Gmail’s New Tab Layout and How it Affects Email Marketing

Since May Gmail has started organising inboxes filtering out different types of emails into different tabs: primary, social, updates, forums and finally: promotions.

Primary emails are the personal emails sent directly to you from friends and family. Social are the notifications from social networks, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Updates are notifications, receipts and bills. Forums are emails from online groups and forums.

And Promotions are newsletters and email marketing messages. For email marketers, this now means that their newsletters containing offers and deals which get sent to Gmail users will most likely end up in the Promotions tab.

Email marketers across the board are asking: "What happens if they don’t look at the promotions tab?"

The answer is that they don't see it.

If your potential customers, the leads you worked hard to earn, don’t see the emails straight away they may not go to the promo tab to have a look. Would you go looking for extra ways to be advertised?

What To Do?

Firstly: don’t panic. Let's put this in perspective: not everyone who saw your email newsletter opens it and some of those people will already filter out these emails from their main inbox. Your email marketing efforts will take a hit, but it's not the end of the world.

Improve Your Subject Lines

Looking at the positive if someone is on the promotional tab, they are more likely to be in the mindset to spend money - you've just got to make yourself stand out when they do. Once they click on the tab, you potentially have a more engaged audience, so if you have a good offering with a good subject line and have previously provided good customer service email marketing can still be profitable.

Ask Nicely

If you want to get back into the primary inbox it is worth asking your customers to simply drag and drop your email from the promo tab to the primary tab. It might be worth saying something like “To keep up to date with all the latest news and offers, please drag our email into your primary inbox” (but remember this is only for Gmail users before you start confusing your other customers!).

A Social Offensive

If your customers are leaving you in the promo tab, you could always remind them about your latest promotions via Twitter or Facebook. While there is a chance of being filtered out there this is a one-to-one filter, rather than platform wide.

Be Regular

Also, it might be a good plan to send your email newsletters out on a regular day or date, if your going to send one out once a month every month, make sure you send it out on the same day - the first Friday of every month for example. This way the already engaged customers who want to look at your email won't miss it.

It's going to be a hard world out there for email marketers for a while, but with these ideas, you'll still be able to reach some of your customers with your message.