<p>Back in October I posted an article entitled "What Google's changes to the Gmail Interface Means to Marketers". To tersely recap, in July Google made a change to its email interface client, Gmail, where it's one main inbox was separated into different tabs. These tabs essentially act as separate inboxes, where emails of similar groupings are placed. According to Alex Gawley, product manager with Gmail, in an interview with Marketing Land, this change was made because "[Google] wanted to give [their] users more control over their inbox".</p><p>Gmail, in their internal studies, found that people would skip over emails and deal with them later. They decided the best groupings based on this research would include tabs for Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. Basic rules were created to decide what tab an incoming email would go into, and user control was given so that a person could move emails from one grouping to another.</p><p>For Digital Marketers, the question was simple: how would this change impact their open &amp; click rates? If all incoming Promotional emails are now going into one specific inbox, would users ignore them or see increased conversions? After only a few months of its implementation, it's very early to decipher results but trends are starting to appear. The first trend comes from Litmus, who is reporting that since Gmail Tabs were introduced there has been a 7.75% decrease in opens. Again, as most digital marketers know, a few months of data is a short term sample and it's difficult to say if this is just seasonality or evidence of a long term trend.</p><p>What is also affecting this number is how the Tabs rollout isn't universal across different email platforms. Users with a Gmail address can view their email in multiple clients including Outlook, Apple Mail or other mobile devices. However, only the tabbed inbox view is available in the desktop Gmail web client or the Gmail app for iOS and Android. In fact, only 19% of Gmail opens occur in its web client or app!</p><p><a href="http://www.4-traders.com/BRIDGELINE-DIGITAL-INC-6072928/news/Bridgeline-Digital-Inc--Analysis-What-Impact-has-Googles-Change-in-the-Gmail-Interface-had-on-Ope-17564949/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.business2community.com/marketing/can-telemarketing-fix-gmail-tab-0697915">Can Telemarketing Fix the Gmail Tab?</a> (Business 2 Community)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dLNfOf52f8r-NCMFibL7dwQVDVVbM&ned=us">3 additional articles.</a></p>