GMail and the Promotion Tab – What to Do and Know About It

If you are not a GMail user, you may be out of the loop when it comes to what happens to the nice e-newsletter you just sent out to your clients. With the new GMail inbox, your newsletter is now automatically sent to a tab in the inbox of users called the “Promotion” tab. For some website owners, this means that your carefully crafted message has just gone into “no man’s land”.

Although the promotion tab is not a junk mail folder, it is a place of less consequence and based on how heavily a user is entrenched with GMail, it may mean that your message is one of hundreds that may simply never be seen.

So what are website owner’s to do when it comes to getting your email message read by users of GMail?

1. Make sure your e-newsletter is interesting and provides value. Whether that be a special promotion or discount, to tips of real value to a reader, remember the following…

“Gmail’s filtering is smart, so once your subscribers engage with your email, the more likely they are to appear in the coveted “Primary” tab. Also, if your email subscribers are into doing a little up-front work, they’ll never miss one of your emails again. All they have to do is click and drag your emails to the correct tab, and choose to always filter those messages in that folder. ” Make sure to read this full article on this GMail issue as it is a good one.

2. Encourage your users to click in, and interact with your emails. You can even go a step farther and instruct users on how to move your mailings by drag and drop within the GMail interface to encourage them to put your e-newsletter in the “Primary” tab.

3. Make sure to use social media to point to e-newsletters you have done and archive them back on your website. This gives GMail users who may have missed your message alternative ways to find out about your news.

If you need help with your own e-newsletter program, we offer excellent writing services to make the articles and information you send out interesting and shareable. Find out more about how we can help you today.

GMail and the Promotion Tab

Google has made some big changes in the last several weeks in GMail. One of the biggest changes is that they are now more aggressively showing advertising in your inbox that looks like actual messages. One of the other big changes that impacts those of us that do e-newsletters is that this type of correspondence will now appear in the default “promotions” tab.

In this video from the Social Media Examiner, you can see how you can help consumers to understand how to tag your emailings so that they will go to the main inbox versus the promotion tab. It is an interesting short video and well worth the look to see if you need to do any instruction in your next newsletter on how to tag your mailings.

So far the industry is reporting about a 10% drop in openings from GMail users now that Google has instituted this design change/filter in GMail accounts.

To watch this online, please visit this page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Elz_1KQnmA