You may have noticed a big change to your Gmail inbox this summer – three big changes in fact. Gmail now automatically sorts your incoming mail into one of three inboxes, shown as tabs on the welcome screen. Your personal correspondence still remains in your primary inbox, while social media notifications are sorted into the “Social” inbox and coupons, marketing e-mails, and daily deals (basically mailing lists) can now be found under the “Promotions” tab.
If your company uses Gmail’s webmail interface, the new tabs can free up your primary inbox for client and internal correspondence – making it much harder to lose important emails amid a sea of promotions, blast email tests, and industry news updates. If you route Gmail through a desktop client like Thunderbird or Outlook, you won’t see the tabs; your mail will behave as usual.
Email is still the most-used method of contacting a customer base, but with Gmail’s new system your promotional messages are likely to skip the primary inbox. Don’t despair! Gmail tabs do not yet show up on smartphones and recent research says 47% of email opens occur on a mobile device. Monitor your open rates – if you notice a decline in opens, experts suggest sending out an email blast encouraging subscribers to simply drag your email into the primary inbox, so it gets added to the list of email addresses allowed to appear there.
By Prasana William