Jimmy Kim argues that Gmail's relevance-ranked inbox is killing the old editorial calendar approach to email. Brands need to audit engagement by segment: if fewer than 20-25% of subscribers opened an email recently, Gmail's algorithm will bury future sends.
A lot of brands have editorial calendars where they're like, we send 3 emails every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, regardless of what they're saying or who they're sending to.
I don't know about— I think that robotic approach to email marketing is dying. You got to be more strategic. You can't blindly stick to a schedule anymore, and every email needs to almost earn its place in someone's inbox. What do you think brands should do?
I'd say number one is audit your current engagement by segment. Look at your overall list. What percentage of people have opened at least one email in the last If it's below 20-25%, you're going to have some serious engagement problems that are going to hurt you now in this new kind of relevance-ranked world.
Look at the engagement trend over time. Is it going up or down? If it's declining, you need to figure out why it's declining and fix it before this whole relevance ranking buries you ultimately.
