We all want our emails to land in the inbox of our subscribers because that’s where we are most visible.  But what if your subscriber uses Gmail, has tabs enabled and your emails land in their Gmail Promotions tab?

What is the Gmail Promotions Tab

Back in 2013, Google introduced categories to your inbox, allowing you to section your inbox by tabs into Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.  The default is usually Primary, Social and Promotions and you can change these or turn them off in your Settings.

 

Gmail looks at your emails and decides which category to move your email to. Marketing emails, promotional offers and those it recognises with offers will find their way to that Promotions tab.

 

Is it a bad thing if emails go into the Promotions Tab?

 

Actually no it’s not.

The Promotions tab is not spam.  It’s simply a tab within your Inbox.

Your spam folder is spam

Emails that go in to Promotions tab are recognised as being more salesy type emails. And actually it’s right they are there.

These aren’t transactional emails, conversations with clients or prospects.

The emails that land in directly in your Primary are the most important to your subscriber and so it’s likely any promotional emails will be skipped over by your subscriber in favour of their work-related or family & friends emails.

The Promotions tab, however, is where your subscriber is likely to go when they want to check out what offers are coming in, what news is being sent from the businesses they subscriber to.

Your subscribers are not in the right frame of mind to see your promo emails when they are in work mode.  Don’t worry.

Gmail are actually helping you organise your inbox so embrace the tabs. We all want to be inbox-tidy don’t we (I do try!).

 

Think about where you go if you want to spend time shopping

You’ll go the high street or the shopping mall  and browse around all the shops. You know where you need to go and that’s your destination.  Once you are there, the best offers will stand out to you.

If you’re in work mode, you go to the office which is down a busy road in the town where there are lots of other similar offices.  It would be out of place for most shops to be there and they wouldn’t get the footfall they desire, even if they have the most beautiful products.

 

How can you get emails to land the Primary tab?

If it’s still important to you get into the Primary box, then here’s a couple of tips (but don’t sweat it to much because ISP’s are changing the email filters all the time).

• Ask your subscribers to manually drag your emails to the Primary tab (but chances are after a while Gmail will pop them back into the Promo tab)

 

• Look at your subject line. Is it spammy?  I recommended to one client that she stopped using caps in her subject lines and her next email went straight into my primary tab.

 

• Provide awesome content that means your email is opened all the time (but if your content is truly valuable then it won’t matter where your email lands up, the subscriber will open it anyway).

 

In conclusion, don’t worry too much if your emails are landing in the Promotions.  The Spam folder is the place you need to keep your emails out of and that’s a whole different subject which I’ll write about separately.

However, if you still really want to get into the Primary Tab and ensure your emails never go to Spam then let’s have a chat about how I can help. Book your free discovery call here.