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Hotmail has advanced its filtering techniques for email marketing recently but Gmail has upped its game with the new Priority Inbox. ESP’s user behaviour will now affect email campaign deliverability.
Emails will now be sorted in to three categories: ‘Priority’, ‘Starred’ and ‘Everything Else’. The content of email campaigns, the sender reputation and how recipients respond to previous email marketing messages from you, will all affect where your email campaign will be directed.
Consumers will be able to specify the kind of email marketing material they want to receive in their Priority Inbox as well as ‘starring’ emails to mark them as important.
This change to ESP layouts will undoubtedly affect the results of email marketing campaigns; therefore the importance of making your email campaigns relevant and targeting your email data will increase even further. Making email campaigns individual is more likely to ensure that they are delivered as priority messages.
The importance of adhering to best practice is now of more importance than ever; non responsive email addresses that are regularly targeted will result in you being marked as spam.
In terms of your creative, it is a good idea to have a text/image ratio that adheres to best practice, as this also enables you to include keywords. You should also consider how the email preview looks as well as the opened email campaign.
Being whitelisted with ESP’s will be crucial for good delivery. If subscribers add your sender address to their address book this also means that your email marketing will not be redirected so inviting them to do this will be beneficial for you.
The increased importance on relevancy means there is a necessity to listen to consumers and target them with appropriate email marketing material. This will enable the new priority inbox to have less of an effect.
