Google Gmail and Email Marketing

Google's announcement of their proposed new free email service, Gmail, has been creating quite a stir not only in the internet industry, but also in the business sector. Google was wise enough to invite several business people to participate in the trial period and give their feedback, thus incidentally insuring a lot of word of mouth advertising.

Two things stand out primarily at this point in time:

1. Privacy advocates are still up in arms about the fact that Google will be spidering through your email messages and adding paid advertisements to them before they hit the recipient's inbox, and the fact that these emails are NEVER deleted from the system, even if you try to delete them.

2. Everyone who's tried the service really likes it, except in some cases for those ads.

Having email stored essentially forever has pros and cons; it could provide very useful documentation of things like business transactions, but on the other hand, if you fire off an email when you're hot under the collar, you might just want that deleted at some later date. Of course, it could be argued that if you're writing things down that you don't want to be saved and possibly seen by other people, then perhaps you should not be wriring them in the first place.

The issue of the advertisements it another story. On a strictly personal level, I don't care if some computer program reads through my email, but I don't care to receive emails that have banner ads added to them. They're annoying enough to me on websites.

However, my dislike of seeing banner ads in my email is personal; the business implications that it has are a different story. One of the services offered by Sharpnet Solutions is email marketing. What will happen to legitimate email marketing campaigns under Gmail? Your advertisement for your client will be scanned by a spider, and an appropriate paid advertisement inserted. In other words, your client will be paying for an email blast which might very well end up also advertising for their competitors! If the campaigns are sent as pure HTML and images, then it's unlikely the spider will find anything to read; on the other hand, none of those emails will get through to AOL users, since AOL email blasts require text messages.

If Gmail really does become a reality and gets a lot of people signing up, then email marketing companies will have to change their strategies. Perhaps it will require filtering the lists, and either eliminating certain addresses, or doing separate creatives for them. Either way, it's almost certain that email marketing costs will rise.

This is a great pity, because opt-in email marketing (as opposed to the universally-loathed spam) is a legitimate, effective, and extremely high ROI means of advertising a business, product, or service.

Comments

[Anon]

Google ads are NOT inserted into any emails - they appear within the web-browser, just like Yahoo & Hotmail banner ads (except it's text ads).