Email marketing is the most economic means of generating business – stale news! Every marketer worth his salt knows this. And while best practices around email marketing being a hot topic across marketing groups spanning the Internet, there isn’t much that’s been left to anyone’s fancy – or is there?
The Email Service Provider is one of the prime stake holders in the email marketing model, only second to the customer/prospect – and we all know that Gmail dominates the email domain with a hefty 60% market share. Why? Because Gmail provides unparalleled user experience. What makes it the Obi Wan of the email universe is its ability to understand the way users interact with their email, and tweak its algorithms accordingly. A sudden flood of spam and viruses over the past years caused Gmail to become extremely strict with its anti-spam policies. While these brought relief to the users by reducing the amount of spam to their inbox, it proved to be nightmarish for the diminishing set of ethical email marketers.
To improve Gmail inbox delivery marketers used a combination of inline and hosted images in promotional emails. While this was easy to implement for most tech savvy companies, it gave email marketing software providers the shivers trying to explain this to the other lot. Hosting the images would require companies to rely on hosting servers, where they would have to share the server space with other companies desiring similar services. Mails would land in spam even if the domains hosting the images were blacklisted. This could be anyone’s fault – the hosting service provider or any of the companies hosting the images.
To improve user experience, Gmail asked users if they want the images to be displayed while reading mails from an unknown source. This protected users from unknown senders who might try to use images to corrupt their computer or mobile device.
Gmail Inbox – Before images being displayed by default
But thanks to new improvements by Google, Gmail users will see all images displayed in their messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from the external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.
Gmail Inbox – After images being displayed by default
So now the messages are much safer and secure as all images are checked for known viruses/malware. What this means is that users will never have to press that snooty ‘Display Images Below’ link again. With this new change, Gmail intends to make users’ email experience safer, faster and more fantastic than ever.
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