Why You Need a Gmail Priority Strategy "As a marketer, and one who works for a digital marketing agency that manages a lot of CRM programs for a lot of clients that includes a lot of email, Priority Inbox both excites me and scares ... me," writes Jonathan Richman at Dose of Digital. In essence, he notes, Google has repurposed its exceptional spam filter to identify highly relevant messages and send them to a Gmail user's priority inbox.
"[I]t works almost perfectly," he says, "meaning it doesn't categorize much incorrectly. You can correct it when it does, so that it gets even smarter, so by now it's running almost flawlessly for me."
And therein lies the problem for the email marketer. According to Richman, the new system has effectively prevented almost all nonpersonal messages from reaching his inbox. Worse yet, he hasn't missed them enough to wonder where they went.
So how do you increase the chances that your marketing messages make it to a subscriber's priority inbox—and, therefore, onto their radar? Richman says the answer is an interactive email campaign that prompts recipients to:
- Open your messages
- Send you messages
- Reply to your messages
But there's an obvious catch: "There aren't really any commercial email campaigns out there that invite people to respond back to the email (in fact, most explicitly tell you not to reply) and there isn't any reason why I'd send an email [to] your company's email program," notes Richman.
The next best thing? Get them to flag your messages as a higher priority just because they like them.
The Po!nt: Become indispensable. Heightened engagement is the best path to a Gmail subscriber's priority inbox. How can you turn your subscriber into a pen pal?
Source: Dose of Digital.
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