Important Gmail update coming soon!

Last week, many sites leaked screenshots of a future major update of Gmail. If most of the features that will evolve will not directly affect marketers (yes, the Promotion tab would still be present, Google would be wrong not to offer it anymore), it is still interesting to look at it, Gmail is often a precursor in the world of webmail.

The stat : Gmail, it's 1.2 billion users in the world!

Source: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/gmail-statistics/ The most important evolution would be visibly on the side of the interface which would take the codes of the Material DesignA development that has already been present for some time in the Gmail mobile application. On the other hand, some of the new products have been developed directly from the laboratory that is " Inbox by Gmail"Two of them are worth mentioning:

• Snooze emails A feature that allows you to create an automatic reminder of the email (tomorrow, this weekend, next week, another day...)
• Smart replies These are small contextual calls to action that are displayed below the emails and allow you to pre-fill a future response (already available in the Gmail mobile application)

Finally, Google should soon implement the possibility to consult Gmail "offline", but other screenshots released last week would also talk about an auto-destruct/confidentiality feature for emails (to see how they will manage the latter, it will probably not be compatible between messengers).

Inbox, stop or still?

Launched in 2014, "Inbox by Gmail" has become Google's laboratory for everything related to innovative features around email. Given the lack of "real" consumer adoption, one can really wonder if it's worth continuing to develop this tool alongside Gmail. Time will tell, but personally, it would be a shame to miss out!

Is there an impact on the marketing uses of email?

Concernant les changements d’interface, comme dit plus haut, les boîtes Promotions et Notifications semblent toujours en place, il ne faut donc pas espérer de changements de comportement de ce côté… même si tout changement d’ergonomie peut entraîner d’importants changements dans l’usage. Le changement le plus important est sans doute la question du « Snooze » ! Depuis pas mal de temps on voit déjà que la plage de consommation des emails à tendance à se rallonger (même si ça n’a pas un effet spectaculaire sur les résultats des campagnes), ici, c’est le destinataire qui va pouvoir se dire « Ca à l’air top cette promo sur mes prochaines vacances, j’aimerais que ça apparaisse de nouveau ce weekend pour le voir en famille ». Bon, il ne faut tout de même pas avoir trop d’attentes sur ce sujet, on verra dans la pratique si c’est réellement utilisé pour les emails commerciaux. As for the "Smart replies", for the moment, on Inbox and in the mobile app of Gmail, they do not appear under the emails of the promotions box (at least, we have not seen any), it would be interesting to "play" with them to see what are the language elements that allow to display them. We will of course give you more news when the features will be present and when we will have been able to test them. Maybe we'll get some new info at the Google I/O conference from May 8th to 10th.

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/12/heres-what-the-new-gmail-looks-like/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/google-is-testing-self-destructing-emails-in-new-gmail/ https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/12/17227974/google-gmail-design-features-update-2018-redesign