Google Adds Simplified Unsubscribe Feature to Gmail

Google has added a feature to make it easier for Gmail users to unsubscribe from emails.

The company’s recently announced “Manage subscriptions” tool lets users view and manage subscription emails, to make it easy to unsubscribe from the ones they don’t want from a single place.

“It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven’t shopped in years can quickly pile up,” Chris Doan, director of Gmail, wrote on the Google blog.

A report Wednesday (July 16) on the new feature by Fast Company includes comments from Omar Merlo, an associate professor of marketing strategy at Imperial College London who said Google’s move is part of a larger trend, with customers seeking more control, more meaningful content and greater value from their brand interactions.

“If email doesn’t meet that standard, people now have a faster and easier way to walk away,” Merlo told the news outlet. “This isn’t the end of email marketing. It is perhaps the end of sloppy email marketing.”

PYMNTS examined some of the challenges facing today’s marketing teams last month in a conversation with Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch.

“Marketing that actually adds value to the consumer’s life versus just sort of, ‘Hey, here’s my product, here’s my product,’ that is what resonates,” Manohar told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, arguing that brands are still playing according to analog rules.

“Our belief is that traditional channels just don’t support the [human-feeling] capability that modern digital channels do,” he added.

His company was founded to combat impersonal, misdirected marketing by embracing artificial intelligence (AI) decisioning: a model that pairs each customer with a personalized agent that can interpret intent, timing and content preferences.

“It’s like going into a bank and meeting a teller who knows you,” Manohar said. “They’re not just going to minute-one tell you about offer X and keep repeating it. But that’s what it feels like receiving marketing communications from a lot of brands today.”

Google’s new unsubscribe feature is rolling out at a time when unsubscribing from things is growing more difficult.

A federal court last week blocked the so-called “click to cancel” rule for subscription services, just days before this Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule — designed to make cancelling subscriptions as easy as signing up for them — was set to go into effect.