Google has annouced that they will be implementing a new feature across Gmail and Google Apps accounts. The new tool is called Priority Inbox and it may drastically change the way people interact with their email client.

Priority Inbox is a new feature that aims to help people organize and prioritize their Gmail Inbox. Through a series of data gathering measures including user input, Gmail will now be able to prioritize your inbox based on the amount of attention you have given messages in the past. Opening and replying to messages will indicate that messages are more important, while deleting without reading or marking messages as spam will do the opposite. You can also manually rate messages as more or less important, which will allow users to customize Priority Inbox even further.

Priority Inbox will split Gmail inboxes into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”. Customizable filters will be available so users can automatically categorize messages as they come in. As is true with most large scale Gmail updates, this feature will be rolling out for all users over the course of the upcoming weeks.

Image taken from the Offical Google Blog

Now that you know what Priority Inbox is, the question you are probably asking yourself is “How will it effect my email campaigns?”. To put it simply, Priority Inbox will further reward those who have already been pushing out quality campaigns and increasingly punish those who send weak campaigns or SPAM. Priority Inbox won’t just effect @gmail.com accounts either, it will include users of Google Apps as well.

Priority Inbox puts increased pressure mailers to follow best practices, send well-designed and thoughtful mailing campaigns, and to get their recipients to add them to the address book. Users with Priority Inbox will most likely burn out even faster than a typical user if you aren’t sending them desirable content.

Rewarding good behavior and punishing the bad guys? Priority Inbox sounds like something that could be good for the industry as a whole. It will be interesting to see how it plays out on a larger scale. One thing is for sure, this is a good time to ensure you email marketing program is dedicated to sending quality mailings. Stay tuned for updates.

Going from cold to hot isn’t so tough.

It’s no big news that email lists can go cold. It can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the list building process took longer than you expected, maybe your boss wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on email marketing when the list was forming, or maybe you’ve just bored your list to tears. Regardless of the reason, you can heat your list back up with some fairly easy methods.

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers why they haven’t been responding to your email.

Communication is key. While you may think that asking your customers directly will make you look bad, it doesn’t. They will respect your honesty and if they do have an issue they will know that you care and are making efforts to correct it.

Offer exclusive incentives to returning customers.

Even if a customer has begun to ignore your email, a particularly good incentive can bring back even customers with the most waning interest. If someone was at one time interested in what you have to offer it’s very likely that they will be again under the right circumstances. Give them a reason to come back.

Change your strategy.

If providing one kind of promotion doesn’t seem to be exciting your audience, try something new. Maybe your recipients are still interested in buying something from you but have just grown tired of the same old offers. If you send them a coupon for 10% off every time, it’s not going to be much of an attention grabber after a while. Consider changing up your offers and occasionally doing something very unique to make your customers do a double-take when they receive your email.

Consider an email redesign.

While content may still be king, good looks certainly can’t hurt. If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your campaign, you may consider taking another look at your email design. A really bad design, and trust me they are all over the place, can scare someone away faster than just about anything. If you want your consumers to trust and respect your company your email should have a design that promotes you in the best light, not as some two-bit spammer.

Re-examine your demographic.

Their wants, needs, and how they interact with your company/organization may have changed over time. What was once a popular subject among the people on your list may now be sorely out of date. Make sure you stay current with the interests and trends among your list. Keep your products and ideas up to date. If possible you could offer incentives to some of your recipients for filling out a survey. A great way for retailers to get people into their store is by giving out a five dollar gift card. Since barely anything costs just five dollars, it’s pretty likely they will be spending some of their own cash once they get started.

If you’re simply using your email statistics to judge the effectiveness of your campaign, you are missing out on a vital tool for improving the success of future email marketing endeavors.

If you want to tap the full potential of email marketing, your work isn’t finished after you send out your campaign. You should give your recipients a few days to read and respond to your email. Not everyone is glued to their computer screens and some take longer than others to act on offers. After you have given ample time for your campaign to be received, you can begin to utilize your statistics. You’ll want to start by getting a general feeling for the overall success of your mailing. You can do this by observing your opens and clickthroughs, but you don’t want to stop there. Below are several other ways you can use campaign statistics to improve your ROI and move your marketing plan forward.

One of the best ways you can use your campaign statistics to your advantage, is by doing targeted follow up mailings. Based on what links people have clicked on, or based on who opened the email, you can send follow up emails to targeted groups. For example, if someone clicked on a link to one of your products, you might want send them out a coupon. Done correctly this can nudge interested recipients into becoming a paying customer!

A slightly more advanced technique is doing a random 50/50 split of your list and sending out an ‘A’ and ‘B’ version of your email. In each version you can vary the content of your email. You might want to change the subject line or present a different offer. Once you have the statistics from both of your campaigns, you can compare the results and get a general idea of which tactics were more effective. Doing this every once in a while will help you get to know your audience better and will make it easier for you to create successful campaigns.

Another tactic that can be useful is to download your list of soft bounces and do a directed mailing specifically to them. It’s best to usually wait a short period of time before sending out to your bounces again, but a specific mailing to them can accomplish two things: 1) You’ll eliminate addresses that aren’t active more quickly and 2) Soft bounce will often times resolve themselves and you’ll be able to contact them on your second mailing.

Oh, what’s in a name?

Language is a beautiful thing. It is perhaps mankind’s greatest and most significant invention. With language we are able to convey so much with so little. It has enabled us to keep a record of our thoughts and to build on the accomplishments of those who have come before us.

Email marketing is an advanced form of communication. From cave paintings to the printing press, the human race has moved forward to this point. We can now send communication nearly anywhere in the world with a simple click of a button. Email is an astounding and revolutionary piece of technology. Communicating with it should be elegant and effective. So why has email become, in many cases, so cold and crass?

I personally blame one word, one word that represents much more, one word that has become a representative for bad email marketing.

Blast.

That dirty little word.

You might be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with the word blast?”, to which I would respond, pretty much everything. Let’s break it down, for the moment we will set aside the connotation of the word, which is probably the worst part, and focus on the denotation or the literal meaning of the word. Sometimes we use a word for so long that we don’t even stop to think about its meaning.

• Here are a couple of my favorite definitions pulled from the dictionary:

If it’s your first time conducting an email marketing campaign, the entire prospect may seem overwhelming. Rest assured, however, it’s not as difficult as you might believe.

The major challenges can be conquered relatively easily with a dedication to planning and thoughtfulness. The technical side of email marketing is the most daunting, but hiring a good service provider such as Admail.net alleviates almost all technical issues. You can create a successful email campaign for your organization by following the golden rule and by relying on some common sense methods.

What do I mean by the “golden rule approach”?

I’m referring to the simple idea of only sending email that you would want to receive yourself. This works best if you put yourself in the shoes of your recipients and is known in marketing terms as “understanding your target market”. The golden rule approach is essentially an exercise in common sense and targeted marketing.

One of the first things that I tell any customer about their email campaign is that they need to be transparent and open with their customers.

We have all heard the phrase “honesty is the best policy”, this applies heavily to email marketing. Your main objective must be to let your recipients know why they got the email, what the email is offering, who the email is from, and how they can stop future mailings if they no longer want to receive the email. If you give your customer all of these pieces of information your campaign will be easily understood and you’ll receive less complaints and unsubscribes.

The success of a campaign is determined by many factors, but the single most important aspect to any email campaign is the quality of your list.

This is one of the most often overlooked of all common sense email marketing practices. You must have a good relationship with your list in order to have a successful campaign. This is the main reason buying a list is such a bad idea. If you buy a list, you have absolutely no relationship with your recipients. You want to have members who have signed up for your newsletter and have a firm understanding of what to expect from it. If you have a list like this, you already know that your recipients are interested in what you are sending them. To achieve this, be clear about what you will be sending and how often you will be sending it.

There are many other examples of common sense practices to improve your email campaign, but most questions you will have to answer on your own. Don’t rush an email campaign and always remember to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

To stay focused on common sense and the golden rule, ask yourself these questions before sending out a campaign. Does it look trust worthy? Does what I am sending follow what I told recipients I would send when they signed up? Does the mailing live up to its offers or promises? Are your offers or information provided in your mailings relevant and worth while? Ask yourself these questions with each mailing and ensure that you can answer each question with a firm “Yes!” but remember, the most important question is, how would you feel about receiving your own campaign?