How to Avoid Landing in the Gmail Promotions Tab

You’re probably familiar with Gmail’s Promotions tab and know that you get a lot of emails that land in that folder. But do you actually read those emails?

Spoiler alert: Probably, not.

Having your business emails land in the Promotions tab for your recipients automatically translates to fewer opens, lower engagement, and missed opportunities to connect with your audience.

In this guide, we’ll show you actionable steps to improve inbox placement and keep your emails out of the Promotions tab in Gmail.

Why emails land in the Promotions tab

Gmail uses behavioral and structural signals to sort emails. Even helpful and relevant emails can get flagged as promotional if they resemble bulk marketing blasts. Common triggers include:

• Sending to large, unfiltered lists

• Using HTML, image-heavy email templates

• Including too many CTAs or links inside the emails

• Consistently low engagement over time

How Mailmodo helps you land in the Primary folder

Here are four things you can do to stay out of the Promotions tab in Gmail using Mailmodo:

1. Optimize your email design

Overly designed or image-heavy emails may lead your emails to the Promotions tab. Mailmodo makes it easy for you to create lightweight, text-forward and personalized emails that feel personal, direct and relevant.

You can use Mailmodo’s drag-and-drop email editor to design your emails better. Some things you can do are:

• Choose from multiple layout options to give a proper hierarchy to your email.

• Place your most important text and images near the top to create a clear visual hierarchy.

• Limit your color palette to two or three colors with neutral backgrounds and subtle accents.

• Use plenty of negative or white space to make your content easy to read.

• Use the AI writer to write short, concise text suitable for mobile screens and quick scanning.

2. Warm up your domain with batch sends

Sending thousands of emails from a fresh domain signals “bulk sender” to Gmail. Building trust with Gmail starts by sending emails gradually from your domain. It slowly warms up your domain and improves your sender reputation over time.

Mailmodo lets you automatically warm up your domain by fragmenting your campaign into batches, the size of which increases over time.

3. Segment your audience for relevance

Sending the same email to everyone can hurt engagement and inbox placement. This is why, it’s ideal to segment your audience and send the only the most relevant emails to each segment.

Mailmodo lets you easily create precise segments based on user behavior, demographics, or past campaign activity. Here’s how you can do it:

• Go to Contacts → Create a segment → Create with builder

• Choose a pre-built segment or strat from scratch

• Name your segment

• Define the conditions that

• Hit create segment

You can also use the AI segmentation feature to group contacts automatically by writing a simple prompt.

4. Optimize send times with STO

Sending emails when recipients are most likely to engage improves open rates and signals Gmail that your messages are valuable.

You can use Mailmodo’s Send-Time Optimization (STO) feature to automatically determine the best time to send email to each recipient based on past engagement patterns.

Here’s how you can set it up:

• Under Campaigns → Bulk campaigns tab, choose Create campaign

• Choose the email template you want to send

• Fill the necessary fields like subject line, sender details, etc.

• Select the segment or list you want to send it to

• Choose Send campaign → Schedule options → Use Send Time Optimization

• Schedule the campaign

5. Boost engagement with interactive emails

Whether it’s clicking on a link inside the email or replying to it, high interaction rates tell Gmail that users find your emails valuable. So, they naturally land in the primary tab.

Mailmodo lets you embed interactive widgets like polls, surveys, forms, and games right inside your emails. The recipients can easily interact with these widgets and take action from inside their inbox.

In the Mailmodo editor, you can simply drag and drop the interactive widgets from the Widgets tab to the template.

6. Keep your email list clean and engaged

A high-quality list is the foundation of good deliverability. It’s important to keep your lists clean to avoid unnecessary bounces, unsubscriptions and spam reports which lead to a negative effect on your sender reputation.

Mailmodo automatically suppresses bounced and unsubscribed contacts, so that you're not sending emails to inactive or risky addresses.

Summary

Once your emails are sent, you can track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounces, etc. to better understand the performance of your email campaigns. Monitoring these results helps you see what works, so you can refine your campaigns and ensure your emails consistently reach Gmail’s Primary tab.