New Updates and Changes Coming to Google’s Gmail Promotion Tabs for Email Marketing
A Little Gmail History
Gmail is the largest email client, with over 1.5 billion users worldwide.
In 2013, Gmail launched the Gmail tabs, where emails can be filtered into tabs. This includes a Promotions area, moving most marketing emails from the Inbox tab to the Promo tab.
The thinking behind tabs is that users will visit the tab when they are inclined to look at messages from their favorite brands. The challenge for brands is if readers only check the Promo tab once a day or less, how do your messages stand out in all the promotions received throughout the day? If your email isn’t sent at the time someone is viewing promotions, your message may fall far down the list of unopened messages.
Introducing Bundles for Prioritizing Promotions
In 2019, Gmail introduced Bundles. With Bundling, Gmail chooses the unopened promotional messages that Google thinks the reader may want to see most and places them in a Bundle view at the top.
The Bundle experience creates views like this on the Gmail app for mobile and is expected to roll out to Gmail for desktop before the end of 2019.
Merchandising Opportunity in the Bundle
There are 5 marketing areas that brands can take advantage of in the Bundle.
Marketing messages can specify what Gmail should show for logo, promo code, expiration date, deal badge and an image from the email.
A nice benefit of the expiration date is that if your message has not been viewed by the expiration date, it may be ranked to populate in the bundle on the expiration date.
Messages fully using these features look like this:
Features Coming Soon to Gmail
Gmail will soon be rolling out Bundles to the desktop experience.
A carousel feature for catalog cards will also make it possible for marketers to highlight specific items, each with a call to action button and a link. Clicks on the catalog card links can be tracked separately from links within the email body. The new feature will look something like this:
Compatibility and Implementation
Not all Email Service Providers and programs are compatible with all features. Gmail’s list of partners for bundle annotation as of November 2019 include: Braze, Cheetah Digital, Salesforce, Litmus, 100% Email, Oracle/Bronto, 250ok, Sailthru, Bluecore, Coherent Path and eSputnik.
The logo should fit in a round area, but can use an image call from a round or square logo.
Deal badges can use 1-4 words and should avoid calls to action like “click” or “open.”
The email image will be 538 x 138 and will be center cropped if your image is larger. Gifs cannot be used here.
Expiration dates must be set in the future or left blank if there is no expiration date.
To use these features, a script tag must be edited and inserted into the header of the email. Use the Google developer markup tool to write your code. Your script tag tells Google what to value for the fields you can control. You can find it on Google’s site here.