5 Ways to Avoid Gmail Promotions Tab
My suspicion is that you don’t want to be that marketer that sends mails that end up “there” — you don’t wanna go there.
Gmail Promotions tab is one of the most dreaded dungeons for email marketers. This is understandable considering the challenges it comes with.
To start with, recipients of your mail won’t receive notifications when your mail drops. The second problem with Gmail Promotions tab is that the mails there clearly didn’t make it to the primary inbox. This reduces the possibility that your recipients would open it.
I was trying to send a sales promotion mail for a client recently and I have to admit it took some work to finally get it right (make it to the primary inbox). I had to do a lot of testing, corrections, undo and redo somethings before I finally got the hack.
Gmail, Google’s free email service, like every other Google product, is customer centric. Google is always about giving their customers the best user experience possible and this ideology is evident in the UI/UX of Gmail. This informed the decision by Google to have different mail categories for every incoming mail. The categories include Primary, Social and Promotions.
· Primary: As the name implies, this is the category that hosts your recipients’ primary messages. Gmail reserves this category for actual conversations, and for messages it can’t find another category for. (We are coming back to this).
· Promotions: This is the category Gmail finds fit for sales promotions, deals, offers and other marketing mails. (This is where your mail should go, but you don’t want that)
· Social: This is for notifications from their favourite social media platforms including Instagram, facebook, linkedin, twitter among others.
The last two categories are Forums and Updates. They are coming here as notable mentions because they are not as popular as the three above.
As mentioned earlier, Google had the customer in mind when they created those categories. For instance, brands and businesses send several marketing mails per hour. But not all users appreciate these mails. So, it makes sense to have a category that receives these mails and save for them. Then they (users) can always refer to the Promotions category at a convenient time, see what they have there and only open mails that appeal to them.
My suspicion is that you don’t want to be that marketer that sends mails that end up “there” — you don’t wanna go there. Below are the 5 major steps you can take to help you get to your audience’s Primary inbox. Trust me, I have tried and tested these tips. I wouldn’t share if I had not tried them myself. Let’s get started:
· Links: This was the first headway I had in the challenge I talked about earlier. Don’t forget that I said we would come back to my explanation on Primary tab. Well, here we are.
Your preferred destination for your mails is the primary tab of your recipient’s mails. And Gmail has reserved this spot for person-to-person conversations. In other words, it is for mails from friends, colleagues, families and acquaintances.
You know you wouldn’t send a mail to a friend with several buttons and links. So to give Gmail the impression you are not trying to sell something, reduce the number links in your mail to the bearest least. Industry standard is one link per mail, but you can push your luck a bit further by trying two.
Don’t forget to send a test mail first to see where it lands before sending a final copy. By the way, isn’t it strange that brands add linked social icons to the footer of their mails. These guys already subscribed to receive mails from you, so why send them to social media pages again?
Anyways those social media links also add to the number of links in your mail, further raising the promotions red flag. You should consider having one strategically-positioned CTA link in your mail and that should be about it. The only exceptions are the Unsubscribe and Update Preference links.
· Images: There is no denying that images make mails, and indeed all form of text-based contents more appealing to read. But people have to open the mail first to see your lovely images. And the possibility of them opening the mail will reduce if it goes to promotion tab.
So you get my point yeah? You don’t? My point is; having too many images in your mail tells Gmail that it’s promotion content, hereby sending it where it belongs — Promotion tab. Reduce your images to one or two. Guess what; no one said your mails must have header and footer images. No doubt they are great for aesthetics. But who cares about aesthetics at this point when you are not even sure your target audience are seeing your messages.
Instead, focus on creating a nice image that summarises the whole essence of your mail and position it where your readers can see it.
· Html Codes: Excess of fancy html codes in your mail also tells Gmail that you are trying to sell something. It’s okay to want to send a mail that’s looking almost like a web page, but the disadvantage is that Gmail sees such excess designs as promotional and places it accordingly. Be as simple as possible with your email templates. More texts, less designs.
More texts, less designs.
· Diction: Permit me to say Google is a “gangster” when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through crawlers, Google can tell that your content is sales-related if it has certain keywords. Words like offer, discount, buy, sale and so on are sales related and can tell Gmail you are trying to sell something. Avoid these words as much as possible. Mind you, don’t try to play smart by using synonyms of these words as Gmail can still spot them. Be creative and play around with words till you get it right.
· Domain Authentication: This is a bit technical and needs some coding skills. The whole idea behind domain authentication is to let Gmail know that the domain for which you are sending the mail gave you the permission to do so. This does not only help you avoid the Promotions tab, it also helps you avoid the worst category of all — Spam. You may want to refer here for detailed explanation on how to do this.
According to Email Deliverability expert, Chris Lang, Gmail has about 450–550 algorithms it uses to decide what category a mail goes to.
At the end of the day, what I recommend as the best hack for avoiding Gmail promotions tab is to actually not send promotional contents. According to Email Deliverability expert, Chris Lang, Gmail has about 450–550 algorithms it uses to decide what category a mail goes to.
What this means is that; even if the tips above help you avoid the Promotions tab, it is only a matter of time before Gmail sees what you are doing via machine learning and send your mail to the Promotions tab where it belongs. Thus, focus on creating contents that would add value to your audience.
Research on questions people in your industry/niche are asking and see how you can answer them in your mails. In other words, adopt the content marketing approach in your mails. Promotional mails can then come in once in a while.
Research on questions people in your industry/niche are asking and see how you can answer them in your mails
This will make your subscribers expect your mails. Some of them may even go as far as adding you to their contacts. You know what that means? It means you have permanently left such subscriber’s Promotions tab, no matter the type of content you decide to send. Focus more on adding value via your mail campaigns and you would be surprised at the amazing results that would follow.
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