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

Jay Schwedelson: Welcome 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 gonna keep these short. They're gonna be fun. They're gonna be awesome.

Danielle Gallant: 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?

Guy Hanson: In this special series, we're gonna bust myths, drop truth bombs, and give you the tips you need to survive the deliverability doomsday.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright. So your host, you got me, Jay Schwedelson from the Guru, Media Hub, and the Do This Not That podcast. And

Danielle Gallant: I'm Guy Hanson. I'm VP of customer engagement at Validity and cohost of our Email After Hours podcast.

Guy Hanson: And I'm Danielle Gallant, also of Validity and Guy's better half on the Email After Hours podcast.

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for our special series Spamageddon, and today we're gonna 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 ten seconds. This is a ridiculous game that has nothing to do with marketing. And I ask Guy a question, I ask Danielle a question, and they only have ten seconds to answer it. And we screw it up every single time, but this time's going to be amazing. So Guy, I'm going with you first. Are you ready?

Danielle Gallant: Let's do it.

Jay Schwedelson: All right. This one's made for you. This is going be amazing. All right. Guy, you have ten seconds. Name three American traditions that make no sense to British people.

Guy Hanson: Ranch dressing. No. Okay.

Danielle Gallant: Partnering the turkey, the the the the the Groundhog Day stuff, and just the other day, was reading about the Liberty Bell, and I find myself wondering about that one too.

Jay Schwedelson: What is the first thing you said? Partitioning the turkey? You mean

Danielle Gallant: Pardoning the turkey. You know? We're

Guy Hanson: sitting Yeah. That's weird.

Danielle Gallant: Your president pardons the turkey and gives it his life back. I mean, that's just weird.

Jay Schwedelson: Do you guys pardon any animals for any holiday in England?

Danielle Gallant: No. We just eat them.

Jay Schwedelson: 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 is, you are built for this one. I have a feeling you're going to crush it. Are you ready?

Guy Hanson: Okay. I'm ready.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. Danielle, you have ten seconds. Name four reality TV dating shows. You better get this right.

Guy Hanson: Oh my God. Okay. Love is Blind, obviously. Jay, we've talked about this at length.

Jay Schwedelson: Yes.

Guy Hanson: Too Hot to Handle.

Jay Schwedelson: Nice.

Guy Hanson: Love Island.

Jay Schwedelson: Yes.

Guy Hanson: The Bachelor.

Jay Schwedelson: Look at this. You could have done that in your sleep. You could probably go, you could go like 20 shows. You were more excited to answer that question than anything else we've talked about in this entire series.

Guy Hanson: My audition tapes coming soon for every one of those Wait

Jay Schwedelson: a minute. Are we publicly announcing that? That's a biggie, right? Are.

Guy Hanson: You're hurting her first.

Danielle Gallant: Yeah. That's a scoop for this Danielle

Jay Schwedelson: might be on a reality show. So, we could say we had her on her show before she came, became like famous. So you'll be like a D level celebrity.

Guy Hanson: Or infamous.

Jay Schwedelson: 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's not doing well.

Guy Hanson: That's a myth. That'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 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.

Jay Schwedelson: Yes. Okay. So Guy, I got a question for you. Let's say you don't buy into what Danielle just said. And you're like, You know what? I still don't want to be in there. I 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?

Danielle Gallant: So I guess the answer, the short answer is almost, you know, not really true. I think, you know, let's caveat 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. Each of them has an algorithm which assesses things like the sender's domain and their sending habits and the message content. And 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 kind of game the system, take a look at Gmail's email sender guidance. And they provide quite a lot of good advice. They tell senders what tactics they can try, things like IP permanence, and using specific from addresses, and the kind of content they use, etc. But there are limits. 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 were open. They said, We 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 game the system. And that punishment can operate in different ways. It could be more throttling and deferrals, it could be more spam and junk placements, 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 game the system. I think as Danielle said, you know, a lot of subscribers actually expect their marketing emails to be in the promotion tab. That's where they live. Remember that, you know, because all of the mailbox providers offer tabbed inboxes, know, even if you do try to optimize for Gmail, it's almost certainly not the same secret source that's gonna work for Apple. And, you know, finally, just remember that there's advantages to go into the promotions tab, you know, sort of look at Gmail. They've made, you know, special functionality like annotations and topics 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.

Jay Schwedelson: You know, a few things related to that. Number one, if nobody's ever heard of Gmail annotations, go ahead and Google Gmail annotations. Because to Guy's point, if you are going into promotions tab in Gmail, you can do things to actually allow your emails to have a greater presence, be easier to respond 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. 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, we've isolated a group of people that we are known, 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. All right. So once again, we've crushed another Spamageddon. Everybody 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.

Danielle Gallant: We like it. I

Jay Schwedelson: 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 for marketers. It is a blast. We'll see you at the next episode.