Google officially announced the redesign of Gmail for the web Wednesday, introducing new enhancements and features. They integrated G-suite so that you can efficiently navigate through Calendar, Tasks, and Keep all in the same window, without having to open multiple tabs.
One of my favorite features is the ability to click on attachments without opening and scrolling through lengthy email threads. Currently that feature is only available in the default view — they provide 3 options: default, comfortable and compact view.
Gmail also added a ‘nudge’ feature that will appear next to the subject line of emails, which reminds you to follow up and reply to any emails that may have been missed. The ’Smart Reply’ feature, which was previously released on Inbox by Gmail and Gmail app on Android/iOS, is now available on Gmail for the web. ‘Snooze’ is another addition that gives users the option to stop notifications from an email for a set amount of time to help reduce potential distractions.
Specific to mobile, they also rolled out a high-priority notifications option that will give you a heads up about your most important emails to further avoid distractions. The other and more potentially impacting feature for bulk senders, is the unsubscribe notification from newsletters/offers that users have not engaged with in some time. As the rate at which consumers are reading emails on mobile devices continues to climb, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some spikes in unsubscribes and/or complaints.
Advice: As a best practice, you should be segmenting your email marketing programs based on user engagement — if you are already, that’s great, and you shouldn’t see much impact to deliverability. However, if you aren’t, you may notice a negative impact on Gmail inbox placement and ROI.
For additional security and protection, Gmail will now display an alert when a suspicious or potentially malicious email comes through. Over the past couple years, they have been a strong advocate of pushing DMARC (domain message authentication reporting & conformance) authentication as a standard, so this appears to be another step in that direction. Lastly, their new confidential mode allows you to set an expiration date (still to be rolled out in the coming weeks) and remove the option to forward, copy, download or print messages for your emails. This is an extremely helpful feature when transmitting sensitive information via email.
Advice: If you aren’t signing your emails with DMARC yet, it might be a good time to start discussing implementation with your team and ESP — 250OK offers a great DMARC solution to help protect your brand and customers.
Feel free to give the new Gmail a try within your own inbox by clicking Settings (cog wheel on the top right corner of your inbox) -> ‘Try the new Gmail’. And if this new version is not for you, you can always revert back to the original version, ‘Go back to classic Gmail’. It will be interesting to see the potential impacts on deliverability and email marketers as the new version is fully rolled out, so stay tuned.