Getting subscribers to whitelist you sure is a popular email marketing topic lately.
Fresh on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement that users can choose to view only emails from their contacts, Gmail is making a change of its own that makes email from contacts more usable and readable than email from non-contacts.
They’re not making a separate inbox for contacts, but they are changing one important part about how they treat emails from certain contacts:
Images On By Default For (Some) Contacts
Gmail recently announced that they’ll be enabling images for certain people in users’ contact lists.
The details:
- You must be in the Gmail user’s contact list.
- You must be authenticating your emails using SPF or DKIM (AWeber does).
- The Gmail user must have sent you at least 2 emails. (They note that this is a starting-out threshold that may change.)
Read the announcement on the official Gmail blog.
“You Mean Subscribers Have to Email ME?”
Yep – getting them to list you in their address books is step #1, but they’ll also have to email you a couple times before images will be on by default.
But that’s OK. In fact, it’s a great reason to do something you should already be doing anyway: ask your subscribers for feedback!
Have them email you their thoughts on your emails…
- What they like
- What they don’t like
- What they want you to discuss in future emails
… and not only will you be on your way to meeting Gmail’s requirements for having images on by default, you’ll gain invaluable insight into how you can improve your emails.
