Fewer Gmail Users Are Opening Retailers’ Messages This Shopping Season

Some e-commerce marketers are having a challenging holiday season, and they blame Google for it. A change to Gmail that relegated retailers’ emails to a separate inbox for promotions has had a big effect during the busiest shopping period of the year, according to three services that manage mass emails. And another change to Gmail, involving the way it shows images in messages, made it harder for retailers to track who opens their emails. Google says it made the changes to improve the service for users, and that the changes could also be advantageous to marketers.