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
Ireland’s Communications Regulator has just introduced the world’s first Consumer Protection for Bills and Billing Mediums. It’s been a long time coming, particularly when you consider the number of lawsuits that have been sparked off by ill-conceived eBilling strategies around the world!
But now that regulation has arrived, it's worth having a look at what the Irish Telco regulator thinks are the main areas of concern with eBilling, as I’m sure other regulators will follow suit.
And it’s a bit of a mixed bag! Here's a quick summary:
- Post-paid bills – both paper and electronic – must be provided free of charge, including fully itemised bills if that’s the customer’s preference.
- Pre-paid customers can ask for a “transaction history” (basically an itemised statement of usage) free of charge.
- Customers who are “forced” to change from paper to electronic can break their contract with no penalties.
- Service providers must ensure and verify that customers can access the alternative electronic media before migrating them from paper.
- Where bills are made available on the service provider’s portal (Pull eBilling), alerts (SMS or email) must be sent during sociable hours, and an opt-out for alerts must be available.
What does it mean for Service Providers?
Forcing customers to switch to eBilling by charging for paper bills is a no-no! Hardly surprising as this has been the reason for a number of class-action lawsuits from the USA to Australia over the years. But how else are these companies going to encourage customers to go paperless?
Allowing customers to break their contract if they are forced to go electronic is even more interesting – just how many will take this option, even if it is a case of 'cutting off your nose to spite your face' People don’t like being told what to do, and will often go to great lengths to make a point if they feel they’ve been pushed into a corner.
A couple of the other regulations offer opportunities and create challenges for the service providers.
Ensuring and verifying that customers can access the electronic bill before you turn off their paper bill requires detailed tracking and more. For example, the fact that the customer opened the email doesn’t mean they can view the PDF eBill; you need to track that this was opened too, which requires some tricky interactive PDF development.
Whilst providing pre-paid customers with a transaction history when they ask for one may sound like an inconvenient additional cost, what if you could incorporate useful, targeted marketing into this document? Or even provide the facility for the pre-paid customer to re-charge at a preferential rate from within the transaction history?
Suddenly, this additional cost could become an important customer touch-point and revenue generation channel.
Regulation and Striata's eBilling Best Practice
From Striata’s perspective, this regulation doesn’t come as a surprise and wouldn’t cause any issues for our clients should this type of regulation become more widespread.
Basically, it’s a very “common sense” approach to eBilling and fits in well with what we’ve been promoting for the past 12 years...
6 ways Striata can keep you on the right side of the Law:
- Don’t penalise customers for wanting to stick with paper – encourage them to switch to eBilling by highlighting theadded features and functions.
- Provide a compelling eBilling alternative that is more convenient than paper and customers won’t turn to another service provider when asked to change.
- Bring eBilling customers on-board with adoption processes that verify they are receiving emails and confirm they can open the PDF documents. Let them see how good your eBilling is before you ask them to give up paper.
- Use transactional eDocuments as regular customer touch-points to reinforce the relationship and cross-sell and up-sell new services, especially where there is no other regular communications channel (like pre-paid telephony).
- Time the sending of email communications to maximise open rates and effectiveness. The same message sent on a Tuesday morning or Saturday evening will perform very differently.
- Always provide an easy unsubscribe link for customers wanting to go back to paper. It won’t get used often if your eBills are more convenient than your paper bills, but always give your customers the choice.
Keen to self-regulate your eBilling efforts before your regulator comes in and does it for you? Get in touch with Striata and we’ll keep you on the right side of the law!
Keith Russell
striata.com
It’s that time of year again when we must shift our focus to ensure that our email campaigns are given an extra boost during the festive season. Focus on factors like standing out in a crowded inbox and making the festive retail experience easier and more convenient for customers.
For me, the key during this time of year is to effectively nudge your customers further down the purchase path. Although this path may be different for everyone, there is a common thread - word-of-mouth, a friend’s recommendation or a thumbs up from an influencer are trust factors that can provide that extra boost and email is a great channel to encourage that.
According to a study from Nielsen, 92% of consumers around the world say that they trust word-of-mouth, as well as friend and family recommendations above all other forms of advertising.
That being said, we can’t ignore the benefits of integrating social media and email for festive campaigns.
6 Ways to Integrate Email and Social Media
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1. Follow and Like
- Encourage your email subscribers to join your social communities. Subscribers are already engaging with your products online via email, so they really are a valuable group from which you can grow your community.
- Placing social icons and call to actions on promotional emails, newsletters and welcome triggers is a great first step to integration. It’s also a good idea to A/B test the placement of the icons to see what works best.
- Another way to grow your social community is using adhoc email campaigns where the product, competition or sale is only available on social media. This way all the great but ‘spammy’ competition and discount sale jargon that would usually get the email stopped by spam filters, is on the Facebook campaign page. You don’t have to add it to your email copy. Here is an example from Bon Appétit
2. Share Content
- Adding Share functionality gives your customer the ability to share certain or all content onto their preferred social networks. It facilitates the dissemination of key content from the email onto social media networks in a manner relevant to the network chosen. This ultimately extends the life of your content. Just be sure to only add share functionality to content that is actually shareworthy.
- Make use of share copy that includes hashtags or @ signs to allow your customers' followers to easily join the conversation or view the festive promotion. But remember to consider the overall social media content strategy or have your social media community manager write the share copy.
- Tracking and measuring the extended reach of share functionality is very important.
In this recent eBucks example, they used share functionality to spread the word about travel deals.
3. Pinterest
- Allow customers to pin great looking images from your email, especially if you have a high volume of female subscribers. This way your branded content will live in the customer’s digital space. According to Media Bistro, 80% of pins are re-pins, and 21% of users have purchased an item that they found on the site says PriceGrabber.
- An image that is supported by alt text, well placed and properly coded can be worth a thousand words.
4. Pre-seeding Announce upcoming email campaigns using a twitter update or Facebook post. Create a teaser tweet about a daily deal, and then post the sign-up link.
This tactic can result in increased open rates and convert followers into subscribers.
5. Grow your subscriber database Social media platforms offer an opportunity to grow your email subscriber database. Whether it is a sign up from on your Facebook tab or just a link to your preference centre on twitter.
You should then tailor your emails based on where the customer signed up.
6. Content Curation Include content from social media to email campaigns. Have a ‘what’s hot & trending’ section. The festive season is a great time to add customer testimonials to your promotional emails.
Customer compliments and recommendations, even a tally of Facebook ‘likes’ placed on a daily deal during November and December can increase sales, because we know that customers trust peer recommendations.
Attract customers with short, enticing messages on your social media platforms, and then use email to paint a picture or promote products with great visuals or demo videos.
To learn more about Striata Share and Social Media integration, you can follow and send a Direct Message to @Striataor @sl_collins
Sheryl-Lynn Collins
striata.com
