News & Press Releases

Media Alert: EmailLabs Tells Marketers to Prepare for Future Impact of Google's Gmail

EmailLabs' Analysis Reveals Current Concerns About Free Email Service Are Unwarranted and Overblown

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (Nov. 30, 2004) - EmailLabs (www.emaillabs.com), the leading Web services provider in the email marketing space, announced today that despite the hype around Gmail, Google's free e-mail service, marketers have time to prepare for its future growth.

As outlined in recent ClickZ.com E-Mail Delivery columns by EmailLabs' Loren McDonald and Kirill Popov, the company's analysis of B2B and B2C email lists indicates that while Gmail has received an overwhelming amount of media attention and overwrought concern among email marketers, Google's free email service (still officially in "beta") actually has an extremely low "list penetration" of well under half of a percent. This compares to a typical B2C list penetration by Hotmail and Yahoo of around 15 percent each.

"Gmail's estimated user base of 1.5-2 million is quite impressive for an email service that is still in beta, but our list analysis reveals that these users are not yet switching their current subscriptions away from their Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo accounts," noted Loren McDonald, EmailLabs' VP of Marketing.

"In the next few years Gmail will clearly become a force to reckon with, likely reaching at least 10 million users, and taking some market share from Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo," adds McDonald. "Because of Gmail's current low penetration, now is a good time for email marketers to begin taking necessary steps, including testing and tweaking their emails, to prepare for Gmail's future growth and specific challenges."

For now, according to McDonald, the reality is that marketers' concerns about Gmail are overblown. Except for Gmail's displaying of ads in marketers' emails that may compete with their own ads or offers, most of the concerns about how Gmail treats and renders emails are identical or similar to issues presented by Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo and email clients such as Outlook. In recent ClickZ.com E-Mail Delivery columns, EmailLabs has outlined these issues and strategies for dealing with them, including:

-- Contextual Ads -- Email recipients may see an ad from a competitor inserted alongside the body of the email message.

-- Blocked Images -- Images in HTML messages are not automatically displayed, users have to click on a "Display External Images" link to have images rendered.

-- Content Formatting -- Gmail strips virtually all CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code out of HTML messages.

-- Spam filtering -- It is unknown which spam filtering technology Google is using with Gmail, but EmailLabs analysis suggests that Gmail is deploying a content-based filter.

-- Gmail Notifier and Snippets -- Gmail's Notifier and Snippets present users excerpts from emails on your desktop and within the Gmail client to help users determine if they should open individual emails.

-- Subject Line Length -- Gmail limits the subject line length to 57 characters, but adds the snippet text after the subject line.

To read more about EmailLabs' perspectives on Gmail, visit:

Gmail Concerns? Don't Press the G-Panic Button Yet www.clickz.com/experts/em_mkt/email_delivery/article.php/3426321

Gmail's Coming -- Are You Ready? www.clickz.com/experts/em_mkt/email_delivery/article.php/3365031

About EmailLabs
EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a subsidiary of Lyris, Inc. (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit www.EmailLabs.com.