What Gmail’s New Promotions Tab Grid View Means for Marketers

Last week, Gmail announced updates to its promotions tab, and marketers rejoiced. While the implementation of the promotions tab was met with mixed reviews from marketers to begin with, this new visual change is definitely a positive thing if you ask me! However, it’s important to make sure you’re taking advantage of all it has to offer if you’re sending marketing emails. Otherwise, yours will get easily lost in the sea of marketing emails, as shown here.

While this feature hasn’t been rolled out to everyone yet, a few people in the Pyxl office are now seeing it on their personal Gmail accounts. At this point you may be saying to yourself, “Well, I’m not a B2C company, so I don’t need to worry about this because my customers all have email addresses at their business domains, not Gmail.” However, even if you’re a B2B company, you need to consider that many businesses use Google Apps for Business, which includes Gmail. In fact, according to Google, 5 million businesses use Google Apps for Business. If they’re using Gmail, the new grid view may be rolled out to them soon enough, so B2C and B2B businesses alike need to begin optimizing emails for this recent Gmail update.

How to Design Emails for the New Gmail Promotions Tab Grid View

First, you need to understand the components of an email in the grid view:

• Featured Image
• Sender Image
• Sender Name
• Subject Line

Featured Image

The Featured Image is really the key part of an email in the new grid view and the thing that will really entice someone to open your marketing email.

The minimum size for your featured image is 580px by 400px, and while Gmail can pull this image directly from your email (if such an image exists) and crop/resize it to fit, you can also provide a URL to Gmail to pull a designated featured image from your server (see Google’s code for how to do it). The key here is to ensure that you’re consciously thinking about the featured image when designing emails so that you’re able to get your message across with the image and entice people to open. Consider including copy on this featured image to complement your subject line and the email offer.

Sender Image

In order for Gmail to pull in this image, the “from” email needs to be attached to a verified Google+ page. If it’s not, Google will pull in a monogram of the first letter of the from name.

Sender Name

As expected, Gmail will pull the sender name from the “from” name. That said, there is a 20 character limit. Anything longer will be truncated, so be sure to keep the “from” name short.

Subject Line

Like the Sender Name, the Subject Line will be pulled directly from your email, as expected. These subject lines have a maximum length of 75 characters, so the subject line length sweet spot will really be 50-75 characters to ensure your subject lines aren’t getting truncated, but also that you’re taking full advantage of this prime email real estate.

If you’re looking to preview what your emails will look like in the new grid view, check out this handy preview tool.

With so much of the population using Gmail, either through Gmail.com or Google Apps for Business, it’s very important to begin optimizing emails for the new grid view! If you’d like Pyxl’s help on email marketing, please let us know.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022