If you’re a GMail user you’ve likely already heard of or may be using Priority Inbox.

Priority Inbox is a new-ish feature on from GMail that automatically sorts users’ inboxes into ‘Important’ mail and ‘Everything Else.’ I know, the feature has been around for a while but it seems to have stuck so I think it’s worthwhile to explore how it can affect e-mail marketing.

The abridged version of how Priority Inbox works is that it tracks users’ interactions with messages to determine which messages are important and which aren’t. In other words, if I consistently open new mail from companyx.com and click on one of the links, Priority Inbox will assume that I consider mail from companyx important. GMail has some more in-depth explanation but it’s safe to say that messages that users interact with are ‘important.’

I’ve heard some moaning and groaning about how the ‘Everything Else’ classification is just Spam Jr. and that it kills the potency of a campaign. My response? Deal with it. Yes, it’s possible that open rates may suffer a bit by pre-classification of a message but this is really an opportunity to enhance your results by focusing on the relevancy of your campaigns. We’ve talked about the importance of sending relevant campaigns before; this is extra incentive to do it. If Priority Inbox measures historical user involvement and targeted campaigns lead to more involvement then sending targeted campaigns will lead to classification of messages as ‘important.’

It’s time to dig in to your subscriber demographics and find a measurement that you can use to divide and target your subscribers. For example, if my company sells gears, springs and pulleys, rather than send a blanket email to all subscribers I’d get much more mileage out of smaller targeted campaigns that only sent information about gears to those customers who have previously bought gears. Subscribers who get a message that they perceive as relevant to them are much more likely to interact with the message. Include links to your other products as a sub-section of your message but if a customer only buys gears, the focus of the message should be gears.

ReachMail can help! Use the demographic filter tool to create mail filters that can be used to target specific subscribers based on one or more demographic criteria. For more info on demographic filters check out this post or head on over to reachmail.net/support and search for demographic.

One of the biggest challenges that you face as an e-mail marketer is keeping lists clean and tidy. An area that we frequent find clients overlooking are soft bounces of the ‘Mailbox Full’ type. These are bounces that came back because the mail server couldn’t cram one more byte into the subscriber’s over-stuffed mailbox.

They have no place in your list. These represent subscribers that have moved on, not just from your newsletters but from that e-mail address all together.

What’s worse is that eventually the ISPs holding those abandoned e-mail addresses are going to deactivate them or hold onto them as spam traps. Continuing to message these addresses after this point is going to negatively impact your sending reputation.

So, ReachMail makes it quick and easy to scrub those records out of your lists. Simply head on over to the Contacts and Lists tab and select the List Sweeper function on any list. In the function select the option to deactivate the Mailbox Full soft bounces and click the Run List Sweeper button. Voila! Your bounces are deactivated.

Are you a Thunderbird user? Ever get this message:

Ever wonder what it’s all about?

Here’s the deal. Thunder bird tosses this warning when the display text of your link is a full URL and it differs from the href attribute of the link (the actual pointer of the link). For example:

Your link says this: Go to http://www.acmecompany.com to learn more.

But your code says this: <a href=”http://www.companyx.com”>

So Thunderbird assumes that the mail is therefore an attempt to direct users to a malicious web site.

So, the issue is that if you use link tracking in your mails and the display text is also a complete URL Thunderbird will incorrectly label you as a scammer. Lame.

There’s a simple work-around though, just don’t use a complete URL in the text of the link. Even just removing the protocol (http://) is sufficient to avoid the scam warning.

So the text of your link might become: Go to our web site to learn more. or Go to www.acmecompany.com to learn more.

Problem solved.