Earlier this year, Gmail introduced their new tabbed inbox. If you are not familiar, you can see the introduction on the Official Gmail Blog.
This update is Gmail’s way of helping their users sift through the flood of email they receive every day. They outline the types of messages by four overarching tabs – Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates. As new email comes in, Gmail attempts to look at the content and categorize the emails, helping their users see the important emails first.
The Primary inbox contains the most important of messages. These emails are typically the ones from another person. Primary can also be told that messages from certain senders are important enough to land there as well, which I’ll get to in a moment.
For email marketers, the new tabbed inbox can be a concern because it means that your station’s messages, by default, are likely not landing in the Primary inbox – instead they’re being sent to “Promotional,” since they’re coming from a business and not another personal email account. In turn this can mean that your reads and clicks will not be as high as they may have been before, and your listeners might not even realize that they have a new newsletter from you. Not good.
The positive side is that there is a way that your listeners can prioritize your newsletters and make sure that you are still considered “Primary.” The next time one of your emails is delivered to their “Promotional” tab, all they need to do is drag the message over to the Primary tab. When they begin to drag the message the other tabs will activate, indicating where to drag in order to complete the move.
(Primary Inbox – Drag important stuff here!)
When your listener drags your message over, this tells Gmail, “I want these messages in my Primary Inbox,” and Gmail will remember that. Now any future emails that you send to that listener will pop up in their Primary inbox, making sure that they see the email right when it’s delivered. Everybody wins!
To help spread the word to your Gmail subscribers, why not send an email out to them letting them know about the solution? In ListenerEmail, it’s simple to send an email to just Gmail addresses, so you can customize a message letting them how to prioritize your emails:
- Go to Email Database > Database Tools
- Type in *@gmail.com
- Give it a second – this is going to give you a full list of every Gmail user in your database, so it might take a little time to load
- When the list is done loading, scroll to the bottom of the page and hit “Send Custom Email” or “Send Template Email.”
Now you’ll ensure that all of your messages land right in the Primary inbox where they belong.
If you are going to ask your subscribers to commit space in their Primary inbox to your content, be sure to reward their loyalty to your brand with valuable, entertaining, content with each message you send. As long as you’re doing that, you and your listeners are in for a long, happy relationship.
This post originally appeared on the PromoSuite Blog where, as Operations Manager, I occasionally post about new features, technology, and the impact it has on the radio industry.