Why Marketers Shouldn’t Care About Greymail, but Actually Should

Author:

Jordie van Rijn

Source:

With the latest version of Hotmail, Microsoft started their battle against greyMail. The ultimate goal is to keep the Inbox nice and tidy and the users coming back to the Hotmail service. Greymail? What does that mean to you? The underlying trend is undeniable. Marketeers need to adjust email strategy to an interaction strategy, otherwise your email might get greyed out.
 
True Spam and email we don’t want
The era of true spam is over. In 2006 the average inbox ranked up to 35% spam messages. Now it is less than 3%. The inbox is still (too) crowded, but now its far less about Spam, but more the combination of interesting and uninteresting email.
 
The uninteresting email contains messages we’d rather not see in our inbox. 75% of the messages that are tagged as being SPAM actually are legitimate email newsletters, offers or alerts. E-mailings that people signed up for, but don’t want anymore. That is what is called greymail.
 
The general public calls legitimate but unwanted email Spam just the same. But those emails might be interesting and wanted for other recipients that signed up/ (or at least they are supposed to be). It’s not all black and white, that is why these e-mails are called greymail. Greymail takes up too much time and space in the inbox. Email providers like Hotmail and Gmail are taking action by recognizing these messages and placing them out of sight.
 
More is coming: The dawn of the engagement inbox
The movement towards more and more strictly filtered email didn’t just appear out of the blue. In may 2010 Hotmail announced that email would be filtered on relevance. This ended up being Hotmail Sweep, while they were working behind the scenes to refine the technology.
 
Galileo Vieira of the Hotmail team at the launch of the Greymail features: ...