Gmail's new ‘Manage Subscriptions' tool could change email marketing forever

Fast Company

2 days ago

Inbox fatigue is real. According to one analysis, the average person receives more than 120 emails a day, with some office-based staff receiving even more due to their work environment. From Substack newsletters to marketing emails from local stores (alongside standard business updates), it can be difficult to stay on top of it all.
It's a challenge Google, owner of Gmail—the world's second-most-used email service after Apple Mail—has acknowledged and is now addressing. Beginning this week, the company is rolling out a new feature for Gmail users in select countries: Manage Subscriptions.
The tool lets users see all their active email subscriptions in one place, along with a count of how many emails each sender has delivered in recent weeks. From there, unsubscribing takes just a single click.
'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,' said Gmail director Chris Doan, in a company blog post announcing the feature earlier this month.
For users, it's a welcome step toward reclaiming control of their inboxes. But for email marketers, this visibility—and the ease of opting out—could signal a reckoning.
The feature reflects a broader trend, says Omar Merlo, an associate professor of marketing strategy at Imperial College London, wherein customers are looking for greater control, more meaningful content, and added value in their interactions with brands. 'If email doesn't meet that standard, people now have a faster and easier way to walk away,' Merlo says. 'This isn't the end of email marketing. It is perhaps the end of sloppy email marketing.'
And while the tool may accelerate unsubscribes among already-disengaged users, some say it's unlikely to trigger a mass exodus, and could, in a sense, help marketers by reducing spam complaints. 'Unsubscribes are better than spam complaints,' says Desi Zhivkova, deliverability team lead at e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend. 'Giving users easier ways to opt out peacefully helps preserve sender reputation and improves long-term deliverability.'
Richard Stone, managing director of PR agency Stone Junction, believes it could elevate the quality of email marketing. 'Email marketing has always been about creating a list of people who actually want to hear from you,' he says. 'All Gmail is doing is making that principle harder to ignore. In the long run, this kind of user control will lead to better relationships between brands and their audiences, not worse.'