Surviving the AI Filter: Why Your Gmail Strategy Needs to Change Now

With 1.8 billion active monthly users and 121 billion e-mails sent every day – Gmail is a mountain that, as e-mail marketers, we must know how to properly climb. 

And they’ve just released some massive, critical new updates.

The new Gmail view, called AI Inbox, reshapes your inbox around summaries, topics, and to-dos, rather than individual messages.

And with the average Gmail user only spending 57 seconds on the app daily (not per e-mail, on the app itself), this calls for a new and improved strategy for all of those who use Gmail for fundraising. 

The Update:

Gmail’s new AI Inbox will offer a “personalized briefing” that prioritizes conversations based on how you use email, filtering out what it considers clutter so you can focus on what it deems important – this means your inbox will no longer be chronological. Think of ChatGPT, and the summaries it provides. 

The Strategy: 

Gmail is an archive for receipts, contracts, travel plans, conversations, tracking information, and work history. As marketers, we would be wise to include phrases related to these topics to help our content survive the AI filtering process. For example, instead of launching merchandise content with “SALE! 24 HOURS ONLY” as the subject line, something along the lines of “ORDER ID NUMBER: Processing, please confirm.” Personally, I can’t count how many times I’ve searched my own inbox looking for Order ID numbers – I’ll choose not to assume I’m alone in that, and that it may be a viable way to overcome AI. 

Another tactic to be trialed would be the increase of personalized senders. If we can ensure Gmail believes that Inbox owner Jane Doe hasn’t opened and read a message from her Congressman, and she typically is not the type of person to let a personal or professional e-mail go unread, we can assume Gmail will actually be helpful for us in that way, by flagging the unread message and ensuring it is opened. 

Ultimately, it will all come down to trial and error and trust. Do users trust AI summaries? Or will they manually override this new feature? Will political fundraisers get filtered out? Or will this help us stand out in ever increasingly full inboxes? 

No matter the outcome, the action is clear;

It’s time to adapt and update our strategy.