Tag Archives: gmail

AMP for Email: Google brings interactive real-time content to Gmail – but reactions are mixed

Posted on February 19, 2018 by | Leave a comment

A few days ago, Google announced a plan to enable “more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences” by bringing AMP to email. While interactive email and real-time content are supposedly big trends in the email industry, feedback from developers was modest, to say the least – for good reasons.
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Prevent Gmail from shortening your subject lines at the beginning (square brackets issue)

Posted on January 3, 2018 by | Leave a comment

There is a lot of information about develping newsletters for Gmail. These range from rendering quirks to unique goomoji and clipping issues. However, one thing seems to be less well known. Or were you aware that Gmail does not only cut off subject lines at the end, like most email clients do, but also at the beginning? Continue reading →

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How animated symbols in Gmail subject lines increased my open rate

Posted on May 18, 2015 by | 7 Comments

As announced in the “Email Gurus” board on LinkedIn, I put Gmail’s animated emoji symbols to the subject line test last Friday:

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Here’s how I did it and what the results were. So much is revealed, they’re like…
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Placing animated Emojis in Gmail Subject Lines? [Cheat Sheet]

Posted on May 11, 2015 by | 34 Comments

Note that Gmail does not support the following anymore:
The emoji subject line cheat sheet and the maps of combined emoji usage from the previous posts are not enough? Well, then how about animating your subject lines like shown in this example:

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Here’s another table of 703 copy-and-pastable unicode characters with the corresponding images. The best thing about those: they are rendered already in the gmail.com inbox overview, not just in the single email view. Therefore it should be “ok” that they are excluded in the preheader. I highlighted the animated emojis with a yellow background (Note: German visitors might want to read my posting on emailmarketing.de):

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Gmail’s image caching: How it affects email marketing & how to heal your opens tracking

Posted on December 7, 2013 by | 23 Comments

Gmail started caching images (see wordtothewise.com and my post on emailmarketing.de): It saves image files from unique URLs temporarily and changes the image URLs in newsletters so that they point to the cached images on googleusercontent.com. The user’s browser then loads and displays Gmail’s cloned images. For marketers, this may lead to reduced tracking and marketing opportunities. Here is why.

gmail-image-cachinggmail-image-caching-problems Continue reading →

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All-clear: Tabbed Gmail doesn’t affect (my) click rates. What about yours?

Posted on August 1, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Did you notice some alarmism lately? Gmail introduced a new inbox, which auto-sorts emails into tabs. Marketers fear, their emails become less visible and response rates drop now that they are filed under a promotions tab. After all, Gmail is one of the two biggest email providers. (The other one is good old Outlook.com/Hotmail.)

So… do those marketers have a reasonable concern? Continue reading →

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Gmail’s new inbox: Email marketing myth busting

Posted on June 5, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Many email marketing bloggers commented on Gmail’s new inbox last week. I have been able to use it since day two after its announcement in both of my accounts. (In fact, I already used it before; the new inbox is a revamp of a labs feature called Smartlabels that I blogged about two years ago.) Since mailers speculate on what the Gmail future golds for them, here is some myth busting – with regards to what my Gmail-inboxes in Germany look like today: Continue reading →

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Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo & Co. – webmail usage in the European Union [study]

Posted on August 22, 2012 by | 9 Comments

In the last months, I shared several European ecommerce, internet and email figures. Here’s another interesting one. Ever wondered, how popular cloud-based email services like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail are – e.g. in the U.K., in Germany, or in Sweden? Answers come from a recent comScore study. I just felt like putting some of them into a map. Continue reading →

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Can seed lists measure email deliverability? A practical guide by the numbers.

Posted on July 19, 2012 by | 5 Comments

A seed list is a set of artificial email addresses, which are meant to be interspersed into campaign dispatches. The underlying seed list inboxes are then checked automatically by software after a certain time. Marketers use seed lists in order to monitor their deliverability. If all emails to the seed list accounts hit the junk folder or got lost, there is a certain probability that this was the case for the subscribers’ accounts, too. However, the reliability factor is often forgotten. I want to shed some light onto the question, under what circumstances seed list results allow good estimations of inbox placement rates or spam filtering rates for a whole campaign… Continue reading →

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Did Hotmail unblock images?

Posted on July 2, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Good news from Hotmail: The world’s oldest freemailer service does not only turn 16 years old in two days. It also may have turned on images and links by default, now. That is for email senders with good reputation scores, as it seems. The phenomenon has been reported on emailmarketersclub.com before. Remains to be seen, if it will be persistent and rolled out globally. Continue reading →

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