Google began rolling out a restructure of the Gmail inbox a while ago, diving the inbox in 3 tabs; Primary, Social & Promotions. Some of us doing Email Marketing campaigns to opted in customers were fearing an apocalypses with customers possible ignoring the Promotions tab. One year later after monitoring countless email sent reports I’m happy to say the new inbox not only didn’t hurt open rates but it reduced spam reports dramatically.

We all live the nightmare of beating the spam report rates not to be blocked by the email engines, but inevitable every email will have some spam report. What I’ve notices after careful monitoring, since the new Mail box is in effect, spam reports from Gmail are virtually zero while unsubscribe rates are at lowest of all email engines. Here’s what’s happening: those tending to look at promotions, are happy to get them & will go through the promotions box. If promotions is not your thing you will likely ignore the promotions tab and even when going through it will not be bothered to hit the spam button.

Bottom line Google did a great move again. If only others will follow suit. As of now Yahoo emails give the biggest share of spam reporting, a promotions tab idea would be welcomed there too.