Why Google's Gmail is able to overcome data and privacy concerns, to become the darling of the email world (and what we can learn from them)

Yesterday I migrated my personal email account to Gmail. I set myself up with Google Apps, so instead of having an @gmail.com address, I can continue to use my own domain name but have all the email managed through Gmail. (It's really a very good solution -- I'd encourage anyone who owns their own domain to look into it...whether you're a small business, an organization, or just someone who likes their own domain name for your email, like me.)

But when I was reading through documentation, blog posts, forum posts, etc. about setting up Gmail within Google Apps, I uncovered a major drawback to any person taking the Gmail plunge and storing all their email with Google:

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to migrate all your messages away from Gmail, should you decide one day that you don't want to use Gmail anymore. That's a pretty high "switching cost"...way worse than just having to tell all your contacts that you have a new email address. On top of that, Google has lost some users' mail, according to many reports.

But I still did it. I still decided to use Gmail. Why? Because Google has created a user experience that is vastly better than anything anyone else is offering. And this is where marketers can learn from Google.

A little history first: Previously I had been handling my mail through GoDaddy with a simple POP mailbox, and it did a nice job. I never had any problems, they had a webmail interface (although I tended to use Mail2Web instead), and I used Outlook Express at home to download and store all my email on my hard drive.

But the experience Google promised through Gmail was superior, and that's why I switched. Gmail's threaded conversations and tags make mail so much easier to manage. Its spam filter is so good that I've seen plenty of people who forward their POP email to a Gmail account just for the spam filtering. Now with Google Apps, you can get the Gmail interface but with your own domains and integration with Google calendaring, spreadsheets, etc. And Gmail also supports POP and IMAP, so they let their users check email in whatever way they feel is most convenient. (Although Gmail's interface is so good, I've been using the web version.)

So back to my "no way out of Gmail" concern. I did lots of searches yesterday and found plenty of people talking about migrating their messages out of Hotmail or Yahoo into Gmail, but I never found anyone trying to move away from Gmail. (Probably because Gmail is in style now, but I'm still a little surprised I didn't find anyone talking about going the other direction, from Gmail to another system.) There are all sorts of scripts and programs and techniques for getting your old stored mail into Gmail, but none for getting it out. Interesting, and a little scary.

I always liked knowing that I could export old mail out of Outlook Express, or Outlook, or Netscape Mail, or the various email clients I've used over the years. After all, when 2010 or 2011 rolls around and the next big thing in email arrives, maybe I'll want to make a switch. (And by then, hopefully someone will have figured out a way to easily get stored messages out of Gmail and into the next big thing.)

But look at the beauty of Google's underlying business philosophy here:

• We'll build a better email system, changing the paradigm for how people interact with their email. We'll make it so good you can't help but sign up.
• We'll serve ads alongside it...which is how we'll make our money.
• To expand our footprint and challenge the well-established Hotmail and Yahoo Mail brands, we'll extend our support to corporate users too.
• We won't make it easy for you to leave.

For most businesses, this final point could be a huge obstacle. Customers usually don't like being locked in like this. But why can Google get away with it? I think it's because what they're offering -- the vastly better email experience -- is so good that people don't mind giving up some flexibility. (Quick plug for one of my favorite blogs: If you're interested in the topic of how companies can create a better experience for their customers, check out Good Experience by Mark Hurst.)

So the lesson for all the marketers who want fiercely loyal customers (the kinds of people who will, for example, entrust years' worth of old email to Google without any way to easily get it out), the key is creating a customer experience that is vastly superior to what others can provide. Innovate to deliver a vastly better product at a significantly better value (which may or may not always mean a better price) than what your competitors are doing. If you can do this, you might have the next Gmail.

The Stupid Filter and social media

This Wall Street Journal blog post discusses a gentleman named Gabriel Ortiz who has invented a "stupid filter" for online message boards:

Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes.

After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.

As social media becomes more important to marketers, and as marketers are increasingly trying to position themselves as content providers and experts, a technology like the Stupid Filter could come into play quite prominently. Many companies are successfully using forums, blogs, and other user-generated content elements to further their brands and even increase sales...and I suspect the trend will continue.

A cynical marketer might say, "If I applied this to my target audience and filtered out all the stupid people, I wouldn't have any customers left!"

But I think the question is: Will technologies like the Stupid Filter squelch the discussion in these social media vehicles, when people know their posts are being scrutinized by a filter? Here's an interesting thing to ask yourself: How many times would your posts need to be blocked before you stopped leaving comments in forums and on blogs? For me, that number would probably be pretty low.

One could argue this whole filtering process would naturally elevate the conversation and scare away the stupid people. But just like spam filters, the technology won't ever be perfect -- so how many "non-stupid" people will be discouraged from adding to conversations? Could the Stupid Filter be a stumbling block for social media -- or is it a saving grace, much the way spam filters have saved email from becoming a completely unusable morass of junk?

Smart quotes aren't that smart

If you're publishing an enewsletter, make sure smart quotes don't get you. Here's how to avoid the ugly results of "smart punctuation" gone bad.

First of all, "smart quotes" are those pretty quotation marks that are automatically substituted for normal quotation marks in Microsoft Word and some other programs. Some people call them curly quotes. Likewise, if you've ever put two dashes together in Word and then hit the space bar, you'll note that it automatically substitutes an em dash...which is a longer dash. Same goes for apostrophes -- those are often substituted as well.

So what's the problem? If any of those characters end up in your newsletter (or if you're advertising, your enewsletter ad), they'll give you yucky results. Quotation marks can turn into question marks, and em dashes might end up looking like this: â€". This happens because the special characters are non-ASCII characters...essentially they're not part of the normal character set that your enewsletter software uses. You'll see an example of a smart apostrophe gone bad in the image within this post...the smart apostrophe became a question mark.

So how do you keep this from happening to you?
1. If you're writing the text from scratch, use a plain text editor instead of Microsoft Word or a program that substitutes smart characters. Windows Notepad is a basic plain text editor. I like EditPad Lite because it has more features but still gives you plain text output.

2. If you're taking someone else's text and incorporating it into a newsletter, simply cutting and pasting it into a plain text editor will not solve the problem. It might appear that the smart characters are gone, but they might not be. A lot of people recommend going into the Word settings and turning off the smart quotes and other substitutions, but I still think this can lead to errors. To ensure bad characters are eliminated, here's the process we use at IndustryWeek:

• Paste the text into Microsoft Word
• Choose Save As... and go to the "Save As Type" dropdown menu below the filename. If you're using Word 2003 or earlier, you should be able to choose "MS-DOS text" from that menu. If you have Word 2007, choose "Plain Text". After you click Save, it'll pop open a dialog box where you choose MS-DOS.
• After you try to save, it should give you one or two warning boxes about how some characters will be lost when you save as text only. That's fine, so hit OK.
• Close Word. Now open the new text file you've created and make sure everything looks right. Sometimes, depending on the smart character and how you composed the message, you'll still find stray question marks in your plain text file. Look for them before you paste into your enewsletter sending interface.

Finally, test it! Before you send the final email to your full list, do a test deployment to yourself (and preferably someone else at your company too) and look for these nasty little buggers.

This process can be a pain, but it ensures you don't end up with embarrassing question marks or other strange characters in your newsletter.

Let's replace the term "open rate"

Many people have discussed the problems inherent in the "open rate" statistic you might see in your email marketing reports. Not to get into the details again, but basically it's a highly misleading number -- it doesn't truly give you a good count on the number of messages that are open for a variety of reasons. With Outlook 2007, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and others blocking images by default, chances are good you've seen your "open rate" stat drop a lot in the past year or so.

As an industry, let's rename "open rate" to something that implies the inherent problem in the numbers. The metric really doesn't measure the number of people who opened your message -- it measures the number of people *we can track* who opened it. There are probably lots more who actually opened your email that aren't accounted for in this number.

I propose "counted open rate" as the new name for this number, because that is really what the metric tells us. It shows us the number of people *we were able to count* who opened your message.

A subtle difference? Perhaps. But I believe the word "counted" at the front of the metric may remind marketers this isn't a perfect number. It might lead senior execs who don't understand the nuts and bolts of digital marketing to ask, "What does 'counted' mean, and who are the uncounted opens?", which of course sets up the discussion about the metric's inherent flaws.

Don't blast your customers!

Here's an interesting blog entry on MediaPost about softening the language we use as marketers.

"Maybe we need to stop calling them consumers, target audience and viewers … and just think about them as people."

An interesting concept, and one I largely agree with. What we call a product/service can often affect the way it's used.

A few years ago I stopped saying the words "email blast" to customers, and instead I'll use "direct email invitation" or something of the like. A subtle difference? Perhaps. But "blast" sounds so...violent and uncontrolled. Do we really want to blast our customers? I hope not...