Most people are ignoring the biggest problem that Google is causing. Gmail's virtual dominance in email field is going to be extremely hurtful for the rest of the hacker and startup community.
At the end of the email marketing remains the numero uno method of user acquisition and retention. With the new features such as priority inbox and automated classification of personal emails/promotion emails it is going to make it impossible for new consumer web startups to succeed.
If GMail kills email marketing, I will walk all the way around the world to Palo Alto and personally shake Larry & Sergey by the hand. Nobody likes email marketing, not even the people building their livelihoods on top of it.
If Google managed to snuff out such a widely reviled marketing channel, it would be an enormously disruptive force in the tech industry. And disruptive forces aren't hurtful for the startup community at all. Disruption makes room for innovation.
Sure, it'd be bad news for SendGrid, but it'd be awesome news for some lucky group of people in the 2015 YC batch.
Absolutely. As users we would all love if we get "no promotional" emails in our inbox. But this is going to give power to Google to decide which email get delivered and which does not giving an bias towards which company makes more money than others. Which is not good.
I would rather see a more distributed and open system that helps people get rid of the promotional emails or not.
sorry, no, i would be thrilled to have promotional email automatically separated from my personal email. it may make your job of user acquisition (isn't "user acquisition by email marketing" just a euphemism for spam?) and retention harder, but this is my inbox, not an extension of your ad campaign.
True. But the idea is that "you" should decide that and not google. For example google might chose to block 99% of the marketing emails which might make you happy but at the same time Google will decide which 1% of them will succeed.
There are many people who actually read the emails they receive from companies, even promotional emails. The fact is that not all email marketing is spam.
Some people like being informed about the products/services they use - in this case, the email marketing they opt into is a periodic newsletter of sorts. When a new feature or improvement is released, some people like receiving an email notifying them of the release. Again, such an email is marketing. For larger companies, there's a marketing team who designed the email and wrote the copy for it.
Don't confuse email marketing with spam. Some marketing is spam, much of it is not.
It's just semi-legitimate spam really. It's OK if you follow these rules:-
> Unsub is stupidly easy to find and use. No, I don't need to fill out your survey or login and use textboxes to complete.
> I signed up for it. The default on the signup page was no. There was clear seperation between boxes that had to be ticked and ones that didn't.
If you don't you lose the semi-legitimate and you're getting marked as spam.
After working for many years in email marketing let me tell you what I have learned. Giving a clear cut and well accessible working unsub link is the best way to ensure deliveribility.
At the end of the email marketing remains the numero uno method of user acquisition and retention. With the new features such as priority inbox and automated classification of personal emails/promotion emails it is going to make it impossible for new consumer web startups to succeed.