As the search giant rolls out Priority Inbox, what does this mean for B2B marketers and their email marketing? Victoria Paley investigates
You’ve got mail; that three-word phrase immortalised in the 90s when a youngish Tom Hanks and a Botox-free Meg Ryan starred in the movie blockbuster about an online romance. It was around this time that the phenomenon of email seemed to really take off, as the technology to facilitate this method of interaction became both more accessible and affordable.
Fast forward to the next millennium and email for both personal and professional use has never been more prolific. In business, it’s a critical way of communicating with colleagues, partners, customers and prospects. As a result, the average inbox is a mélange of both the useful and the useless. No real surprise then, that industry news in September about recent research from Salesforce has revealed that 38 per cent of office workers are suffering from information overload, with seven out of 10 reporting email as the worst culprit.
Enter Google’s ‘Priority Inbox’ service launched last month. It’s been marketed as the canny email tool – designed to not only filter out the junk but also categorise messages according to perceived importance. Pretty nifty for the time-poor office worker – but what of the implications for the B2B marketer? While Google might be perceived as a largely consumer ESP, it estimates that there are two million businesses using Google Apps with more than 3000 new businesses signing up each day. With its corporate user-base rising, and the likelihood that other ESPs will be hot on the heels of Gmail’s service updates, Priority Inbox is something to be ignored at the B2B marketer’s peril.
Email is evolving. But at a time when emails are increasingly being substituted for contact via social media, will Priority Inbox prove a nail in email marketing’s coffin or at the very least a pesky fly in its ointment?
Private – keep out
According to Richard Robinson, industry head of B2B at Google, Gmail’s latest offering has been designed to not only help users manage the deluge of mail that clogs up their inboxes but ultimately boost user privacy.
“The signals that Gmail uses to prioritise your email are never surfaced to anyone they’re only used to prioritise your mail for you,” he says.
That’s all well and good for the senior decision maker who doesn’t want to be constantly interrupted during the day or have their email preferences explicitly shared. But for the product or service provider wanting to market their business via email, this latest development potentially means another barrier to have to break through. And the risk of emails being automatically relegated to the bottom of a priority list is a real possibility.
While Gmail’s new tool may strike fear into the B2B marketer, marketing services director at Responsys, Martin Ruddy, suggests it’s actually something the industry should welcome.
“It’s good news for B2B marketers since it forces us to raise our game and increase the relevance and content of the emails we send. It’s also great news for customers, who will be relieved of information that is not relevant to them. Ultimately, it’s helping us to become better at what we do since marketers can ruin a good reputation by sending unwanted emails,” he asserts.
Martin Schneider, director marketing communications at CRM software provider SugarCRM, agrees that B2B marketers should view functions like Gmail’s Priority Inbox as a positive development. He specifically highlights its benefits to CRM, lead generation and productivity savings.
Schneider points out that by analysing customer’s email preferences, it will allow CRM users “to instantly see their most important email dialogues and also the most frequent or profitable (e.g. for sales).”
He also echos Ruddy’s comments about the importance of email relevancy. He suggests that Priority Inbox will cause email’s role in terms of content and frequency – to change, “the number of email messages to a single target may go down, but the relevancy of those messages should increase – leading to a less intrusive but more effective email marketing initiative,” he says.
The evolution of email
Despite Google only launching Priority Inbox in August, many savvy marketers are already considering how the function will affect their email strategy. This suggests the development is part of the larger evolution of email and not just a fad.
“Priority Inbox isn’t the exception when it comes to email filtering; it will likely become the new rule. Hotmail recently launched its own filtering system for users and other ESPs are likely not far behind,” says Margaret Farmakis, senior director of response consulting at email deliverability services company Return Path.
Hotmail’s latest activity involves a sweep functionality that allows users to control unwanted, solicited emails that make it into the inbox. The ESP giant also plans to add another level of intelligence that will deliver or reject emails based on a user’s prior behaviour to an email sender. Ruddy suggests that both Google’s and Hotmail’s latest email wizardry will pave the way for other ESPs, “We expect more email services to follow suit and as a result, getting into the inbox is going to be increasingly important for elite marketers,” he says.
Smart marketers are abandoning ‘spray-and-pray’ email strategies, targeting their audience with more relevant content, as well as mixing up dialogue through social media channels. Whether social media completely overtakes email as a way of interrupting or cutting through to prospects and customers remains to be seen. Social media in the B2B arena is certainly on the rise. But the general consensus seems to be that forward-thinking email strategies need to integrate email with social media, rather than rely on just one or the other, as Robin Collyer advises, “Search engines and websites feed the ‘pull’ or self-serve model, while social networks and email serve the ‘push’ style. Unsurprisingly, the answer isn’t one or the other, it’s a careful blend of the two that empathise with the ultimate recipient.”
Planning consultant at eCircle, Gianfranco Cuzziol, agrees that the most successful digital marketing strategy should have email and social media working in partnership. He suggests that emails provide the ideal ‘master key’ to opening up dialogue with a target audience on social networking sites, “I like to picture email as being what I call a ‘personal portable gateway’ that can be used to access all of the content that social media offers via a variety of channels (desktop, laptop, netbook, smartphone or iPhone).”
Email preference services, such as Google’s Priority Inbox, would appear to be the way forward. However, they are not without their potential pitfalls. Felix Velarde, managing director at Underwired Amaze, wonders whether it will, ironically, just add another time-consuming complication to the office worker’s day as they search through multiple mailboxes for an important email that may have been wrongly prioritised. He’s not alone. Sanjay Mistry, technical director of InfoMedia Services asks, “Can software really tell you which email you need to read or not?” He adds, “Of course not, because the criteria to make that decision changes all the time.”
Whether email preference services like Google’s Priority Inbox really take off and change the face of email marketing forever remains to be seen. Regardless, the message to marketers seems clear – personalised and relevant content is key. As Cuzziol surmises, “The challenge has always been relevancy and this will become even more important in the future.”
