Why Retailers Are Watching Gmail’s Latest Updates Closely

In a world where apps and chatbots are fighting for user dominance, there can be something almost quaint-seeming about email commerce. Who cares about email marketing, after all? It’s so 10 years ago.

But Google — with its dominantly powerful Gmail services — cares very much about email and its potential for marketers, hence its announcement of responsive design for email earlier this week. That function means, going forward, emails will automatically format themselves to the screen of the device they are being viewed on. Email developers will be able to easily change styles based on the characteristics of the device accessing an email, including display type, width, height, orientation and resolution, Google said.

Email may be overlooked but, according to reports, drives around 3 percent of a retailer’s web traffic. Moreover, Google noted, the latest updates are part of its efforts to expand and evolve its relationships with retailers and developers.

“This is just one part of an overall effort to expand CSS support in Gmail and to give email designers more control over how their messages are rendered,” Google said in its official apps developer blog.

More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, meaning the update is long overdue. Aaron Pearson, a product manager at email service provider Listrak, noted that Google efforts really link up with what has already been the long trend in email marketing.

“If your emails are optimized for mobile today, regardless of the responsive method they are built with, Gmail’s update will finally support the hard work you invested in developing your template,” Pearson said.

“Without support for responsive design, opening an email in the Gmail app was presenting a really poor experience for readers. Usually, the email would either be scaled down and difficult to read and engage with, or it would be broken by Gmail’s attempt to reformat the message.”

There were workarounds, but it required Google-specific coding that was time-consuming and costly. Also, those workarounds didn’t always work.