A little while ago Google updated their Gmail platform interface by adding several extra tabs with automatic filtering to help people differentiate different types of email content. These additional tabs are ‘Social’ – containing updates and news from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest; and the other tab ‘Promotions’ containing what Gmail flags as advertising or marketing content.

While this is good way to have your inbox organised, it becomes a problem when your valuable content is selected by this filter, and therefore not given as much attention as it should. If you are sending newsletters out to a subscription list, you may not know that your emails are being filtered like this!

Why is this important?

Latest research suggests that up to 20% of Gmail users don’t ever check their Promotions tab, even though about 85% of all emails get filtered into it. Combined with the fact that emails in the tab only have a 19% open rate.

With this information, we can clearly see that this is a problem where your newsletters are significantly less likely to be seen – let alone read – by its recipients.

How to keep out of the Promotions tab

Gmail’s filter looks for the email structure as well as the content to decide if the email gets sent into the Promotions tab. There are several tips you can do to reduce the likeliness of it catching your newsletters, and hopefully staying out of there for good!

Keep a high text – image ratio.

Quite simply, if your email content contains too many images, it will be sent straight to Promotions. You should aim to have no more than 60:40 images to text.

Check your links

You need to use as few links as possible, no more than 2-4. It’s also a good idea to remove links that are very common in promotional content such as social media icons.

Header and Footer

Text such as ‘Unsubscribe from this mailing list’ or ‘View email in browser’ will almost certainly make Gmail mark the email as promotional. Remove theses or reduce as much as possible (Simple have the word ‘Unsubscribe’ instead of the whole sentence.)

Simplicity is key

Do not use any complex email templates, such as those supplied by email providers. Create your own simple template based on your brand, ensuring that there are no background images or complicated HTML.

Keep it Personal

Personalise your emails as much as you are able. Keep it simple and clear, as if writing a short note to a friend. Engage with the recipient and ask them a question to encourage a reply.

Final notes

You may need to investigate and test your emails on a wide range of mailbox providers to see how they handle your newsletters. Deliverability is fairly unpredictable and it’s hard to know how each provider will handle your email, and where it will land between primary, promotions or even spam.

However with constant testing, and by using the tips above you should be able to direct yourself out of Gmail’s Promotion tab.

Nick Wearing

Developer

Although Nick only has only been in the web design industry for a couple of years, he quickly became a valuable member of the Nexus Websites team.