Gmail and promotional email: some thoughts on marketing and common sense

The first thing I noticed when I tried the new tab-organized Gmail inbox at the end of May was that promotional mails were automatically stored in a folder called Promotions, the contents of which I could ignore or check later at my leisure.

I totally loved the idea: I am one of those users that knew email when it was still a communication tool between people that was completely free of advertising, and who was indignant when he first began to receive promotional mail; I even remember bothering to reply to some of them in rather inflammatory terms. So Google seemed to be offering me just what I had always wanted: control over my in-box. In short time, I also became aware of the implications for companies that use email as a commercial tool and that were going to see their messages reduced to low priority. I wrote about it a few days afterwards, and have since see two interesting articles on the subject in MIT Tech Review, and another one in GigaOM.

If you haven’t seen the response yet; you will: angry companies and organizations that see Google’s initiative as an affront; sending mails asking you to free them from exile by dragging them to your Primary Gmail tab: the almost half a billion users of Gmail are too tasty an objective to just let them get away without a fight. But let’s think a little about what promotional emails are really about, and what the vast majority of companies do with email marketing. In reality, that use is pretty much the same as what until they did until recently with our physical mailbox.

There are two main reasons why we get less junk mail through our letter boxes: the first is, quite simply that we don’t pay any attention to what we receive through that channel: most of it we throw away immediately, and in many apartment blocks there are even trash cans near the mailboxes… and some letters remain in the mailbox for several days. The second reason is that most of these companies have since found a much cheaper way to hassle us. We have seen an exponential increase in the use of email for commercial purposes, an increase only mitigated by the gradual improvement in the accuracy of anti-spam filters.

Huge numbers of companies insist that their mail is not spam, either because it is not indiscriminate, or because sometimes we have given permission to be sent commercial emails via an interminable list of options that we had to mark, or because they have threatened us by saying that if we don’t authorize their messages we could miss out on something really important, which so far we haven’t. It is absolutely obvious that the criteria these companies sending me messages are very different to mine: it is a rare occasion when I consider an email that has automatically gone to the Promotions tab to be important. But they all still think that what they have to say is a matter of life and death, and seem to think that my life will be utterly meaningless unless I receive their message.

But there is a huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. The fact of the matter is that email should not be a tool for companies to use to send advertisements. It’s that simple. In short, companies should not be allowed to destroy the value of any means of communication they come across, and that we are trying to use: the same thing happened with the telephone, which now serves as a means to allow salespeople to make unwanted calls when we are having dinner; it was the same with door-to-door sales, and with our mailboxes. Some of these channels have now all-but disappeared: sales people can ring my door all day long, but I will call the police before I open the door to them so that they can unleash their spiel on me. Others, sadly, are on the increase. So, dear businesses, could you please, for the love of God, stop calling me on my cellphone to try to sell me things?

Email is something special. It is a communication tool to be used between people and should remain as such if it is to retain its usefulness. If businesses decide to invade it with advertisements, these should be flagged as low priority, and be collected in a place where they do not interfere with real communication; only people who genuinely want to receive those communications from certain companies should be those who, voluntarily, drag said mails to their inbox. Google’s thinking behind Gmail seems to me spot on, as long as it doesn’t recant and offer companies prepared to pay for the privilege to get access to my main inbox.

Google’s view is probably that the best way for a business to approach the users of its email service is not to invade their inbox with promotional material, something that Google obviously cannot charge for, but instead by paying Google to place an advertisement on the right hand side of the message in a non-intrusive way. Fine, I have no problem with that: advertising on the right hand side of a message is much less bothersome than a huge list of messages, most of which are potentially preventing me from seeing those that actually matter to me.

If scanning messages to look for keywords infringes the law and our privacy rights and Google has to stop doing this, then I am sure that the company will use other contextual or behavior targeting strategies for these advertisements that in all likelihood will reduce their relevance, but advertisements will remain, one way or another. It makes no sense that the best email tool ever invented is also unable to make money for its owners, and it is hard to imagine a situation where email management becomes a paid service; although personally, I would be delighted.

If you are a business and in the email marketing business, this is the harsh reality: YOU ARE A NUISANCE. You are a nuisance to just about everybody who receives your mails; in the same way that tele-sales calls are a nuisance, that junk mail is a nuisance, and door-to-door selling is a nuisance. There is no point in trying to call what you do by another name than spam.

We should only receive messages that we have already asked to be sent: as simple as that. I can accept advertising on television—albeit with certain rules—that my program will be interrupted by advertisements that in part finance what I am watching, but I would prefer you kept out of my email inbox, and if you must show up, that do so as low priority, allowing me as a user to do with your mail what I please.

Promotional emails are the equivalent to making it legal for a company to send a salesperson round to our home to be permanently at our side shouting in our ear every time we try to talk to a friend or colleague. The use of email for promotional purposes to invade our inbox by companies seeking to capture our attention is the result of an age of excesses that were never properly punished, and that can only be described as an offense against common sense.