What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Gmail Priority Inbox

Google released their new Priority Inbox feature for Gmail and Google Apps users last week.  If you haven’t looked at it already, Priority Inbox is basically an algorithm that sorts your most important emails into a “priority inbox” so that you can quickly see them in an otherwise overflowing mailbox.

Priority Inbox does this by “scoring” emails based on a number of characteristics, such as how often you open emails from that person, the topics that you read about in emails, and which types of emails you save in your archive.  One way to describe the algorithm would be that Priority Inbox makes decisions based on the level of engagement you demonstrate with emails of that type.

Priority Inbox can also be trained by using a button to mark emails as more or less important.  For example to let Gmail know that the Amazon emails it thought should be in your Priority Inbox are actually not that important to you, or that email from your mother should always be in your Priority Inbox.

Priority Inbox Kills Email Marketing!

The reaction in email marketing circles has been interesting, bordering on hysterical.  Some have declared it the end of effective email marketing.  Others have even gone as far as to say that a class action lawsuit against Google for “blocking emails” is inevitable.

But if you step back from the ledge you can see that Priority Inbox is just a way of automating and simplifying something that people already do with their email.

So when you think about Priority Inbox there are really two versions of it:

1. The one that email users already set up for themselves using filters and rules
2. The one that Google has made available as a Gmail feature

Most of the reactions I’ve read so far have been from email marketers of the strictly commercial variety, but Priority Inbox does have an impact for bloggers who use mailing lists to send content and promotions to their subscribers.

How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy for Priority Inbox

Because there are multiple ways that Priority Inbox makes its decisions there are also multiple ways that you can respond to it.

Note that the automatic calculations that Google has deployed with Priority Inbox are also expected to be used in other mail services such as Hotmail in the near future, so these techniques can help you with more than just your Gmail subscribers.

Who Sent the Email

What Google says:

If you email Bob a lot, it’s likely that messages from Bob are important

What you should do:

Encourage subscribers to reply to you. You can use a simple call to action in your newsletters such as:

“What is your number one tip for writing great blog posts? Hit reply to this email and let me know”

There may be a temptation to use this trick in non-genuine ways, getting people to respond but just funnelling the replies off to your trash bin. If you did this I think your subscribers would start to notice, so if you do plan to use this tip make sure you use the feedback in a positive way, for example a follow-up blog post that has a summary of the feedback you received.

What Keywords the Email Includes

What Google says:

If you always read messages about soccer, a new message that contains those same soccer words is more likely to be important.

What you should do:

This is almost like SEO for email.  By using consistent keywords and phrases within your emails you can signal to Priority Inbox that it matches previous emails that the recipient considers important.

Easier said than done? Obviously you can’t write emails on the same topics or stuffed with the same keywords all of the time. Instead use consistent text and branding in your email templates.

The Actions Readers Take

What Google says:

The actions that help us determine which people/terms are important to you include: replying, using stars, archiving, deleting (Messages you star are probably more important than messages you archive without opening.)

What you should do:

Encourage as many of those positive actions as you can.  I’ve already mentioned ways to encourage replies.

Opens will depend largely on whether your subscribers are used to seeing quality emails from you that are worth reading, as well as your use of effective headlines. Train your subscribers to expect emails that are worth opening.

Archiving vs deleting could be determined by whether your email has useful information in it that the reader will want to keep and refer back to. Give your subscribers content worth keeping.

Manual Adjustments

The last factor in how Priority Inbox treats email messages is whether the mailbox owner has used the special buttons to mark your email as “important” or “not important”.

What Google says:

When you mark a message, it will move to the appropriate section. This will help Priority Inbox learn what you care about most.

What you should do:

Treat this like you would any other voting mechanism and ask Gmail users to mark your emails as important.

“This week I’ll be sending out a discount code for advanced buyers of my new ebook. Don’t miss out! Mark this email as important so that the next one arrives in your Priority Inbox.”

All good email service providers, such as Aweber, allow you to segment your list, so you can very easily create Gmail and non-Gmail segments so that only Gmail users see this particular call to action.

Summary

Google’s Priority Inbox feature presents a challenge for bloggers using email marketing.  To overcome this challenge make sure that you:

• Encourage replies and other engagement with your subscribers
• Use consistent branding and keywords in email contents and headlines
• Use effective headlines, and create an expectation that your emails are worth opening
• Send useful content that subscribers will want to keep rather than delete
• Encourage subscribers to mark your emails as important

If you think about it, these are all things that you should be doing with your email marketing already. But Priority Inbox in Gmail, and the similar features announced by other webmail providers, makes it very important that you start doing it now.

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