🏃 How to avoid the Promotions tab

Some tips for you. View in browser Hi there, Let's talk about email! I've seen the topic of deliverability crop up in multiple spaces in the last two weeks. It's an important thing to be concerned with; there's no point going to all this time and effort building up our lists and crafting engaging content for our subscribers if they never see our bloody emails. However, I'm worried that people seem to be reaching for the most obvious solution (changing provider) when there are a number of things an author should run through before taking that step (and dealing with all the associated hassle), not least because it's highly likely the real problem is something else, and will likely go unsolved.  Meaning all that trouble was for nothing… and may indeed make the problem worse. Deliverability is a big topic, and large companies will have whole teams of experts dedicated to constantly improving deliverability, so let's focus on one under-discussed aspect today: how to avoid the dreaded Gmail Promotions tab. In case you are not a user of Gmail – which is by far the most popular email service on the planet – let me briefly explain the issue. A couple of years ago, Gmail brought in a series of tabs to help users sort through the large amounts of emails they were receiving. Spam was already being sorted into its own dedicated folder. Indeed, most spam actually gets zapped before it even makes it to your Spam folder – and a lot of deliverability issues that you might think are caused by something else are probably down to your messages being incorrectly identified as Spam and not even reaching your subscribers. (We can, unwittingly, bake in various signals into our emails that cause them to be misidentified.) Anyway, in addition to Inbox and Spam, Gmail added a couple of tabs: Promotions and Social. The latter was intended for social media updates, and the former was intended for marketing messages. Gmail originally thought that the Promotions tab would be actively perused by users, and had all sorts of ideas about organizing all the offers in there into various themed groups, that users could sift through as if they were doing some kind of email version of couponing. Instead it has become an email graveyard, barely trafficked much more than the Spam folder itself. Latest estimates I read indicate that less than 20% of Promotions emails are read. Which means you need to avoid it like… [metaphor redacted]. This is not easy but is definitely worth the faff-filled steps I'm going to recommend adding to your email writing workflow. Just keep in mind that because avoiding the Promotions tab can be so difficult – and dropping in there can have so many diverse causes – email companies generally take a hands-off approach in giving you advice on this front. Seek help elsewhere, is my suggestion, otherwise they might just tell you that dropping into Promotions isn't such a big deal and you should worry about other things instead. (I firmly disagree.) Some more numbers to underline the point: it is estimated that almost 85% of marketing messages end up in the Promotions tab. Meaning if you can avoid it with your newsletters, then you are definitely getting an edge on the competition, as well as getting your emails read by more people, of course. I can tell you from experience that ensuring you hit Inbox as often as possible will really improve your open rates over time – and you will particularly want to do that with super important messages like a launch announcement or the first email in your welcome sequence. It is possible to train readers to help you out here. Simply moving messages from Promotions to Inbox will fix the issue… for that reader. But that's not exactly scaleable and, as anyone who has tried to get readers to do whitelisting will know, the take-up on anything like this is likely to be small even if you stress the importance or incentivize the process somehow. Realistically, it's on you. First, lets run through some of the main things that can cause your emails to go into Promotions. Then I'll show you how you can actually test your own emails, and make the necessary changes, to ensure as many as possible go to Inbox instead. Gmail Promotion Triggers There is a long list of things that can potentially cause your email to drop into Promotions. In fact, with too many of these things in your emails there is a further danger that they will drop into Spam, or even get zapped before they arrive. Some of these factors I won't bother listing as they won't be relevant to most authors (for example: doing a mass send from something like Gmail is one potential trigger, but most authors will use a dedicated Email Service Provider like MailerLite or Active Campaign etc.). However, some are things we commonly do: Links can be a trigger, so keep them to a minimum (when possible, of course). Images are often a problem, especially if you use too many or if you don't optimize them for email. A 640px image is generally the maximum width I use in emails – anything wider is pointless – and you really don't need to be using high-res images in emails at all. In fact, the size of the email (in terms of kilobytes) is also a factor. Too big, and the likes of Gmail will be suspicious. Sender rep is a factor here also. Until you authenticate your domain, you will be relying on the Sender rep of MailChimp or Constant Contact or whoever your own provider is. But if you authenticate your domain, you are relying on your own Sender rep instead – which is definitely what you want. Doing this one change often has a very positive effect on open rates, so don't skip it. Here are the instructions for MailerLite, but if you use a different provider, they should have something similar in their Help pages. Personalize your emails. If you have collected the first name of your subscribers, use the mail merge feature of your provider to insert their first name. But if you are like me and you don't collect the first names of your subscribers, then it's still worth opening with a more human "Hello," or "Hi," or "How's she cuttin'" as we say in Ireland. Something that looks human and personal helps your email look less like a sad robot farting out happy birthday messages on behalf of a furniture store. Avoid spammy words, especially in your subject line. I regularly Google "email spam words" to have an up-to-date list at my fingertips, because this is the kind of thing which changes often as marketers and Google continue the world's longest running game of cat-and-mouse. This list from Active Campaign looks good (and they definitely know their onions). Here's a big one: Free. A lot of authors use that in their subject lines, often with the first email in their welcome sequence, which is a pretty big hole in their bucket right at the start. I recommend using another form of words here. Now, don't freak out about any of these. I use images and links in every email. And because I talk about marketing a lot, every single email has lots of spam words. But my emails mostly go to Inbox because I test them first, and find where the thresholds are. I can't give you exact guidelines on that front, because it varies. My sender rep is not your sender rep, for starters. But it also varies from send to send because the content is different. I test my emails using the process below, and, when it's hitting Promotions on the test send, I usually only need to make a couple of small tweaks and I'm good. Testing Your Emails This is a really simple trick that you should adopt. First, get yourself a new Gmail address – and don't use it for anything else. And the next time you are creating an email to your list, run a test send to this fresh, dummy Gmail address. If it drops into Promotions, you will need to tweak the contents a little. Check the subject line for spammy words, and if there are none or that doesn't work, then start looking at reducing images and links until you drop into Inbox – those are the main culprits, in my experience. It's really important you use a fresh Gmail address for this testing, as if you use your existing Gmail address, that may skew the results – if Gmail sees any organic history between two email addresses, it may proactively drop the email into Inbox for just that person. Sometimes the above doesn't identify the issue and I have to take one further step. Mail Tester is a free service which I like a lot. It will give you an email address which you then send a test email to, and will generate a free report indicating potential issues. In my experience, running through that process will help in maybe 95% of cases. I do run into a tricky email now and then which requires a lot of tweaking before it lands in Inbox, but I haven't yet encountered an unsolveable one. The solution can be strange sometimes – shortening the length of the email, removing some HTML effects that aren't needed, taking out some buttons in the footer, adding some buttons instead of links – but there is always a solution. Even if you don't want to go to these lengths, I strongly recommend doing it for every message in your welcome sequence – particularly that first one. Keep in mind this effort is really worth it – all of these things have the happy side-effect of also keeping you out of Spam folders. Doing this stuff is never universally foolproof - I bet this email will still drop in one or two Promotions tabs or even (gasp!) a Spam folder or two. Email is tricky! But adopting these best practices will definitely get you into Inbox more often. Dave P.S. On-brand music this week is Return To Sender. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe