eBook - Silverpop

Your Next Challenge: Keeping
Your Emails Visible in the
“Prioritized” Inbox
How can I make sure my
Q: subscribers are actually
seeing my emails in their
inboxes, now that email services
like Gmail are prioritizing
messages?
Inbox classification, which aims to
A: highlight the messages recipients are
mostly likely to value and open, is one of the
strategies ISPs are using to make their email
services more valuable and retain customers.
Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail are three of the
services that sort email by “priority” (based on
many factors, including recipient activity on
previous emails from that sender), “contacts”
(senders who are already in the recipient’s address
book) or “smart” filters.
Having generally minimized spam in the
inbox, Gmail and other ISPs/Web email service
providers are moving the battlefront to “gray”
mail or “bacn.“
Priority Inbox is designed to help Gmail users
get control of their inboxes, spending less
time on messages that aren’t spam yet
aren’t meaningful or relevant for them at
the moment.
Behind the Scenes:
Gmail Priority Inbox
I’ll look specifically at Priority Inbox,
because it uses several rules to gauge
how to classify a message.
Essentially, Gmail identifies which emails
are more important to recipients, based
on their previous actions (opens, clicks, replies)
and recurring keywords across all their messages,
and then groups these emails at the top of the
inbox under an “Important” label.
Starred messages (Gmail’s equivalent of flagging)
appear in a second category. Further down, the
“Everything Else” category contains all the other
non-spam email in the inbox.
In addition to Gmail’s algorithm, users can identify
emails as “Important” or “Not Important” by hitting
a “+” or “-” button in the Gmail navigation.
Users can also easily turn Priority Inbox on or off,
but many users have overlooked the ability to simply
toggle in the left navigation from the regular
“Inbox” to “Priority Inbox.” So at any time, a user
can view emails by “last received.”
Road-Testing Priority Inbox
After road-testing Priority Inbox for several years,
I’ve come up with these insights:
Priority Inbox is simply inconsistent. I subscribe
to several wine-related newsletters, and so
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