How to Keep Your Emails Away from the Promotions Tab of Gmail

Businesses rely on email marketing as an extremely efficient and cost-effective method of expanding their customer base, building brand awareness and keeping the customers engaged. The right email marketing strategy can result in an incredible ROI and help you to stay in touch with your target market. With that being said, email marketing is not as simple as it sounds. Every day email marketers are facing new challenges in making sure that their emails get opened. They have to spend hours on generating the most compelling, enticing and unique content for the audience as part of an effective email marketing campaign strategy. In 2013, Google introduced tabs within Gmail, adding to the frustration of email marketers. This new feature meant that promotional emails, offers, newsletters, etc. would now go into the “Promotions” tab of Gmail, negatively impacting their visibility.

Does It Matter?

Gmail has become the most popular email service provider with a total of 1.5 billion users. According to Report Path’s survey that gave some useful insights to the use of tabbed inbox by Gmail users, a striking 19.9% of users never open the Promotions tab. Moreover, even if your user does check their Promotions tab, your email will be lying in the midst of a plethora of other marketing emails. So, no matter how much of your effort goes into crafting engaging content for the readers, if your email gets buried in the Promotions tab, the chances of it being noticed are slim.

What Can You Do About It?

You can’t make changes to Google’s algorithms that work in the background to decide which email goes under which tab. However, you can make a few changes in your emails to make them recognized as primary emails. Here are some tips:

Go Easy on Links and Images

An email full of images and hyperlinks is bound to go into the promotions tab. Have no more than a single link and don’t use images unless absolutely necessary.

Don’t Sell

Avoid use of any promotional trigger words like offers, discounts, and price tags in your email. All of these should be moved to your website.

Keep It Short, Simple and Personalized

Steer clear of any fancy templates and keep your emails concise. Addressing your recipient by their first name is a good practice. Craft the email keeping in mind that you’re sending it to a friend, not your customer.

Headers and Footers

Using automatically generated headers and footers from email marketing service providers is a sure-shot way to landing your email in the Promotions tab.

Your Reply-to Address

Fix your email service provider settings to make sure that your recipients can reply to the same address that’s in the sender’s field. Having a different reply-to address gives a clue that the email was sent by a company, not a person.

Authenticate Your Domain

Emails coming from authenticated domains (with DKIM and SPF records) enhance your reputation and stop your emails from looking like spam. To ensure that your emails get the desired attention and generate a favorable response, opt for the professional services of Inbox Group – your one-stop email marketing campaign solution.