Not my inbox
Probably not, but some think this new development may provide a challenge for e-mail marketers. According to the overview provided on the Priority Inbox (I’ll call it PI) support pages, “Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted.”
So how exactly does it work? There’s a PI tab on the left side of your inbox, and when you click it, messages will be grouped into three sections: Important/Unread, Starred and Everything Else. As you move messages around, over time you train Gmail to figure out which incoming messages you’ll deem important, using the following criteria:
- Who sent the email (For example, if you email Bob a lot, it’s likely that messages from Bob are important.)
- What terms it includes (If you always read messages about soccer, a new message that contains those same soccer words is more likely to be important.)
- The actions that help us determine which people/terms are important to you include: replying, using stars, archiving, deleting (Messages you star are probably more important than messages you archive without opening.)
This all theoretical, for me, anyway, because Gmail still “rolling out PI slowly” and I am not one of privileged few yet. This might not be the worst thing, though.
What Elliot Ross, senior creative designer at e-Dialog London, points out is that e-mail marketers now not only have to worry about getting their messages into recipients’ inboxes, but into this inbox within an inbox. (Hmm, it’s kind of like Inception) He also wonders, though, if the PI is worth trying to infiltrate.
“Bear in mind that whilst the user will check the priority email first,” he says, “in this folder they will be scanning things quickly and looking for things to act upon. The users mind state once they come to read the regular inbox afterwards may be easier to engage with for some marketers.”
At any rate, people don’t have to use PI, and a lot probably won’t for fear that an important e-mail will slip through the cracks.
