announcement, Litmus saw a 7.8 percent decrease in Gmail opens as percentage of total opens across all email clients. Further, its study revealed that Gmail opens accounted for only about 4 percent of total email opens across all email clients. Also, 41 percent of those opens (roughly 1.6 percent of all email opens) occurred in Gmail clients that support Tabs. 

What does it mean for my email campaigns?

An email that gets placed in the Promotions tab faces different types of competition. First it competes with other email marketing campaigns.Second it also competes with Gmail’s native inbox ad placements. Which is kind of a set back, as these inbox ads are placed above “normal” promotional emails, pushing these campaigns even further down the folder.

The main worries for email marketers are the following. Firstly, recipients will spend less time reading emails in the Promotions tab, than those in the Primary tab. Secondly, triggered and transactional emails might lose their effectiveness with this new feature.

These emails are highly effective for ecommerce professionals because they are timely and relevant. In fact, abandoned shopping cart emails have the highest return on investment when sent within the first few hours after the abandonment. If these messages appear in the Promotions tab, it could reduce their effectiveness and the revenue they generate. 

In fact, Return Path sees this as a positive development and believe that Gmail users who matter most to marketers appear likely to continue reading their email at the same rates they always did, and the most engaged may actually read more. The impact of Tabs and similar inbox organizers may vary widely among brands, though. Those with higher concentrations of less engaged subscribers may indeed see sharp drops in email marketing response, while the ones who succeed at engaging their audiences actually enjoy a lift thanks to Tabs.

Bottom Line? If you are sending relevant email communications to an engaged audience, Gmail tabs may actually improve your visit metrics and your marketing effectiveness.

Want to learn more? Download the white papers from the following sites:

Linthorst, M. (2013, October 13). The effect of Gmail Tabs on email marketing. Retrieved January 19, 2014 from: http://econsultancy.com/blog/63569-the-effect-of-gmail-tabs-on-email-marketing

Silverpop (2013, December) Gmail Tabs: Impact on Email Marketing and Strategies to Respond. Retrieved January 19, 2014 from: http://www.silverpop.com/marketing-resources/white-papers/all/2013/Gmail-Tabs/

Return Path, (2013) Gmail Tabs Don’t Stop Shoppers: So Far So Good for Email Marketers. Retrieved January 19, 2014 from: http://landing.returnpath.com/gmail-tabs-marketing-impact-analysis-report-thanks