- The recent widespread adoption of promotional tab packs in Gmail will reward good, engaging emails with more opportunities to strengthen that engagement.
- FeedBlitz helps you make the most of this opportunity today by preparing every email we send with a featured image.
Here's how it gives you a competitive advantage: The vast majority of emails are on the Promotions tab No ready to use in batches, so with FeedBlitz your emails will suddenly be way ahead of the competition.
This is important because Gmail now owns the majority of consumer email, and so being able to differentiate itself from Gmail itself is a huge competitive advantage for email programs.
To help you with this, FeedBlitz will find the featured image in your blog, newsletter or email and make sure that if your email address appears in the Promotions tab pack in the Gmail app, Your favorite image will appear. This makes your email stand out from the crowd, encouraging opens and subsequent engagement.
Since a picture says a thousand words, here's an example from a client:
See how Lisa's email stands out? This is because (a) it was bundled in Gmail's Promotions tab and (b) FeedBlitz prepared the email so that it was ready to be bundled, so that an attractive image appears.
It's neat and easy—and currently requires no extra effort for FeedBlitz customers. If you send an email using FeedBlitz, it just works.
Depending on what Gmail knows about the subscriber, it may group the email at the top of the Promotions tab as part of a “package”—the recipient will see it highlighted as “Top Deals,” “Top Promotions,” or similar text (the text varies depending on what Gmail thinks the email is about).
If an email ends up at the top of the pack, it's usually followed by maybe another related email, and then a couple of Google ads (yep!, says my inner cynic, way to emphasize thoseGoogle).
However, the batch email appears at the top of the Promotions tab. even if other letters arrive after itso this is a way to keep your posts visible and attractive.
However, merging is neither guaranteed nor predictable – sometimes we've seen an email arrive and position fine, and then refreshing the Promotions tab (by dragging and dropping it) causes the email to be merged. (Personally, I'd like the app to run reliably and do so without mysterious manual intervention.)
There is no guarantee that your email will be bundled and this obviously depends on the individual recipient. (Also keep in mind that the Inbox tab is not merged—it's just the Promotions tab, and only in the Gmail apps).
However, this is an important development that Gmail is introducing, so I'm going to explore it a little further so you can take advantage of it.
At one time, the email marketing community was very concerned about bulk emails and newsletters being siphoned off by Gmail to the Promotions tab. There were concerns that open rates would suffer, causing open rates and revenues to fall. This didn't actually happen, and the Promotions tab is just a convenient pre-made folder for searching for non-personal mailings.
However, when your email is consolidated, things get MUCH better for the email marketer.
- Your email will be pinned to the top of the tab and become temporarily sticky.
- You can stand out by highlighting images and offers without opening the email.
Both encourage openness and inclusion, and those are good things. It's an interesting interaction-based feature, and while the optional image and deal highlighting is currently limited to the Gmail apps (not their web browser interfaces as far as I can tell), it's an opportunity for any business, big or small, to look to improve their email marketing.
However, combining and making the most of it when it happens goes further. This helps create a virtuous cycle: the more comprehensive an email is, the more engagement it will generate, making it more likely that future emails will be bundled as well. It is an accelerator of good email marketing and organizations that do well with email. The winners get breaks, as it were.
[There is a catch to the images that show with a bundled email, however, and that is that if a bundle shows your email’s bundle-ready image, that image is cropped and letter boxed – only the middle sliver is shown.]
This leads to two questions: one regarding FeedBlitz, and the other a more general email marketing question:
- How will my email be included in the Promotions tab?
- How does FeedBlitz help?
Let's get to it.
This is a Gmail specific algorithm and obviously its purpose is only to merge or highlight corresponding emails that have history of positive interaction. Bundling also personalizedand the decision to merge the application will depend on the recipient. In other words, your email may be aggregated for some readers but not for others. Obviously, the way to increase the likelihood of your email getting to the top of the grouping list is to double down on engagement and best practices so that not only is your sender/brand reputation excellent, but your interactions with readers are consistently positive.
How?
- Make sure your open rates are good by writing compelling subject lines and using pre-headline/preview copy as much as possible.
- Create a good mix of content (text, headlines, and images) to encourage dwell time in your email.
- Have compelling and relevant calls to action that take you from the email to relevant content, an offer, or another call to action, including secondary calls like “join my patreon” as well as “20% off” (or whatever!).
- Keep your list clean by removing unengaged subscribers, which will help increase open rates.
- At the top of your email, place your featured image at least 322 x 82 (even if it's scaled down in your email).
As of today, if your email contains a prominent or explicitly featured image, FeedBlitz will do all the work to ensure that if Gmail aggregates your email in the app, that featured image will appear along with it.
It just works.
This is true for traditional newsletters, RSS-based blog subscriptions, sales funnels, and transactional emails we send to you. In other words, as a FeedBlitz customer, you're not doing anything more than what you're doing right now, and it just works. Automatically! Our featured image algorithm is part of our service and has been around for many years, restructuring blog emails from “here's a blog post in your email” to “here's an interesting and dynamically restructured update from a blog” – this featured image detection algorithm allows us to create post thumbnails or hero images on the fly.
This is good for RSS mailings; After all, the whole point of an RSS-based email subscription service is to set it and forget it. This way, all RSS-based campaigns will have a ready-made package of Promotions tabs, and neither the campaign nor the newsletter template will need to be changed.
For emails and newsletters created with our visual drag-and-drop editor, also known as the Visual Mailing Editor (VME), the test email dialog now shows a preview of the featured image found by FeedBlitz and what it would (likely) look like if included in the Gmail app, like this:
However, if there are other candidate images in your email, a dialog box allows you to switch between them using arrows and select the one you like best. The preview we show is a very good copy of what Gmail shows, but that's no guarantee: the Gmail developers love to mix things up and keep us email service providers (ESPs) on our toes.
When you create your email in FeedBlitz VME, you can select the image you want to highlight and set it up as part of the image block properties before the email testing step.
How does FeedBlitz find featured images?
There's a bit of a secret here, but basically we're looking for large images that stand out. Essentially, our featured image algorithm mimics what the human eye immediately notices when your email is first opened and promotes that image into the Gmail package.
You can influence our algorithm, for both traditional and RSS-based newsletters, by attaching a CSS class containing the word “featured” to the HTML image tag you want to emphasize (if you don't know what that means, that's okay, remember that the algorithm works automatically and is very, very good at what it does without any human intervention).
Once FeedBlitz finds a set of candidate images that can be included in the favorites, it selects the first one with the CSS class tag “favorites” or, otherwise, the first one found. (Postscript here: if the algorithm doesn't always find the right image, write to support for advice).
