Gmail Tabs - the feature that lets you separate the emails in your inbox into categories like social, promotions, forums, and updates-launched about six months as Google's attempt to help you unclutter your inbox.
Now, thanks to some number-crunching by MailChimp, we've got evidence that Google is actually succeeding at its goal of keeping users from getting fed up with their inboxes.
Here's what we learned thanks to MailChimp's study of 29 billion emails over a six-month period:
- Gmail users are opening messages at slower rates than they were before tabs, while the open rates of users of other services (like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL) have remained unchanged.
- The number of emails opened by Gmail users have fallen more than twice as much as any other service. Gmail users are definitely using tabs to ignore certain emails.
- However, Gmail was the only mail service for which there was no upward shift in the number of unsubscribers from May to October, a period when users are likely to unsubscribe due to a deluge of holiday-related mail.
- The normal holiday-spurred frustration isn't showing up in the data, which shows that Gmail tabs are working as intended in helping users better manage their inboxes.
Check out the full blog post on MailChimp for some interesting charts.