Stitching Together Email Identities Becomes More Vital after New Gmail Feature

Google is rolling out a new feature allowing users to add up to three additional Gmail addresses to their Google account while keeping access to their existing data and services. For marketers, the change puts even more emphasis on the ability to connect activity across multiple email addresses to a single customer but doesn’t pose any deliverability risks.

The new Gmail feature will appeal most to long-time Google account holders, who are the most likely to have changed their name or to want to better align their Gmail address with who they are now. This is a change from the past, when users could create a new Gmail address but couldn’t connect that with an older account and would have to log into each account separately.

Previously, Gmail users could create email aliases that would forward any emails received to the user’s Gmail account. What’s different is this new feature allows you to turn your existing Gmail address into an alias that’s tied to a new Gmail address. It also allows you to check emails received by any of these Gmail addresses in a single unified inbox.

Different Email Addresses, Same Person

Given the importance of email addresses to establishing identity in CRM systems, the new feature adds a little more complexity to an already complex task. That’s because many consumers already use multiple email addresses to engage with brands, including the following:

Email aliases: These email addresses use the same domain but have different usernames or local-parts. Mail for all aliases are received in the email account they’re associated with, and any associated aliases can be used to send email, too.

Gmail plus addresses: Akin to an alias, Gmail allows users to append a plus-sign to the end of the username in their email address and add any combination of letters and numbers after it (e.g., spam+123spam@gmail.com). When delivering email, Google ignores everything from the plus-sign to the @-symbol. However, if a user only shared a specific Gmail plus address with one brand and then starts receiving emails from other brands using that same address, then they know the brand sold or shared their email address or were hacked.

Secondary email addresses: These are typically legacy email addresses that a consumer created. Even though they now use another email address as their primary, they keep this secondary address to:

• Sign up for promotional emails they won’t want to receive in their primary inbox.
• Sign up for services they suspect they’ll receive unwanted emails from.
• Complete lead gen forms where they want the signup reward or deliverable, but don’t want to get any subsequent emails in their primary inbox.

Secondary email accounts are checked far less frequently than primary email accounts. And being given a secondary email address is generally a sign of a lack of brand trust.

Temporary email addresses: When consumers don’t have a secondary email address or don’t trust a brand enough to share that with them, they may use a temporary email address. Often created to be operable for as little as a few hours, these addresses forward any emails received to another email account. When the temporary email address expires, emails sent to them hard bounce.

Relay email addresses: While relay addresses act like temporary addresses in terms of forwarding received emails on to another email account, they don’t automatically expire at a set time. However, relay addresses can be turned off at any time, which result in the hard bounce of any emails subsequently sent to them. Apple’s Hide My Email is a popular service for creating relay email addresses.

No Deliverability Impact

Secondary email addresses can lead to low engagement, and temporary and relay email addresses to higher bounce rates, both of which can affect email deliverability. However, Google’s new Gmail functionality shouldn’t impact it at all.

That’s because if one of your subscribers adds a second Gmail address to their Google account, any emails you send to their original Gmail address will still be received in their inbox, along with any emails you might send to their second Gmail address.

However, that fact does bring us back to the central issues with all of these different kinds of email addresses.

The Two Imperatives for Marketers

The new ability of Google users to create additional Gmail addresses associated with their Google accounts further highlights what should be two priorities for brands:

1. Resolving identity

Through first-party cookies, credit card numbers, phone numbers, names, and other information, marketers need to be able to identify their customers across channels and stitch together known and unknown user profiles that are in fact the same person.

If a customer migrates to a new email address, you want to make sure that all of the previous purchases and engagement connected with their previous email address are also connected with their new address. Having enterprise-grade customer data management (CDP) and identity management capabilities can help address these identity resolution requirements.

2. Establishing trust

Whether it’s a secondary, temporary, or relay email address, the main reason a customer or prospect is sharing that instead of their primary address is a lack of trust—a lack of trust that you’ll respect email permissioning and a lack of trust that you won’t sell or share their email address.

Consider reviewing all of subscriber acquisition sources (e.g., homepage, checkout) your brand uses and asking yourself:

What can we do to clarify opt-in permissions? When collecting promotional email opt-ins as part of other processes like checkouts, do we have an opt-in box or are we automatically opting every buyer in? If we have an opt-in box, is it unchecked or pre-checked? Is this permission language the same size as the surrounding text or smaller? In each of those cases, the former is the more reassuring approach to take than the latter.

What can we do to clarify our data-sharing policies? If we’re not selling or sharing email addresses, do we make that clear? Including such statements can build trust and increase opt-in rates.

Consumers using multiple email addresses to engage with brands is nothing new. Consider the launch of this new Google feature a reminder to review your ability to resolve visitor and customer identities and reexamine how your subscriber acquisition sources clarify permission and build trust.