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How to Avoid the Google Promotions Tab
How to Avoid the Google Promotions Tab

How to avoid your emails from reaching a contact's Google promotions folder.

Jordan Longtin avatar
Written by Jordan Longtin
Updated over a week ago

The Gmail inbox is categorized into several tabs: primary, promotions, social, update, and forums. Incoming emails go through a Google filter before landing in one of these categories. When the filter picks up that something is being marketed, sold, or promoted, the email is pushed into the Promotions tab. This can be problematic when you are trying to reach a candidate, as promotional emails are often looked past. The last thing you want is for your hard work to end up in a wasteland of other promotional emails.

Follow the tips below ⬇️ to find out how your emails can avoid the promotions folder when using SourceWhale.


Utilize the sending window when starting a campaign ⏱

On each of your steps in a campaign, you are able to adjust the time in which the emails are sent out. We recommend allotting a window of at least 8 hours for your emails to send. With SourceWhale, emails are sent out every 180 seconds. This helps your email deliverability by not blasting all of the emails out at once; making it seem less automated to email filters.

Use the content suggestions box βœ…

One of the newest features of SourceWhale, the content checker, guides you through your campaign content creation in real-time and offers suggestions to enhance your outreach. The suggestions box will flag certain things including spam filter phrases, long subject lines, long email content, too many links/images, and not using enough custom fields.

Personalize your content with variables πŸ‘«

When creating campaign content, SourceWhale offers several dynamic, static, and custom variable options to personalize your copy. If your emails are personalized, they are less likely to land in the promotions or spam folders because they are tailored to the contact and they seem less automated. Plus, contacts are more likely to open and respond to messages that show you have put in the effort to find out more about them.

Enable custom domain tracking on your website πŸ“©

We highly recommend reaching out to our customer success team to enable click tracking on your website. It only takes five minutes to set up and is available as part of your SourceWhale package at no extra cost. Not only will you be able to view analytics on what links your contacts click on, enabling this feature allows your links to be consistent in terms of branding, and they look more credible to your recipients and email deliverability systems.

Try out A/B testing πŸ“Š

When building out your email campaigns, try A/B testing on one or more of your campaign steps to test and measure different variations of messaging. When outreach is sent, SourceWhale will randomly send Step A to a portion of your campaign contacts and Step B to the other portion. We recommend only changing a few variables in each version of the email so you can easily spot what is working and what isn't as the open and reply analytics pour in.

Warm up your email domain with SPF and DKIM records πŸ”‘

SPF and DKIM records are verification mechanisms used to confirm that an email has been sent from your account and hasn't been altered in transit. This will help prevent bouncebacks and improve deliverability. You can obtain these records from your email service provider and add them to the domain's DNS settings.


Stuck or need some help? Click on the chat icon at the bottom right-hand corner to connect with our support team! πŸ’¬

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