Gmail, Gmail, Gmail

Gmail has made some changes lately that affect email marketers. Here’s an update on a couple of these modifications and what they may mean for you, as a marketer and a consumer:
 
Images On:  Most email clients (Yahoo! Outlook, etc.) leave images turned off. This is intended to protect the recipient’s privacy. (Remember, you generally only know who opened your HTML emails by those who have downloaded your images.) For those of use sending legit email, it’s annoying. Now, whenever a Gmail user gets email from someone they’ve emailed at least twice containing images, they will see them right away.  This is a good thing for marketers who create image-heavy messages AND have encouraged feedback from their subscribers. As Ben at MailChimp points out, if encouraging feedback is scary, just add a link to messages sent to Gmail subscribers. And get rid of the “Do Not Reply Statements”! 
 
Auto unsubscribe: In late July Gmail added a feature that lets users automatically unsubscribe from unwanted mailings with one click.  It doesn’t work for every sender, but if you want to incorporate this feature into a newsletter, there’s more information on the Gmail blog. Worried that your list size will shrink? I think making it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe is absolutely a welcome concept.  This is a chance for you to make a good final impression, which hopefully will make your customers want to come back. This feature is the closest Google has come to offering a feedback loop for complaints. While marketers would generally prefer for subscribers to use the unsubscribe functionality within the message, this type of unsubscribe button can ultimately lead to lower complaint rates. This, in turn, helps email from those companies be more easily identified as good.