Your Inbox in your SERPs?

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced that they would be opening up trials to display Gmail results in SERPs. Simply sign up and you could get information from your Gmail inbox right in your regular search results.

The question is, is this a good idea?

This is what it looks like in the wild:

Before you click show results

After you click show results

As you can see, email details are not show by default; you need to click show results to get to this.

What does this mean for email marketing?

There are a couple of interesting things that could develop from this:

A new form of landing page

These Gmail results appear in pretty valuable positions of the SERPs; either right at the top of the organic SERPs (if your query contains either “email” or “gmail”) or more likely just to the right. Here’s some examples:

 Gmail results appearing at the top of the organic listings

When you click through one of these results you will see something like this:

If the email has been designed well, this has the potential to become a very powerful landing page.

SEO for Email

We may see emails start using certain keywords in a similar way to SEO & PPC landing pages.

There seem to be a few issues with this at the moment. For example, I have some emails about insurance in my inbox but when I search “insurance” in Google I don’t see any Gmail results. This is likely down to these search terms being valuable to Google’s bottom line as well as them being quite broad search terms.

Results are far more common with brand searches as well as generic searches with limited commercial potential for Google; “receipts” for example.

Brand management

Users who have historically engaged with your brand will likely see Gmail results for any brand queries. The examples at the top of the post is a good instance of this. I use Megabus a lot (what can I say, it’s cheap!) so when I search for any Megabus terms I get a bunch of emails from them. If your branded terms do have any ‘problematic’ results, having these extra results at the top of the page could potentially distract the user from engaging with them.

Cross promoting / Up-selling Products

I can see potential in further up-selling products in confirmation emails. For example, imagine a customer buys some hand luggage from your website. The receipt or order confirmation could contain mentions of some of the other products you offer; passport holders, suitcases etc. Then if the customer does further searches for these products, your email has the potential to appear in their results. Quick and easy wins!

Of course, all of the above depends on this trial being a success. So, will users like seeing their inbox in their SERPs? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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