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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you're sending more than a single confirmation email that the user has not EXPLICITLY requested then you are part of the problem.
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.<p>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).
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).<p>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)<p>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).
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.<p>App Uninstall.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
To me, this is part of Google's long-term strategy.<p>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<p>Future: user signs up with website, website no longer has access to user via email, website has to pay Google to advertise to searchers<p>This will absolutely have an impact on AdWords and AdSense.
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.<p>"SomeRandomPerson has endorsed you. Click here to find out what they endorsed."<p>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.