Get Clients Online
How I Got Out Of Gmail’s “Promotions Tab Jail” (And The Tools & Techniques You Can Use If You’re In There Too)
Posted by
Ian Brodie on 13th June 2016.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up to a nightmare scenario for any email marketer.
As I do most days, I tapped away to write an email I thought would be useful, interesting and fun for my subscribers. Job done, I shot off a test email to myself to make sure the links were all working.
5 minutes later, it hadn't arrived in my inbox. Another 10 minutes and it still wasn’t there. I sent another one.
Still nothing.
Then I spotted a notification that there were new emails in my Gmail promotions tab.
Surely not? Surely my own emails that I read on a regular basis aren't going into my promotions tab?
But yes, they were.
According to Email Deliverability expert Chris Lang, you get an 8-10% increase in opens and clicks simply by being in the primary tab rather than the promotions tab on Gmail.
That's a huge difference. And it's a direct hit on your revenue if email is a key part of your marketing.
Lang estimates that Gmail runs about 40% of the world's email behind the scenes. In my case, since my clients tend to be smaller businesses it's probably higher.
So ending up in the promotions tab is bad, bad news.
So why was I in there and more importantly: what could I do to get out? I started looking around for answers.