Marketers Hate New Gmail Format

They fear their pitches are getting lost
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 16, 2013 9:39 AM CDT
Marketers Hate New Gmail Format
File photo of Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.   (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

Gmail users might still be getting used to the ins and outs of their reorganized email sorting, but retailers have seen enough to know they hate it. Generally speaking, marketers fear email pitches are getting lost as they're now diverted by default from a user's primary inbox to a "promotions" folder, reports the Wall Street Journal. And even when people open said folder, Google has started putting up to two ads at the top that kind of look like emails, though they're marked as such and shaded differently.

"People are not very amused by those," says a product manager at marketer HubSpot. Early signs suggest that the shift has indeed resulted in fewer retailer emails being opened, with another marketing service reporting a 1-point drop in its open rate, to 12%. As a result, businesses (among them Gap, Delta, and Groupon) have begun sending emails to clients explaining how they can train Gmail to put the pitches back into the primary inbox. PC World, meanwhile, thinks the new pop-up window for writing emails is clumsy, but it finds the newly introduced full-screen option to be an improvement. " It works really well, but it's not the default," writes Brad Chacos. Click for his how-to. (More Gmail stories.)

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