
How GMail’s Tabbed Inbox Changes Startup’s Mobile Marketing Strategies - ttunguz
http://tomtunguz.com/mobile-reengagement
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na85
Ugh, I absolutely detest the attitude on display here.. After a user signs up,
they get an email? Okay, that's great. Most people expect/want a confirmation.
But a few days later? A month later? If they haven't signed in? No, fuck you.
Stop spamming me with your stupid Sales Funnel bullshit marketing emails. If
your startup requires spamming your users in order to keep them coming back,
then guess what? Your product/service isn't good enough.

This article is nothing more than a diatribe by a spammer who's upset that
Gmail's new feature makes it harder to get his spam into my inbox.

And let me preempt the CEO of a startup who's sure to reply, telling me that
THEIR product is good, and that THEIR users actually want to read the spam.
Everyone thinks their special-snowflake emails are the exception, but that's
almost universally delusional.

If you're sending more than a single confirmation email that the user has not
EXPLICITLY requested then you are part of the problem.

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bbwharris
I personally agree with your sentiment, but if it didn't work no one would do
it. Obviously there are people out there that do not think like you do. A lot
of them.

Why else would a company waste time and money on life cycle emails if they
didn't work?

They have a nonzero rate of return. You are hating the player, and not the
game. Humans are error prone, forgetful beings. An email reminder can often
times engage them into something they intended to do but simply forgot, or
became too busy to complete. In this act of reminding there is also a non zero
rate of pissing off end users. The advantages obviously outweigh the
disadvantages or it wouldn't be done.

I shrug and move on. There will always be an endless cycle of advertising and
marketing surrounding you. The entirety of the economy depends upon getting
you to exchange currency for productivity.

~~~
Hermel
The problem is the externalities. It's the same as with spam. Emailing 1000
recipients is free, and there might be 1% that actually appreciates the email.
However, there are 990 recipients to whom it is an annoyance. The net effect
is that the startup causes more annoyance than value, but it does not need to
bear the costs.

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parennoob
Any app giving me a push notification saying "You haven't used this app in 10
days! Want to use it now?" will be uninstalled forthwith, and downrated on the
Android Market.

Also, aren't there some guidelines for what sort of stuff push notifications
can be used for? This would basically seem to fall under advertisement (self-
advertisement, I guess).

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kadabra9
What bothers me the most about the discussion from marketers regarding the new
tabbed inbox is the sense of entitlement, as if they should have some sort of
right to not only bother me with pointless emails to try to lure me back, but
also expect me to return to their app/service (after I've opened their email
and brought their funnel full circle, of course).

You read some of these outcries from marketers, and you'd think that Gmail
decided to stuff all of these emails in the spam folder, never to be seen by
anyone, ever. I'm speaking anecdotally here, but when I'm checking mail now I
always tab through each inbox and review my new mail in each one. It's not as
if the "promotions" or "social" inboxes have been blacklisted, I just tend to
not care about the messages that end up in them (but I wouldn't care about
them if they ended up in my primary inbox, either)

When I actually come across an email that catches my attention from a service
I find valuable, what do I do? I open it (yes, even when its in the lowly
"promotions" inbox). That doesn't happen too often though, because as is
astutely pointed out, most of them are bullshit emails from services that I
don't care about. Again, that's just my own perspective and I'm sure there is
data to suggest lower open rates/conversions etc. since the UI change, but at
the end of the day, the premise remains the same. Send me a relevant email
that actually captures my attention, and I will open it (regardless of what
inbox it falls into).

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taude
I go slightly further that there's a few companies I actually want to see the
Promotions/Updates from, so I drag the email to my Primary tab and those
emails will forever show up there.

I as the user, am in control.

And I thank Google for for ranking my email for me, so I don't half to.

BTW, Gmail already had the concept of "Important" email that one could filter
their entire inbox by, which I used a lot. While it's not as in your face as
the tabs, it had the same results.

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taude
Businesses need to use push notifications with caution and not with the same
intensity they blast out email, though. It's far more disruptive. Thus,
nothing annoys me off faster than a marketing-based push notification...my
phone is my sacred time and lifelink.

App Uninstall.

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jharrison
If we start with the premise that there are more people accessing email from a
mobile device then we have to take into account how they're doing that.

I have the Gmail app, iPhone's built-in Mail app, and Mailbox app. The only
one of them that filters my email using the new Gmail tab structure is the
Gmail app (which is not my primary mail app).

This also doesn't take into account that there are still thousands of
businesses that are using Outlook to access their Gmail. B2B operations won't
have to deal with the Gmail filtering as much.

There's no question that the new tab system has SOME impact but I don't think
we can simply accept the numbers in the article as fact in all cases.

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GrinningFool
If it means that I stop getting those pseudo-casual emails that are apparently
the preferred way to promote continued engagement or to pull me back in when
I've been away for 'too long', I'm all for it.

~~~
Pxtl
This. Twitter is atrocious for this crap.

~~~
GrinningFool
For me it seems simple: if I stop using a service, it's because it didn't
provide value to me. Even if I click a link in a reminder email out of
curiosity - that doesn't change the fundamental problem.

I'd be interested to see some numbers on the long-term effectiveness of such
campaigns, instead of the short-term spike in return visits

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tjoff
Or, you could focus on creating a great service instead of being an ass.

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kunle
Agreed on this. I'd also add a couple of things - first, deeplinking is a
partial solution that a ton of (even really sophisticated) products have yet
to adopt (I'm looking at you LinkedIn). Second, push notifications for iOS are
still a massive pain to implement. I see sophisticated dev teams struggle
getting this set up all the time. Layer to that all the different ways people
use emails (marketing emails, lifecycle emails, transactional emails etc) and
try to turn these systems into generating push messages, at scale, and you
have an even bigger challenge. Times will get tougher before they get better.

EDIT: Focused on iOS because, as of today, that's still where the money is.
From what I understand setting push notifications up for Android is far more
straightforward.

~~~
k3n
Nothing says "uninstall me" like an uninvited push notification.

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ScottWhigham
To me, this is part of Google's long-term strategy.

Today: user signs up with website, website has access to user via email,
Google is out-of-the-loop except to serve ads to gmail users only

Future: user signs up with website, website no longer has access to user via
email, website has to pay Google to advertise to searchers

This will absolutely have an impact on AdWords and AdSense.

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corresation
Somewhat tangential, but LinkedIn has turned to email to increase engagement
with such desperation that I am starting to short the future of the company.

"SomeRandomPerson has endorsed you. Click here to find out what they
endorsed."

etc. It is a invirtuous cycle of trying to essentially trick people into doing
things that trigger these emails for other people (recall Classmates.com being
an earlier crash-into-Earth example of this pattern). They're trying,
desperately, to fight the fact that many people simply have no need to use the
service with any regularity at all, so it becomes gaming about endorsements.

