CMOs predict email marketing is the online promotional tactic that will bring in the most revenue for their brands this holiday season. Now, marketers must take note that a new unsubscribe […]

CMOs predict email marketing is the online promotional tactic that will bring in the most revenue for their brands this holiday season. Now, marketers must take note that a new unsubscribe feature from Yahoo means relevant content is key to getting marketing messages read – instead of removed from inboxes.

The Yahoo Mail blog announced today that it is launching an OtherInBox (OIB) Unsubscribe feature to make it easy for users to stop receiving messages that are not relevant to them. The timing – during what Brafton has reported is online holiday spending's Peak Week – may seem unfortunate to marketers, but Yahoo suggests that this tool is meant to ensure that users find the promotional messages they most want during the shopping season.

Officials explain that the Automatic Organizer application for Yahoo Mail, which is in the lower left of users' inboxes, now allows for easy unsubscribing. Moreover, it helps users organize the marketing messages they do want. This makes it more important for brands' emails to be optimized by industry for users' inbox searches and for content to be relevant to the sales consumers want.

"The commercial email and social networking messages you actually DO want [are put] into appropriately labeled folders like OIB shopping, finance and news," Miriam Geller, director of product management, explains.

Messages that aren't deemed useful can now be removed with the click of a mouse. When users put messages into an OIB Unsubscribe folder within the app, Yahoo safely unsubscribes on their behalf.

This is just the latest Yahoo Mail feature launched that makes it invaluable for marketers to carefully craft their marketing messages with inbox searches in mind. Brafton recently reported that Yahoo launched a Beta system that facilitates email searching.

Marketers should take these developments to heart; there are currently more than 300 million Yahoo Mail users, making it a top email system. By comparison, Gmail has just 171 million global users.  

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.