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The Gist
- Tabs impact. Promotions tab placement doesn’t equal spam and doesn’t harm email deliverability.
- Tricking algorithms. Manipulating Gmail’s tab placement algorithms can have severe consequences.
- Sales generation. Landing in the Primary tab doesn’t necessarily lead to more sales or conversions.
Ten years ago, Gmail introduced inbox tabs, including the infamous Promotions tab. Among marketers, the development caused panic. You see, there were reports that open rates were slipping at Gmail, and marketers blamed the Promotions tab. To combat this shift, many major senders ran campaigns asking their subscribers to re-tab their emails from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab.
Fast forward to today and such requests are exceedingly rare. Most brands recognize — like it or not — tabs are here to stay. Indeed, having been copied by other inbox providers to various degrees, tabbed inbox interfaces are now common and highly accepted by and familiar to consumers.
However, some senders continue to fight against tabs. So, here on the 10-year anniversary of Gmail Tabs, let’s talk about five truths about tabs, as well as some real new concerns.
1. The Promotions Tab Isn’t the Spam Folder
Just like the Social, Updates and other tabs, the Promotions tab is the inbox. Tab placement is a non-issue when it comes to email deliverability. Every tab is the inbox.
And when it comes to performance, an email that lands in the Promotions tab will perform exponentially better than one that lands in the spam folder. It’s not even remotely comparable.
Related Article: 7 Factors That Determine Email Deliverability
2. Trying to Trick Gmail’s Tab Placement Algorithms Is Risky
Google doesn’t appreciate it when brands try to game their algorithms. It has a long history of handing out “manual actions” to punish brands that engage in blackhat and other manipulative SEO tactics. The Gmail team is just as punitive toward brands that try to manipulate their spam and tab placement filters.
The advent of generative AI makes it all the more tempting to try to circumvent Gmail’s pattern recognition engines. Rest assured that spammers and, in particular, phishers, will be looking to leverage GenAI for these purposes. And anytime you use the same tactics as spammers and phishers, you dramatically increase the likelihood of Gmail treating you the same as it treats them.
Related Article: Is Your Brand Trusted Significantly More Than ChatGPT?
3. Being in the Primary Tab Doesn’t Generate More Sales
The myth here is that emails landing in the Primary tab are opened more and therefore generate more down-funnel activity. This myth is pervasive because it’s half-true.
Having your emails land in the Primary tab instead of the Promotions tab can substantially boost open rates. We’ve seen this with our clients in recent years, during which Gmail has periodically had some tabbing algorithm malfunctions. Typically what we’ve seen is open rates jump as much as 100% higher. However, what we haven’t seen are bumps in clicks or conversions.
Essentially, when emails are out of place, subscribers often wonder what’s going on with the email and open it. However, it’s not because they’re any more interested in the email. They’re just curious. It’s exactly the same phenomenon as when brands write vague subject lines that are designed to attract curious subscribers instead of interested ones.
Thankfully, because our clients have solid permission practices, their emails haven’t experienced a significant increase in unsubscribes or spam complaints when this mis-tabbing happens. However, that is absolutely a risk of being in the Primary tab when you’re uninvited (as well as when you’re trying to lure subscribers into opening emails with vague subject lines that waste their time).
Related Article: 4 Ways Brands Go Wrong With Digital Marketing Metrics
4. You Want Your Emails to Be Where Your Subscribers Expect Them
Back in 2013, in response to the wave of B2C brands asking their subscribers to move their promotional emails to the Primary tab, I wrote:
“When subscribers go to their Promotions tab, they’re in a buying mood…. They expect to find promotional emails and that’s what they get, one after another.
“So, by asking subscribers to move your email from the Promotional to the Primary tab, you’re essentially closing your store at the mall and deploying door-to-door salesmen that interrupt your subscribers’ conversations with their friends and loved ones. You’ll surely be more visible, but also probably more intrusive and ultimately less welcome.”
I felt good about that advice 10 years ago, and feel even better about it now that tabbed inboxes are well-established. Trust that Gmail will put your emails in the most appropriate tab, and that subscribers will re-tab your emails if they’d like them somewhere else instead.
5. The Promotions Tab Exposes You to Promotional Pressures
Besides creating a more orderly email experience for its users, tabs — specifically the Promotions tab — allows Gmail to monetize promotional emails by placing ads adjacent to them. Which, I should add, is fine and good. However, this inherently ups the pressure on promotional emails to be more, well, promotional.
While this isn’t much of an issue for some already very promotional brands, other brands slotted into the Promotions tab aren’t trumpeting discounts regularly, if at all. Most luxury brands are good examples, as are many manufacturers and CPG brands that don’t sell direct to consumers.
This tension was upped with the launch of Email Annotations, which allows senders to use schema code to highlight discounts and sale expiration dates, and even display small images in the inbox before an email is opened. I remember when some of our clients first saw what Annotations could do. “It would make our emails look like ads,” one of them said, vowing never to use it. Other reactions were similar, with the brands feeling that the ad-like presentation undermined the relationship marketing they were trying to do.
It turns out that lots of brands weren’t interested in Annotations — either because of the look or them considering it too much extra work for an uncertain and hard-to-quantify payoff — because Gmail paused the program for multiple months to retool. That caused its already-low adoption to dwindle to near-zero.
And here’s where we get to the “real new concerns” I hinted at. Since relaunching Annotations, Gmail has been imposing it on some senders, presumably as a way of letting brands know that it’s working again and to drum up interest.
While I’ve definitely heard more chatter about Annotations, I can also tell you that some of the brands that had Annotations imposed on their emails didn’t appreciate it. They’d spent considerable time crafting the message, didn’t want to use Annotations, and didn’t like how haphazardly it was applied to their emails. The product carousels were the least appreciated, as they tended to highlight secondary and even tertiary product promotions, undermining the primary messages of their emails. Essentially, these brands felt like their emails were hijacked to achieve Gmail’s goals.
As serious as this concern is, Gmail’s efforts will presumably stop at some point. Given all of the problems with Annotations and schema — with the most significant being the limited addressable audience — my prediction is it will fade away, eventually being retired. Like another struggling Gmail innovation, AMP for email, Annotations and other schema systems are doomed to minimal usage in the US unless inbox powerhouse Apple decides to support them. And that seems incredibly unlikely.
Promotions Tab Isn’t Worth Fussing About
But even with the specter of Gmail hijacking brands’ promotional emails, the Promotions tab isn’t worth worrying about. Instead, brands should focus their time and attention on addressing real problems, such as these 10 common email marketing mistakes and these 10 additional common mistakes.
And once you’ve tackled all of those, brands have tons of opportunities to increase the effectiveness of their email marketing programs by serving their subscribers better.
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