This myth has been haunting email marketers ever since Gmail came up with a series of tabs as a way to organise users' inboxes. It was 2013 and, although nothing indicates that everyone uses them or that it significantly affects the results of openings or conversions, there are still those who think it's a bad idea for their emails to end up in Promotions. Let's debunk the myth because this tab is not as bad as it seems.
How the Promotions tab works
The only person who has the power to configure their inbox is the user themselves: they decide how they want their messages to be ordered. There are different ways of doing this, for example the most common is to place the unread messages at the top, but each email manager has its own and the only thing we can do is try to adapt so as not to lose visibility.
It is Gmail (and others such as Outlook or Yahoo) who decides where to display each message. The sender can only try to optimise the content to try to stand out more when it is in the Promotions tab, but it is their filters that distribute the emails as they decide.
To determine what type of message it is, Gmail looks at the sender, the content, and also at previous interaction with that type of communication. It then categorises and displays them in the different tabs available:
- Primary: this is the tab most similar to a conventional inbox because it includes personal mail, but also mail that has not been sorted in the other tabs.
- Promotions: This will show everything that Gmail considers to be ‘marketing, interest, charitable and political causes, other advertising messages’ bulk mail. This category would include promotional campaigns clearly indicated as such, but also informative newsletters.
- Notifications: this tab is probably the most visited because it displays transactional emails, such as shipping confirmations or bank receipts.
- Social: its name clearly indicates what type of messages are included, which shows that the networks also send many communications in this way.
- Forums: collects emails from online groups, mailing lists and discussion forums, confirming that users who have the tabs activated make intensive use of email.
It is important to bear in mind the role that the user plays in this classification because he has the power to move from one tab to another the messages that he considers to be badly classified, for example from Promotions to Main if he wants to highlight them more than the rest. In fact, just as they are asked to add us as contacts, we can also suggest in the welcome message that they move us to the Main tab.
Why being classified as a promotion can be a good thing
At first, it sounds negative not to appear at first glance in the inbox and that the user has to go to a tab to find our message. It is clear that the first impact is lost, but it is not a limbo that nobody visits, on the contrary: those who organise their inbox in this way are used to using them and spending time visiting the different themes of their email.
Once in the Promotions tab, the competition for openings is somewhat different than in an inbox without this automatic organisation. When all the messages are simply sorted by date, without any other sorting, you have to fight with emails from family members, social media notifications, newsletters from other companies, transactional notices, etc.
The Promotions tab, on the other hand, only contains marketing communications and perhaps some from direct competitors, but then we are more dependent on our ability to attract attention than the time the user has to spend on all their email in general. So instead of having to stand out from, say, 50 messages of all kinds, we will have to do it with half or even less.
What is the real hell in email marketing
The Promotions tab is not the worst level of email marketing hell, there are some worse. When our communications end up there, it's almost as if they were in the inbox because they are within reach of a user who knows they will find messages of interest there. So, it cannot be considered the worst-case scenario. This is when deliverability drops to the point where the message is blocked and the user never receives it (missing rate). This is the worst thing that can happen to an email because it also weighs on the long-term results.
This situation is painful and very close to a hard bounce because the user also never knows that he has missed something. The difference would be that there is little we as senders can do to control bounces of this type. Beyond allowing data updates or unsubscribes, it is up to the user to decide if they want us to continue sending them emails if their email account has been deleted.
One level above this hell we would place soft bounces because, although users do not receive the message, it can continue to be sent in the future so it is only serious in the short term, for example if it affects transactional messages or priority customer service communications.
Worse than going to the Promotions tab is still going to the spam folder. Being considered as spammers or having our domain or IP end up on a blacklist can affect our reputation as a sender in the medium term, so both user complaints and the filter criteria of mail managers are a priority problem that must be solved.
