[Limited Series]🥫SPAMAGEDDON🥫 Promotions Tab ≠ Doom 🧠 | Ep. 354

0:05Welcome to Spamageddon. This is a special five part crossover series between the email after hours podcast and the Do This Not That podcast. We're going to keep these short. They're going to be fun. They're going to be awesome. We're teaming up to help marketers battle the ultimate inbox apocalypse. Is your email program doomed or can you survive the invasion of spam filters, block lists, and dwindling engagement? In this special series, we're going to bust myths, drop truth bombs, and give you the tips you need to survive the deliverability doomsday. All right, so your host, you got me, Jay Schwettlson from the Guru Media Hub and the Do This Not That podcast.

0:42And I'm Guy Hanson. I'm VP of Customer Engagement at Validity and co-host of our Email After Hours podcast. And I'm Danielle Gallant, also of Validity and Guy's Better Half on the Email After Hours podcast. We are back for our special series Spamageddon. And today we're going to be talking about the promotions tab. Is it a horrible place? Is it a good place? Do we care? but before we get into the promotions tab and all your email we want to play our game our game is you have 10 seconds this is a ridiculous game that has nothing to do with marketing and i asked guy a question i asked danielle a question and they only have 10 seconds to answer it and we screw it up every single time but this time is going to be amazing so guy i'm going with you first are you ready let's do it all right this one's made for you this is gonna be amazing all right guy you You have 10 seconds.

1:32Name three American traditions that make no sense to British people.

1:41Ranch dressing. No. Okay. Pardoning the turkey, the Groundhog Day stuff. And just the other day, I was reading about the Liberty Bell, and I found myself wondering about that one too. What is the first thing you said? Partioning the turkey? you mean cutting the turkey you know yeah that's weird your president pardons the turkey and gives it his life back i mean that's just weird do you guys pardon any animals for any holiday in england no we just eat them all right i actually kind of agree i think you're spot on with all of those all right danielle are you ready for yours this you are built for this one i have a feeling you're going to crush it are you ready okay i'm ready okay danielle you have 10 seconds name four reality tv dating shows you better get this right oh my god okay love is blind obviously jay we've talked about this at length yes um too hot to handle nice love island yes the bachelor look at this you could have done that in your sleep you could probably go you could probably go like 20 shows you were more excited to answer that question than anything else we've talked about in this entire series my audition tapes coming soon for every one of those days wait a minute are we publicly announcing that that's a big right you are yeah that's a scoop for this series danielle might be on a reality show so uh we could say we had her on our show before she came we became like famous so you'll be like a d level celebrity.

3:19Or infamous. Yeah. I cannot wait. Oh my God. We'll make so many memes of you. But let's get into it today. Promotions tab. Everybody loves talking about the promotions tab. Now there are two promotions tab. Gmail has a promotions tab. Oh no. My emails are going in there. Apple has their promotions bucket now. And this is the reason all my emails are doing terrible. Oh no. So Danielle, let me ask you the question first. All right. True or false? Or is it a myth that if your emails are going into the promotions tab, nobody's going to see them. It is the reason your email is not doing well. That's a myth.

3:54That's false. I know every marketer in the world wants to go to primary, but subscribers that have tabs enabled, because not everybody does, you can turn this functionality off both for Gmail and for Apple. But those that do have tabs enabled, they want their emails categorized appropriately. There was a mail gun survey that showed that half of Gmail users don't even have tabs enabled. I don't personally, because I don't know, I just am old timey about my mailbox. But then like down funnel metrics, like clicks and conversions, they don't really take a hit based on tab placement. And for those subscribers that do have tabs enabled 80 check their promotions tab at least once a week and 50 do it every day so yeah open rates might be higher for primary but those are really important probably personalized personal messages so it makes sense yes okay so guy i got a question for you let's say you don't buy into what daniel danielle just said and you're like you know what I still don't want to be in there.

5:07I feel weird about it. I still want to get out of the promotions tab. I always hear there are these tricks that you can game the system. There are ways to get out. A, is that true? B, should you be doing those tricks to get out of the promotions tab? So I guess the answer, the short answer is almost, you know, not really true. I think, you know, let's carry on that. You know, let's remember that, you know, the tabs aren't just Gmail and Apple now, I think Microsoft and Yahoo have been providing tabbed inboxes for years already. And each of them has an algorithm which assesses things like the sender's domain and their sending habits and the message content.

5:47And that determines where the messages land. And in some cases, subscribers can also educate those algorithms to say, listen, no, it wasn't meant to land there, put it there. But I think answering the question in terms of can you game the system take a look at gmail's you know email sender guidance and you know they provide quite a lot of good advice they tell senders what tactics they can try things like ip permanence and you know using specific from addresses and the kind of content that you use etc but you know there are limits you know when they introduced the new bulk sender guidelines last year and email senders are going how do you know what a transactional email looks like and Gmail and Yahoo are open.

6:29We don't. We don't know. They're not that smart. But they will also very open that they will punish senders for trying to gain the system. And that punishment can operate in different ways. It could be more throttling and deferrals. It could be more spam and junk placement. It could be more blocking and rejection. And also, specifically at Gmail, they will withhold your right to mitigation if they believe you aren't being a good actor. So I think, you know, those are all good reasons not to gain the system. I think, as Daniel said, you know, a lot of subscribers actually expect their marketing emails to be in the promotion tab.

7:07That's where they live. Remember that, you know, because all of the mailbox providers offer tabbed inboxes, you know, even if you do try to optimize for Gmail, it's almost certainly not the same secret sauce that's going to work for Apple. And, you know, finally, just remember that there's advantages to going to the promotions tab. you know sort of look at gmail they've made you know special functionality like annotations and top picks available to marketers to use to improve the user experience with their emails in the promotions tab and it's not going to be available if you're ending up in primary instead you know a few things related to that number one if nobody's ever heard of gmail annotations go ahead and google gmail annotations uh because to guy's point if you are going in the promotions tab in gmail you can do things to actually allow your emails have a greater presence be easier to responded to be responded to and it's a win and then two other things going into the promotions tab in any environment is not the junk folder it is part of the inbox okay it's just an organization of the inbox you don't feel like you're doing something wrong and that's why you're going in there you're still going to the inbox and then the last thing as it relates to apple because we've been doing a lot of testing into apple you don't need to be thinking about the apple tabs at all at least for the short term.

8:23And the reason I say that is very few people even have access to the new tabs. You need to have an iPhone 15 or higher, which is just a subset of people using iPhones. And then of that, you actually have to leave your tabs enabled. And a lot of people are not loving the functionality of the new tabs within your mail app, and they're turning it off. So you're looking at anywhere between 10 to maybe 20 % of Apple users that are even messing around with these tabs right now and in our testing uh we've isolated a group of people that we are know that are known tab users and we have seen no drop in performance very similar to the way it is in gmail no drop in performance in terms of your promotional email or your email newsletters going to people that have their tabs enabled so it's a big kind of nothing burger that people blame the reason that their emails are not working it's just not the root cause of your problem um all right so once again we've crushed another Spamageddon.

9:21Everybody go and check out Email After Hours. I love that show. It is awesome. And Do This Not That is all right. It's not bad. We like it. I appreciate you guys. We'll see you at the next one. That's a wrap on this episode of Spamageddon. But the battle for the inbox never ends. If you love this crossover chaos, you got to tune in the next time and make sure to subscribe to Email After Hours podcast. It is one of my favorites. And also check out Do This Not That podcast from marketers. It is a blast. We'll see you at the next episode.