Email Marketing is a Game ... Now More Than Ever

Email marketing continues to be a dominant channel for audience engagement, sales monetization, and product sales. Why? Because it’s an owned audience. You own the direct relationship with that audience member. Well, for the most part. That direct relationship with the audience is increasingly under attack from Google, turning email marketing into a game that is quite similar to ones publishers and brands have been playing for years with Facebook and Google itself. It’s 2020, and we all better be ready to play the email game. 

Remember when publishers were burned so badly by Facebook back in 2014 when organic reach plummeted from 16% to a mere 6%? Publishers and brands had worked so hard to grab all of those friends (then fans, then likes) and our voice was essentially snuffed out unless we forked over cash to boost content. 

For years, email has been our solid companion; our owned audience. It’s definitely the path of least resistance to the audience and serves the purpose of delivering content, promotions, advertising, subscription offers, event invitations, and more. The barriers of entry are low, the tools are accessible, easy to use and not too expensive. 

But it’s time for email strategy to evolve. Publishers need to be ready to play because Google is changing the game. And although Gmail doesn’t have the same dominance in the email market that Google has for search engines, as of 2019, Gmail is leading the global email client market share with 27.8%. There are 1.5 billion active Gmail accounts worldwide. By comparison, Outlook reported their number of users at 400 million in 2018 and Yahoo! Mail has 228 million active subscribers. 

In 2013, Gmail launched the Social and Promotions Tabs. This update was intended to offer Gmail users a better emailing experience by segmenting emails based on their content and who they were from. Your contacts end up in your inbox while marketing and bulk emails, such as deals, offers, and other promotional messages go into the Promotions tab. The tabs also serve another purpose for Google: ad inventory. Advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free Gmail accounts. “Mail classifications automatically adjust to match users’ preferences and actions,” a Google representative has said, “Users really like the tab organization.” This means our inboxes are starting to operate more and more like our social feeds; influenced by our engagement and assumptive about the type of content we want to see. 

Recently, nonprofit news organization The Markup conducted an experiment to determine how Google “filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits” and the results were astonishing and all over the map. 

Candidates like Tom Steyer, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar ended up in the Promotions tab more than any other candidates. But that’s nothing compared to Beto O’Rourke and Kamala who ended up in the SPAM folder more often than any other inbox destination. Pete Buttigieg by comparison ended up in the Primary inbox 63% of the time but also had more than a quarter of his emails go to SPAM. Setting aside the anxiety this induces in me about the influence of only one or two companies to impact our elections, publishers need to start paying attention to the ground rules that Google is setting with Gmail. 

Last year, Gmail began to penalize marketers for continuing to send to email addresses that hadn’t engaged in more than 180 days and used the same criteria to affect SPAM folder placement and reputation scores, making it increasingly important to maintain a clean email database and regularly purge inactive email addresses. 

All of these changes over the last 7 years point to the fact that Google is increasingly making the inbox a competitive landscape that requires adherence to the rules set forth. Attention, engagement, testing, and reputation. Sound familiar? Don’t take email marketing for granted. It’s 2020 and publishers need to play the email game. 

Looking for help? We work with publishers all over the world to implement audience development strategies including email marketing. Let’s chat.