Gmail’s ‘Manage subscriptions’ feature is a win for segmented senders

It’s not the easiest time to be an email marketer. Gmail and Yahoo’s evolving spam guidelines — compounded by earlier iOS updates that made them harder to meet — have turned deliverability into a universal challenge.

When Gmail rolls out a new feature that makes it even easier for users to unsubscribe from multiple senders simultaneously, it’s understandable to fear the worst. But how worried should we be about Gmail’s new “Manage subscriptions” feature?

Here’s how the feature works, what we’re seeing across client accounts and what you can do to avoid any potential deliverability hits.

How ‘Manage subscriptions’ works

You may or may not have seen this feature in your Gmail experience. It’s rolling out across the Gmail app on Android, iOS and desktop — but it’s not yet fully live. At my agency, there is about a 50/50 split between those who have access and those who don’t.

Designed to help users clean up their inboxes, the feature displays a list of active email subscriptions and the number of recent* emails received from each sender. (*Based on our testing, “recent” refers to emails sent within the past three weeks.)

Subscriptions are sorted first by email volume, then alphabetically by sender — an important detail, especially when considering how users may decide which emails to cut.

This isn’t breaking tremendous amounts of new ground. Gmail has released other ways for users to easily unsubscribe from individual senders, though this is a new and more comprehensive view.

The impact on our client accounts

My team’s expectation upon seeing this feature was that many users would use it when they first discovered it and then sporadically thereafter. We also assumed that the people who chose to use it would already be relatively aggressive about managing their subscriptions in the first place.

In other words, we expected impact to be pretty minimal — and that has been the case to date. Our clients have not seen a statistically significant increase in unsubscribe rates for Gmail subscribers.

Recommendations for mitigation

Even before this feature rolled out, we knew from experience that unsubscribes usually happen when send volume outpaces engagement. At my agency, we’ve addressed this through audience segmentation and subsequent sending alterations. For instance, unsubscribe and low-engagement segments get emails far less frequently than highly engaged segments.

This new feature — even its layout, which prioritizes send volume in how subscriptions are displayed — reinforces what we’ve long advocated: tailoring email frequency to engagement levels through intelligent segmentation.

Dig deeper: Subscriber acquisition best practices following Gmail’s spam update

Smart segmentation still wins

Anytime a marketer sees something like this, it brings up fears, but we’re not seeing a significant impact on accounts that adapt to a user’s engagement level. File this one away as yet another reason to use intelligent segmentation and be strategic about when and how often to engage your lists of users.