Does Gmail’s Priority Inbox Mean the End of an Internet Marketing System?
For many, email marketing has been a reliable and profitable internet marketing system. Instead of constantly chasing SEO results or paying for traffic using sources with ever-changing rules and competition, emailers have been quietly making a fortune on lists they built and merely maintained. Today, though, many email marketers are worried. Gmail just released a new “Priority Inbox” feature that gives preferential treatment to the mail from favored contacts. For most commercial emailers, that’s not going to include their messages.
aWeber has commented on the new development, and they’ve advised emailers to hold off on judgment, as it’s just too soon to tell how this new feature will play out. Will consumers resent Google’s attempts to decide what’s important to them? Will customers value their commercial correspondence enough to give it priority? Or will this be a complete doomsday scenario for all email marketers, with every other major email provider following suit?
The answer is that it probably depends on how you do your email marketing. To stay on the good side of things, I would recommend that you focus on two things. Number one, make sure that you’re using a high-quality double opt-in provider like aWeber. When you do things the honest way, you will generally find that you are rewarded.
Beyond that, you also need to make sure that your messages deliver when it comes to quality. Anyone can send out ads, but if you want a high click-through rate and high reader satisfaction, you absolutely must deliver something of value in most, if not all of your messages.
What do you think? If anything, I think it will make the email marketing landscape less competitive. Now is a better time than ever to get started.
