Where will your email land in the inbox with ISP’s new approaches to email categorisation?

Over the past 6 months new techniques have been deployed by Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo to categorise emails within the inbox. The main focus is to identify messages that are not ‘spam’ as such but are perceived as unwanted or irrelevant to the recipient and filter these out into different folders within the inbox.

The proposed reasons for the changes are to reduce clutter within the inbox, creating a better user experience for their customers; and to reduce 'false positives' – incorrectly filtering out messages as spam, something that Yahoo have been heavily criticised for.

But unfortunately the changes have quite serious implications for email marketers, as many programs will see a large decrease in reach and therefore response.

However this is not all bad news, if you take the time to analyse and segment your database in order to target communications and increase relevancy, than you will hopefully see an increase in response, as your cut-through increases due to the reduction in clutter within the recipient's inbox. It is those marketers that are still employing the broadcast approach, or are happy to run with dated or repetitive content that will suffer from these new developments.

Click through to read a breakdown of each ISP's approach to email categorisation. In addition to these, existing variables such as 'saved to safe sender' and spam complaint rates still play a key role.

Next month's Click! will look at strategies to help keep your emails in the main inbox.

Gmail's Priority Inbox:

Automatic sorting looks at a variety of signals to establish the importance of the email, including which messages you open and which you reply to. Users can also increase sorting effectiveness by using the buttons.
In box organisation separates emails into sections:

• important and unread
• starred
• everything else

These standard sections can be customised to individual requirements.

Hotmail Sweep

This is user generated inbox filtering. If a user wants to move (or delete) an email into another folder (this could be junk or it could be a sub categorisation like 'shopping'), they simply have to check the box next to the message from that sender.

They can then choose to sweep all future messages from that sender into the designated folder.

Hotmail automated filtering

Microsoft are also now looking at inbox data to determine how an email should be categorised. The influencing factors include:

• Messages read, then deleted
• Messages deleted without being read
• Messages replied to
• Frequency of receiving and reading messages from a source




Yahoo manual mail filters

The filtering feature allows users to position incoming mail into various folders in order to sort and group messages. Filters are created on values within any of the following elements:

• Sender
• Recipient
• Subject line
• Body copy

100 filters are available on Yahoo! Mail and 200 on Yahoo! Mail Plus.