If your list has a significant number of Gmail users, there is a good chance that your emails are ending up in the Promotions tab without your subscribers ever seeing them. In this technical post, I will show you a few tips and tricks to make sure your email lands in the primary tab instead of the promotions tab. If you make it to the end, I will show you a neat hack that has limitless applications for your email marketing.
Photo courtesy of Gmail Blog
If you don’t use Gmail, just know that back in 2013, the Gmail team started releasing an option for Gmail users to sort their emails into for-purpose tabs. Emails are sorted into the social tab if they are from social media, forums tab if they are from forums, and promotions tab for marketing messages. There was a bit of a scare, which was well founded; marketers saw a definite drop in the number of opens from Gmail users. It’s easy to understand, the emails now go straight to the promotions tab without ever entering the default screen of the user, and since most people just let them pile up without ever reading them, it’s become somewhat of a ‘lite’ junk folder.
The real issue now is that all new Gmail accounts come with the promotions tab enabled by default, meaning increasingly more users are missing your marketing messages.
There are certain markers that Gmail reads to determine whether an email is a Promotional email. The most influential ones are:
So if you reduce the number of images, links, and promotional language you can make it into Primary – simple right?… okay maybe not. Whether we like it or not, this isn’t really an option for most marketers; we all have a penchant for nice looking emails, and usually it’s because it works. Plain text without linking to your products and services isn’t really going to get the results you’re going for.
Get your email in the Primary Tab
Luckily the story doesn’t end there. The main factors that influence an email landing in the Primary Tab are the user adding the sending address in their contact book, manually tagging an email as ‘Primary’, or dragging an email from the Promotions Tab to the Primary Tab. Once this is done, all future emails should land in the Primary Tab, where they’re more likely to be read.
Asking your subscribers to get your email in the Primary tab is usually okay, especially in your first few messages to them. To make it even easier, here’s a template. Feel free to use it in your own emails: (note: merge tags are for MailChimp, include your own if you use other software)
—————–
Hi *|FNAME|*,
To make sure you always receive our emails, please add *|LIST:EMAIL|* to your contact list. To ensure you never miss a message, also mark the email for your Primary Tab. If you’re on desktop, just drag this email into the primary tab like this:
If you’re using the Gmail app on your phone, select ‘Options’, then ‘Move to’, then hit ‘Primary’:
Now you shouldn’t miss any of our updates!
—————–
Easy.
By now you’ve probably noticed an issue with this approach; how do you make sure only Gmail users ever see this email? After all, if someone opens this in the Apple Mail app or Outlook, they will be totally confused. Luckily I have a way to make sure only Gmail users see this email; so here’s the neat trick/hack I promised. Hold on, we’re going for a ride!
Ultimately you want to send this email only to subscribers who have Gmail. To do this, we need to make a segment of Gmail users.
First you need an Email Analytics tool that gathers users Email Client. At Email Experts, we prefer Litmus, but Hubspot, Salesforce add-ons, or other tools should do the trick. You will need to send an initial email with your tracking code included first. Wait a few days for data to arrive as users open the email. Once you’ve done this, you will need to manually export the full tracking report into excel. Depending on your software you will see lots of useful data, but for now we just want the Email Client column, so delete everything else:
Now you’re left with a report with a column of email addresses, and the client they opened their email on. Save this as a CSV.
Now open MailChimp and navigate to the list the emails addresses are in. Hit “Add Subscribers” > “Import Subscribers”.
Go through the process of adding subscribers by importing a CSV. When you come to marrying up the columns, select “Edit” > “Create new column”, and name it “Mail Client” (or whatever you like).
Before you import, make sure you check the box to “Auto-update my existing list” so you are just adding the column to existing email addresses.
Return to your list, click “Manage Subscribers” > “Segments”. Once there, hit “Create Segment” to make a segment where “Mail Client” “is” “Gmail”. Preview and save – if you keep “Auto Update” checked, you won’t need manually update your segment in the future (though you will still need to import the CSV data). Now you can create a campaign or workflow that targets just those who are part of the Gmail segment.
That’s it, you can send your email asking users to move your email into the primary tab which, if you have a large enough Gmail user base, can significantly increase the open rate across all future campaigns.
Shaun is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Email Experts. Using Email analytics to feed into future campaigns has powerful applications. If you’d like to see more posts about technical strategies of email campaigns, post a comment below. To receive a detailed analytics assessment of your list, and to know which email clients your subscribers use, reach out today for a free report.