Did you know that only 1 in 5 Gmail users check their promo tab? Which means, you should be ever-vigilant when sending emails to your contacts.
If you’re like most business owners, your email efforts most likely build on the golden essentials:
- growing a quality list,
- designing great emails,
- writing amazing copy.
And with quality like this, you’ll surely avoid the promo tab, right?
Not necessarily.
There are 6 more factors that play into landing your email in the actual inbox.
Before we get to them, let’s talk about the importance of promo tab…
Carrot and a stick aka inbox and promo tab
According to data, 347.3 billion emails are sent and received per day in 2023—a 4.3% increase from the previous year.
That being said, an average person receives over 50 emails each day.
So to protect their users, inbox providers use promo tabs to help ensure irrelevant messages don’t clutter up their user’s inboxes.
Promo tab filters act like a shield. They analyze incoming emails and allow the good ones to reach the inbox while filtering the meh ones into the tab folder.
Promo filters explained
In the past, promo filters analyzed the content of your emails.
Phrases like ‘Lose weight fast’ and ‘double your income’ were obvious signals that would cause your campaigns to end in the promo tab.
These days however, email providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook have gotten a lot more advanced with their methods…
Now, whenever you send a new email, inbox providers look at their user engagement and previous interactions with your past emails. They then use this information to determine whether your latest campaign makes it to the inbox or not.
Specifically, they look at the following factors:
Good Signals
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Open – User frequently opens your emails.
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Reply – People respond to your emails (via reply email).
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Not promo – People move your email out of the promo tab (junk folder).
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Move to folder – Your recipients move your emails into various folders in their inbox.
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Add to address book – Your recipients add your email address to their address book.
Bad Signals
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Move to junk – People move your email to the Junk folder.
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Delete without open – Your recipients take a quick glance at the sender and subject and then delete your email.
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Inconsistent sender – You send out emails inconsistently or only when on promo days.
These factors give you 2 unique scores:
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Your score with the individual subscriber
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Your score with the email provider as a whole
And when it comes to deciding whether to deliver your latest email to the inbox or not, email providers like Gmail take both of these reputations into account.
You’re probably landing in the promo tab if…
1. You’re collecting misspelled email addresses
It’s so easy to collect invalid email addresses. On average 80% of invalid contact data is because of human error. Especially when people are using mobile devices.
As a best practice, you should always set up a double opt-in for new subscribers. Double opt-in validation prevents misspelled addresses from being added to your email list right off the bat.
2. You’re not cleaning your email list
Why are you keeping unengaged contacts on your email list?
It’s only costing you more money to keep uninterested contacts there. — I was able to cut $3k per month for one of my client’s just by getting rid of unengaged contacts.
As a reputable business, it is your responsibility to regularly remove unengaged users from your email list.
3. You’re sending meh content
Never compromise quality for quantity. Email marketing is savvy and if you slap together a poorly created email, users are much more likely to complain and unsubscribe.
Things to keep in mind when creating your email content:
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Don’t use a bait-and-switch subject line.
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Do pay attention to the email preview text as well.
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Don’t oversell to your users.
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Optimize your email templates for mobile.
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Don’t use spam words in your content (NOTE: spam words get constantly updated and are subject to season).
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Don’t send image-heavy emails.
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Format your content for readability.
4. You’re sending emails inconsistently
This is a common one… yet often overlooked by busy business owners.
But here’s the truth…your email frequency matters when it comes to landing in your reader’s inbox
The word you’re looking for is balance. You don’t want to annoy your users and generating spam complaints by sending them multiple emails a day. And you don’t want to miss out on sales opportunities by emailing them too little.
The bottom line is that if you don’t have a consistent schedule, and email random days and times of the week instead, your users may lose interest.
As a rule of thumb, you want to set clear expectations with new subscribers upfront. This way you can indicate how many times per week they should expect to hear from you.
5. Keeping spam traps on your email list
One rotten apple can bring down the whole tree.
The problem with traps is they can directly lead to getting blacklisted.
This is why, many marketers tend to jump ship from email platform to email platform— the black listings prevent their whole campaign from being delivered.
There are two main types of traps.
1. Pristine traps are email addresses created by ESPs or blacklist organizers who post their email addresses across the web. Most of them get into your list because they were “scraped” or “harvested”. You might not directly be scraping data from the web, but you never know if one of your data suppliers has used these techniques.
2. Recycled spam trap. These are email addresses that were once real but have been abandoned by the user. The ESP deactivates the account which should cause hard bounces for you so you remove the user from your list.
After the email address is inactive, the ESP reactivates the account many months later. If that account is still receiving emails from you, you will be blacklisted for not following best practices.
6. Not using segmentation to send targeted, relevant campaigns
Rather than blasting the same email to your entire list… segment your list and target those who you know are going to be interested.
Segmenting your list properly will help you increase open rates and decrease the number of people deleting your emails (which sends positive signals to email providers and keep your name in green).
Wrap up
Avoiding promo tab and getting your emails into the inbox isn’t usually top of mind for most email marketers.
Yet landing in the inbox has a huge effect on the results you get from your emails. It can give your brand an advantage over your competitors—especially during promo days like BFCM, International Women’s Day, Independence Day, etc.
So as you go about working on your email marketing, think back to some of the tips we just talked about:
- set up a double opt-in for new subscribers
- regularly remove unengaged users from your email list
- send relevant, high-value content
- develop a consistent sending schedule
- send emails to the contacts that gave your permission only + keep your list clean
- segment your list and send segment-relevant emails.
And as always, I’m here to help if needed (first call is on the house).
y’all coming for supper or what?
Katja Mokotar
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Katja Mokotar is a professional email Copywriter. She creates email strategies for CPG eCommerce that generate new & repeat customers… and can often be scaled to $1M and beyond.