Google has recently started caching images for emails that come into their Gmail system so that they can serve them directly, rather than retrieving them from the sender’s servers. When this was announced, many email marketers were concerned with the fact that they would lose some of the reporting abilities. In the old system, for example, if someone using the Aweber email marketing system send out a broadcast, Aweber could provide statistics concerning the location of those who opened it. This is valuable information to some marketers.
With Google’s change, Aweber can no longer track this type of thing, limiting the amount of data they can provide to their users. Of course, this will affect other email marketing providers in the same way. In addition, marketers won’t be able to track when people open their messages multiple times, which can be used as an indication of how interested people are in a given message.
With the change, however, marketers will be able to more accurately track the number of unique opens their email has, which can be important as well. The caching of images can also take some load off of the sender’s servers, and reduce any down time when there is latency, which will keep readers from just deleting a message that isn’t loading properly. Of course, that doesn’t happen very often anyway, but it can be considered a benefit.
Over the past week, most of the major email marketing service providers have written about the changes, and how it will affect them. Places like Aweber, Responsys, Silverpop and others are more or less in agreement saying that the changes are a mixed bag. There will be some benefits, and some problems caused by Google’s change.
Aweber’s Justin Premick, the Director of Education Products, commented that time will be the judge of these changes, but sees it primarily as a positive thing. He commented saying, “Regardless of whether the Gmail change makes tracking opens more or less valuable, all marketers should agree that having images on by default is a broadly positive thing. It creates a better experience for the subscriber – who wants to have to turn on images? – and makes email designers’ lives a bit easier by reducing concerns about designing for images-off.”
What has your experience been since the change? Have you noticed any improvements or problems related to Google caching the images? If so, comment below.
