Brian Lees

We’re now one week into the launch of Gmail’s priority inbox, I’ve heard mixed reviews but overall many Gmail users appear to be pleased with this new piece of functionality. I personally think its fantastic, the Gmail priority inbox combines a logical user interface with an intelligent “brain” on the backend that is constantly learning about what is important to me. And if it doesn’t get things right, I can tell it what to do…. perfect!

Now, when I take off my Gmail user hat, and think about the priority inbox as an email marketer, I have mixed emotions. It makes our lives just a little bit more difficult, we have to think a little harder about developing relevant campaign content and we have to be much more diligent when designing marketing campaigns that are reaching customers at the most appropriate time. That said, Gmail is still the #3 webmail provider and the other big players (Yahoo and Hotmail) don’t have a similar feature in the works, so we aren’t talking about an immediate impact across all ESPs.  Also, old habits are hard to break and it is really easy to go back to the classic inbox. In fact I saw a number of posts from users this week that had to change their browser favorite link to point to the priority inbox vs. the gmail classic inbox.  The best way to look at the challenges that email marketers may or may not face is to look through a short term then a long term lens, as outlined below:

Short Term

Challenges

• Timeliness is key – For email marketers that wait to communicate to customers weeks after they’ve opted in and/or purchased, they’ll need to change their strategy now. The longer the wait to communicate to customers, the less likely they will open messages, which means they will likely receive a lower priority, and may never get opened.
• Relevance – Both the subject line and the message body should be relevant to each customer. Because the priority inbox measures opens and clicks, it is important that each message is engaging.
• Interval – Delivering timely and relevant communications at the appropriate interval will determine if customers regularly open and click on a message. Brands that have longer buying cycles but frequently communicate to customers will need to be very cautious about the content of the message and may need to reevaluate the frequency of delivery (to gmail.com users).

Summary

Due to Gmail’s market share and the fact that the priority inbox is still very new, I would consider the short term effects of the priority inbox to be minor. That said, following the rules above will give email marketers a higher rate of success when vying for inbox attention. Marketers should regularly measure the effectiveness of their email campaigns to gmail.com recipients to determine if further changes to campaign tactics are necessary.

Long Term

The long term implications actually have less to do with Gmail itself but if other ESPs build similar functionality. Of course Gmail will likely gain more market share which will play a role, but what really matters is if the priority inbox becomes an industry standard for webmail, mobile email application, and desktop applications.  My hunch is that this functionality will become much more mainstream, and change what I consider a short term minor challenge to an every day challenge in email marketing.

The gmail priority inbox feature is set to released this week, some of you may already have it. I’ve not yet seen the update on my account, I can say as an email marketer I am very interested seeing it first hand. The priority inbox means a lot to users that have a cluttered inbox, and it is not a tool that requires a ton of configuration. Gmail will automatically categorize messages based on their level of importance using a number of criteria like how often you’ve viewed a message from a specific sender, keywords within a given message and whether the message was delivered only to you. Bottom line, it’s brilliant and we’ll likely see other ESPs adding this feature in the future.

So, what does this mean to email marketers? Inbox competition is even more challenging, relevance is key if you are going to get your customers attention. The shotgun approach of sending a single message that you hope will appeal to everyone were gone a long time ago, but the priority inbox  is yet another nail in the coffin. When it comes to features like the priority inbox the challenge for marketers is going to be the first touch in the customers lifecycle. It is imperative that the customers attention be captured otherwise messages will be less visible. Products/services that have a much longer buying cycle may also be affected, unless messages from the sender are flagged as important I suspect their relative priority over all other messages and will have to fight even harder to get their customers attention.

After I’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit, I’ll post some more on the Gmail Priority Inbox this week. More soon…..

The days of using a single email address as a method of communicating to contacts/customers are long over. Between email, social networks, sales force automation tools we have a ton of “lists” we are trying to keep up with on a day to day basis. To solve your contact management woes, try Gist, it organizes contacts across most mainstream sources and provides the latest information on your contacts via a simple user interface.

We all know Facebook and Twitter are powerful vehicles for communicating to customers. Each are easy to use, require little to no upfront set up and of course, their free! There is however, one core challenge for marketers, gathering actionable information about their fans and followers. The good news is information can be gathered and marketers can convert followers/fans to leads through some simple and advanced steps.

Starting Simple

1. Let’s start with Facebook, so you have a ton of followers but have no clue of their identity, their value or their current placement in the customer lifecycle (prospect, customer, lapsed customer, lost customer). At the very least, any portion of your site that captures customer information should have a simple checkbox asking customers if they follow you on Facebook. A response will help marketers understand who their followers truly are, and will help engage followers more effectively.
2. Like Facebook, the same applies with Twitter, insert a question asking if they are a follower on Twitter. With twitter you can take it to the next level by requesting the customer’s Twitter user id, it’s not required but is really useful, I’ll explain this later.

Some Advanced Steps

1. Facebook’s application API gives marketers the ability to create a variety of applications that Facebooks users can add to their profile and interact with on a regular basis. The benefit of Facebook applications is key information about Facebook followers can be captured when they add/install the application. This truly converts the facebook follower to an actionable lead (or you find out they are already a customer). This step obviously requires some development effort but in my opinion is the best way to understanding who your fans truly are. An excellent example of a Facebook application is the Boston Celtics 3 point play game.
2. As mentioned above, capturing a user’s twitter id can be beneficial for marketers. When capturing a customers twitter user id, marketers can identify patterns among active twitter users and their purchase activity. There are various ways of capturing twitter activity through social media monitoring tools, I won’t go into the details in this post but a great reference can be found on Sales Rescue Team’s blog 195 Social Media Monitoring Tools.

All of the above does require a bit of effort and analysis but will really help marketers understand and effectively target their customers with relevant communications via social marketing, mobile marketing and email marketing channels.

Take a look at the last 10 email or print marketing messages you’ve received, and you will find most will make reference to their presence on at least a handful of the popular social networks. Whether or not you have decided to follow these brands we are clearly seeing a shift in how customers are consuming information and how brands are communicating. Now, take these same brands and unless you have opted to receive tweets,  facebook updates etc via text, its likely that only a handful are reaching you through any definable mobile marketing strategy.

Compared to email, direct mail and social, marketers are still reluctant to adopt a mobile marketing strategy or even complement their direct mail, social or email marketing campaigns with what is obviously a viable channel. It’s estimated that there are 285.6 million wireless subscriber connections in the United States (CTIA 2009) compared to 221 million Internet users online in the United States (eMarketer 2010). With that in mind one would think most marketers would be far along in their mobile marketing strategy but that is clearly not the case. Currently, less than one third of marketers believe that optimizing a mobile marketing experience is important to their customers (eMarketer – July 28).

Sure, mobile has some challenges, of the current wireless subscriber base 50 million are smartphone owners (TechNewsDaily – July 9), so only a fraction (50 million is still a ton!) of mobile devices can view web enabled content. Also, communicating to a customer via text can be challenging due to text message limitations and maybe marketers feel mobile messaging is too intrusive. Then there is the time and effort to develop and host a mobile optimized website. These are all excuses in my opinion, and not a reason for failing to supplement your current marketing strategy with a clear mobile marketing strategy. The numbers paint an obvious picture, there is clearly less “inbox competition” in mobile as you will find in email, direct mail or social which is a great opportunity that marketers should not ignore.

In addition to the numbers already provided some other reasons to think more about mobile:

• Mobile messages generally go to a more captive audience, think about the last time you didn’t have your mobile phone on hand. Receiving and viewing a mobile marketing message now, vs receiving an email later could make the difference in a customers decision to purchase your product.
• Most email or direct mail marketing messages can be supplemented with a short text message that simply points the user to a mobile optimized web page of content that has already been created.
• Mobile messages are generally more simple by nature because you only have 160 characters to work with!
• Mobile optimized web site content follows a similar principle, due to small screen sizes you can develop a simple yet effective website that is accessible by most devices.

When you decide to take the plunge, keep these things in mind:

• Start simple then expand, I often see grandiose visions that are great but eventually lose steam. Keep the vision in mind but also break the strategy down into releasable milestones. There is no need for a “big bang”, incrementally refining your mobile marketing strategy is good practice and will keep your brand fresh in the eyes of the consumer.
• Keeping the “start simple” idea in mind, think about the customers that could most benefit from mobile communications, then work your way away from that core (mobile) segment. This group of customers may only be a subset of your overall customer base but a good mobile experience may be the difference in keeping them engaged with your brand.
• Start capturing mobile opt ins now! This will force your brand to start thinking hard about communicating to these customers but in parallel will capture new leads that you can communicate to immediately when your new campaigns are launched. Keep in mind the sooner you communicate to new opt ins the better in order to maintain the highest level of customer engagement.
• For mobile enabled content, think about what a user may want to see on a hand held device. Perhaps it is a simple section about who your company is, a news/press release section and an opt in/contact section. Often times people are visiting mobile sites to get a quick peek at who the company is, if they can’t even read the homepage they may quickly forget and never return.

Today I read eMarketers article “Why Email Metrics Are in Decline“. While I found the information insightful I found it odd that there was no mention of Social Media contributing to its decline. Sure, cluttered inboxes and poor targeting likely share the majority of the blame but as more people use social networking sites to get their information and as companies jump on the social bandwagon, clearly this has to be a contributing factor to email’s decline.

Brian Lees architects solutions by combining common sense business strategy and technology. In roles ranging from Solutions Architect to Chief Technology Officer, Brian has built brands and businesses through his core competencies in marketing solution design, and technology team leadership. For over 10 years Brian has been a pioneer in the digital marketing space and was part of the founding management team at Intrasight, now known as ClickSquared. ClickSquared combines vertical industry marketing solutions with a cloud-computing platform for multichannel marketing.