No doubt you’ve heard or seen the uproar about Google’s new change to Gmail. In their infinite wisdom they’ve reached the conclusion that they could manage your inbox better than you can, and have “helped” you accomplish this by separating your incoming mail into several “tabs”. The first is your Primary tab, where most of your important mail (again, in their view) comes to roost. Next is the Social tab, where your social media mail is deposited, and finally, a Promotions tab, where things deemed commercial or promotional is pitched. You do, (for the present time) are able to create custom tabs or revert to the old inbox. But how long will that survive?
So what can you do?
If it’s your personal Gmail account, you can simply go along with it, custom adjust your tabs, or for now, switch back to the old Inbox. If your aim is the open rates of the emails you’re sending to your lists, you’ll need to be a little more hands-on that that. Only your most active subscribers will take the effort to move your emails, and that often means that most of your messages will go unopened and unread. Right now there is some evidence that open rates are crashing because of this, and to make things worse, now Google is placing email subject line-like ads at the top of the promotional box, making it even harder to vie for attention. While no other email providers have followed suit yet, it’s most likely only a matter of time. The important thing now is understanding what we can do to avoid having our emails find themselves in “promotional hell”.
Four tips to help get your emails read in Gmail
- Use social media to alert your regular readers. They probably follow you socially, so tell them of important emails.
- Make sure you aren’t using spammy words in your subject lines that Google will view as promotional.
- Train (gently) your readers that if they aren’t seeing your emails, to peek in their promotional tab and move them for regular access.
- Creating awesome content is the best way to make sure they find your emails, wherever they are!
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