Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

Thanks for the update. This is very interesting but it only impacts the open rates for emails. As such, I'm not concerned. It's all about the click for me. Clicks make money...not open rates.

Google are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. They try and portray this image that they are against people collecting information, but they themselves, scan through your emails, collect all kinds of data, and stalk you all over the web so they can serve you ads

They share your info with any country willing to take it, but HEY they respect your privacy

The comments to that article are funny. They refer to spam as anything they don't want, and think it will stop real spammers.

-g

Keep up the good work Google Daddy!


I love ya. This is great news for us, that offer REAL services and not junk marketing crap.s.o's clickbunk and jvjuck products.

This is really a second major blow to email marketers as they introduced the Promotions tab earlier this year. There is going to reach a point where google can't grow anymore and it will be interesting. They are certainly flying high now.

This isn't bad, it's actually good. The open rate will show true open rate, only recording it once when it's opened rather than multiple times when people open the email a second time.

I think Google is going to cache the image and show it only once to every person receiving the same email. I'm guessing they will be scanning the emails, and if it's the same, subscribers will see that same cached image from Google's servers.

Dude, don't come in here spamming your blog post with a one liner.

I've been studying this for a few hours, the technicalities, the consequences, the fixes etc. It is worth noting to begin with that only some Gmail accounts have images shown automatically (similar to Gmail Tabs where only some accounts have it).

There is good and bad to this, it is mostly good for email marketers and not so good for some email service providers who are experiencing problems. The good is that obviously all images in Gmail are now shown automatically, so it gives marketers more incentive to include images in their emails, where previously it was not always a good idea as the recipient has to click on view images to see the images, and most people won't take even that simple extra step (particularly if you send emails that look similar to plain text emails), so it will either show as a blank image or nothing. Now, all images are shown in Gmail so marketers who include images have an advantage and can experience improved click-through rates. You can, for example, include an image of a video that links to the actual video or an image of your product or headline.

The bad is mainly that for a small section of email service providers, it is causing the problem with the open tracking (and even geo tracking), where in some cases repeat opens and even unique opens are not tracked. But overall, it appears there is a fix for the open tracking problem (related to the technology/code of the open tracking pixel) and email service providers who apply that fix solve the problem of repeat opens not being tracked (or even worse scenarios, as has been rumored).

So in short, if you don't find any irregularities with your open tracking stats in the past two weeks as compared to before, then the email service provider has done a good job doing the fix/fixes (mostly to do with the email tracking pixel), or there was no need to do any adjustments, and there is no problem with that. In theory, unique opens should increase (for some email service providers who set up the pixel in a certain way) as all images on Gmail are now showing, but this remains to be seen.

Now there is actually an advantage for email marketers who use images because they will now be displayed automatically.