Hi all – I am part of a developer community, Google Developers Group Cochin, based in Kerala. Its been sometime since we had the problem of our members missing out emails since they are sorted to other tabs. I talked with some other community managers including Asha here at TheRodinhoods and came to know that everyone has this problem. Here is a different UX flow for singup, which hopefully can help sort this out to a certain extent.
- Person signup with the most basic details.
- Send a confirmation email and show a gif asking him to move email to primary tab and confirm the email.
- Continue with further details.
Once the email is moved to the primary tab as shown in the gif, all future emails from your ID will be delivered to the primary inbox of the user!!
Live demo for test : https://gdgcochin.org/beta/join.php
DIY gif creation tips :
- On Mac, you can use screen recorder (Quick Time Player > File > New Screen Recording) to record a video of yourself moving the email and convert video to gif here!
Let me know what you think and any other suggestions to improve? comment here or tweet me @COD3BOY !
asha chaudhry
wow.
i just love the way you took up a real pain and tried to solve it!!!
signing up. and sharing this with all of our early adopters for sure!
Anoop Nair
Nice concept sanjay. I liked your approach.
Thanks!
Rishi
As someone who sends such emails, I’d love if people follow the instructions.
However as a recipient of such emails, I wouldn’t do it. The thing is even in promotions/updates tabs I look for emails I expect; just that they are not a priority for me like the ones ending up in Primary…and moreover, Gmail is getting really smart! I noticed the more frequently you click on an email from a particular sender in updates, it automatically moves it to primary at some point.
Yatin Mulay
Cool @ the gif. But i tend to agree with Rishi’s point about Gmail getting smarter. I suspect Gmail measures the open rates for individual users as well as it measures the list’s open rates on an aggregate level to determine whether the email remains in the primary or fades into promotions tab.
In the longer run only genuine engagement will win the primary. In the meantime, one can stick to the best practices like personalizing the newsletter with merge tag tricks, etc.
Abey John
Good idea. We’ll need to work it into the signup confirmation flow. That should improve response rates some but its still a band aid for the attention-deficit and email-overload problem.
Like Yatin and Rishi point out, you really need to have a strong connect with the end user that will make them WANT your content and hence are willing to move it to primary.
Sanjay Nediyara
Thanks for the insight, I’ll post about the results sometime later as I am just getting started. I thought about a scenario where the user want the email to be delivered to his inbox, for example the newsletter from Rodinhoods, but a non savvy user is too lazy to move the email, but a little push will definitely make him do 🙂 Personally its very rare that I check promotions tab.
Sanjay Nediyara
Exactly, I was more concerned about users who really want the emails to be delivered to their primary inbox, but the smart gmail doest know it already, gmail want us to teach it by digging the promotions tab and opening the mails a few times 😀
Sanjay Nediyara
Thanks, I’ll share a report of how this experiment went 🙂
Govind G Prajapati
I don’t prefer tabs, I use priority inbox.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
I’m a bit confused – what is the sign up for?
To see this video?
Sanjay Nediyara
Yeah – that’s an example to demonstrate the flow.
Govind G Prajapati
Its how google assumes, that any of your emails are marked as promotional even though it was sent from some one you know and its about the work.
So they want to create voice and send it to Google, so google update their algorithm.
asha chaudhry
hey sanjay – any progress on this?
Amit Shroff
Sanjay, this was really cool.. Never tried this before.. but it really worked.. Thanks..!!!