Gmail has changed his inbox. Its new design includes different types of tabs that filter your emails in different categories (Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums). Now you have to choose which category you would like to use for each email. This way, the users can decide which emails want to read and when.

The “Primary” category is for all those priority emails. In “Promotions”, Gmail filters all the offers and emails related with marketing issues while in “Social” category you have all Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social networks emails.  

Gmail, with this new format, makes different alerts according the email priorities. The second tabs alerts are more subtle and for this reason, users can’t notice immediately new promotional or social networks emails.

This change confuses all marketing online users. For somebody who works in email marketing this means a big change because the newsletters won’t show in the “Primary” category but will show in “Updates” or “Promotions”.  This also means that the user will have to look up for email marketing campaign emails into those categories.  

The consequences of this change aren’t still clear: the real impact will depend on how many users use this category system (for now Gmail doesn’t force people to use it). If there is a low use, or a lot of users switch off this system, impact won’t be that effective. If there is a high use, impact could be positive if users go to “Promotions” and read their emails or could be negative if they ignore this category because they haven’t enough time to do it.

Experts think this will have a low level index and will go down but maybe, to see positive results, we only have to wait for people to adapt. From GMK Press, we think that you can minimise the impact if you send emails with quality and relevant content and, this way, your subscribers will look for your emails regardless they are in one category or other.   

You can reinforce your position giving information to your clients about this new system and tell them how to use this new Gmail. This will help them to have our emails in the “Primary” category. Every time that users move one email to a different Gmail category, the email program will take this into account.

Finally, you have to see the importance that mobile devices have in email marketing because half of those emails are read with mobile phones. Despite this new Gmail app is ready to use in mobile devices, a lot of people haven’t installed it yet or they use a different email apps like Iphone one.