A lot of people have been freaking out about the new Gmail tabs – namely, anyone who uses internet marketing:
This will ruin email marketing as we know it. Gmail’s out to get small businesses. My emails will never be read because they’re not in your main inbox. Get rid of those evil tabs and go back to a single-inbox format!
These people seem to think that because the Promotions tab exists, their emails will automatically end up there – and never be read.
This isn’t true, for several reasons. First, Gmail users are getting used to the new tabs. They’re fiddling around and figuring out where all their emails end up, and they’re deciding for themselves what belongs where. They’re not going to flat-out never see your emails in the Promotions section of Gmail tabs.
But that’s not what internet marketers are worried about. They’re worried you might leave their emails there.
That could be worrisome, but not for the reason you think. People won’t stop reading emails because they’re in the Promotions tab.
People will leave them there because they weren’t reading them to begin with.
How People Read Emails
When Gmail first announced the tab changes, I was thrilled. (Well, okay, first I had knee-jerk hatred. Then I was thrilled.) My inbox gets a solid mix of work-related emails, promotions, newsletters, social media updates, and personal emails on a regular basis.
When I start my day, here’s what I do:
- Read my personal emails. They’re both important and enjoyable. They’re the best emails.
- Go through all the work emails. These are important, but not always fun.
- Read all the other emails that are possibly fun or informational. They’re enjoyable, but not important.
You might flip #2 and #3, depending on how much you procrastinate, but one thing is for sure: almost everyone hates reading promotional emails.
That doesn’t mean we never open them.
Very occasionally, someone is offering me something at the exact instant I want it. I open these emails and write down the code or print the coupon.
I don’t read them. There’s nothing enjoyable or important to me to read beyond the useful tool in this email – the discount or the offer. Once I have that, I’m done.
99% of promotional emails get deleted immediately, because I just don’t need them. They’re not important, and they’re not enjoyable. They are my absolute lowest priority.
These priorities haven’t changed with the new Gmail tabs format. The only difference is that it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to prioritize. Now I can start my day with personal and work emails in my inbox and get through all of them without being distracted by incoming emails that ruin my quest for Inbox Zero.
(Click on that screenshot to see it big-time. Then check out that theme. Zen as anything. At night there’s a fox that does some t’ai chi on the porch. You can see I categorize my emails, too. Men with Pens clients in blue, Good Ink Inc. clients in Green, and the unmarked ones are personal emails from friends. Tessa sent me a quiche recipe. It was delicious.)
When I have a lunch break or it’s the end of the day, I can leisurely browse through the stuff in my Social folder, which now includes all my newsletters and social media updates. I enjoy that material much as I would read through an RSS feed full of blog posts.
(See how Jon Morrow’s email has [SPAM] in front of it? Gmail did that. I told it that Jon wasn’t spam, but it still marks it that way. But you know what? I just ignore it and read them anyway, because Gmail don’t tell me what to do no-how no-way.)
When I’m about to close my email, I briefly glance in the Promotions tab to see if there’s anything I want to use immediately or in the near future.
(You’ll note that The Body Shop is in the process of trying to convince me that every day I’m about to miss out on a sale. It’s cried wolf too many times. I also put my social media spam here, because I don’t care about what updates I may be missing.)
If so, I open it. The second email from the top is a gym I’m thinking of joining in my city. I open that because if they have a discount to offer me, I’m likely to want to use it.
(Way to get to the point, Colorado Athletic Club. You know perfectly well I don’t care about reading the rest of this email. Just show me what I need.)
Hey, look at that. They’re offering me a $100 discount. I don’t even bother reading the rest of the email. I just print that out for when I go visit the gym later to sign up for a membership.
Promotions that I want still get opened and used. They just don’t get read.
But that’s the problem! My emails are in that Promotions tab, which means you’re not reading them!
Silly rabbit. If I was reading your emails before, I’m still reading them now. I moved them out of the Promotions tab so they wouldn’t get lost in the unimportant stuff.
Oh, yeah. Didn’t anyone tell you about that?
Gmail’s Designation of Your Emails Isn’t Set in Stone
One of the biggest complaints about the new tabs is that Gmail automatically considers all newsletters as “promotional”, which means that all your emails will go to the Promotions tab and no one will ever read them and marketing as we know it is over.
Yeah, no. That’s not quite the deal, here.
When the new format first launched, Gmail thought that many of my regular newsletters belonged in the Promotions tab. Fair enough.
I subscribe to the following mailing lists: Men with Pens, Ittybiz, Copyblogger, Chris Brogan, and Jon Morrow’s Boost Blog Traffic. Gmail thought ALL of these belonged in the Promotions category.
But Gmail isn’t God, even though they both start with G. And I disagreed with Gmail’s robotic algorithm opinion. I read nearly every single one of the emails these people send. They’re useful, they’re informative, and 90% of the time, when I open an email from any of these people, I want to read it.
So you know what I did? I used my brain. I’m a person with independent thought and free will (I bet you are too), and I decided those emails don’t belong there.
You were wrong, automated Gmail sorting algorithm.
And – hold onto your hats, people – I moved those emails from the Promotions tab to where I wanted them to be.
Granted, this was a super-complicated process. I had to click and drag the email a whole inch from one tab to the other. Watch:
(Right-click on that image to see it full size. You can’t see the pointer, because for some reason my screen shot saver doesn’t show it when I hit prt scn. But it’s there. Oh, it’s there.)
(See? Moving that conversation like no one’s business. Couldn’t do that without a pointer. Ghosts can’t move conversations. Everyone knows that.)
A little question appeared at the top of my inbox. It politely asked if I’d like to have all emails from this address sent to the Social tab instead of the Promotions one:
(They don’t offer you an option for no. The option for “no” is to ignore Gmail. Which I do with some glee on a regular basis.)
I clicked yes, and now all of the emails from Naomi reside in my Social tab forevermore.
(I know. That was exhausting. It took a whole split second. Someone give me a towel.)
It takes literally one second to rescue someone’s emails from the Promotions tab. That’s an amount that any of your devoted readers, even the busiest ones, can take out of their day to move your emails to the tab where they want them.
Even better, they’re already in a sorting frame of mind because the email tabs are new, and it needs some help – there are work emails ending up in the Social tab and personal emails going to Promotions left and right. You have time to piggyback on people’s willingness to sort out their inboxes and tabs and filters.
It’s almost like it wasn’t an earth-shattering disaster that Gmail put those emails in the Promotions tab to begin with. Which leads me to believe that people aren’t bitching because Gmail sorts their emails to the wrong tabs.
People are bitching because readers might think that the Promotions tab is exactly where those emails belong.
What Makes Your Emails Worth My Time
Not all emails that promote are relegated to the Promotions tab. Heck, look at that list above: Men with Pens, Ittybiz, Copyblogger, Boost Blog Traffic, and Chris Brogan. They’re all marketing experts. You think they’re not using their emails to market? Of course they are. Some of them are doing it right now.
And yet they remain in my Social tab – where I put them, thank you very much. Here’s why:
90% of the content these entrepreneurs send me is non-promotional. It’s useful information I can apply. And 90% of the time, when I open an email from one of these people, there’s an immediate payoff for me. I take enjoyment from reading and am glad I got that insight in my day.
These people are people I want to hear from. And that’s why I put them in my Social tab.
What about when they’re doing a promotion, though? What about when these people are actively selling me something?
I’m already conditioned to think of their emails as useful information from someone I like. So when they send me an email that IS promoting something, I don’t see it as promotional or spammy. I don’t see it as a sale.
I think this:
A person I like is offering even more useful information for a reasonable price.
Here’s what I don’t think:
This person I like sent one promotional email and has tainted my opinion of them forever.
One promotional email out of ten isn’t going to change my opinion of this person’s emails at large. If you knew someone who was grumpy in the mornings but an absolute darling for the majority of the day, you wouldn’t think of them as a grumpy person. You’d think of them as a nice person who is occasionally grumpy.
So if your emails are mostly sociable and helpful, I’ll think of you as a sociable and helpful person who occasionally promotes something.
Pay attention, because here’s what’s important:
If most of your content is useful, your promotions won’t change my perception of you as useful.
I won’t leave your emails in the Promotions tab.
If, on the other hand, you promote and pitch and sell me 90% of the time, I’m going to think of you as a salesperson who occasionally says something nice or helpful. I think:
This person sends promotional emails, so this new email is probably a set-up for yet another damned promotion.
And you know what? I’m usually right.
Those people never made it out of my Promotions tab, and they probably never will. (They shouldn’t make it out of yours either.)
Why Gmail Tabs Are Beneficial for Internet Marketers
I read approximately the same amount of promotional emails in the new Gmail tabs format as I did with the old format. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is this: I read far more emails from the people I want to hear from.
In the old format, all my emails were mixed together. I’ve got 8 work emails mixed in with 20 promotional emails and 10 newsletters and 5 social media updates and 3 emails from friends of mine.
That makes it harder for me to get to work. Those work emails are buried. If I don’t delete or archive the extraneous stuff, I’m likely to miss an important work email.
And frankly, with eight million emails, I feel overwhelmed – look how many emails I have to get through! So many emails! It gets kind of hard to get psyched about getting to work, because I have to sift through 8 million bits of stuff that isn’t important.
With the old format, I developed the strategy of deleting everything that wasn’t a work email just to clear my inbox. That included both the promotional stuff and the newsletters I actually wanted to read.
I didn’t want to read them right that second, which meant they were in my way. So they got deleted.
Or (and this is worse) I skimmed them.
Take Ittybiz, for example. Naomi Dunford and Dave Navarro send out a fantastic newsletter. Every email is full of great information. It’s like a whole separate blog from their main website, sent directly to my inbox. I love it. I read every single email they send, without fail, even when I’m busy. I archive most of those emails to refer back to later.
But when I have to work, I feel rushed. I know I should be doing something else. I should be working, but to start work I want a clear inbox, which means I have to put this email somewhere. If I archive it, I might forget about it. If I delete it, I’ll miss out on awesome content.
So I compromise: I skim.
When I skim, from Naomi’s point of view as a marketer, I am not doing what she wants me to be doing. She wants me to read that newsletter thoroughly so I can see the full scope of her genius.
She wants me to try the technique she’s describing in that email so that I think to myself: “This woman knows what she’s talking about. Maybe I should buy one of her products.”
She wants me to conclude that when I’ considering hiring a marketing coach, she’s the person who comes to mind.
If I’m skimming, none of that is happening. I’m just breezing through and then deleting it. I’m barely registering what I’ve read. I’m certainly not taking the time to apply her advice to my business.
Which means Naomi and all the other people who send me useful newsletters actually benefit from Gmail’s new tabs.
I know my favorite newsletters will be there waiting for me when I’m ready to read them. They’re in the Social tab. I won’t forget that the tab exists – it’s right there. I can come read the emails when I’m prepared to read the useful information, take notes, and think about how to apply it to my business.
This is better for everyone. It’s better for Naomi and Dave and James and Brian and Sonia and Chris and Jon and me and my local bookstore, whose newsletter I read religiously because it is excellent.
The only people it’s not better for are the ones who do nothing but promote.
How to Get Your Emails Out of the Promotional Tab
Stop thinking of Gmail tabs as the enemy. Fighting Gmail gets you nowhere. You can’t stop it from changing its format, and you can’t stop your customers from using the new tabs.
They’re going to do what’s good for them, not what’s good for you.
It’s not Gmail’s fault your emails are perceived by your customers as promotional. It’s not your customers’ fault either. It’s no one’s fault but your own.
And it’s completely within your ability to change.
If you want your customers to perceive your emails as belonging to the Primary tab or the Social tab, start making them more primary or sociable. If you want your readers to put your emails in a tab they’ll actually read, make them better reading material.
Mention that you have things to sell now and then, but don’t make that mention the bulk of your emails.
You may be fine with people seeing your emails as promotional. That’s fine – don’t gripe when people don’t read them. And don’t blame Gmail.
Gmail didn’t do anything but make it easy for your customers to sort between important and promotional. That’s all.
P.S. If any of those screenshots above look screwy, blame James. I had nothing to do with it.
