Introducing the Ultra Managed Inbox

Author:

Stephanie Miller

Source:

Caught up in our own inbox placement tracking, marketers often forget that mailbox providers like Yahoo and Hotmail are also competing for subscriber attention and loyalty. Retention for them equals active users of the email service - and lower abandonment of inboxes due to clutter and excessive spam.

The latest example of mailbox providers improving the value of their service is the Hotmail announcement in late June of a number of new inbox management tools that will be available to all accounts toward the end of the summer. Gmail has long offered advanced spam filtering and social connection tools, and similar Yahoo "My View" features were released last year.

These new inbox management tools are designed to help all of us access the email messages we want more efficiently, and eliminate the ones we don't. Yahoo offers a streamlined design that, according to its blog, helps "make more space for what matters most to you" by filtering out messages from senders that are rarely engaged. Hotmail claims that only about half of what we see in our inboxes is actually something we're interested in. Its product website calls the vast majority of the rest of it, "junk." "Eighty percent of what gets reported to us as 'spam' isn't actual spam (e.g., malicious mail from scammers). It's what we call junk mail. It's that newsletter you inadvertently signed up for two years ago that continues to haunt your inbox, or the promotional mailing that you forgot to opt out of, or the real estate listing alert you never canceled."

Marketers: look in the mirror. This "junk" is our precious email marketing! Time to face a new reality (drum roll, please): the ultra managed inbox....