Here’s a (legal) Gmail hack to get your emails seen by more people!
The biggest part of email marketing is how many people will open your email, engage with your email, and hopefully click through to your offer. But people are a lot less likely to open an email they never see, right?
Right.
So, what if some of the people on your list never even have a chance to see your email? I’m not talking about the SPAM folder, either…
I send out nearly half a million emails every week at work… and I had no idea of this potential hurdle to my open-rate until I accidentally stumbled upon it.
Do you know what this is below?
Well, if you do, then you’re on Gmail, one of the largest free email platforms on the planet. For example, of our roughly 300,000 contacts on our email list, over 174,000 are @Gmail.com… that’s over 50% of my contacts that I’d be missing out on just because of a keyword or some basic formatting.
Most users will have their inbox set on default settings (shown above). This means that emails will automatically be divided, even if they don’t go to SPAM, into one of these three folders. If you want maximum eyeballs on your email, you need to make sure they are landing in the Primary inbox.
As the senior editor and email writer at work, I have to test the email links. I sent the email to a second account I had, but for some reason, it never arrived… until I realized it was in the PROMOTIONS folder! Eghad!
So I checked through other emails that had hit both boxes and noticed that mine had too many images in it. So, I cut back and made modifications until the test landed in the Primary inbox. Then I sent it out to the entire list! I saw a massive increase (over 10%) in opens from other emails using the previous image-heavy template.
Want to know how to test it yourself? You don’t have to wait for an accidental discovery, like I did.
You can setup a way to test very easily:
1. Create a brand new Gmail account.
Yes, it’s that simple.
Just make sure not to change any settings on it. No filters. No preferences. Just leave it vanilla so you can get the best kind of test platform.
2. Send your test emails there, and see which box they end up in.
It will take some trial and error for you to figure out which words in the subject line, and which features in the body, have the email go to the Primary inbox.
I’ll release an article soon, after proper testing, giving you more in depth tips on what to do (and not to do) to help your emails hit the Primary inbox!
Hope this helps!
UPDATE: Even the big players don’t know this secret!
— Vaughn Reynolds, Funnel Guild
P.S. There’s a new software product that’s taking over the Internet. It’s called ClickFunnels, and you can get a FREE account to check it out and give it a test drive!
