Deliverability1 min read
Why Your Business Emails Land in Promotions (Not Inbox)
Gmail tabs, engagement signals, and authentication — fixes for legitimate senders.
Promotions is not spam — but it is easy to miss. Reduce marketing language, authenticate your domain, and encourage replies to train inbox placement.
Quick summary
- Heavy HTML templates with many images and buttons
- Sales language, prices and discount codes
- Many links, especially to several different domains
- Sending the same message to a large list at once
- Plain, short messages written to one person
Promotions is a category, not a penalty
Gmail sorts mail into tabs based on what a message looks like and how people have treated similar mail from you. Promotions mail has still been delivered — it is just easier to miss. There is no setting a sender can use to choose the tab; you can only make your mail look and behave like personal correspondence.
What tends to push mail into Promotions
- Heavy HTML templates with many images and buttons
- Sales language, prices and discount codes
- Many links, especially to several different domains
- Sending the same message to a large list at once
What helps one-to-one and transactional mail
- Plain, short messages written to one person
- A real From address on your domain, not noreply@
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passing and aligned with your domain
- Replies — when recipients answer you, later messages are more likely to land in Primary
- Keeping marketing campaigns on a separate address or subdomain from support and receipts