List Deliverability Update (and maybe a Game Changer): Yahoo!, Gmail and others folder your email automatically!

There is a movement out there that could change email inboxes forever.   Yahoo!, Gmail and other email providers have started moving commercial email into separate, automatically generated, non-Inbox folders.  This means that the list you have spent so much time building and the email you created and sent might never see the inbox. Instead it could fall into one of the pre defined folders.

What can you do about this?

1- Remind your subscribers to keep a look out for your email.  Always ask them to white list your domain.

2- Use keywords in your email or in the alt tags.  If you are promoting a website, include the website name, topics etc. This will help to be sure your email falls into the correct inbox folder.

3- Keep in mind that right now this is an application that must be installed.  As a result, it won’t reach critical mass immediately. Learn about this now so you will be ahead of the curve.

4- A positive from this new technology is that it appears that legitimate emails will no longer go to the ‘spam’ folder.  It will instead be directed to one of the predefined inbox folders.

5- Take a look at this technology to see how it works.  Go to www.otherinbox.com.

Does this mean the end of all of our deliverability problems?  Will it dramatically decrease or increase domain performance to those email providers? I can’t say now, but I have begun tracking this more closely and you should as well.

Here’s the screen shot from my Yahoo! account showing the new ‘Shopping’ folders:

What do you think about this?

About author

Jordan Lane is an Email Marketing expert. His website, http://www.emailmoxie.com/ ,offers Email marketing Best Practices, Knowledge & Tips. Follow Jordan on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/JordanDLane