The little-known Gmail feature that could improve your open rates

If you use Gmail like everyone else (1.5 billion users and counting), you may have noticed your inbox is split into three tabs: Primary, Social and Promotions. Google rolled out its new tabbed approach back in December 2018 in a bid to clean up Gmail’s inbox interface. And although the user experience is now best in class, some brands (mainly SMEs) worried their marketing emails would get buried in a landslide of promo comms; sent straight to a graveyard of unopened newsletters never to see the light of day. RIP eDM, right? Not quite.

There’s a little-known leg-up out of email oblivion: Google email annotations. Created specifically for the Promotions tab, annotations help highlight your promotional emails by adding stuff like images, logos, promo codes, expiration dates on deals, and a whole lot more.

We’ve seen this feature utilised by a number of big brands like Samsung. But smaller businesses just don’t seem to use annotations at all. Or, more likely, don’t know about the feature. A quick look at the emails from the top 100 Shopify Stores tells you everything: 30.1% of those emails include a reference to ‘deals’, with only 2.5% using annotations.

Flourish send over 500 million emails a year, and we use learnings from each and every one of those sends to constantly improve our email templates. That’s the great thing about email – almost everything is measurable, trackable and tweakable, so each one of our improvements can be rooted in robust, data-led thinking.