Is Gmail Swinging the Vote for President? Not a Chance

The right message, right time and right person rings truer than ever when it comes to email deliverability. Inbox providers like Gmail leverage technology to improve relevancy and experience, which has proved challenging for some presidential candidates to overcome, writes, Tom Sather is a Senior Director of Marketing Validity.

You may have recently read the report from The Markup attempting to prove that Google has created an unfair playing field for nonprofit and advocacy groups. Understandably, with the 2020 election just around the corner and so much at stake, political campaigns and nonprofits are concerned that Google’s spam filtering and message classification system are stacked against them.

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The “primary” argument (pun intended) from The Markup is that most of these emails aren’t being seen in Gmail users’ Primary inbox, and that most are being diverted to the “promotions” tab, and, in some cases, the spam folder. As a result, open rates are declining and so are donations. Is Google playing favorites and creating an unfair system? Extremely unlikely. In fact, the proposed cure is even worse than the perceived “disease.”

Learn More: Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services Software Platforms for 2020

Here’s why. The Tabbed Inbox:

In 2013, Gmail launched its tabbed inbox, allowing users to sort emails they receive into promotions, updates, social, and forums tabs. Mail that didn’t fall into one of those buckets would likely fall into the Primary inbox. Google envisioned the primary inbox as one-to-one emails, or emails deemed important by Gmail users. There are two important things to understand first:

1. All incoming emails to Gmail are classified using a machine learning algorithm into one of the categories mentioned above: promotion, update, social, and forums, or “none.”

2. All incoming emails, in addition to being classified based on message type, are subjected to Gmail’s spam filters.

If a spam filter flags a message as spam, those messages will be delivered to spam, regardless if they were classified as a promotion or update. Messages that can’t be classified are subjected to even more scrutiny from spam filters, meaning messages that don’t neatly fall into one of the four categories have a higher chance of landing in spam. Therefore, if you’re an email marketer trying to avoid classification so you can land in the primary inbox, good luck making it past the spam filters first.

Most non-personal emails that land in the primary inbox, however, are likely classified as an update where the end user doesn’t have the update tab enabled. By default, Gmail has the Social and Promotions tabs enabled for new users. As a result, if a message is classified as an “update” and the update tab isn’t enabled, those messages will land in the Primary inbox. According to our past research, only a third of Gmail of users even use tabs. Of those that have it enabled, 68% use the Social tab, 60% use the Promotions tab, and slightly more than a quarter use the Updates tab. And here’s where things get tricky – an overwhelming amount of Gmail users (91%) state that Gmail classifies messages correctly. So while many senders, like those mentioned by The Markup, may feel their messages belong in the Primary tab, most Gmail users believe message classifications are accurate.

How Messages are Classified

While it’s true that Google’s machine learning algorithms are a black box (and that’s true for nearly all machine learning algorithms), we can make some assumptions on how they can classify messages for certain scenarios.

1. Webmail to webmail – Email being sent from the Yahoo Mail network (or Microsoft or any other Verizon property) and received by Gmail will likely be “unclassified” and appear in the Primary tab.
2. Bulk send or one-off – If Gmail sees a bulk send coming from certain domains and IP addresses, all with similar subject lines and messages, the message will be classified in one of the four categories and not appear in the primary inbox if the user has all tabs enabled. The algorithms at this point will likely look at the content of the message to determine if it’s a promotion or update, for example. I’d also be willing to bet they can easily determine who is sending through an email service provider to determine if a message should be classified.
3. Promotion or update? This is an area in which things can get messy, especially for organizations asking for donations. For retailers sending promotions, Gmail, I assume, can easily look for keywords (save now! 25% off today only! This sale is almost over!) to determine if an email is a promotion. If a retail email contains shipping information or an order confirmation, again, this should be pretty easy for an algorithm to determine that the message should be classified as an update.
    

But what about an email asking for $25? That doesn’t fit so neatly into either a promotion or an update, so the algorithms are most likely relying on user feedback to determine how that should be classified. And to make things even more complicated, this can vary by individual based on their own feedback and preferences. Therefore, an email from Trump asking for donations may be classified as a promotion for one person, but as an update for another. For the most part, these emails are considered promotions if:

• it’s a bulk email campaign,
• it promotes a political or nonprofit brand, or
• it has a call-to-action, and in some cases, donors receive something in exchange (i.e. a bumper sticker or membership).
   

So if it looks like a promotional email and walks like a promotional email, it’s likely going to be classified as a promotional email.

Unfiltered Feedback on Filters

Unless you’re using your own homegrown email server to send and receive emails, you are most likely using a free email account which has a built-in spam filter and other productivity tools that give you, the consumer, the power to decide how to deal with emails in your inbox, like Gmail’s tabbed inbox. And naturally, because individuals have been given so much power and choice to decide what they see and read, some organizations would prefer Google and other “big tech” companies not to give consumers so much freedom. Others would even go so far as to suggest these companies have no business deciding if an email is spam or not, and want email providers to nix the spam folder altogether.

This is a bad idea.

If email providers like Google stopped filtering spam and stopped providing productivity tools, the entire email ecosystem would likely collapse. Consumers would move to different channels where they had more control of what they wanted to see and read. Spam messages would also overtake inboxes. Competition in the inbox is hard now. Imagine how difficult it would be if a business had to compete with 10x the amount of spam. Spam would drown out most opt-in marketing messages to the point that open rates would drop significantly. Phishing emails, which today are mostly filtered out of the inbox, could cause more harm than they already do. It’s a lose-lose situation for both consumers and email marketers.

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Dealing with Filters

Instead of trying to strong-arm email providers, the best approach is for email marketers to take a good, hard look at their own programs and identify areas to improve or optimize. If messages are being delivered to spam, look at your sending reputation and subscriber engagement to improve your deliverability. For example, one reason the Pete Buttigieg campaign is likely “winning” at email is due to their list hygiene practices. After signing up for his emails in June of 2019 using a dedicated Gmail account, my email was removed from the list after not opening any emails for six months. While some may argue this could result in lower donations, I assume the Buttigieg campaign was able to deliver more to the inbox after culling dead addresses and therefore raise more money. Smart decision.

And as for Gmail’s tabbed inbox and classification system, it’s unlikely one can find a workaround to not be classified as a promotion or update. By trying to do so it may cause more harm in the long run. Instead, make the experience not only enjoyable but welcomed by focusing on what you do have control over: creative, copy, cadence, frequency time of day, and subscriber lists.

Email marketing is still marketing where “right message, right time, right person” rings truer than ever. Gmail may be a large, influential company, but even an organization that size can’t predict what’s going to happen in the fall. We’ll all just have to wait and find out.