socketlabs
It’s crazy to realize that Gmail released tabs back in May 2013, so we’re just shy of a ten year anniversary of this functionality. A functionality that often confounds and annoys marketers. And it might even be crazier to recall that the guidance of the time (here’s Ken Magill) was essentially send wanted content and you’ll be just fine.Ultimately, that’s still true today, just about ten years later. Gmail’s attempt to categorize messages into the primary, social, promotions, updates or the forums tab isn’t an attempt to marginalize senders, but is instead meant to help both email senders and their recipients. Sender email messages are easily found by those most interested in them, and recipients benefit based on a categorized inbox that organizes inbound messages into coherent and easily-navigated groupings.In the past, I’ve collected and shared guidance from across the Internet on how best to “escape” the Gmail promotions tab.
SocketLabs’ Brian Godiksen and Campaign Monitor’s Travis Hazlewood joined forces in this excellent blog post to explain what can go wrong when you use a subdomain (under a domain you don’t own) to send mail. Example? Some registrars offer up this goofy thing where you can buy a “domain” “under” uk.com, like spamresource.uk.com. Neat idea, except it’s really just a subdomain. And the domain uk.com has a poor reputation at Gmail, making it kind of hard to get email delivered to the inbox reliably, if I use a uk.com subdomain as my sending domain.So as to not totally steal their thunder, I’ll make you click on through to get their thoughts on what to do instead, and how to measure risk with regard to your choice of TLD (top level domain). This is one you need to read before you buy a new domain name to use for email!