Gmail is one of the most widely used email clients across the globe. Millions of people use Google’s email service for sending and receiving their emails. This has also made Gmail extremely valuable to email marketers as a large percentage of the emails they send are sent to Gmail users. Therefore, any change made to the Gmail interface or service is likely to affect email marketers almost as much as the users themselves. This seems to be exactly the case after Google unveiled some changes made to Gmail.

Google is on a quest to make using the internet as simple and convenient for its users as possible. Their latest move in this regard has been to introduce new tabs in Gmail. Now, Gmail will automatically categorize the emails you receive based on their source and purpose. However, this has gotten the email marketers to step into panic mode as they feel this will have a devastating effect on their campaigns.

The tabs that have been introduced are:

• Primary
• Promotions
• Social
• Forums
• Updates

Any email you receive from Facebook goes into Social while promotional material is available under Promotions. This is where it becomes clearer why the email marketers are so worked up over the changes.

Previously, any email the marketers sent to Gmail users went straight to their Inbox. Since there were no categories, users saw the headline of the email and decided whether or not it was worth reading. At least this gave marketers a chance of catching their interest and getting them to perform the desired action. With the change in design, it is likely that emails sent by marketers will be categorized into Promotions or any other category except Primary.

This will definitely reduce the visibility of their emails, making it difficult to target their customers. There seems to be no use of coming up with creative and catchy subject lines and high-quality content when their emails are unlikely to be seen by the recipient. Companies that have been relying on email marketing are going to be the ones most affected by this development.

And it is not just the desktop version of Gmail that is undergoing a change. Google plans to revamp the mobile and tablet variants of its email client as well in the days to come. Therefore, email marketing is going to become more difficult. The only companies and marketers likely to survive this situation are the ones that have built relationships with their clients. This helps ensure them that their messages will be viewed by users even if hidden in one of the background tabs.

It is only a matter of time before most Gmail users switch to the new design. So email marketers may have a few weeks to come up with a way to tweak their marketing campaigns to avoid this tricky situation.