Slow death of email marketing?

Saw that as well.

The weird thing is, I am getting some of my list in my inbox and some others are going to "promotions". All through aWeber so I don't know if the subject has something to do with it?

A very funny thing happened recently. I recovered a Gmail address that I'd forgotten password to. And, it had been about five years since last accessing. And, there were 17k+ spam emails from various internet marketers. To be honest, I had to give up the gmail address as there's no way I can possibly delete that much spam. So much for the idea that spam is dead, as most of the emails were from the past year, from subscriptions I'd made when I first got the Gmail box.

This has been hashed out already here:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post8235385

I saw this too and I'm actually a bit concerned. If other email providers follow suit, then open rates will certainly decrease all across the board. Going to look into it some more and see if anything needs to be done to sustain/improve open rates with Gmail users (and any other providers who implement these changes).

Yep, pretty disconcerting, isn't it? As Devid Farah just mentioned, you can get rid of the tabbed view altogether (my preference), but gmail doesn't make it obvious how to do so. I expect most users will not bother, and that opens are going to take a hard hit, fast.

rofl... it must be a veeeeery slow death, email marketing was declared to be dying over 15 years ago, when RSS started being popular...and yet...

I believe email marketing will be alive and well for as long as direct marketing will carry on working. And direct marketing has been working for at least the past century already, so I'm pretty optimistic ;-)

I haven't noticed any drop in open rates for the past couple of days, but maybe someone else has? I'm not really worried about Gmail tabs, but about tabbed email becoming the industry standard.

The strange thing is, some of the autoresponder emails ends up in the primary folder and some of my partners mails ends up in promotions. I really hope none of the other bigs, like Yahoo and Hotmail, don't adopt this absurd strategy of dividing in 3 folders all the emails.

Or this will really be a big blow against email marketing...

Most of the emails that're having 'unsubscribe' keyword directly goes into 'Promotions' tab. So I guess we need to either rename it or remove that word from our mail..

I guess the auto responders should look into this matter seriously, they should provide us some solution for 'unsubscribe' link which will be automatically appended for every email that we send!

I remember this same conversation when the "Priority Inbox" came out. We'll find a way to adapt. We always do.

Here's what everyone's talking about (in case you've never seen it):



As a Gmail user, I really dig the sorting.

As a buyer, I find myself reading more promo emails than usual, and doing so when I'm actually in the best (buying) mindset to do so. I've definitely read lots of broadcast emails I wouldn't have before they were sorted together for me in Promotions.

I've also deleted a metric TON of email I don't care about. In fact, it's made it more clear which emails I want to see and which I can safely unsub from. That's not necessarily a bad thing - who wants to carry/pay for subs that don't want/open/read/click your emails?

As a marketer, it's more important than ever to have solid email copy chops and development top-of-mind awareness with your subscribers.

Best,

Brian McLeod

I got "upgraded" today as well.

And while I understand the fears that you guys have... I think they're a little too excessive.

It's not difficult to switch between tabs, everyone and their 90 year old mother will figure it out pretty quickly.

And it's not like your readers will completely ignore the Promotions tab. That's where all of the big companies like Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc. are going to be. People will still check it for coupons and stuff.

In some ways, your email will be easier to find by customer, because it will be higher in the Promotions tab.

Besides- as some people already mentioned, if your list likes you, they'll be looking for your emails anyways.

The internet's proverbial skies aren't falling yet.

Thanks Dan for the heads up, I wasn't aware of the new tabs as they didn't make it to my gmail account yet.

Lots of autoresponder tests coming ...

Gmail takes into account the subject line. If gmail is getting hit with a lot of emails with the same subjects that raise flags then they will send it to spam inbox sometimes, even with AWeber.

Call me crazy, but I believe that in the long run this may be a good thing for those who have a real business and are providing valuable solutions to their prospects' & customers' problems. For those throwing up simple bribes to get the sub so they can bombard people with affiliate offers, etc...maybe not so much. Time will tell.

Some of you may not know this...

But every email that is sent by a major email service provider (ESP) has a silent "header" inserted into it called "list-unsubscribe". All Gmail needs to do is read the header and filter that email into the proper "Promotions" tab. And no, you can't disable that header in any way if you're using a reputable ESP.

If that's not enough, I'm pretty sure Gmail is already familiar with all of Aweber, GetResponse, MailChimp, etc SMTP server IP addresses. They can simply filter those IP's into the Promotions tab.

If you get sneaky and decide to send directly from a server without the header or unsubscribe link, they'll eventually isolate your IP address and domains and filter using those variables. Plus, you could potentially violate CAN-SPAM if another opt out mechanism isn't provided.

Bottom line: There's very little that can be done technologically to bypass the promotions tab if Google goes nuts with it.

The only thing that will work is educating your customers. Give them clear instructions on how to move your emails into the Inbox tab. I'm sure that Aweber is already working on a new "confirmation" page with video instructions.

Is sure is going to affect the open rates but then it is also time to educate and "train" your subscribers.

Out of everyone I never expected a 'death of' thread from you Brad.

Ofcourse this is not the death of email marketing nor even close to being the death.

Look at the WSO forum. How many people are in their searching for offers each and every day? Yes, the average consumer in this industry seek out opportunities, they don't just sit there to be told about them. If all of the promos are going to a new tab then that's exactly where they will be going to look for all those offers they have been missing.

If anything it makes it easier for them to go through all the promo emails faster.

I honestly think the average person in this industry likes to be marketed to and would feel lost and alone if all those emails suddenly stopped.

Just tell your subscribers to check in their promotion tab folder to receive emails from us and to add our autoresponder "from email address" into their personal contact list :|

Put this on your confirm your email or thank you page. Isn't this how we have always done to prevent our emails to be categorized as spam?

There. No need for a WSO.

Gmail might as well have named the tab as "Spam" as "Promotions" has almost the same connotation. It is people throwing a bunch of promotions at you.

Like it or not, if your email is in that tab, you ought to take this seriously. Marketing is the path of least resistance. If people have to wade through a pile of promotional junk, you better be top quality. The game rules have changed, if there are people who still think they can do email marketing the old way and expect the same response from their email list, its just not going to happen.

Charles Kirkland among many have realized this and moved fast and hard to nip this problem in the bud. The best solution is to educate the list with a video how to move the email to the main tab.

Gmail is more organize now, I think its not death, its improvement.

E-mail marketing is not dying, it's just evolving and perhaps new and improved strategies must be developped to reach the desired customers.

Anyone can have the "new tabs" or turn them off (like I did) by going to "Settings" and "Configure inbox"

Also, as Willie said, all email communication is inheriently *NOT* private. This has nothing to do with the NSA or PRISM and more to do with how the SMTP protocol works. Your email may pass through 2-3 "servers" when getting delivered to an end users email box. Because of this... each server is legally allowed to read the email (and email headers) to be able to pass that email on. Because of how email works (and the need to read email headers) this also could never be made illegal. Having an SMTP server (at say, a company) that aliases email addresses to backup emails to a directory, wouldn't be illegal (in the simplest terms, although there are always exceptions).

If you are concerned, you should encrypt your emails.

On a different perspective, I was wondering what happens if the contact whitelists your address? Would it still go into the promotion box?

We could aim at that direction and move.

I've been in touch with my auto-responder service already about this!

Hopefully there will be a solution to do this sooner rather than later.

The relationship should be built BEFORE someone opts in not afterwards. If you've done that right then by the time they opt in they already have enough of a relationship with you to want to open and read your emails.

I would think that unsubscribe links are going to be huge giveaways that it is a promotion. I am sure Google will build a profile of different unsubscribe links and key off of those. That's what I would look for.

I was wondering why I hadn't been receiving certain emails for the past few days then realised that google and lumped that stuff into "promotional". Looked in there and all the emails from sign ups were sitting lonely in there. People tend to just look in their main folder so it could be a hassle for them to find what we send..

I completely agree with M Thompson! Relationship is everything.

I don't WANT people on my list who are going to make a spam complaint over me putting a link to an educational blog post, over one thousand words with nothing to purchase whatsoever...

However, the folks that want to be on my list will read my emails regardless of what tab it ends up in...

Think it's time I make a video for my list showing them how to whitelist my email and make sure it ends up in the tab they prefer...

Great idea!

- Carol

i personally couldn't care less and i'm not concerned at all

the fact is if people want to hre from you then they will make sure that they can by marking your emails as friendly or what ever they need to do

the way i see this is the people that build good relationships with their readers and subs will benefit and the ones that just spam and don't do so well will lose out

anyone that wants to still follow someone will make sure they can and anyone that they don't really care about will be left

i see this as good news for good email marketers and bad for bad email marketers

Love the last couple of thoughts on this topic... I have to echo the same idea... if someone WANTS to hear from you, they'll find your email; plain and simple - just make sure you provide enough information/value that they look forward to hearing from you.

Email... PPC... SEO... social... it all changes, constantly; stay on your grind and keep ahead of the pack... stay up to date on changes and adjust accordingly - stack the odds in your favor when possible and take action; from there, let the chips fall where they may!