Click here to uns*****ibe: How will new Gmail function impact PR?

Sit for a moment and imagine the utopia. You arrive at work and open your inbox and a few relevant emails from genuine human beings appear. A couple contain opportunities, a couple are pretty functional, maybe there is the odd piece of constructive feedback. But what there isn’t, is a mountain of spam. 

Now that you are relaxed and feeling serene, take a second to imagine the dystopia. Your marketing funnel has dried up because all your leads have unsubscribed from the emails you send them. You are shouting into the void, blasting out email marketing messages to lists that are rapidly shrinking and you don’t know where the next sale is coming from. 

Both are legitimate futures, and both are places some people are going to find themselves in the years to come, thanks to Gmail’s new subscription management function, which provides a simple way for users to unsubscribe from anything they receive en masse. 

How does the new function work? 

It’s actually pretty clever and a big step up from the some of the existing tools that just automatically move things into your junk, rather than literally unsubscribing. 

All you have to do is click ‘more’ n the left-hand navigation in Gmail and you will be presented with a list of all the things you subscribe to, sorted by the frequency with which you receive the emails.

The, just tap the minus icon to the left of the listing and Google will follow the unsubscribe link in the email to remove you from the list. Give it a couple of days to work and bingo, you are in zero inbox email nirvana. 

This will be particularly useful tool for those of us who would like to reduce our risk of phishing and malware attacks — which is surely all of us? Andrew Paul reported in Popular Science recently that, “The past few years have also seen an uptick in phishing schemes disguised as unpaid highway toll text message alerts. But another equally mundane strategy frequently lurks in your email inbox: fake un-subscription links.” 

In fact, the same source reported an estimate from DNSFilter claiming that one in every 644 unsubscribe links were in fact some sort of cyber-security risk. So, a safer option couldn’t hurt — although Gmail still has to follow that link somehow, of course.

But is it going to kill your sales funnel? 

Does this end email as marketing tactic? 

Far from it. Gmail’s new manage subscriptions tool doesn’t kill email marketing, it just makes lazy email marketing harder to get away with. Unsubscribing from an email from a legitimate sender has never really been difficult, and the best marketers have long understood that your audience’s attention is earned, not assumed.

Email marketers should be interested in how to get people to subscribe, not worried about how to stop them unsubscribing. 

The truth is, the kind of email that gets ignored, archived or unsubscribed from, was never delivering real value in the first place. If your content is relevant and trustworthy, and if you’ve taken the time to understand your audience’s needs and interests, you’ll be welcomed in their inbox, not filtered out.

Email marketing has always been about creating a list of people who actually want to hear from you. All Gmail is doing is making that principle harder to ignore. In the long run, this kind of user control will lead to better relationships between technical brands and their audiences, not worse.

So, you are definitely looking at email utopia and only the biggest offenders will be facing the dreaded opposite! 

Richard Stone is managing director of technical PR agency Stone Junction.

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