Delivering to Gmail can feel like delivering to a black box. You worked hard on your email, and you know your subscribers will love it–but you don’t know if it will get in front of them, because Gmail has so many mysterious rules and practices, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping it gets there.
It doesn’t have to be a such a game of chance, though. First, we have to accept a couple truths:
- To succeed, you have to play by Gmail’s rules.
- When you understand the why behind Gmail’s rules, it becomes easier to follow them.
Why Gmail?
According to Litmus, Gmail has second largest market share at 27%. This means that 27% of people in this data set opened their email in either the Gmail web or mobile client.
This doesn’t even consider whether someone checks their Gmail in another tool (like Apple’s Email app), or whether someone uses Gsuite for a branded domain, so in reality, this percentage is likely higher.
When I’ve sorted clients’ lists by email provider, Gmail generally comes in at about 60% for US-based senders. And according to Gmail itself, they have over 1 billion users.
My point: Gmail matters to you. They are very likely your largest gatekeeper. If you want your email to get through, you should care about what Gmail cares about.
What matters to Gmail is what matters to Google
Google is motivated by increasing market dominance, and generating more revenue.
You probably know this if you use any part of the Google ecosystem — from Chrome to Search. They want to be the most popular search engine, most popular browser, most popular mobile OS, most popular email service. And so they focus on getting as many users as possible for each of these products — that is why they are free or open source.
And as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the service, you are the product.
By attracting as many users as possible, they then have a very large, very valuable pool for advertisers. They can serve ads in your inbox and in your search results. They can use your experience in the inbox and in search to serve you really relevant ads on other websites.
Free isn’t enough
Just because a Google service is free, doesn’t mean people will all of a sudden use it. It also has to be extremely good, so they focus on improving the user experience.
Have you heard stories of people complaining about how a Google Search algorithm change totally fucked up their traffic? That’s because Google doesn’t build search to cater to the needs of the marketer–that’s what their ad platform is for. Instead, they cater to the needs of the user.
Google Search has to be the fastest and most relevant search for us to keep using it after all these years. They are constantly changing it, to keep us coming back and sharing data — data they can use to make money.
For the most part, Google’s tools, especially Search and Gmail, provider a great user experience. But it’s important to remember that it is Google’s definition of a great user experience. Google will continue to change it’s platforms, which means the rules marketers need to play by will also continue to change.
It can be easy to feel frustrated by this change, but I’d argue it’s even easier to embrace it. Focusing on a great user experience by default, rather than the latest hacks and tricks, will always pay off.
Increase revenue by improving the user experience
This all applies to Gmail too: Gmail must be the most pleasurable free email service, and it must understand what it’s users want and need to serve better and better ads.
I’m not out here trying to convince you Google is Good – the only reason they focus on the user experience is because it helps them make more money.
But let’s be real here: we’re all trying to making more money. You’re reading this because you want to increase sales with email (and if that’s not your main goal, it should be!).
So, you need to do the same thing. Your emails must enhance the user experience too– send emails Gmail wants to deliver, the user wants to engage with, and you’ll always be rewarded.