6 Ways to Get Out of that Cycle

Ever experienced this before? You’ve spent countless hours getting your email prepped, and you’re proud of the dope creative you’ve made. You hit send and later you realize that you’re not getting the opens you expected. Discouraging doesn’t even begin to describe how that feels- and you’re now left wondering why that’s happening. One explanation could be that your emails are ending up in their Gmail promotions tabs. Here’s how to keep that from happening.

Here are 6 Things to Think About Tweaking 

1. Ask for them to whitelist you (which means to drag your email over to primary basically). When is the best time to ask for this? ASAP. Add the line right before you offer up your welcome discount code, so people read it before grabbing that.
   
2. Watch the phrasing in your subject lines & preview text. There are certain triggers that will always get your emails labeled as a promotion if you include them in subject lines. For example: tons of !!!!, % signs, and the words: Free, Deals, and Discounts. Several tools exist that will check the spammy-ness of your subject lines or preview text and point out any red flags.One of our favorites is http://isnotspam.com/. Just send a test email and view your report!
   
3. Try to stray away from your emails being just images. We know that it’s the easiest way to accomplish unique branding, use custom fonts, and make emails generally more stylized. But when email servers look at those emails they see very little text, which is a big indicator that the email is promotional.
   
4. Who is the email coming from? Are you sending promotional emails from info@company.com? Oftentimes the info@ or help@company.com addresses will get flagged pretty immediately. You are much safer using someone’s name, or if that isn’t possible, try hello@company.com or hi@company.com. Those get flagged less frequently.
   
5. Add more personalization (if you can) in the email. If you can make your email dynamic and add their first name in the email body somewhere, Google assumes you know the person and it’s more likely they won’t flag it as a promotion.
   
6.  Check your timing. If you’re sending emails at all hours of the day/night – it’s pretty clear that’s not coming from a person (unless they’re a vampire from Twilight). Double check your automated emails and make sure they’re running at normal times of the day so those aren’t getting you flagged (even if you’re batch & blasts are going at an optimized time). And don’t forget to consider time zone differences!

Still landing in the promotions tab? Contact us! We’d be happy to help solve that for you!