Last updated: October 14, 2020
Due to the way Gmail automatically categorizes emails, you may notice that your marketing emails are appearing in the Promotions tab of your recipients' Gmail inboxes. Learn more about why this issue occurs, and what your contacts can do to ensure that your future emails appear in their primary inbox.
How the Gmail Promotions tab works
Gmail introduced the Promotions tab to help organize the inboxes of its users, and keep all marketing emails, promotional content, and any other bulk emails all in one place. When you publish and send emails, HubSpot cannot influence how Gmail categorizes your email, so you can't directly control whether the email appears in the Promotions tab of your contacts' inboxes.
The Promotions tab is not the same as a spam folder. Even if Gmail puts your marketing emails into the Promotions tab of your recipients, Gmail users can still engage with your email. Engaged contacts can also configure their Gmail inbox to move your emails into their Primary inbox.
Moving emails out of the Promotions tab
Your recipients can drag your email messages from the Promotions tab to Primary to help ensure that similar emails will appear there moving forward. Once the recipient moves the email from their Promotions tab into their Primary tab, Gmail will ask the recipient if they would like to do this for similar messages in the future. If they click Yes, your emails should now appear in their Primary tab.
Your recipients can also add your email from address to their Google contacts to prevent emails sent using that address from ending up in the Promotions tab.