Google announced a new app called Inbox and it could bring some major changes to how subscribers interact with your emails in Gmail. Here’s what you need to know about how this new app could impact your email marketing.

What is Inbox?

Inbox is an app from Google that helps organize and group emails in your inbox by relevance, similar to how Gmail tabs work now. The app also has features to help stay on top of the email in your inbox. Two features that are the most newsworthy are Bundles and Highlights.

Bundles is a feature that like Gmail tabs, allows recipients to group emails into similar categories, and then set a preference. According to the Official Google Blog, “for example, all your purchase receipts or bank statements are neatly grouped together so that you can quickly review and then swipe them out of the way. You can even teach Inbox to adapt to the way you work by choosing which emails you’d like to see grouped together.”

What this could mean for your email marketing: For Gmail recipients you may have to email subscribers further out from the date of a sale or offer, or run a promotion longer to allow folks time to actually open their bundled email and act on it before a sale is over. It could also mean that people who subscribe but don’t currently open your emails may be even less likely to do so if they’ve bundled it.

Highlights helps keep important information from emails front and center. According to Google’s blog, information “such as flight itineraries, event information, and photos and documents emailed to you by friends and family. Inbox will even display useful information from the web that wasn’t in the original email, such as the real-time status of your flights and package deliveries.”

A few other features within Inbox that can be used to manage email include Reminders, Assists and Snoozes which allow you to add your own reminders like picking up your dry cleaning or making a restaurant reservation for that big date you have coming up.

Assists work with Reminders providing pieces of information you may need to get the task done. For example, if you create a Reminder to book a reservation, Inbox will provide the restaurant’s phone number and tell you if it’s open.

Snoozes are just like what they sound. You can snooze emails or Reminders until a later time, or until you arrive at a specific location like your office or home.

Who can get Inbox?

For now, Inbox is only available by invite-only as a separate app instead of being completely integrated into Gmail. Because of that, the effects and adoption are likely to be more gradual.

We’re still waiting for our invitation from Google and will report more once we’ve explored Inbox first-hand. What are your reactions to the Inbox app? Share in the comments.

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