• Gmail’s recent introduction of promotional tab bundles will reward good, engaging emails with more opportunities to boost that engagement.
• FeedBlitz helps you make the most of this opportunity, outside the box, today, by making every email we send ready with a unique image.

Here’s how this gives you a competitive advantage: The vast majority of emails in the Promotions tab are like this no Ready to pack, so with FeedBlitz your emails are suddenly ahead of the competition.

This is important because Gmail owns the bulk of consumer emails today, so the ability to stand out within Gmail itself is a huge competitive advantage for mailers.

To help you do this, FeedBlitz will find the featured image from your blog, newsletter or email, and make sure that If your email appears in the Gmail app’s Promotions tab package, Your featured photo will appear. This makes your email stand out in the clutter, encouraging eventual opens and shares.

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

Do you see how Lisa’s email stands out? That’s because (a) it’s bundled in the Promotions tab in Gmail, and (b) FeedBlitz created the email to be bundle-ready, so it shows an attractive image.

That’s neat and easy — and as of today, there’s 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 bundle an email at the top of the Promotions tab as part of a “bundle” — seen by the recipient marked 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 the pack, it’s usually followed by another bulk email, and then a few ads on Google (aha!, says my inner cynic, way to confirm ThoseGoogle).

However, a bulk email appears at the top of the Promotions tab Even if other emails arrive after thatSo it’s a way to keep your messages clear and consistent.

However, bundling is neither foolproof nor predictable – sometimes we see an email arrive and be placed normally, and then refreshing the Promotions tab (by dragging it down and editing it) will cause the email to be bundled. (Personally, I would like the application to behave consistently and to do so without mysterious manual intervention.)

There are no guarantees that your email will be collected, and this obviously varies based on the individual recipient. (Also be aware that the Inbox tab is not grouped — it’s only the Promotions tab, and only in the Gmail apps.)

However, this is an important development being rolled out by Gmail, so I’ll be exploring it further so you can work on taking advantage of it.

In the past, the email marketing community was very concerned about moving email and newsletters bundled by Gmail to the Promotions tab. The fear was that open interest rates would suffer, with a consequent decline in open interest rates and revenues. This doesn’t really happen, and the Promotions tab is just a handy pre-created folder for finding non-personal correspondence.

However, when your email is aggregated, things get a lot better for the email marketer.

• Your email is pinned to the top of the tab and becomes temporarily persistent.
• You can stand out by highlighting photos and deals without opening an email.

They both encourage openness and sharing, and these are good things. This is an interesting engagement-based feature, and although additional images and deal highlighting are currently limited to Gmail apps (and not, as far as I know, their web browser interfaces), it’s an opportunity for every business, big or small, to strive to improve their email marketing.

However, collecting – and making the most of it when it happens – goes further than that. It helps create a virtuous circle: the more email you bundle, the more engagement you’ll get, which increases the likelihood of future emails being bundled as well. It serves as an accelerator for good email marketing and organizations that do email well. For winners, breaks, as it were.

(A problem with images that appear with a bulk email, however, is that if the package shows a package-ready image for your email, that image will be cropped and placed in a box with the letters – only the middle part is shown.)

This leads to two questions, one specific to FeedBlitz, and one a general email marketing question:

• How is my email collected in the Promotions tab?
• How does FeedBlitz help?

Let’s jump into it.

It’s a Gmail-specific algorithm, and its goal is clearly just to aggregate or differentiate appropriate Email messages containing A history of positive engagement. Aggregation is too a personalityThe decision to bundle the application will vary depending on the recipient. In other words, your email may be syndicated to some readers, but not to others. Obviously, the way to increase the likelihood of your email reaching the top of the pile is to maximize engagement and best practices, so that not only is your reputation as a sender/brand excellent, but your engagement with readers is consistently positive as well.

how?

• Make sure your open rates are good by writing compelling subject lines and making the most of your pre-header/preview text.
• Create good mixed content (text, headings, images) to encourage time within the email.
• Have compelling, relevant calls-to-action to click through from the email to relevant content, offer, or other call-to-action, including secondary phrases like “join my patreon” as well as “20% off” (or something else!).
• Keep your list clean by removing unengaged subscribers, which will help raise your open rates.
• Have a featured image near the top of the email with a size of at least 322 x 82 (even if it’s scaled down on your email).

Starting today, if your email contains a meaningful or clearly recognizable image, FeedBlitz will do the work to make sure that if Gmail bundles your email into an app, that recognizable image is displayed with it.

It just works.

This applies to traditional newsletters, RSS-enabled blog subscriptions, conversion funnels, and transactional emails we send you. In other words, as a FeedBlitz customer, you’re doing 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 and dynamically restructured update from the blog” – This featured image detection algorithm is how we quickly generate post thumbnails or main images.

For RSS-powered messaging, this is a good thing; The whole point of an RSS-based email subscription service is to set it and forget it, after all. So RSS-enabled campaigns will all be a ready-made promotional tab package, no need to change the campaign or mailing template.

For emails and newsletters created using our visual drag-and-drop editor, also known as the Visual Mail Editor (VME), the Test Email dialog now displays a preview of the featured image found by FeedBlitz, and how it would (most likely) appear if it were bundled in the Gmail app, like this:

However, if there are other featured candidate images in the mail, the dialog box allows you to navigate between them using arrows, so you can choose the image you prefer. The preview we’re showing is a pretty good replica of what Gmail offers, but it’s not a guarantee — the developers at Gmail like to mix things up and keep us ESPs on our toes.

When you create your email in FeedBlitz VME, you can choose which image you want to feature and set it to appear as part of the image block properties, preempting the email testing step.

How does FeedBlitz find featured images?

There’s a certain amount of secret sauce here, but basically we’re looking for the big pictures that stand out. Essentially, our featured image algorithm mimics what the human eye is immediately drawn to when you first open your email, and promotes that image into your Gmail bundle.

You can influence our algorithm, for both traditional and RSS-enabled mails, by attaching a CSS class containing the word “featured” to the HTML image tag you want to focus on (if you don’t know what that means, that’s okay, remember that the algorithm runs automatically, and is very good at what it does without any human guidance).

Once FeedBlitz finds a set of recognizable candidate images, it takes the first image that contains the “featured” CSS class tag, or the first image it finds. (Footnote here: If the algorithm can’t consistently find the image you want, please drop a line to support for advice.)