Importance of Email
As long time readers will know, we preach the importance of email. Email attracts more purchases, donations, reads and comments than any social media platform. People still feel the need to get through their entire email inbox whereas a Facebook message or tweet can easily pass them by and never be thought about again.
The key to effectively using email is getting your email recipients to actually open your email. We usually tell clients that 20% is a good number. If one out of five people read what you send you’re doing well. It sounds depressing, but it’s true.
One of the most important email platforms is Gmail. Gmail, owned by Google, is a popular and free email service that is often used for personal email addresses. You might be surprised looking at your own email list how many recipients use Gmail. For 9 Clouds, we ran the number and over 25% of our subscribers are on Gmail! By far the most of any email platform.
Changes to Gmail: Tabs
There was thus a collective uproar recently in the marketing world as Gmail quietly announced and quickly rolled out a new system for sorting email: Tabs.
Tabs now presort email to Primary, Social and Promotions as you can see in this screenshot:
For business, organizations and anyone sending out updates to a large list of people, your email most likely will be presorted in to the Promotions tab. That means that some readers may never click on that box to even know you sent them an email.
You can reassign emails from certain senders to new tabs. So if you want to make sure you see everything that 9 Clouds sends to you, just click on Promotions and then on any email from 9 Clouds and drag it to the primary tab.
Click to see this great video on how to make sure 9 Clouds emails or emails from others don’t get lost in the new inbox.
Do Gmail Tabs Hurt Email Open Rates?
While many have worried that Gmail tabs could hurt the number of people who open an email, it is essential as CS Penn notes, to always measure and see if it’s true for your list. We decided to take the challenge and measure our list.
Gmail tabs rolled out beginning at the end of May, so we measure all of our email sent in April and May (control group) and June and July (post tabs).
We pride ourselves on writing valuable emails that lots of people want to open. Heck, we even wrote a free ebook about email marketing you can download, so we were very happy to see that our emails in April and May had an overall average open rate of 28%.
How did the Gmail tab change things?
Measuring Email Deliverability
We first took a look at the four week moving average. Basically, how are our open rates improving or getting worse over a four week period:
Interestingly, our open rate is actually decreasing before the new Gmail tabs are launched. Then our open rate increases before settling in after July 4th.
This tells me that Gmail tabs may actually be helping our email. It may separate our email out to make it easier to find in the Promotions tab. At the very least we can confidently say that it is not hurting our open rates.
Besides the moving average we look at the overall open averages. Before Gmail tabs we we averaged 28% over April and May. In June and July? Only 23%.
This gives us pause. Is Gmail hurting us?
When I look at the moving average I can say no. The April and May open rate is moving downward consistently and our June and July average is down due to a large email send we sent at the beginning of June to our cold leads. This meant that our open rate was dragged down.
Overall, I’ll continue to watch our open rates and particular those from recipients using Gmail, but for now, I’m extremely happy with the results!
Auditing Your Email
Email should be your number one channel to generate leads and sales. Since it is so important, it is essential that you also take time to measure once and a while to confirm that everything is working as it should.
Whether it’s the launch of Gmail tabs, mobile email or the next technological change, you should keep track of what works and what doesn’t so you can make business decisions based on your data.
If you need help doing that, just click the contact button and we can tell you about our digital audit service to measure what works for you.
