Intelligent inboxes and your email marketing future

Email marketers were all-a-flutter recently when Google announced the Priority Inbox feature for Gmail. And for good reason.

Not because the Priority Inbox is a big deal in itself, but because of what it represents: the era of the intelligent inbox. This intelligent (and social) inbox was one of the four trends we identified earlier this year as crucial to future email marketing, so Gmail's announcement is a timely reminder to explore that topic in more depth.

In this post I'll briefly review the implications for email marketers and then suggest three approaches to help your email marketing achieve cut-through.

The growth of the intelligent inbox

The Priority Inbox feature reviews incoming mail and sorts it by priority at the individual user level.

Messages Gmail thinks are important to the recipient (based on his or her previous interactions with email) get put in the "priority inbox" at the top of the page. Messages it thinks aren't get dumped further down the page in the "everything else" inbox (details).

Each user can also help Gmail make the right decision by marking mail as important/not important.

As Loren McDonald concluded:

"What poses the greater challenge to email marketers is not this particular inbox innovation. It's the clear trend that most Webmail, desktop and mobile email clients are adding similar categorization and filtering features."

Yahoo! Mail, for example, lets you flip the inbox display to show only messages from contacts and connections. Hotmail lets you "sweep" all email from a particular sender into the trash or another folder at the click of a button.

Hotmail has also made clear they will consider an individual's read/delete patterns for a particular sender when determining whether future email from that sender should go to the inbox or junk folder.

Why intelligent inboxes matter

What webmail services and software manufacturers are trying to do is replicate the human filtering system with a machine-based one. Instead of the user reviewing the inbox and assigning priorities to each message, the email software is trying to do it for them.

Both processes share a similar outcome: the most important email gets the most attention. So if nothing's changed, why all the fuss?

The other outcome - the less important emails get less attention - is not the same with the two systems. These less important messages get much less attention when the machine does the mental sorting.

All emails typically get at least a glance from the recipient...enough to judge the value of the message. Yes, automatic filters and such like have been around a while, but they were generally clumsy to set up for all but the more high-level user.

As a result, each email can make an impression and grab attention if the circumstances are right.

That opportunity declines with the intelligent inbox, as the subscriber is no longer obliged to look quite so closely at every email. The machine does the presorting. And the machine can't know that after leaving 20 jewelry emails unopened, today's the day you decided to buy an engagement ring.

Ouch.

Of course people will still look at "less important" email...we're terrified of missing important messages and know that machine-based filters are far from perfect (though improving). And probably the majority of users still won't use the filtering tools available, however usable they might be.

But intelligent inboxes do mean that we'll give "less important" email even less of a glance than before. Equally, the machine is already nudging us to think of these messages as less important. So there's an attention/time impact and a psychological impact.

Skeptics take note of this quote from Mashable on the impact of the Priority Inbox on viewing habits:

"...the search giant found that users spent 16% less time reading insignificant e-mail."

The challenge is obvious: make sure your email is counted as important. Well...yeah.

Making email more important

The first point is to still focus on what subscriber's find important, and then worry about what machines might find important.

If you deliver value to subscribers, they will tell the machines that your email is important. Either directly (e.g. adding to contact lists, marking as important, marking as "not spam") or indirectly (e.g. not deleting email, moving it to folders, opening messages).

As such, the intelligent inbox is nothing more than a reminder to keep improving the value you offer...doing all the stuff recommended in the email marketing literature: segmentation, data-oriented marketing, trigger and lifecycle messaging, piggy-backing marketing messages into transactional email, etc.

Beyond that you might improve interaction with your messages...in the broadest sense of the word. That's about more than just optimizing your subject lines to get more opens. Or taking yet another 10% off your summer specials.

Consider three aspects in particular:

1. Interactive and/or engaging elements

Most people don't open, click or reply to marketing emails because the main content or offer justifies none of those actions. That's a fact of email life. But it doesn't have to be like that. You might, for example, consider:

• Secondary calls-to-action (e.g. navigation links to search boxes or popular website sections, secondary content or promotions in side bars)
• Diversionary content (try something different: a horizontal email, a text-only message, a humorous product offer/article or a unique email personality that gets people to look at the message even if the current offer/content isn't interesting)
• Teaser content (mystery offers or coupons that require a click to view, teaser summaries encouraging further reading on the website)
• Content per se (supplement email promotions with useful content, either as standalone messages or integrated with the promotion)
• Classic interaction (requests for feedback, subscriber surveys, competitions, request for reviews, reader polls etc.)

2. Integration and connectivity

Machines are likely to perceive formal online connections between you and your subscriber as an indication of importance and trust. Consider:

• Regular messaging (perhaps even standalone campaigns) reminding subscribers to add you to contact/address/safe sender lists
• Work to establish cross-channel connections: encourage subscribers to connect with you through Twitter, Facebook etc. This, of course, assumes you're active enough in those channels to justify the connection.

3. Strong first impressions

If humans and machines judge importance based on the history of interaction with your messages, then you need to build up a strong history from Day 1.

If you're not sending a welcome email, consider this: my welcome message gets three times the opens and five times the clicks of my standard newsletter.

If you're sending a welcome message, revisit it and ensure you include the main elements. Consider sending a welcome series...engaging new subscribers when interest is highest and before they get "dumped" into any generic email marketing program.

Finally, let's not wring our hands at the imminent arrival of intelligent inboxes. They aren't a punishment for bad marketing email programs, they're a reward for good ones...

Your thoughts?