5 ms·

A new, more visual way to view your Promotions tab

36 points by rkudeshi 12y ago

lgp171188 12y ago
Since their primary stream of revenue is advertising, they want to get more eyeballs on the promotional emails, most of which are ads.
- Theodores 12y ago
  My promotions tab is 3rd party emails. It will be interesting to see how this looks, will they make thumbnails of promotion emails or pick an image? How will this affect statistics for folk at Mailchimp et al? what about the little guy who sends a couple of hundred promotions out via a Mailchimp? Will their 'open' stats be skewed?
tenaciousJk 12y ago
My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits back?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Why would Google want to get those visits back? Things in the promotions tab are essentially competing against Google's own ads in Gmail so it probably benefits Google that you don't look at them.
  - tenaciousJk 12y ago
    Agreed. Why spend the effort on the new display look then?
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Weren't they inserting ads in the promotions tab that look like regular e-mails? http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails-promotions-inbox-to-promote-a-new-kind-of-ad http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails... The plan seems kind of simple here: - Make the promotions tab nicer. - More eyeballs for placed advertisements.
nisa 12y ago
The promotion tab does not work for me. A lot of my emails are miscategorized into it. E.g. monitoring emails. A flexible tab system would be really great. The Google machine learning approach does not work for me. Am I the only that experience this issues?
- alwaysdoit 12y ago
  You can drag messages from one tab to another. It will ask you if you want to put all messages from that sender into that category in the future.
  - nisa 12y ago
    Yes. It's a usability nightmare. I can't do it for all messages at once..., if I scroll down the tab is gone... hell I can't even move messages to the Inbox.. only labels and other tabs are possible.
teleclimber 12y ago
I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail". Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction. Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").
- eli 12y ago
  More cynically, it's also a great way to get people to tolerate high-value google ads in their inbox.
ryanlchan 12y ago
This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature. [1] http://www.altomail.com http://www.altomail.com
frade33 12y ago
Would you please leave my email alone. there are already 1000 and 1 distractions in my life over the internet. by the way what is the price tag of Gmail. If I ever get rich I would buy it and let it be what it is. an email service.
- jtreminio 12y ago
  This is an opt-in thing.
Derbasti 12y ago
I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero. Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started out as.
- hcurtiss 12y ago
  What did you move to?
  - Derbasti 12y ago
    Mostly native clients. And a provider that hosts in the same country I live in (Germany), that values my privacy, and uses green energy.
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      I don't understand why people don't use native clients more. Every time I say I use Thunderbird people look to me like I eat soup with a fork or something.
- magicalist 12y ago
  I think we agree about the usefulness of things like the Promotions tab, but I just never turned it on. It's not really a big deal. Meanwhile my mom loves the email promotions she's signed up for (if only she would stop forwarding me ones every few days...), so something like this is great for her. Different strokes and all that, and it doesn't degrade my experience by existing. Seems like a win.
- mankyd 12y ago
  > It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. Email itself has transformed into its own thing, "somewhat tangential to traditional email". Email is now used for a host of interactions that extend far beyond its roots. GMail is adapting to meet those usage patterns. I'm not calling your choice to move wrong - you may not use email for all the things the GMail is attempting to account for. But it would be foolish for GMail to stop adapting.
quintinoliver 12y ago
Wasn't the whole foundation of Google based on the notion of non-intrusive (text-only) ads?
thanatropism 12y ago
STOP MESSING WITH WEB MAIL. I have to get OwnCloud running on the server I already rent for an inane IRC bot.
petercooper 12y ago
Okay, so how do the ones that are just text appear, I wonder? (Like my newsletters, for users who've not yet moved them back to their Inbox.)
snoonan 12y ago
They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads. From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something. (which is almost all the time) The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not. That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email... edit: I a word.
plorg 12y ago
I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate. I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.
- aiiane 12y ago
  A lot of people don't want to spend the time to set up filters. Not everyone who uses GMail is a HN user.

36 points by rkudeshi 12y ago

Since their primary stream of revenue is advertising, they want to get more eyeballs on the promotional emails, most of which are ads.

Theodores 12y ago
My promotions tab is 3rd party emails. It will be interesting to see how this looks, will they make thumbnails of promotion emails or pick an image? How will this affect statistics for folk at Mailchimp et al? what about the little guy who sends a couple of hundred promotions out via a Mailchimp? Will their 'open' stats be skewed?

tenaciousJk 12y ago

My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits back?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
Why would Google want to get those visits back? Things in the promotions tab are essentially competing against Google's own ads in Gmail so it probably benefits Google that you don't look at them.
- tenaciousJk 12y ago
  Agreed. Why spend the effort on the new display look then?
- danieldk 12y ago
  Weren't they inserting ads in the promotions tab that look like regular e-mails? http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails-promotions-inbox-to-promote-a-new-kind-of-ad http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails... The plan seems kind of simple here: - Make the promotions tab nicer. - More eyeballs for placed advertisements.

nisa 12y ago

The promotion tab does not work for me. A lot of my emails are miscategorized into it. E.g. monitoring emails. A flexible tab system would be really great. The Google machine learning approach does not work for me. Am I the only that experience this issues?

alwaysdoit 12y ago
You can drag messages from one tab to another. It will ask you if you want to put all messages from that sender into that category in the future.
- nisa 12y ago
  Yes. It's a usability nightmare. I can't do it for all messages at once..., if I scroll down the tab is gone... hell I can't even move messages to the Inbox.. only labels and other tabs are possible.

teleclimber 12y ago

I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail". Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction. Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").

eli 12y ago
More cynically, it's also a great way to get people to tolerate high-value google ads in their inbox.

ryanlchan 12y ago

This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature. [1] http://www.altomail.com http://www.altomail.com

frade33 12y ago

Would you please leave my email alone. there are already 1000 and 1 distractions in my life over the internet. by the way what is the price tag of Gmail. If I ever get rich I would buy it and let it be what it is. an email service.

jtreminio 12y ago
This is an opt-in thing.

Derbasti 12y ago

I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero. Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started out as.

hcurtiss 12y ago
What did you move to?
- Derbasti 12y ago
  Mostly native clients. And a provider that hosts in the same country I live in (Germany), that values my privacy, and uses green energy.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    I don't understand why people don't use native clients more. Every time I say I use Thunderbird people look to me like I eat soup with a fork or something.
magicalist 12y ago
I think we agree about the usefulness of things like the Promotions tab, but I just never turned it on. It's not really a big deal. Meanwhile my mom loves the email promotions she's signed up for (if only she would stop forwarding me ones every few days...), so something like this is great for her. Different strokes and all that, and it doesn't degrade my experience by existing. Seems like a win.
mankyd 12y ago
> It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. Email itself has transformed into its own thing, "somewhat tangential to traditional email". Email is now used for a host of interactions that extend far beyond its roots. GMail is adapting to meet those usage patterns. I'm not calling your choice to move wrong - you may not use email for all the things the GMail is attempting to account for. But it would be foolish for GMail to stop adapting.

quintinoliver 12y ago

Wasn't the whole foundation of Google based on the notion of non-intrusive (text-only) ads?

thanatropism 12y ago

STOP MESSING WITH WEB MAIL. I have to get OwnCloud running on the server I already rent for an inane IRC bot.

petercooper 12y ago

Okay, so how do the ones that are just text appear, I wonder? (Like my newsletters, for users who've not yet moved them back to their Inbox.)

snoonan 12y ago

They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads. From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something. (which is almost all the time) The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not. That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email... edit: I a word.

plorg 12y ago

I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate. I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.

aiiane 12y ago
A lot of people don't want to spend the time to set up filters. Not everyone who uses GMail is a HN user.