By Ryan Kopperud, Content Editor at GovDelivery
In spring of this past year, Gmail introduced their new inbox tabs, effectively separating incoming email content into general categories for their users, and adding a unique feature to the world of email. As the year comes to a close, Google has made another significant change to the Gmail service. Many email clients like Gmail or Outlook don’t display images in email by default, and require users to turn on images for each message or by send. Now, however, Gmail will be displaying all images in emails by default. Once again, Google has made an interesting and impactful change for those who work in digital communications and subscribers alike.
In just the few days since Google debuted this new feature, there’s been widespread conversation about how this change will affect the Gmail user experience, as well as the reporting metrics for email senders. To help you navigate the newest Gmail update, we’ve put together a simple explanation of the image display change, including how this will affect you and your organization.
How will displaying images by default work?
Automatically displaying images sounds like a pretty benign change, and for the most part it is – but there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. On the subscriber facing side, Gmail users won’t have to click that annoying “Display images below” link to be able to see images in their inbox.
Outside of the convenience factor, Google is also touting safety and security enhancements as a result of the images feature, by serving images from their own secure servers.
As a quick refresher, email opens are tracked by email service providers using an invisible, single pixel image file in each email. When the email is opened, the image is downloaded from the email service provider’s server, and an open can be tracked. And since the tracking of email opens is directly related to image loading in emails, this change may have a significant impact on email metrics for your organization. The good news is that the change is likely for the better.
In the past, if a subscriber opened an email and read it, but chose not to click on the “Display images below” link, it was impossible to track their open. Now, however, Gmail will automatically be displaying those images, and thusly an open will automatically be tracked when a Gmail user opens an email, without them having to actively allow images.
For a more technical explanation of how and why Google is executing this change, you can read the announcement on the official Gmail blog by clicking right here.
So what does this mean for my organization?
The most likely (and noticeable) impact that this change will have on your organization is that open rates might increase slightly for your bulletins over time, as Google rolls out this update to all Gmail users. While there weren’t large numbers of Gmail opens that were untraceable before, there should still be a somewhat noticeable increase in the amount of opens you have from bulletin to bulletin, based on the fact that every open that occurs in a Gmail email client is now trackable. More generally speaking, this change should ultimately lead to more accurate reporting of opens for GovDelivery subscribers with a Gmail email address.
Are there exceptions to this?
Firstly, subscribers who aren’t interested in having images display automatically can turn this feature off in their Gmail settings; however automatic image loading will be the new default.
Secondly, there are certain ways of opening a Gmail email that won’t be affected by the new automatic image-loading feature. This applies to people who have a Gmail email address, but open their emails using another client (i.e. native email apps on iPhones and iPads, or Outlook and other desktop email clients). Due to the limited number of people who open their emails within the actual Gmail interface, there is some contention about how impactful this change really will be.
In Conclusion
At GovDelivery, we’ll continue to analyze and monitor the results of this new change to the way Gmail handles images, as well as the effect on reporting metrics. From everything we’ve seen thus far, we can confidently say that this update will give Gmail users a better experience while improving GovDelivery’s ability to track those users, and provide your organization with more accurate metrics – an all around win-win situation.
With over twelve million Gmail subscriptions to public sector communications (and counting), using friendly and engaging image content throughout your bulletins is more important now than ever. For information and best practices on creating engaging and impactful email content, you can download our Email Best Practices Guide right here.