Gmail: The Battle Between Promotions And Primary Tabs

Gmail – like a lot of Google applications – is not everybody’s cup of tea, and it might not be yours. However, there are literally hundreds of millions of people who are evidently very happy with the service and who use it as their primary email every single day.

Even if your company isn’t using Gmail as its email client, it is almost guaranteed that a significant proportion of your company’s audience does.

With 900 million users and 1 billion downloads of the Gmail android app, it’s safe to say that Gmail is popular to the extreme. The people on your email list will be using Gmail for their correspondence – and that means that their Gmail inboxes will be segmented into 3 folders – “Social”, “Primary” and “Promotions”.

To break these down – in the Social folder, users will largely receive emails concerning social media updates, the Primary folder is where correspondence from ‘real’ people ends up, and in the Promotions folder is found everything else – i.e. email newsletters and any other commercial appeals.

And it is between the Promotion and Primary folders that a very sticky battle for email marketing takes place.

Perceptions Of Promotional Emails

Let’s face facts here – growing an email list is one of the hardest things on the social media marketer’s agenda. It takes a lot of promotions, landing page designs, covert marketing skills and sometimes even the essential ransoming of key information in order to capture a social follower’s email address. It’s a tough job, but one of the most rewarding in terms of ROI.

However, as any marketer will tell you, simply capturing email addresses is not even half the battle. Once you’ve got an email list, attracting users to actually open and engage with the emails they receive is another matter altogether. Even when people sign up for a newsletter, they don’t always bother with paying attention to it when it arrives in their inbox every week. With the amount of junk mail that floats around the web waves, who can blame them? I know that I get lots of promotional emails in my inbox every day, no doubt coming from some company that I signed up with many moons ago, and, frankly, I either just ignore a lot of them or delete them immediately. I expect you do the same, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that many of your subscribers will also.

But, at least there’s only one inbox to contend with – so, even if most of your recipients aren’t engaging with your emails, they will still nonetheless be reminded of your presence once a week as the name of your brand and the subtitle of your promotion appears in their inbox.

That is unless they are Gmail users…

The Controversy Of The Promotions Tab

By default, any email promotions or newsletters that you send out from your company will have been ending up in Gmail Promotional folders since mid-2014.

When Gmail first rolled out this update, there was much furore by marketers claiming that this was the end for email marketing. Indeed, there was a lot scaremongering being bandied about, and some rather ‘colourful’ blog posts appearing, citing ‘chaos’, ‘marketing apocalypse’ and large-scale ‘panic’ ensuing.

Here’s how Jay Baer put it in his ‘What To Do About Gmail Tabs’ blog as an example:

“The ‘Promotions’ tab will be a newfangled spam folder, an email shantytown where only the bravest recipients dare venture. […] The theory is that people won’t check that folder much because it’s perhaps less urgent and personal than the Primary emails, and thus open rates will fall, we’ll all make less money, bunnies will perish, and chaos will reign.”

Now, Baer’s words have clearly been crafted with a certain satirical twinkle (that is to say that I think we can sense the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole in some of his sentiments). However, Gmail tabs nonetheless created a new challenge for email marketers – how do we now ensure that our emails don’t get missed in Promotions folders?

There are a couple of answers to this question.

Embracing The Promotions Tab

Despite Baer’s doom–mongering words, the reality of the Promotions tab can actually be beneficial for serious marketers. If you’ve been prudent and pertinent in the construction of your email list, then it will contain a register primarily comprised of loyal customers who trust you, are interested in what you have to offer, and will continue to be excited about your content. These people will still be opening your emails – even if they do end up in the Promotions folder. Of course they will – and your hard-core following will probably go the next step and drag your messages across to their Primary tab of their own accord.

As is pointed out in Marketo:

“The Promotions tab makes sure that your customers see your email at the best time and in the best context. In a way, Google has done some of your targeting work for you.

“Don’t forget, Google uses email marketing too, and so far they’re playing by their own rules.

“The fact that Google has put its new email-like Ads in the promotional tab means they want, intend and indeed need users to go to the promotional tab. Right now Google has a strong incentive to ensure users do review their promotions tab.” – Tim Watson, Zettasphere (@tawatson)

Tips To Land Your Emails In The Gmail Primary Tab

Your loyal following will remain loyal – and Google, as Watson notes, is actually on your side. However, some of the people on your email list might have been a little more ‘hard-won’. That is to say that they won’t necessarily make the effort to dip into their Promotions folder to dig out your email of their own accord. They might well have opened up a few of your messages in the past when there was just the single inbox on their Gmail account, but now that their emails have been segmented, the likelihood of some of your emails being missed is increased.

The solution in this instance is to try and craft your emails so that they arrive straight in your subscribers’ Primary folders – and below I’ve listed some tips for how you can achieve that.

#1. Address The User By Name

Addressing the recipient by first name is the first thing to do. Google tries to detect what sort of email it is that’s being sent through the use of algorithms. Essentially, you’re trying to appear to Google as if you are Primary worthy, and addressing the recipient by first name is a great first step towards doing this. And besides which, addressing your customers with first names is a great email marketing strategy in any case, so make sure you do this with your whole email list, and not just those with Gmail.

#2. Remove Images

This is counterintuitive, not to mention working in direct contrast to the usual advice on devising promotional emails. But, if your open rate is suffering because of the Gmail Promotions folder, then you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands. Google views emails that contain images as being promotional, and therefore your newsletters, if they contain images, will tend to end up in Promotions folders. Remove your images, and you remove this problem.

#3. One Link Maximum

Obviously the whole point of your email campaign is to drive traffic to your website – and the most effective way to do that is to include links in your emails, right? Right. However, if you want to survive Google’s Gmail filter then it’s advised that you only include one link.

#4. Don’t Use RSS

Needless to say, RSS is automated, so Google can very easily detect that a ‘real’ person is not sending such an email, and so it will end up in the Promotions folder.

#5. Don’t Pitch Promotions

Of course, one of the primary purposes of your email campaign might be to offer exclusive promotions to your subscribers. However, if you send these to your Gmail recipients, then they will end up in the Promotions folder most definitely. If you don’t want this to happen then you can’t include them, it’s as simple as that. You will have to reserve your one link to direct your customers to a special promotions page on your website instead.

Final Word

The Promotions tab is a challenge for email marketers – there can be no denying that. But there are ways around it, and the trick really will be to keep it short and sweet. As an example, Convince&Convert provide the following screenshot. Note the conversational tone, lack of images, RSS, only one link and the use of the first name of the recipient. This is the sort of email that is likely to land in Primary folders every time.

Continue reading here: How to Use Gated Content to Generate Leads

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