5 Strategies to Keep Your Email Marketing Out of Gmail’s Promotions Tab
If email marketing is one of the channels you use to promote your business, there’s a big chance that your recipients are receiving your emails through Gmail. This is actually a smart choice since more than a billion people use Gmail every month.
However, it’s not easy to ensure that your email campaigns are actually reaching your target audience. For all you know, your emails go straight to Gmail’s Promotions tabs instead of the user’s primary inbox. When that happens, your open rate, click-through rate, and other important email marketing metrics will suffer.
To make sure that you can avoid this, here are several tips to increase the odds of your emails landing in the primary inbox.
Segment your lists.
The algorithm of Gmail is simple. Emails that are often clicked and opened by users will almost always go to the primary inbox. Emails that were ignored, on the other hand, are most likely to be sent to the promotions tab. If you don’t want the latter to happen to you, you need to make sure that you are sending emails that are relevant to the recipients. You can do this by segmenting your lists based on the data you’ve collected. If a user has shown interest in your newsletters but not in your promotional emails, then remove them from the list where you send promotional emails and keep them on the newsletter list.
Use less images.
Gmail can determine the content of your email. If it has less text and more images, it will be tagged as an email from a business and not someone that the user knows personally. So to keep your email in the primary inbox, don’t use multiple images and keep the content text-based as much as possible. If you need help picking the right image for your emails, you can hire a graphic designer VA to create powerful images for your email campaigns.
Use less links.
Similar to images, overdoing it when it comes to links can be detrimental to your emails. If links are randomly placed in the content of your emails, make no mistake that they will go straight to the promotions tab. Make sure to avoid this by using only one link and preferably placed in your call-to-action button. Your email should be designed like a funnel. The CTA should be the focal point of your content since this is what you use to drive the users to your landing page.
Personalize.
If you don’t use your contacts’ first names to address them in your email, you are basically telling Gmail that you are sending emails to people you don’t know. Make the emails more personal. Any good email marketing tool allows you to use personal information in your emails, so make use of that feature.
Be careful in your subject lines.
Subject lines matter a lot. If you are using marketing words in your subject lines like “free” or including too many emojis, your emails will definitely be sent to the promotions tab. Make sure you avoid them. It’s also a mistake if you don’t add personalization in your subject lines like using the contact’s first name.
Is promoting in Gmail a part of your online business marketing strategy? If it is, then make sure you learn about these strategies that can help keep your emails out of Gmail’s promotions tab.
