Keeping tabs on Gmail Tabs

For the last few months I’ve been monitoring the online “chatter”, blogs and news articles around the Gmail tab changes and recently wrote an article on how to get your time critical messages into the primary Gmail inbox tab.

The online community’s response to these changes range from wide-eyed fear that marketing messages will not be read, to resignation that the tabs actually do work and do not affect open rates too dramatically. 

For now, I’m sitting in the second group. After using the new tabs for a few months, I believe that the new interface candramatically improve the organisation of your mailbox. It certainly supports my aspiration to achieve the magical “inbox zero”. 

What is Gmail's ultimate goal with tabs?

I’ve come across a few stories that support the theory that Gmail’s ultimate goal with tabs is to grow their ad serving strategy. After all, about 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. 

Although the guise of the launch is to improve usability and to help you organise your mailbox, I suspect this change is to support a corporate goal. With this in mind, I ask if the “engine” that applies the rules is mature enough for us to feel comfortable? 

The Gmail test

For context, when we did our study (mentioned in my article), we tested a variety of emails and found dramatically inconsistent results. 

In our small test, we sent a sample of emails across financial services senders to see what would happen in Gmail. The objective was to see if there were obvious steps a sender should take to ensure their message is delivered to the Primary tab.

More detail on the methodology:

• We sent the mails from various environments to check if the servers would influence the delivery statuses (i.e. if you send a majority of marketing messages from a server, would Gmail consider your mail more likely to be a marketing message?)
• We checked content for obvious copy like “statement, newsletter or promotion”, however some mails that landed in the Primary tab for one person, landed in the Promotions tab for another. There were no obvious differences in the setup of these mailboxes (starred messages, previous conversations or saved contact details, among others) to indicate why the mails were being treated differently.
• We made assumptions that if the mail contained copy like ‘promotion’ or ‘statement’ they would be automatically moved to the updates or promotions tabs as per those tabs definitions – Theseassumptions proved fruitless as messages were not treated consistently.

Our small test revealed no conclusive ‘rules’ that we could determine would assist in getting an email into the Primary tab. The same email landed in different tabs for different recipients with no obvious difference in mailbox setup.

The results of the tests we conducted only led me to ask more questions:

• As the current solution stands, with no consistency in the results, how can you as a marketer/billing sender guarantee that your messages will land in the tab that you require? (See my previous article for some helpful tips)
• Will Gmail users adapt their behaviour to treat the folders in the way they were intended – as a filter device, not simply ignore or delay viewing emails that don’t land in Primary? (I have found that I check my Primary tab regularly and only look at the other tabs occasionally and briefly. If I find anything of interest in those tabs I immediately move them to my Primary tab)
• Is Gmail starting off lenient and aiming to get stricter with the classification of inbound emails into tabs? Will the algorithm change?

It's evident that Gmail is evolving - ensure your emails don't get left behind. Talk to us about how to increase the chances of your email messages landing in the right tab. 



Michelle van den Berg
striata.com