Featured Images Now in Gmail Promotions Tab Packs!

Gmail’s recent extensive rollout of promotions tab packs will reward good, engaging emails with more opportunities to solidify that engagement.
FeedBlitz helps you make the most of that opportunity, right from the start, today, by prepping every email we send with a featured image.

Here’s how this gives you a competitive advantage: The vast, vast majority of emails in the promotions tab are No packet ready, so with FeedBlitz your emails will suddenly be miles ahead of the competition.

Stand out from the crowd on the Promotions tab

This is important because Gmail holds the majority of consumer emails right now, so being able to stand out within Gmail is a huge competitive advantage for email senders.

To help you do this, FeedBlitz will find the featured image in your blog, newsletter, or email and make sure it If your email appears in the promotions tab package of a Gmail app, Your featured image will appear. This makes your email stand out from the rest, encouraging openness and subsequent engagement.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is an example from a client:

See how Lisa’s email stands out? This is because (a) it was included in Gmail’s promotions tab and (b) FeedBlitz created the email to be package-ready so that an attractive image appears.

This is clear and easy and, as of today, requires no additional effort for FeedBlitz customers. If you send an email using FeedBlitz, it just works.

So what is a Gmail promotions tab pack?

Depending on what Gmail knows about the subscriber, it may bundle an email at the top of the promotions tab as part of a “package” — the recipient sees it highlighted as “Top Picks,” “Top Promotions,” or similar text (the copy varies depending on what Gmail thinks the email is about).

If an email ends up at the top of a packet, it’s usually followed by maybe one more email and then a couple of Google ads (aha, says my inner cynic, way of emphasizing thoseGoogle).

Still, an email appears included at the top of the promotions tab. even if other emails arrive laterso it is a way to maintain the visibility and fidelity of your messages.

However, bundling is neither guaranteed nor predictable: sometimes we’ve seen an email arrive and rank normally, then refreshing the promotions tab (by dragging it down and dropping it) caused the email to clump. (Personally, I’d like the app to behave consistently and do so without mysterious manual intervention.)

There is no guarantee that your email will be included in a package and it clearly varies depending on the individual recipient. (Also note that the Inbox tab does not include packages; it’s just the promotions tab and only in the Gmail apps.)

However, this is an important development that Gmail is implementing, so I’ll explore it a little more so you can work to take advantage of it.

What are the benefits of Gmail Promotions Tab Packs for email marketers?

In the past, the email marketing community was very concerned about Gmail diverting bulk emails and newsletters to the promotions tab. The fear was that open rates would suffer, with subsequent drops in open rates and revenue. That didn’t really happen, and the promotions tab is just a handy pre-designed folder for finding non-personal emails.

However, when your email is grouped, things get A LOT better for an email marketer.

Your email is pinned to the top of the tab and becomes temporarily pinned.
You can stand out by having images and offers highlighted without the email being opened.

Both encourage openness and compromise, and they are good things. This is a cool engagement-based feature, and while the extra image and offer highlighting is currently limited to Gmail apps (not, as far as I know, your web browser interfaces), it’s an opportunity for all businesses, big or small, to strive to improve their email marketing.

However, being grouped (and making the most of it when it happens) goes further. It helps establish a virtuous cycle: the more packaged an email is, the more engagement it will generate, making it more likely that future emails will also be included. It’s an accelerator for good email marketing and for organizations that use email well. For the winners, the breakups, so to speak.

[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 one more general about email marketing:

How can I include my email in the promotions tab?
How does FeedBlitz help?

Let’s jump into it.

How can I include my email in the Gmail promotions tab?

It’s a Gmail-specific algorithm and clearly its goal is to group or highlight only important emails that have a positive engagement story. The group is also personalizedand the decision to bundle the application will vary depending on the recipient. In other words, your email may be included for some readers, but not for others. Clearly, the way to increase the likelihood of your email making it to the top of the pack pile is to double down on engagement and best practices, so that not only your sender/brand reputation is great, but your engagement with readers is consistently positive.

As?

Make sure your open rates are good by writing attractive subject lines and making the most of pre-header/preview text.
Create good mixed content (text, headlines, and images) to encourage email time.
Have engaging and relevant calls to action to click from the email to relevant content, offer or other call to action, including secondary ones like “join my patreon” and “20% off” (or whatever!).
Keep your list clean by removing unengaged subscribers, which will help increase your open rates.
Have a featured image near the top of the email that measures at least 322 x 82 (even if it appears smaller in your email).

How FeedBlitz Helps with Gmail Promos Tab Packs: Find and Promote Your Featured Images

Starting today, if your email contains a meaningful or explicitly featured image, FeedBlitz will do the work to ensure that if Gmail includes your email in an app, that featured image will be displayed with it.

It just works.

This applies to traditional newsletters, RSS-based blog subscriptions, funnels, and transactional emails we send for you. In other words, as a FeedBlitz customer, you do exactly nothing more than what you’re doing now and it just works. Automatically! Our featured image algorithm is part of our service and has been around for years, restructuring blog-based emails from “here’s a blog post in your email” to “here’s an interesting, dynamically restructured blog update”; This featured image detection algorithm is how we create post thumbnails or featured images on the fly.

For RSS-powered emails, that’s a good thing; After all, the whole point of an RSS-based email subscription service is to set it and forget it. Therefore, all RSS-driven campaigns will be ready for the promotions tab package, and neither the campaign nor the email template will need to be changed.

For emails and newsletters created with our drag-and-drop visual editor, also known as Visual Mailing Editor (VME), the test email dialog now shows a preview of the featured image FeedBlitz found and how it will (probably) appear if it’s included in the Gmail app, like this:

However, if there are other candidate featured images in the email, the dialog box allows you to cycle through them using the arrows, so you can choose the one you like best. The preview we show is a very good facsimile of what Gmail shows, but it’s no guarantee: Gmail developers like to mix things up and keep us email service providers (ESPs) on our toes.

When you’re creating your email in FeedBlitz VME, you can choose the image you want to highlight and set it to appear as part of the image block properties, preempting the test email step.

How does FeedBlitz find featured images?

There’s a certain amount of secret sauce here, but basically we’re looking for big images that stand out. Basically, our featured image algorithm emulates what would immediately attract the human eye when your email is first opened and promotes that image in the Gmail package.

You can influence our algorithm, both for traditional emails and RSS emails, by attaching a CSS class containing the word “featured” to the HTML image tag you want to highlight (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 guidance).

Once FeedBlitz has found a set of candidate images that could appear, it grabs the first one with the CSS class tag “featured” or, otherwise, the first one it finds. (A postscript here: if the algorithm doesn’t consistently find the image you want, message support for advice.)