Tis the season for tips on how to drag your way out of the dreaded promo tab. Gmail has had tabs for a good long time now (since 2013), and with Apple jumping on board the tab (category) bandwagon, too, people are again worried about the specific tab or category placement. And thus, tis also the season to remind people that the promotions tab is not the awful purgatory that some folks assume it to be.
I mean, you could remove promotional and salesy content from your emails, making them bad examples of email marketing messages that make you less money than they would have otherwise. (And that would probably disqualify your content from being featured on Really Good Emails, too.) But you shouldn't, because if your goal is to make money from email marketing, removing the content that helps drive sales kind of undermines the whole purpose of this exercise. You might get to the inbox, and make no revenue from it.
After all, look at the guidance other folks give for this when it comes to content. Don't sell, no images, no more than one link, etc.? Ugh. That's not the path to email marketing success.
Instead, embrace promotions tab placement. Open rates aren't going to tank -- because, like Lauren Meyer says, the promotions tab is part of the inbox. People who like the tabbed layout know to look for marketing messages there, and people who don't like the tabbed layout turn off tabs (and then you land in the main inbox view, anyway). It's what Google wants, and it's what users want.
And avoid people who say they can trick it. People who offer up expensive magic elixirs to prevent promotions tab placement are often lying or are locked in an arms race utilizing questionable tactics, adding junk text or employing other hacks that might get you away from the promo tab today but not tomorrow. And might even make Google unhappy and get you spam folder placement, because those hacks look spammy (and are spammy).
Google has tightened the reputation screws at Gmail, too. What I mean by that is that multiple deliverability consultants for multiple email marketing automation platforms are telling me that they're lately seeing quicker (partial or full) spam folder placement for campaigns even when the reputation stats are similar to what they were in years past. I knew this was coming -- and I previously warned that Gmail remediation is slower than in the past. All the more reason to avoid risky and bad shortcuts that could damage your standing and ability to deliver to the inbox.
So, this holiday season, remember that the best way to succeed as an email marketer is not to fear or try to hack your way free of the promotions tab: embrace it, and watch how it doesn't impede your marketing success. Like marketing journalist Ken Magill said all the way back in 2013: "Send stuff people want and whatever the various inbox providers do with their interfaces will have little effect on you." Still true today.
Tis the season for tips on how to drag your way out of the dreaded promo tab. Gmail has had tabs for a good long time now (since 2013), and with Apple jumping on board the tab (category) bandwagon, too, people are again worried about the specific tab or category placement. And thus, tis also the season to remind people that the promotions tab is not the awful purgatory that some folks assume it to be.
I'm certainly not the first person to talk about this -- even this week. Here's Jaina Mistry from Litmus with her great thoughts on why engagement, identifiability (and even BIMI) are more important to marketing success than finding a clever hack to keep your emails from being tagged as promotional by a mailbox provider.
I mean, you could remove promotional and salesy content from your emails, making them bad examples of email marketing messages that make you less money than they would have otherwise. (And that would probably disqualify your content from being featured on Really Good Emails, too.) But you shouldn't, because if your goal is to make money from email marketing, removing the content that helps drive sales kind of undermines the whole purpose of this exercise. You might get to the inbox, and make no revenue from it.
Instead, embrace promotions tab placement. Open rates aren't going to tank -- because, like Lauren Meyer says, the promotions tab is part of the inbox. People who like the tabbed layout know to look for marketing messages there, and people who don't like the tabbed layout turn off tabs (and then you land in the main inbox view, anyway). It's what Google wants, and it's what users want.
And avoid people who say they can trick it. People who offer up expensive magic elixirs to prevent promotions tab placement are often lying or are locked in an arms race utilizing questionable tactics, adding junk text or employing other hacks that might get you away from the promo tab today but not tomorrow. And might even make Google unhappy and get you spam folder placement, because those hacks look spammy (and are spammy).
Google has tightened the reputation screws at Gmail, too. What I mean by that is that multiple deliverability consultants for multiple email marketing automation platforms are telling me that they're lately seeing quicker (partial or full) spam folder placement for campaigns even when the reputation stats are similar to what they were in years past. I knew this was coming -- and I previously warned that Gmail remediation is slower than in the past. All the more reason to avoid risky and bad shortcuts that could damage your standing and ability to deliver to the inbox.
So, this holiday season, remember that the best way to succeed as an email marketer is not to fear or try to hack your way free of the promotions tab: embrace it, and watch how it doesn't impede your marketing success. Like marketing journalist Ken Magill said all the way back in 2013: "Send stuff people want and whatever the various inbox providers do with their interfaces will have little effect on you." Still true today.
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