"Don't Be Evil" - Google, Spam, Patents & Email Domination in Age of X-channel Innovation
Always a lot of chatter in the email community relating to changes in Google's advertising guidelines and algorithms affecting search and email. Hearing of brands evaluating their search and email acquisition efforts, always busy helping others get out of Gmail spam folder that even the most well known email brands land in:
Loving it b/c not only it creates more work for us, but b/c it creates better marketers out of everyone.
If you follow Google from the beginning, you know the phrase and how often they say (or as some would call it - hide behind) 'Don't be evil'. So when they launched Gmail in 2004 (or publicly in 2009), a smart marketer should've expected changes to come. And if you know or had studied Paul Buchheit's days at Google you would've noticed Gmail was born out of search and you might have then foreseen the days ahead.
Fast forward to 2016 and most of our clients' lists are composed of 60-80% of Gmail - not sure if anyone would have expected the domination to happen so quickly, but everyone should've anticipated and observed the changes since then. The most recently talked about changes are not that new or you should've known they're coming, they've been happening for years ... and if your mailbox looks like mine:
you get 1000s of messages a day (and 10x of that in junk), you understand ISPs have resources too, you know how smart Google is, what their agenda is and you can read a little between the lines, you would've watched it, observed it, learned from it, maybe even begged for or collaborated on features like snoozing, priority inbox, image caching, grid, built apps etc...
Without going into all the details of what made Gmail the powerhouse it is today. One thing for sure - it's approach to SPAM. When I run my first company, while on the Google project I wrote 'Why can't email be like search' in 2007. Same year Google patented one of it's many email related patents. There are of course so many others. This is just to list a few, few, few.
IMHO (although one can argue) those were also the beginnings of omni channel marketing. That's when we decided to focus on also running seo and sem as part of media buying as part of email marketing management ... crazy huh? ... not only b/c search is (was?) such a great acquisition and list building tool, but b/c it made us better email marketers. And not as separate silos or departments either. You can't call yourself a cross channel marketer if you don't try to merge, amplify and feed one channel off of another.
But nuff said about past. Focusing on the now and what's next, I simply love the world we live in. So much innovation in this pretty archaic email space. And we have other channels to thank for that.
So being ironic, I'm truly looking forward to finally enabling images by default across the board. Are the algorithms perfect? No they're not so always be enjoying getting brands out of junk jail. Is the browser messaging going to be called the next email killer? Will Google do a world a favor, buy LiveIntent and resurrect the Grid? When will Criteo's Dynamic Email get in trouble? What will the newsletter preview by Gmail Inbox do to the opens? But most importantly, which brands will be the first to truly understand and take full advantage of omni channel marketing. So many do not, so many will not.
Let's bring down the silos, let's reorg.