Should we really be worried about Googles new promotion tab?

31 replies
I have been noticing a lot of hype and worry about Googles change in their gmail format. The promotion tab has a lot of IMers worried about what it is doing to their open rates. Personally I have let my readers know about this change and gave them instructions what to do if they want my emails to go into their primary inbox. The very few that have not switched my emails to go into their primary tabs were probably the ones who were not opening my emails anyway. These are the ones that I will eventually unsubscribe because why do I want to pay to have them on my list if they are only there to be a number. The larger the number the more your AR charges you. In my opinion if we are giving valuable content to our list they are going to actively look for our emails no matter where they end up. I mean really Yahoo has a folder for Spam. We never know if our emails get put these folders or not. At least with Googles promotion tab we know exactly where our emails are being put and can react accordingly. Am I looking at this scenario wrong? Can you please enlighten me with your thoughts on Googles new promotion tab?
#googles #promotion #tab #worried
  • Profile picture of the author VidzVoo
    I think for someone who sells digital products and email marketing is their main form of income then yes it would be a worry.

    I myself like the new setup but that's because I feel it organizes the mail better than before.
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  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    Instead of worrying about something you can't control, focus on what you can control instead. Educate your gmail using subscribers BEFORE they subscribe. No different from those 'check your spam folder' instructions you see at many sites that require signups.

    WORRYING isn't going to do anything. TAKING ACTION solves problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gordon Mak
    Yes, I agree, Worrying does not solve anything - it's like sitting in a rocking chair, to-ing & fro-ing and not really getting anywhere. Taking action to resolve the issue at hand and finding solutions is always the best policy! :-)
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    • Profile picture of the author overtonis
      I have to tell you...from flip side as someone who gets emails that I dont always read...the promotion button has de-cluttered my inbox. It was great move by google...but I can understand on other side of it affecting click rates.
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      • Profile picture of the author jfranchino
        It's true that goog value always will work. But, the change is doing e-mail campaigns more difficult.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ali M
    I have overcome the issue by using a custom made emailing script.... but to be honest, i prefer using aweber going to the promotions tab....

    The amount of people viewing my email have certainly reduced but the number of people purchasing from my suggestions have very slightly declined......
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  • Profile picture of the author zenxseo
    i heard about custom script but yaa if people love the product and they think mail's are valuable for them they will open at promotion tab too.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sarevok
    It depends what type of email marketer you are.

    If you send crap email that nobody is going to actively seek out, look forward to, read, or value, then yeah.

    You should be running scared.

    If you're capable of entertaining your audience, connecting with your audience, helping your audience, and teaching your audience then all the tabs in the world won't prevent them from reading your content.



    The moral of the story.. Is to create awesome content that people actually want.

    Then the uphill battle of getting people to read your content.. Becomes a sweet oceanly sea breeze.

    Just my $.02
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    • Profile picture of the author BackLinkiT
      Oddly enough I find I actually read more of the promotional stuff than I did before. When they dropped in my primary inbox I'd just hit delete but now if I have an idle moment I'll go to the promotions tab and have a browse...

      I am finding I am probably reading more of them than I was before!
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    • Profile picture of the author writeaway
      Originally Posted by Sarevok View Post


      The moral of the story.. Is to create awesome content that people actually want.
      Truer words were never spoken. People should use this 'disaster' as a wakeup call to a) better and more targeted list recruitment and b) higher quality list content.
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  • Profile picture of the author Roy A Jones
    So far it looks like my opinion is right. Just give your readers the exact same kind of content you enjoy getting and everything else will fall into place. I sure wish I could get that point across to all the internet marketers who are wasting their time worrying about what I really don't see as great big issue. As stated above it looks like some of our emails are actually going to be opened now, where as before they were tossed into the trash folder. Not only is this new tab not a problem but has anyone noticed the new social tab? Now some of our social media posts are getting put right into peoples inbox's. You know darned good and well that these are going to get opened and read.
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    • Profile picture of the author jaybenoit
      Originally Posted by Roy A Jones View Post

      So far it looks like my opinion is right. Just give your readers the exact same kind of content you enjoy getting and everything else will fall into place. I sure wish I could get that point across to all the internet marketers who are wasting their time worrying about what I really don't see as great big issue. As stated above it looks like some of our emails are actually going to be opened now, where as before they were tossed into the trash folder. Not only is this new tab not a problem but has anyone noticed the new social tab? Now some of our social media posts are getting put right into peoples inbox's. You know darned good and well that these are going to get opened and read.
      EXACTLY! Building a list is big, but building the relationship is HUGE!

      I would suggest at least 3 things:

      1) When someone first subscribes on your email list, have them whitelist your email address you are suing when sending your newsletters.

      2) Get your subscribers to communicate with you by replying to your emails. This is all part of building a relationship with your list.

      3) ALWAYS try to connect with your subscribers in other social media sites like facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc... So even if they may not see your email you send or if they unsubscribe from your email list, you are still connected in some other ways using social media.
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  • I predict that email open rates will dramatically go down.

    I also predict conversion rates to sales will go down even more.

    What will work is if you have a loyal audience that knows and trusts you and wants your emails to still work for the time being
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  • Profile picture of the author JasonBennet
    The business environment will keep on changing but we simply just need to adapt to it. But I foresee that there should not be much issue because at the end of the day, we want to get those subscribers who are willing to open the email and not just huge number of subscribers who do not open email. Just my 2 cents.
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  • Profile picture of the author ronrule
    Those of you guys saying "create content people want" are missing the point - it's not about users who see your name/subject and make a conscious decision whether or not to open your mail. It's about the fact that users won't see your name or your subject because mail is being filtered out to a "promotions" tab that, unless they visit manually, will circumvent their primary inbox.

    This isn't a good content vs. bad content conversation topic - it's about how to make users know you sent them something if your mail is being filtered. From 2004 to 2013 (pre-promotions tab) I read every single email that was ever delivered to my Gmail account that wasn't marked as spam. Since tabs have been enabled, there are about 1,100 unread in my mailbox right now. Some of them are probably great content. But the point is that unless a Gmail user makes a conscious decision to visit the promotions tab and look at what they've been missing, they won't even know you sent them something.

    That's a problem. And if other mail services (Live/Hotmail/Yahoo) adopt a similar strategy, email marketing will be changing in a big way.

    In the old days, we used to have to "check our email" - we would have to manually start up an email client or sign into a website and check for new messages. But we don't do that anymore, today mail is pushed to us automatically via smartphones and desktop notification services. When a new message came in, I was notified that instant, and a message that was from a mailing list I subscribed to had the same priority as a personal email from a family member or a notification from my bank. I either read it that instant, or remembered it and went back and read it later.

    But that's not the case anymore because the pre-filtered promotions messages aren't pushed out as a notification that new mail has arrived, lumping them together in one big folder that I can only see if I manually choose to go there and look at them. And who has time to browse the promotions folder?

    My personal list is about 87% Gmail users - I recognize this is higher than most people (and it's that way because I used to have an Android app creation platform, so naturally the majority were subscribing with their same gmail accounts they used for app development). Open rates have gone from a solid 28% to about 11% since Gmail tabs. They literally fell off a cliff.

    You can ask people to manually drag your email to the primary inbox from promotions and hope they do it ... but how many will? It's highly unlikely. But other than that, you're being sent to promotions (whether you're "promoting" or not) if you're using any of the major list services.

    Once again, Google has decided how the web "should work" and taken it upon themselves to classify all subscriptions as "promotions". Heck, just changing the word would make a huge difference psychologically. I rarely find time to visit a "promotions" tab, but people would visit a "subscriptions" tab I think. But that's not our decision, it's theirs, and we're just kind of suck with it.

    Either way, it's a big deal and content has nothing to do with it. You guys who just want to keep sending emails thinking quality will win will be losing ground in time.
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    Ron Rule
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  • Profile picture of the author celente
    I see many people whining about the promotions tab.

    No one really cares....except the person who is receiving your promotion.

    If you have built trust and give them great stuff, they will be logging into their emails just to check your latest update or messages. So in a way they are an awesome thing, as GMAIL is not indexing them for people who hate spam, or who love you individually.

    Think outside the box and realise you are on peoples list, and always crave stuff from 1 or 2 of your favourite marketers right? right!!!....so its simple, be someone elses favorite marketer! and your emails will not get deleted. Infact more will get read, and clicked on, and the promotions tab will actually be a big help for you in the end.
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    • Profile picture of the author ronrule
      Originally Posted by celente View Post

      I see many people whining about the promotions tab.

      No one really cares....except the person who is receiving your promotion.

      If you have built trust and give them great stuff, they will be logging into their emails just to check your latest update or messages. So in a way they are an awesome thing, as GMAIL is not indexing them for people who hate spam, or who love you individually.

      Think outside the box and realise you are on peoples list, and always crave stuff from 1 or 2 of your favourite marketers right? right!!!....so its simple, be someone elses favorite marketer! and your emails will not get deleted. Infact more will get read, and clicked on, and the promotions tab will actually be a big help for you in the end.
      Dude, you can't be serious. Out of 14,000 twitter followers and roughly 10,000 email subscribers, I maybe have like 3 "fanboys" who hang on every word, always reply to every email, or favorite/retweet stuff I post. The rest are following because maybe at some point I'll share a tip or a strategy that they can use. Internet marketers don't have groupies... Nobody wakes up and says "Ooh boy, I can't wait to read Ron's email today!"

      So come back to reality for a minute and try to follow what I'm saying. There is a science to email marketing ... for example, the time of the day you send a message is crucial to whether or not it will be opened. If I sent all of my emails out at midnight then guess what, first thing in the morning it's buried among all of the other idiots who send their emails out overnight. Finding the right time for your specific audience is a key factor in improving the open rates, with the BEST time being a dynamic variable for each user based on the time of day they originally subscribed to your list.

      You want your emails to be received at a time when their inbox is the most likely to be free of unread mail, so your name (as the sender) and your subject stand out. My inbox is always empty at 11:45, because I just cleared out and I'm about to head out for lunch, right? So if you send me an email at 11:50, and my phone dings, guess what, I'm going to at least glance at it and see if it's something I need to read NOW or when I get back.

      But with the Gmail tabs, I won't even know you sent it yet. I get no alerts, no notifications, nothing. It doesn't get pushed to my phone or desktop. It sits in a tab, with all of the other "non-spam marketing CRAP" I get, patiently waiting for me to make a conscious decision to visit the promotions tab and scan down the list.

      At no point during my day do I say "Man, now would sure be a good time to go see what's in the promotions tab". It just doesn't happen. Your ability to reach me as an email marketer is limited to your message's ability to notify me that it exists. And that doesn't happen anymore, which is precisely why there are now 1,100 unread emails in my inbox (all in the promotions tab), when historically I would have seen all of them.

      It's a bigger deal than you think, and the proof is in the universally-lower open rates pretty much every email marketer is seeing right now.
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      Ron Rule
      http://ronrule.com

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  • Profile picture of the author Snurekop
    I think this change is going to make us better marketers of influence, since we are forced to think outside of the box and make our subscribers yearn for more. So this may be a good thing long term. I love it though, because if you are a marketer of value, your emails are not gonna drown into the endless amounts of emails your subscriber gets from people just trying to promote their offer.

    If you really are providing value for your subscriber, he will likely star you and notice your every email
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    • Profile picture of the author Lance K
      Every email I get shows up in my inbox on my phone regardless of what tab it's in when I check it from a computer.
      Signature
      "You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."
      ~ Zig Ziglar
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  • Profile picture of the author John Atkins
    My open rates have decreased with this update:

    http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...i-thought.html

    It's not surprising I guess. This new update reduces visibility.
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  • Profile picture of the author Igor Fridrihs
    Hey

    I send a thank you letter to my buyers and include an instruction there:

    "P.S.Important note for Gmail users:

    All emails from me (including products you’ve purchased and paid for) will be delivered to your “Promotions” tab.
    This is down to Google; there’s nothing I can do, but there are measures you can take.

    1. Click on the “Promotions” tab
    2. Find one of my emails and drag it to the “Primary” tab. Then, make sure you click “Yes” when the alert pops up. Do this for any of the emails you want to see right away.

    Now that your settings are adjusted, I’m looking forward to staying in touch with you!"
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  • Profile picture of the author ronrule
    Another interesting observation on this subject, I changed the contact form on my blog to use SendGrids smtp server and all of THOSE messages go in the Updates tab.

    I wonder how much of this is auto-detection based on content vs Google just "picking" where messages go based on the outbound mail server. SendGrid is more commonly used for transaction receipts and customer service systems than marketing, vs GetResponse which is nearly 100% marketing. Maybe its as simple as changing smtp services. I wish I had more time to test this stuff.
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    Ron Rule
    http://ronrule.com

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  • Profile picture of the author hustlinsmoke
    Yes and double yes.
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  • Profile picture of the author clever7
    I started improving my email messages after reading about the importance of an email list, but I stopped caring about email marketing because of these tabs. These tabs don’t let the users find our messages before their eyes. If they won't open the promotions tab, they won't read any message that is there, no matter how interesting it may be.

    I decided to care about something else that would have better results.








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  • Profile picture of the author misterkailo
    With all these changes, SMS marketing might be better for open rate
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  • Profile picture of the author BigG95
    Now ever since google came up with those tabs, I've been following pretty closely where "promotional messages" go.
    Most of them of course hit the promotions tab, BUT for some reason certain marketing messages still land in my primary inbox.
    Google seems to prefer messages sent via amazonses, VIplus and sendgrip and doesn't throw those in the promotional tab.

    Anyone experience the same?
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  • Profile picture of the author ronrule
    The only factors I've tested/observed are:

    Messages using sendmail from a web server either go to Primary or Spam, depending on content, whether they are a one-off email or from a Wordpress newsletter plugin.

    Messages from getresponse, mailchimp, and aweber all go to Promotions tab.

    Messages from SendGrid go to the Updates tab.

    Here's whats the most interesting... thinking I found a way to "beat it" I sent a mailing using the Wordpress plugin to about 3700 subscribers, of which a third or so were Gmail. When I sent a SECOND message to that same list a week later, the messages ended up in Promotions.

    So it seems that Google is automatically filtering some messaged based solely on the SMTP provider, without doing any content scan, and then if there is no match there it's "learning" which tab to put the rest in based on content, time received, or how many other gmail users are receiving the same message.
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    Ron Rule
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    • Profile picture of the author TheFury
      Originally Posted by ronrule View Post

      The only factors I've tested/observed are:

      Messages using sendmail from a web server either go to Primary or Spam, depending on content, whether they are a one-off email or from a Wordpress newsletter plugin.

      Messages from getresponse, mailchimp, and aweber all go to Promotions tab.

      Messages from SendGrid go to the Updates tab.

      Here's whats the most interesting... thinking I found a way to "beat it" I sent a mailing using the Wordpress plugin to about 3700 subscribers, of which a third or so were Gmail. When I sent a SECOND message to that same list a week later, the messages ended up in Promotions.

      So it seems that Google is automatically filtering some messaged based solely on the SMTP provider, without doing any content scan, and then if there is no match there it's "learning" which tab to put the rest in based on content, time received, or how many other gmail users are receiving the same message.
      I do not think you are correct, or I should say, I think it is more complex. I have definitely had email that starts in inbox and then moves to promotion and not just first vs second e-mail...
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      • Profile picture of the author ronrule
        Originally Posted by TheFury View Post

        I do not think you are correct, or I should say, I think it is more complex. I have definitely had email that starts in inbox and then moves to promotion and not just first vs second e-mail...
        That's what I am saying though, some messages are automatically filtered based on the originating server and the rest are filtered through a more complex algorithm. I doubt any messages from GetResponse have made it to your Primary (unless you configured them to as a user)... but other non-bulk senders will and then later when their algo decides its a promotion, based on whatever their factors are, they end up where Google wants them.

        Regardless, open rates are down across the board. It doesn't matter how "engaging" your messages are, how compelling your subject is, or how popular your messages are among your readers if your messages are getting buried in a tab users aren't visiting.
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        Ron Rule
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        • Profile picture of the author TheFury
          Originally Posted by ronrule View Post

          That's what I am saying though, some messages are automatically filtered based on the originating server and the rest are filtered through a more complex algorithm. I doubt any messages from GetResponse have made it to your Primary (unless you configured them to as a user)... but other non-bulk senders will and then later when their algo decides its a promotion, based on whatever their factors are, they end up where Google wants them.

          Regardless, open rates are down across the board. It doesn't matter how "engaging" your messages are, how compelling your subject is, or how popular your messages are among your readers if your messages are getting buried in a tab users aren't visiting.
          Ok cool I understand. Yes, I agree. I think it is delusional to think the promotion tab will not make mailing lists much less effective across the board.
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  • Profile picture of the author JimDucharme
    We are engaging in a good amount of speculation regarding these changes and we'll likely continue to do so for some time. I realize Ronrule is simply using GR as a handy example. I would hope we'll start seeing some hard data over the next couple of months which should give everyone a better sense of what impact the Gmail tabs have.

    I've given my opinion on this before, so I'll share some other's opinions and the data they found this time. Yes, I've shared the Litmus data before, but's worth repeating.

    A report last month from Litmus put things in perspective. The fact is that 66% of Gmail opens are from a mobile device and 33% come via the iPhone default email app which doesn't show the tabs. My Samsung G2 default client doesn't show them either. If you have the official Gmail app, you will see them. Mobile open rates have recently hit record highs.

    You'll notice that Litmus did record a drop of 18% around the tabs release time, but we need to see more data to know if that was a normal Gmail blip or a result of tabs. That doesn't mean the cheese hasn't been moved at least a little and there are a lot of Gmail accounts, so the impact as Jorden Cohen points out here could be substantial. But again Jorden offers some other stats on trends which impact that potential impact -- it's all about perspective. As Jorden points out, this is not the first time the inbox cheese has been moved.

    Finally, here's some more perspective and data on the topic which I think you will find a good read.

    The good news is that smartphones are recharging email as it remains the most flexible and robust channel we have.

    Regards,
    jim
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