Gmail Tabs for Marketers: How to Stay Visible in 2025
== Updated (Sept 2025)
Since publishing this piece on August 20th (less than a month ago!), Gmail has rolled out a couple of changes worth flagging, especially with the holidays looming. Consider this your quick add-on before diving into the full post. 💌
If you’ve worked in email longer than five minutes, you’ve heard some version of this:
“We make more money when we land in Primary.”
And if you’ve worked in email longer than five months, you’ve also seen the aftermath: a short‑term bump in Primary tab placement, followed by rising complaints, unsubscribes, and head‑scratching about “sudden” deliverability issues.
Meanwhile, vendors continue to parade around, promising ‘Primary placement’ like they control Gmail’s filing cabinets. (They don’t, and they never will.)
So, let’s get a few things straight, right out of the gate:
Promotions = Inbox. It’s not the spam folder. It’s not a junk drawer.
Promotional mail belongs in Promotions. That’s where people go when they’re in a buying mindset. Trying to sneak your advertisements in between mail from friends and family as if people want them there is misguided (and a little bit delusional) at best; intentionally misleading or self-centered at worst.
Chasing Primary for marketing mail is a losing, never‑ending game. Filters evolve in real time; engagement is the only thing that compounds.
In this lesson, we’re gettin’ into why “Primary or bust” is short-sighted, misleading, and bad for your brand. And if you need proof that Gmail agrees with me, here it is…
Gmail Expanded Tabs: Giving You More Control Over Your Inbox
This fall, Gmail made a few moves that change how messages surface… not just in Promotions, but across the entire tabbed inbox. Here’s what’s new:
Most Relevant View: In addition to the standard “Most Recent” view, users can now sort the Promotions tab by “Most Relevant”, which pushes the brands they actually interact with (e.g. opens, clicks, replies) to the top. If you’re just background noise in someone’s inbox, you sink to the bottom. If you’re earning consistent engagement, you’ll be front-row.
💌 Translation Station: delivery ≠ visibility. Two people can open Gmail at the same time and see completely different stacks, based on their own engagement. It’s not just *whether* people interact — Gmail now cares *how quickly, how often, and how broadly* they engage. (More on the metrics worth tracking in a minute.)
New Purchases Tab: Gmail is also carving out a dedicated lane for purchase confirmations and shipping updates (yep, straight from Google’s announcement). For users, it’s clarity. For senders, it’s Gmail drawing a harder line between transactional or “critical service” mail vs. promotional. If you’ve blurred those lines, it’s time for a clean up on Aisle 5.
💌 How to respond: This one’s all about business up front and (promotions) party in the back. Dedicated subdomain/IPs, and kill the promo pixie dust that might make your business-critical mail seem promotional: upsell CTAs, cross-sell banners, and “while you’re here” copy. If it’s service-critical, let it look and behave like service mail.
Manage Subscriptions Expansion: Gmail’s one-click unsubscribe requirement (RFC 8058, if you want to get nerdy) is being surfaced more visibly, making it easier than ever for users to prune the brands they don’t value. That indirectly strengthens the “Most Relevant” signal for the ones they do engage with (and actively lowers your odds of ever showing up there). Here’s the full scoop.
💌 My favorite part: this is all about transparency. Gmail now shows subscribers how many emails you’ve sent them recently (e.g. “20+ emails this week”), lets them open that whole stack, and decide whether to keep or cut you. Click, click, boom! So, repeated, earned engagement matters more than list size. Over-sending just accelerates churn.
How This Affects Senders Like Us…
1️⃣ Delivery ≠ visibility.
In a ranked Promotions feed, two people subscribed to the same brands can open at the same time and see completely different stacks. If you’re not in that person’s regular rotation, your email gets dropped to the Promotions basement (or shuffled to page two) — send-time optimization be damned.
💌 Translation Station: “Most Relevant” raises the bar. Weak engagement doesn’t just look bad on a dashboard — it buries that email you spent so much time on waaaay down the Promotions stack… even if you sent it at the “perfect” time.
2️⃣ Tabs are optional, but the consequences of not sending it right are universal.
Manage Subscriptions makes unsubscribing from brands you don’t care about effortless. Click, click, boom. Dead weight drops faster, good signals get louder, and the brands sending too much mail fall straight in the crosshairs. The net effect is that list size matters less… and repeated, earned interaction matters more.
3️⃣ Transactional mail must be easy to tell apart from promos.
With the new Purchases tab pulling receipts/shipping details into their own lane, any promo glitter in your transactional stream becomes obvious (to both users and spam filters alike). So, keep that service mail looking (and behaving) like service mail, mmmkay?
💌 That doesn’t mean it has to be robotic, it just can’t be a promo-wolf in transactional sheep’s clothing. Promos and upsells cross the line, but you can lean into tone of voice, clarity, and usefulness, for example: reassuring copy (“we’ll let you know when it ships/delivers”), helpful next steps (“here’s how to track it / store it / care for it”), and clear access to support if something goes wrong. If you're linking out with those, you'd have an opportunity to get a little more pitchy on the page where they land.
4️⃣ Be useful or be invisible. Your call.
If the first tap doesn’t move them forward, it’s gonna start movin’ you down. So, ditch the filler. The need to send genuinely helpful content that benefits the recipient more than the sender is getting harder and harder to deny by the day. Quality over quantity (for real).
What this means (in a nutshell):
Engagement isn’t just about avoiding the spam folder anymore.
This is Gmail dropping the subtlety: if you want visibility, you have to earn it — not just once, but consistently. That means cleaner lists, (truly) useful content, and genuine respect for inbox choice.
Inbox visibility isn’t rented space anymore — it’s earned real estate. So, quit trying to game the system!
So, let’s get into why Promotions is the smarter bet, so you’ve got the ammo you need to push back when someone insists on hacking their way into Primary.
Why Promotions Is Often the Better Business Outcome
💌 Intention > Attention
People check Promotions when they’re in the mood to browse and buy — not when they’re clearing inbox clutter or avoiding notifications. That’s why, even if open rates in Promotions aren’t always huge, the intent-to-buy conversions often are.
💌 Not Everyone’s Using Tabs
Tabs aren’t universal. According to a 2024 study by Sinch Mailjet, only ~50% of Gmail users report having a tabbed inbox. Setup, device settings, and habits still matter, alot.
Even among Gmail users, not everyone sees tabs.
Older users, or folks less tech-savvy may have them enabled but ignore tabs altogether.
Many popular email clients (like iPhone’s native Mail app) don’t show tabs at all. For those readers, your Promotions email just… lands in the inbox. Voila!
Not to mention how many Gmail accounts pre-date when tabs/categories were turned on by default, so those users may have inherited settings where tabs were off — or never saw tab categories at all unless they manually enabled them.
Bottom line: Tabs are one slice of the pie, not the whole pizza.
It’s a great reminder that email marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Tabs matter. But what matters more is presence, relevance, and consistent value. Because many readers find you outside of the tab, or only check when it’s worth their attention.
💌 It’s Not About Fancy Features
Yes, the Promotions tab comes with bells and whistles like Gmail Annotations and AMP. But most senders don’t need them — they’re heavy lifts, niche, and unpredictable thanks to AI constantly reshuffling what gets surfaced. What really works is clarity, timing, and making your emails worth opening.
Why “Nobody Checks Promotions” is The Myth That Won’t Die
When someone says, “Nobody checks their Promotions tab,” what they usually mean is “I personally don’t” or “I don’t want to believe my customers do.”
But it’s just not true! Let’s talk about why it’s not a problem worth bending your entire program’s back over.
💌 Because they do check it — more often than you think.
Sinch Mailjet’s “The Path to Email Engagement in 2024” backs that up. They surveyed ~2,000+ consumers (primarily in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Spain) and found that:
~50% of folks with tabbed inboxes say they check Promotions daily (which is consistent with their 2021 study). That’s millions of eyeballs that are actively looking (or at least open to) offers. Hardly the “black hole” some make it out to be… if your content earns engagement, that is.
Nearly 75% check their Promotions tab at least weekly.
These studies have limitations: sample sizes are modest, respondents may lean more engaged or tech-aware, and not every user surveyed is a Gmail user with tabs enabled. Still, the data seriously undermines the “nobody checks Promotions” argument.
We need bigger, more specific studies so we can put this topic to bed, once and for all. Google, if you’re listening, please show us the data.
Long game > quick hacks. Tweets fade. Push bounces. A good promo email lives, is searchable, and resurfaces when people go looking (codes, updates, deals). Those behaviors compound.
Respect the unsubscribe. Some people will never engage. Let them leave cleanly and optimize for the ones who stay. Chasing “Primary hacks” just burns trust and list health.
💌 Because they might not be “email people” at all.
If someone truly never looks at Promotions or searches their inbox for offers, they’re not an engaged subscriber. And they’re not who you should be designing your program around.
Meet them on their preferred channel — SMS, app push, retargeting, whatever works — and keep your email list full of people who actually engage. Those are your people.
That said, note that the folks who claim they “never” check are typically the same ones who go dumpster diving into their inbox when they need a deal. They just don’t think of it as “checking Promotions” — they think of it as “looking up that thing I wanted to buy.” Which brings us to our next reason…
💌 Because chasing ghosts costs more than it returns.
The “never checkers” are a tiny minority. To reach them, you’d have to chase hacks that try to drag all your mail into Primary, disrupting the experience for everyone else (the ones who actually want your mail).
The result? More complaints, unsubscribes, and long-term deliverability risk. It’s smarter (and more profitable) to optimize for the people already engaging in Promotions, instead of breaking your program to chase a sliver of uninterested users.
💌 Because Promotions is where they expect to find you.
Tabs exist to give consumers more control over their inbox. And for real people (you know, the ones outside our little email bubble), promos belong in Promotions. Respecting that choice builds trust. Ignoring it erodes trust (and risks complaints) even from the people who do buy from you.
“But We Make More in Primary”: What’s Really Happening…
We’ve all heard the stories: “Our promo landed in Primary, and revenue jumped!”
At first glance, it feels like a win. But dig deeper, and those bumps usually come from things that have nothing to do with tabs:
Selection bias. A unicorn campaign, a perfect offer, or seasonal timing.You’re comparing different messages, not just different placement.
Short windows. One or two sends is not evidence. Filters (and audiences) adapt quickly.
Incomplete metrics. People celebrate clicks and conversions while ignoring complaints, unsubscribes, blocklistings, and declining future inboxing.
User preference violation. Bypassing tabs is like turning off someone’s do-not-disturb. Sure, they can buy — but they may also punish you for the intrusion.
The result: a short-term spike today, maybe even next week. But what happens next month, or next year? Long-term revenue doesn’t come from forcing attention. (Trust me, I have six-year-old twins.)
And when someone insists, “But the numbers prove Primary works,” it’s worth looking at what the data really shows. Chad S. White, head of research at Oracle Digital Experience Agency, found that Primary placement can boost opens by about 30% — but with no meaningful lift in clicks or conversions. In other words: curiosity may spike, but intent doesn’t.
The takeaway: sustainable revenue comes from being easy to find when people want you, not from hijacking their attention.
Vendor Pitch Dissection (No Names Needed)
A lot of those “Primary = more revenue” myths start with vendor pitches. They swoop in with polished pitches:
“More eyeballs, more clicks, more $$—land in the Primary tab where you belong.”
They’ll back it with shiny A/B screenshots and case studies promising +129% clicks here, +79% conversions there. It’s clean, persuasive… but it’s only half the story.
And here’s the kicker: Gmail itself has been steadily routing more mail into Promotions, even from senders who used to see regular Primary placement. Netcore reports a significant algorithm shift that pushes messages into Promotions regardless of sender reputation or content.
So the marketers who bet on “staying in Primary” are already losing visibility — while vendors keep selling a tactic that’s slipping away.
What’s missing from pitches like this:
❌ Longitudinal evidence. Where are the 30/60/90-day complaint trends and reputation curves?
❌ Causality controls. Was the lift due to placement, or just a better sale/offer/timing?
❌ User expectation. Tabs are a user choice. Override that too many times and you’ll pay in trust, complaints, and eventually, inbox placement.
❌ Sustainability. Gmail’s filters change in real time. Today’s “tactic” dies in weeks (if not hours).
❌ A view into the full funnel. If the only numbers shown are clicks and conversions, you’re looking at half the picture.
This isn’t an anti-vendor rant (ok, maybe just a little). It’s pro-evidence. If someone wants you to believe a tactic has longevity, they need to show both the upside and the downside.
That means, if a pitch says: “Land in the Primary tab, where you belong” and showcases only upside snapshots, ask for:
Spam complaint rate (by MBP)
Unsubscribe rate
Inbox vs. spam placement over time
Reputation telemetry (Postmaster Tools, third-party seeds, panel data)
Customer trust indicators (reply sentiment, preference-center activity)
Proof the lift sticks without wrecking your complaints, unsubscribes, or reputation
If they can’t or won’t show that, you already have your answer.
Why These Services Rarely Work the Way You Think
Yes, some vendors have found ways to nudge tabs classifications — for a minute. But that’s nowhere near enough to guarantee Primary, and it rarely holds.
💌 There’s no switch to flip.
No magic header, code snippet, or DNS setting that guarantees Primary placement for promotional email. Gmail weighs hundreds of dynamic signals (domain/IP reputation, authentication, complaint history, recipient engagement) to make that call.
💌 Placement is personal.
The same campaign can land in Primary for one person and Promotions for another, based on their prior behavior, settings, and preferences… even if everything else about the send is identical.
Data from George Schlossnagle’s post-2019 panel study backs this up. Looking at senders whose campaigns straddled different tabs for different users (or shifted tabs entirely due to algorithm updates), the engagement patterns barely moved. Wanted mail performed, wherever it landed. Unwanted mail didn’t. Tabs simply organize mail; they don’t rewrite intent.
One example he highlights: a sender with a mail-stream that got caught in an algorithmic change and was swept from Updates to Promotions. On the chart, the read-rate lines glide smoothly from one category to the other, with no drop in engagement. Placement changed; performance didn’t.
💌 Tricks don’t last.
Most “hacks” are fragile. Altering headers or metadata, exploiting a gap in detection — Gmail’s machine learning closes those loopholes fast, sometimes in weeks, sometimes in hours.
💌 The risks are real.
Masking the commercial nature of your mail can backfire: increased filtering, spam folder placement, degraded reputation that takes months to rebuild.
💌 It’s bigger than just Gmail.
Yahoo, Outlook, and Apple now all use tabbed or categorized inboxes, too, each with different (even if similar) rules and anti-spam filtering. Even if you gamed Gmail today, you couldn’t replicate it everywhere else.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re dealing with, courtesy of the lovely folks at Oracle:
So yes, a vendor might show you a week’s worth of “Primary” seed results. But Primary today isn’t proof of Primary forever. The real flex isn’t screenshots of one shiny lift… it’s a program that earns engagement, campaign after campaign, because the evidence speaks for itself.
The Only Responsible Way to Test This (If You Must)
Stakeholders may still insist on “seeing for themselves.” That’s fine, but a quick A/B and a screenshot aren’t evidence. If you want to prove Primary placement has durable value, the test has to look more like a clinical trial than a marketing stunt.
Design it right:
Multiple campaigns (6-10, not one), balanced by offer, audience size, and timing. Also ensure you’re testing from the same environment, because variance in your configuration (domain, IP, or ESP) will influence where your mail lands.
Randomized splits by mailbox provider, device, geography, and engagement history — because vendors love to cherry-pick the slices that make their numbers look best.
A true holdout group that receives your normal program to reveal any kind of halo effect or degradation in performance.
Tight scope. One domain, one IP — so you actually know what worked. Shared IP pools (and shared domains) introduce too many x-factors.
Guardrails. Keep your spam complaint ceiling below 0.03%, watch for unsubscribe spikes (+25% vs baseline) and figure out when you’ll pull the plug if Postmaster Tools reputation dips or blocklistings pop up.
Measure the whole picture:
💌 Leading signals: placement (where observable), opens, clicks, conversions, replies.
💌 Satisfaction signals: complaint rates (by mailbox provider since not all of them provide data that feeds into the rate you see in your ESP dashboard), unsubscribes, reply sentiment turning negative, or a surge in preference-center activity.
💌 Lagging signals: domain/IP reputation, future campaign engagement, list health (bounces, blocklistings), and revenue per thousand emails (RPM, which normalizes revenue so you can compare campaigns with different volumes).
One note of caution: you’ll never have perfect visibility. Mailbox providers don’t share exact tab placement for every recipient — the best you can do is triangulate from seeds, panels, and engagement. Which is why vendors claiming certainty are selling smoke.
And if someone shows you a single shiny lift from one campaign, that’s not proof. That’s a puppet show.
If you do run the full study, don’t stop at surface metrics. The money’s in the compounding signals:
Click reach (how many unique subscribers engage over time)
Conversion reach (how many unique subscribers buy over time)
Tenure on list (how long people stick before opting out)
Lifetime value (total revenue over a customer’s journey)
That’s where tabs actually help: by segmenting intent, they give you cleaner signals of who’s browsing, who’s buying, and who’s just passing through.
When Escaping the Promo Tab Does Make Sense
If your mail is landing in Promotions, that’s usually where it belongs. Those CTAs, discounts, and over-designed templates are your email walking and quacking like a bushy-tailed lil’ marketing duck. So, of course Gmail will treat it like marketing. And it should.
But there are edge cases where fighting Promotions is justified, such as:
True transactional mail. Password resets, receipts, two-factor codes, account alerts. If these land in Promotions, that’s a problem — because they’re time-sensitive and service-critical.
Non-commercial newsletters or community updates. Think church bulletins, alumni groups, open-source community notes. If the intent is connection, not commerce, Primary is where subscribers expect to see them.
Activism and civic mail. Platforms like Change.org thrive on immediacy and mobilization, not discount codes. Being misrouted to Promotions can dull that urgency.
High-consideration B2B relationship mail. Sales updates in a long buying cycle, personal check-ins from an account manager, or board-level communications. If the recipient expects a 1:1 cadence, Promotions undercuts the relationship.
While decently rare, if you suspect Gmail is placing you in the wrong tab, your best bet is clarity. Work on ways to correct the misclassification rather than attempting to game the system.
Quick Actions for Gmail’s New Reality
Take a look at your program and do this right meowww, before the holiday email season kicks into high gear:
1️⃣ Separate (and de-glam) your transactional.
This one’s all about business up front and (promotions) party in the back. Dedicated subdomain/IPs, and kill the promo pixie dust that might make your business-critical mail seem promotional: upsell CTAs, cross-sell banners, and “while you’re here” copy.
2️⃣ Lean into easier unsubscribes
Allowing users to easily “Manage Subscriptions” will accelerate list churn, whether you like it or not. But there are ways you can encourage would-be unsubscribers to stay with you by getting in front of it, right meowww…
💌 Offer a preference center where subscribers can opt-down instead of out. To be clear, if someone wants off the ride, let ‘em go! But that doesn’t mean “unsubscribe” has to be the only option.
By giving people the ability to hear from you less often, snooze you during busy months, or pick the types of content they want, you’ll get another chance to turn those relationships around.
💌 Proactively drop the frequency for chronically low-engagers. That’s right! You don’t need to wait for them to take action before making adjustments. You’ll trade some short-term list size for higher relevance — which is exactly what “Most Relevant” rewards.
So, dig into your metrics, identify the dead weight, and figure out when it’s the right time to kick off that re-engagement plan I know you have waiting in the wings (right???).
💌 Treat unsubscribes as win-back intel: they hurt our hearts, for sure. But unsubscribes don’t hurt deliverability, and you can use their trends and patterns to identify parts of your program that may be driving more churn than others.
💌 Share unsubscribe insights across your org. If a certain campaign drives a spike, loop in Product, CRM, or merch teams so they can adjust what’s upstream.
3️⃣ Adjust your Promotions presentation for “Most Relevant”
You can’t force… really anything in your recipients these days. But you can encourage them to engage by making it super clear what your message is about and why they need it in their lives with very little effort.
💌 Use your subject line + preheader to highlight the benefit with specificity. For example, instead of: “Our Fall Drop is Here”, get specific! Say the outcome.
Subject line: “24-hr restock on [X] you favorited” ·
Preheader: “Your size is back — ships today.”
That said, keep in mind that mailbox providers have started replacing preheader text (among other things) with their own AI summaries, which can vastly change the experience your readers have with your mail. Soooo…
💌 Assume AI may rewrite your preheader. Put the point in the first 120–150 characters of the body copy so if (when?) Gmail summarizes you, the meaning still survives.
💌 Keep it simple. Can you tell what the email is about in 1.5 seconds? Is the CTA obvious? Does the first click send people somewhere that proves you understand them, and perhaps even “remember” them (size, store, category)? If not, fix it.
Everything else can live below the fold or in the footer so as not to distract the humans (or machines) from understanding the point of your email.
💌 Be consistent on identity. Use a recognizable Friendly From (e.g. “Lauren at SocketLabs”), a recognizable domain (ideally, a subdomain under your company’s website domain), and a preview image that matches the landing page. Consistency = trust = clicks = top of the inbox.
4️⃣ Update your scorecard to match how Gmail ranks mail
In the “Most Recent” view, your visibility’s been mostly about timing. Winning attention just requires you to send an email at the perfect time… or send often enough that one of ‘em is right near the top when the subscriber checks their inbox.
Whereas with “Most Relevant,” getting mail delivered doesn’t equate to a fair shot at being seen (even if you land in the inbox). Two subscribers can check their mail at the same time and see totally different stacks of digital paper waiting for them.
If you’re not in that person’s regular rotation, you don’t just slip a few spots — you get dropped to the Promotions basement (or shuffled to page two)… even if you just hit send. Visibility needs to be earned in Gmail’s neck of the woods.
So, don’t just stare at your opens and CTRs!
Optimize for speed of engagement, reach (how many engage), and stickiness (how often they engage).
Add these to your watch list:
Time-to-First-Open: as you can imagine, the faster mailbox providers see engagement from your readers, the nearer to the top your future sends might land.
Active Gmail Reach: the % of Gmail subscribers who opened at least 1 campaign in the last 30 days.
First-6-Hour Click Share: “Most Relevant” rewards recency and engagement. So, out of all Gmail clicks on your campaign, suss out what % happened in the first 6 hours.
Click Reach (30/60/90 days): Gmail wants the majority of your recipients to find value in your mail, not just your superfans. Track unique clickers over time to identify how much of your list is truly engaged (e.g. your top 10% most engaged vs. mid vs. low). Consider ways to adjust your frequency and content to meet each of these segments of subscribers where they are.
Reply Rate (and other “Helpful” Signals): High-intent interactions are stronger relevance signals than passive opens, so actions that require a little more effort on the subscriber’s part, such as reply %, survey responses, preference-center saves/changes after you ask a human question.
Persistence Score: Mailbox providers have always loved consistency and their ranking systems do, too. They wanna see repeat engagers, not one-off spikes. Tracking the % of Gmail recipients who opened 2+ of the last 4 sends will help you identify not only your most engaged audience, but also the content that seems to resonate best.
The goal is not to introduce more complexity to your day-to-day monitoring process: it’s to ensure you send fewer emails to the wrong people, and more to the right people, more often.
5️⃣ Stop blasting to everyone.
No, seriously. Stop it.
Prioritize the folks who’ve actually engaged with your mail for the next couple of sends (2-3, at least) to start training the “Most Relevant” ranker with real signals indicating your readers find value in the content you send.
Start with people who opened/clicked in the last 30–60 days.
Hold back chronic non-engagers until momentum returns.
Watch Time-to-First-Open and First-6-Hour Click Share; if both slip twice in a row, consider ways to adjust the offer/cadence and segmentation.
Remember: relevance is an ongoing quest, not a one-time activity.
So, make sure the majority of what you send goes to active subscribers. Save those batch-n-blasts to inactives for a rainy day (aka for campaigns that actually need to go to everybody).
What to Pour Energy Into Instead
Whether your mail is being misclassified or simply just suffering from low engagement, the most important thing to take away from this week’s lesson is that the fix isn’t a “magic header” or vendor trick.
It’s making your mail clear and consistent — in setup and in substance — so placement aligns with what the user thinks they signed up for. From there, invest in strategies that compound over time.
So, here’s where to focus instead:
Configuration & Engagement
💌 Make your setup obvious.
Separate transactional vs. promotional streams (e.g. with dedicated subdomains/IPs), authenticate properly, and use sender names/addresses that actually reflect the intent of the message.
Here are some examples for Acme’s Support team:
✅ support@acme.com
✅ help@support.acme.com
✅ From: Acme Support
❌ xy7kw92n@acme-alerts.com
❌ server1@acme.com
❌ From: Acme
💌 Segment based on engagement.
Tabbed inbox providers feed on engagement to decide where to put your mail in the future. The more opens, clicks, and replies you generate, the clearer the “this belongs here” signal becomes.
Stop lumping prospects and customers together. Ease up on ghosts. And don’t hit ‘Send to All’ unless it’s truly relevant.
More relevance = more engagement. More engagement = better placement. It’s not magic. It’s just math.
Content & Experience
💌 Pack real value into every click.
The Promotions tab is not the junk drawer — it’s the shopping mall. Avoid looking like just another cardboard sign in the food court by adding proof (reviews, testimonials, user-generated content), utility (guides, tips, templates), or fun (an Easter egg, a quiz, a scratch-to-reveal).
Nobody knows your audience like you do. Make every click feel like progress, not déjà vu.
💌 Stand out in scrappy ways.
Skip the “get into Primary” chase and focus on tactics that actually cut through the noise — without needing a dev army for solutions like Gmail Annotations and AMP for Email:
Timing: Avoid the top of the hour when everyone’s blasting. Mailbox providers actually give this advice themselves because their servers get so overloaded. Off-beat sends = less rush-hour traffic, more inbox visibility.
Friendly From names: the sender name is the most important factor in whether someone chooses to open an email. Use something recognizable (such as “Lauren from Send It Right” or “Acme Support Team”) instead of a generic “no-reply”. Familiar senders get that instant “Oh hey, I trust this” nod before your subject line even registers.
Micro-interactivity: Simple touches like accordions, hover effects, or even a carousel of products can feel fresh. It’s all about helping your readers connect with your brand, your content, even your sales promotions, in a way that feels immersive, fun, created specifically “for them”. Speaking of fun…
Gamification: Scratch cards, spin-to-wins, progress bars — lighthearted, high-engagement tactics that also send good signals to mailbox providers.
Personalization that matters: Location-aware offers, real purchase history, or behavior-based nudges can be incredibly effective. And when you can’t, try mimicking personalization with smart bundles (“people who bought X also buy Y”).
However you decide to stand out, just remember: clarity beats cleverness here. If they don’t know what’s in it for them in 1.5 seconds, you’ve already lost.
💌 Respect subscriber choice.
Easy unsubscribes, usable preference centers, and healthy list hygiene all reduce complaints (and risk). Let people slow you down, snooze you for a busy season, or pick content types and frequencies they actually want.
Then study those patterns so you can keep the relationship alive (and the complaints down): if snooze requests triple around a certain campaign, maybe it’s your cadence that needs fixing.
Alllll of This to Say…
Promotions isn’t punishment — it’s placement. Simple as that.
And major providers like Google are investing in tabs to improve the recipient experience.
If your goal is sustainable revenue and healthy deliverability, optimize for the aisle your shoppers already walk down, not the cabinet they use for life’s most important things.
If you’re tempted to chase shiny short-term lifts, remember: tabs aren’t the enemy, short-term thinking is.
The marketers who win are the ones playing the long game — building clarity and compounding engagement so your results outlast the latest vendor pitch.
Send It Right. 💌
I’ve got receipts!
Because I know this is gonna be your execs tomorrow...
Gmail “Manage Subscriptions” announcement: where to find it and how it works. Screenshots, mechanics, details… all the goods.
Google on Purchases + Promotions: the official update on both; perfect for the “prove it” crowd, because you knoooowww somebody’s gonna ask. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sinch Mailjet’s The Path to Email Engagement 2024: Promotions usage data (spoiler: yes, people check it… a lot).
Spam Resource: “Relevance comes to the Gmail promo tab.” Short, pragmatic context from Al Iverson.
Got a great resource I should add? Send it my way (please!).
But wait! Before you go...
“Let’s put today’s lesson into action!
Spend 5 minutes in your own Promotions tab and notice what actually catches your eye (and why).
What did you discover?
Reach out and let me know. ”
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