Google’s New Inbox App: What It Means for Marketers

Google continues to place a huge emphasis on innovating around the email inbox, announcing a new email app simply called Inbox. This move follows the wider rollout of a native unsubscribe link, turning on images by default with image caching, introducing grid view, and launching Gmail Tabs—all in the last year and a half.

The Inbox app’s two most compelling elements are Bundles and Highlights. Bundles allows users to group emails together for viewing. That apparently also includes grouping emails—such as promotional emails—so that they only arrive once a week, for instance.

Highlights is Google’s new, highly disruptive spin on snippet or preview text. When appropriate, it will show images, not just text—and more importantly, it will show content that’s not actually in the email in some cases. For example, using Google’s search expertise, an email about a package delivery could show you the real-time status of that delivery, even if the email doesn’t contain that information. Given this change, we should probably start calling it snippet content or preview content, not text.

For a full discussion of what these features mean for email marketers…

>> Read the entire post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud blog