This does, however, create a bit of a problem if your business relies on digital marketing, as email forms the backbone of all direct marketing activities; and with the amount of email addresses set to continue climbing, the inbox will remain first prize for businesses looking to punt their brands.
Now the thing is, while we're all attached to our service providers, the times they are a changing. In fact, if you've been a Hotmail, Orchestra or Yahoo user you will already have experienced the shift in direction and the fact that Gmail has switched things up should have come as no surprise.
From a user's perspective, however, the benefits of labelled mail and compartmentalised email management are clear. Take a look at the inbox of a young professional working in South Africa today. Endless newsletters, internet banking announcements, Twitter notifications and that loathsome online discount sales announcement indicating yet another start-up in trouble.
Taking all of this into consideration, is an automatically and more importantly practically organised mailbox really such a bad thing? No...and you know what, it's even better for marketers and here's why. Targeting.
Before we entered the relatively new phase of compartmentalised inboxes, what did we have? An assault of updates and invites, notifications and newsletters coming from all directions; just click 'mark as read' on all 'selected' and forget about the lot.
Gmail's new view breaks this up into easily digestible chunks of information, with clear distinctions between social, promotions and the like.
This is great for marketers, because no longer will you be the bane of a user's existence. In fact, they might go to their promotions folder and drag your communications straight to the main mailbox - this is where the popular ones live. After that it's smooth sailing as your mail will end up with the popular kids time after time.
There are, of course, a few things you need to keep in mind when you're dealing with a mail server that automatically sorts its own content.
Now that readers are no longer immediately confronted by your material, they're more likely to become quite picky about what they read. This means you're going to have to get your ducks in a row and segment, segment, segment.
Any ESP (email service provider) worth naming will give you the tools to analyse your campaigns and better adjust to the demographics you aim to sell to.
Thing is, we're not all as organised as we should be, or as much as we think we are. While it takes some adjusting to, both from a business and personal perspective; it's a necessary change.
The move from single column inboxes to categorised emails is great for competition in terms of digital marketing, while protecting the consumer from being overwhelmed.
If we can understand that email is the most personal place on the web, then marketing to and building quality connections with readers will dominate and drive our actions in business.
