Blogs

As many of you may or may not know, my wife and I had our third baby, Joshua William Kollas on Aug. 25. Since I am still out of the office Sean Wirt has graciously agreed to guest blog for me today--thanks Sean.

For some time now, we have been stressing the importance of user engagement in email delivery. ISPs have been looking at user engagement to determine what mail they think their users want to see in their in-box and what they do not. If they suspect that mail might be spam, they will put it in the spam folder and look for user reaction. Does the user report that the message is not spam? Do they open it? Do they just delete it? Even when it is in the in-box, is it read, is it replied to or is it just deleted?

Google has now taken the importance of user engagement to the next level with what they are calling “Priority In-Box” in Gmail. This new feature flags mail that it feels its users will want to see. It makes this determination based on the level engagement it has seen from the user with certain types of e-mails. They look at the mail you have read and the mail you have replied to and elevate those messages in priority. When you login to your priority in-box for the first time, you get a pop-up showing how a sampling of your messages has been prioritized. You then have the ability to change the prioritization. For the record, I was presented six sample messages and each was correctly prioritized. There is a clever intro video at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html.

So, what does this mean for email marketing professionals, striving to improve email delivery rates? It means that user engagement is even more important now than ever. Take a look at your campaigns and see how you can make your email programs more engaging. Make them want to read your email and, if possible, provide a reason for them to reply to your messages.