The new Gmail has not been that kind to email marketers. Firstly, the service introduced an inbox classification which clearly labelled promotional mails as such, thus drastically reducing the open rates for promotional emails being sent by marketers and brands. Users now have a choice to ignore these mails and just look at the inboxes which are necessary. Earlier all mails used to be come through just one inbox and many users would open it. Now, that is not the case when it comes to Gmail users.
Secondly, Gmail now loads images in promotional emails from its own servers as opposed to images hosted on a marketer’s server. This makes it difficult for email marketers to track analytics. Now, in order to balance their product for marketers, the service is experimenting with a new feature for the promotional email inbox.
According to a blog post put out by Gmail’s product manager, the company is asking users to sign up for a field trial which lets users switch between traditional view and a new visual view of the their promotional inbox.
Here’s a gif showing the experimental feature.
As you can see, users can toggle between the traditional inbox view and visual view by clicking on the views button on the top right hand corner.
This could be an advantage for marketers if they could provide a good visual impetus for their users to check out their communication and ultimately click through to the actual link. Pictures are way more effective than a piece of text and since the traditional inbox an additional step to reach the visual content compared to the visual one, there might be an increase in the number of user engagement with promotional mails.
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