Two different things get called the same problem.
Landing in the promotions tab is one. Landing in spam is the other. They feel similar from the sending end and they have almost nothing in common, so it is worth separating them before changing anything.
The promotions tab is not a penalty
Gmail sorts commercial mail into promotions. Your email is commercial mail. It is doing what it was built to do.
People who buy from stores go to that tab on purpose, when they are in the mood to shop, which is a better state to be caught in than halfway through a work morning. A promotional email in the promotions tab is not a failure. It is filed.
The tricks for escaping it mostly work by making your email look less like an email from a shop — stripping images, removing links, sending in plain text. Sometimes that lands you in the primary inbox. It also means arriving somewhere the reader was not shopping, looking like a personal message they did not ask for. That trade is worth less than it sounds, and it degrades every time it is used.
Spam is the real problem, and it is a different conversation.
What actually decides whether you land at all
In rough order of how much they matter.
Whether people who get your email want it. This is most of it. Mailbox providers watch what recipients do — opens, replies, deletes without opening, and above all marking as spam. A list where a good share of people engage is a list that gets delivered. One where most people ignore you is not, no matter how the emails are built.
Which means the single most effective deliverability action available to most stores is to email fewer people. Not fewer emails. Fewer people, chosen better.
Authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC on a sending domain you control. This is a checkbox exercise, it takes an afternoon once, and skipping it is being unreachable by choice. Since the Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements came in, it stopped being optional for anyone sending volume.
A dedicated sending domain rather than sending from your main one. Reputation attaches to the domain. Keeping the marketing sends on a subdomain means a bad month cannot follow you onto the invoices and password resets.
One-click unsubscribe that works. Someone who cannot find the unsubscribe link marks you as spam, which is the worst outcome available to you and costs far more than the subscriber did.
Volume that does not spike. Going from two thousand sends a month to forty thousand in one week reads as compromised. Ramp.
The unsubscribe link is on your side
The instinct is to make it small. It is the wrong instinct.
Every person who wants to leave and cannot find the door takes the other door, and the other door is the spam button. One tells the mailbox provider that a person stopped being interested. The other tells it that you send spam. They are not close in cost.
Make it easy to leave. The people who use it were not going to buy.
Sunsetting, and why nobody does it
Stop emailing people who have not opened anything in six months, and everything else improves.
Open rate improves, because the denominator shrinks. Click rate improves. Deliverability improves, because the share of recipients who engage is what providers watch. Your Klaviyo bill goes down, because you pay by profile.
Almost nobody does it. Suppressing forty thousand people who once gave you their address feels like setting money on fire, even when those forty thousand have not opened anything since last summer. There is no meeting where deleting subscribers is the good news.
It is worth doing anyway, and it is a good example of the sort of decision that a person avoids and a machine does not, because the machine does not have to feel bad about it or explain it to anyone.
What we check first
Given a new account, in this order: authentication, then how much of the list is actually engaged, then whether the engaged segment is the one being sent to, then everything about the emails themselves.
That order surprises people. It puts the copy last. The reason is that copy only affects people who receive the email, and every problem above it decides how many people that is.
Should I use a plain text email to get into the primary tab?
Sometimes it works. It is usually the wrong goal. Being in promotions is where shopping mail belongs, and a reader in that tab is in a buying mood. Optimising to escape it means arriving in a place the reader did not go looking for you, dressed as something you are not, which works once and gets worse each time.
Does the promotions tab hurt open rates?
Less than the state of your list does. A store with an engaged list does fine from promotions; a store emailing everyone who ever bought once in 2022 does badly from anywhere. If open rates are the concern, the fix is in who you are sending to, not which tab you land in.
