- Gmail’s latest extensive Promotions tab bundles will reward good, engaging emails with more opportunities to solidify that engagement.
- FeedBlitz is helping you make the most of that opportunity, right out of the box, today, by making every email that we send bundle-ready with a featured image.
Here’s how it gives you a competitive advantage: The vast, vast majority of emails are in the Promotions tab no Bundle-ready, so with FeedBlitz your emails are suddenly way ahead of the competition.
The promotion tab stands out from the crowd
This is important because Gmail currently owns the majority of consumer email, and so being able to differentiate itself within Gmail is a huge competitive advantage for mailers.
To help you do this, FeedBlitz will find featured images from your blog, newsletter or email and ensure that If your email appears in a gmail app’s Promotions tab bundle, Your featured image will appear. This makes your email stand out from the clutter, encouraging opens and downstream engagement.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s an example from a client:
See how Lisa’s email stands out? This is because (a) it’s bundled in the gmail promotions tab, and (b) FeedBlitz has made the email bundle-ready, so that a compelling image pops out.
It’s neat and easy – and, as of today, zero extra effort for FeedBlitz clients. If you send an email using FeedBlitz, it works fine.
So what is a Gmail Promotion tab bundle anyway?
Depending on what gmail knows about the subscriber, it may group an email at the top of the Promotions tab as part of a “bundle” – the recipient sees it highlighted as “top pick,” “top promotion” or similar text (copy gmail what email is about (think it varies depending on it).
If an email ends up at the top of a bundle, it’s usually followed by another bundled email followed by a few Google ads (ouch!, says my inner cynic, way to emphasize). They areGoogle).
However, a bundled email will appear at the top of the Promotions tab Even if another email comes after itSo it’s a way to maintain visibility and stickiness for your messaging.
However, bundling is not guaranteed or predictable — sometimes we’ve seen an email arrive and be positioned normally, then refreshing the Promotions tab (by dragging it down and releasing) bundled the email. (I personally want the app to behave consistently and do so without mysterious manual intervention.)
There is no guarantee that your email will be bundled, and this obviously varies based on the individual recipient. (Also be aware that the Inbox tab doesn’t bundle – it’s only the Promotions tab, and only in the Gmail app).
Still, this is an important development that Gmail is introducing, so I’m going to explore it a little more so you can work to take advantage of it.
What are the benefits of Gmail Promotion Tab Bundle for email marketers?
Back in the day, the email marketing community was very concerned about sending bulk emails and newsletters to the Promotions tab via Gmail. The fear was that open rates would suffer, resulting in reduced open rates and revenues. This hasn’t really happened, and the Promotions tab is a handy pre-built folder for finding non-personal mailings.
Once your email is bundled, however, things get a lot better for an email marketer.
- Your email is pinned to the top of the tab and becomes temporarily sticky.
- You can stand out by highlighting images and deals without opening the email.
Both of these encourage openness and engagement, and these are good things. It’s an interesting, engagement-oriented feature, and although additional images and deal highlighting are currently limited to the Gmail app (not their web browser interface, as far as I can tell), it’s an opportunity for every business, big or small, to improve their email marketing. strive to
Bundling — and making the most of it when it happens — goes further, though. This helps establish a virtuous cycle: the more an email is bundled, the more engagement it will increase, making future emails more likely to be bundled as well. It’s a catalyst for good email marketing and companies that do email well. To the victors, break, 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 specific to FeedBlitz, and a more general email marketing question:
- How can my emails be bundled in the Promotions tab?
- How does FeedBlitz help?
Let’s jump to it.
How do I bundle my email into the Gmail Promotions tab?
This is a Gmail-specific algorithm, and apparently they only aim to bundle or highlight relevant That email has one Positive engagement history. Bundling is also done personalized, and app bundling decisions will vary by recipient In other words, your email may be bundled for some readers, but not for others. Obviously the way to increase your chances of reaching the top of the email bundling heap is to double down on engagement and best practices, so that not only your reputation as a sender/brand, but your engagement with readers is consistent. positive
How?
- Ensure your open rates are good by writing compelling subject lines and using pre-header/preview text.
- Create good mixed content (text, headlines, and images) to encourage time between emails.
- Make compelling and relevant calls to click on relevant content, offers or other calls to action from emails, including secondary ones like “Join my Patreon” as well as “20% off” (or whatever!).
- Keep your list clean by removing non-engaged subscribers, which will help increase your open rate.
- Place a featured-image near the top of the email that’s at least 322 x 82 (even if it’s rendered smaller in your email).
How Feedblitz Helps Gmail’s Promotion Tab Bundles: Finding and Promoting Your Featured Images
Starting today, if your email contains a meaningful or prominently featured image, FeedBlitz will work to ensure that if Gmail bundles your email in an app, that featured image will appear with it.
It just works.
This is true for traditional newsletters, RSS-driven blog subscriptions, funnels and transactional emails we send to you. In other words, as a FeedBlitz client, you don’t do more than what you’re doing now and it works. Automatically! Our featured image algorithm is part of our service, and for years has been reorganizing blog-based emails from “a blog post in your email” to “an attractive and dynamically restructured update from the blog” – this featured image detection algorithm is how we post thumbnails or heroes. I make pictures.
For RSS-driven mailings, this is a good thing; The whole point of an RSS-powered email subscription service is to set it and forget it. So all RSS-driven campaigns are going to be campaign tab bundle ready, and there’s no need to change the campaign or mailing template.
For emails and newsletters created using our visual drag and drop editor, aka Visual Mailing Editor (VME), the test email dialog now shows a preview of the featured image found in FeedBlitz and how it will (probably) appear when bundled. In the Gmail app, like this:
However, if the mailing contains images featuring other candidates, the dialog lets you cycle through them using the arrows, so you can choose the one you like. The preview we show is a very good simulation of what gmail looks like, but it’s not a guarantee – gmail’s developers like to mix things up and keep our email service providers (ESPs) on our toes.
When you’re creating your email in FeedBlitz VME, you can pick the image you want to highlight and set it to feature as part of the image block feature, right before the test email step.
How does FeedBlitz find featured images?
There is a certain amount of secret sauce here, but basically we look for the big image that stands out. Basically, our featured image algorithm is simulating what a human’s eye would be drawn to when first opening your email, and promoting that image to the Gmail bundle.
You can influence our algorithm, for both traditional and RSS-driven mailings, by attaching a CSS class containing the word “featured” to the HTML image tag you want to emphasize (it’s okay if you don’t know what that means, remember (Algorithms that work automatically, and are very good at what they do without any human guidance).
Once FeedBlitz finds a set of candidate images that can be featured, it takes the first one with the “featured” CSS class tag, or the first one it finds otherwise. (Here’s a postscript: if the algorithm doesn’t consistently find the image you want, drop a line to support the suggestion).
