MindComet

A New Challenge for Email Marketers: Gmail’s Priority Inbox

Yesterday, Gmail announced their new Priority Inbox feature. It allows users to set their inboxes to automagically sort through their emails and appropriately label them as Priority, Starred and Everything Else. The search parameters call on keywords, replies and general behavior based on the user and sender relationship.

So what does this mean to email marketers? Well, truthfully, this has the potential to lead to lower-than-usual activity rates with Gmail subscribers. If you’re not relevant in the subscriber’s mind, you will more than likely be relegated into the Everything Else box.

Now, more than ever, email marketers need to focus on relevance.

Marketers need to look at their subscriber’s behaviors and reactions to their emails. If this is done, marketers will have a better understanding in predicting how to segment their lists for future sends and hopefully earn the right to the Priorty box. This, of course, needs to be front-of-mind along with making sure you’re whitelisted as well as keeping design and code standards to an optimum.

Peep this video from Gmail below which illustrates the brass tacks of Priority Inbox:

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 31, 2010

For the Impulsive and Non-Committed: Gmail “Undo Send” Quick Tips

If you’re not already aware, Gmail offers an “undo” option after you send an email. At first, you were only allowed 5 seconds to decide whether or not your email was up to snuff, but now the Gmail team has EXTENDED the undo time limit from 5 seconds and provides 10, 20 & 30 second options.

If you’re unsure of how to turn this on, first go to the Labs icon.

Find the “Undo Send” option and enable it.

Then once you’ve saved your changes, navigate to the Settings link and select your cancellation period.

Now, whenever you hastily write an email and send it without double checking to see if you’ve attached that time-sensitive document, you’ll have up to 30 seconds to cancel, fix your mistakes and send confidently.

Another reason why Gmail is really the only web email client you should be using. No other client comes close to the amount of options and customization offered by Gmail.

Thanks to Mashable for the inspiration.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 24, 2010

Fix for Gmail Image Rendering Issues

Gmail has recently changed the way they interpret and display code. Most noticeably, this has caused a number of emails to render incorrectly. The broken Gmail emails are suffering from the same symptoms—horizontal lines between rows of images—Hotmail was encountering recently. Find my post about that issue here.

The same fix that applied to the Hotmail issue also applies here. Simply include img {display: block;} inbetween the style tags of your email and that should do the trick. If you want to be even more thorough, you can apply the same bit of code inline. Example:

<img src="images/header.jpg" style="display: block;" />

If there are any other ways of fixing this issue, please comment your findings below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 17, 2010

Video within email is finally becoming a reality

The holy grail of email marketing is finally becoming a reality, and the geniuses at Gmail are the proverbial Indiana Jones’ who’ve discovered it.  As far as I know, Gmail is the first browser-based email client to allow videos to display within their emails. In order to turn this feature on, enable YouTube previews under “Settings” > “Labs”.

Yes, yes, I know this was blogged about everywhere last week, but I haven’t had the chance to test it myself until today. And I don’t mean to sound exaggerated, but this has the potential to be pretty ground-breaking in the world of email marketing if you think about it.

If you’re an email marketer you have to turn off click-tracking within your ESP in order for the video to work.  The video will only display if the YouTube URL is in your HTML… not the unique URL your ESP creates in its place for click-tracking purposes.

I only have one other criticism with this: The video displays separated from the email—below it. You have to “unhide” the video for it to actually play. See below:

This is all well and good right now… But once they allow emails to include EMBEDDED YouTube video, then that my friends, will be Gmail’s overarching killer app.

With all things considered, I can’t wait until I get the opportunity to segment all of my Gmail users and send them an email with a YouTube video.  I suggest first sending out an email asking your Gmail subscribers if they’d like to receive videos in their emails. Provide them with the simple directions on how to enable the videos in their account.  A week later, start sending them videos relevant to their interests. I’m guessing your response rate will spike significantly.

If anyone has incorporated a video into any of their email campaigns, comment below.  I’d love to hear about the results!

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Posted by MindComet on Mar. 27, 2009

Gmail Unveils Multi Pane Viewing

Being the masters of all things related to email organization, Gmail has yet again outdone themselves.  They now have a new feature which allows users to simultaneously view multiple panes within one window.  You can save searches based on labels, which makes Gmail even more efficient for existing users and appealing for non-converted.

All you have to do is activate Gmail Labs, then enable Multiple Inboxes and click saves changes.

From there enter the “code” of your label by searching for “label:coworkers”.  Anything that’s tagged with “coworkers” will pop up in a separate pane.  It also allows you to integrate multiple searches such as “is:drafts OR is:sent”.

With labels & themes, and now with multiple panes, Gmail is undoubtedly paving the way for the ultimate in email personalization.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 06, 2009

Gmail Themes Causing Rendering Issues

With the release of the 30 or so Gmail themes this week, comes some predictable rendering issues.  Now, with the implementation of these themes, it’s even MORE important to style all of your emails using inline, longhand CSS.  The most obvious issues come with the attributes of backgrounds, text and links.

According to The Retail Email Blog, “approximately 40% of all retailers have the potential to be significantly affected by this rendering problem”. Click here for an example of the rendering issues that may persist.

You should have been doing it to begin with, but make sure to ALWAYS define background, text and link attributes independently—colors and otherwise.

If you see any other issues related to the Gmail themes pop up, comment below.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 25, 2008

Gmail Unveils New Design Themes

It looks like GMAIL is breaking the mold again; this time with allowing their users to add themes to their interfaces.  The “themes” tab still hasn’t been added to my account, but I’m sure it’ll only be a few days until I see it pop up.  Some of the themes are obviously tacky and for the youngin’s, but most are designed quite nicely.

The tab will be under the settings section when available which, again, will be within a few days.  I can’t wait to see when they roll out the “upload your own theme” function.

Check out some screenshots below:

Thanks to albert via lifehacker via the official gmail blog for pointing this out.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 19, 2008