How to get out of the Gmail Promotions tab

Why Gmail puts your email in Promotions#

Your order confirmations land in Primary or Updates, but the “new stock is in” email you spent an afternoon on sits under Promotions, and sales from it look thin. That is Gmail working as designed: no header, setting or payment overrides it, and the steps below are the ones with evidence behind them. With the Default inbox type, Gmail sorts mail into Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums by itself, and describes Promotions as “deals, offers, and other promotional emails”. Readers who choose another inbox type turn the tabs off.^[1]

Google’s explanation of the sorting says its signals “include (but aren’t limited to) who the email comes from, what type of content is in the message and how Gmail users have interacted with similar content”. The most important is the reader’s own “direct input”. The same post lists newsletters among the “call to action” email Promotions is for.^[2] Apple’s iCloud Mail categories^[3] and Outlook’s Focused Inbox^[4] also set marketing mail aside, and in all three the reader’s own choice wins.

Does landing in Promotions cost you sales?#

You lose some attention, not the readers. Promotions is part of the inbox: the message was delivered, and a reader who opens the tab sees it. The cost Google documents is notifications: by default, its help says, new-mail notifications cover only messages in Primary.^[1]

Promotions is not a cliff. The last large measurement, from 2016, found 19.2% of Promotions mail read against 22.0% of the mail Gmail left in Primary, averaged over all Gmail users when only about a third had tabs switched on: read a little less, not ignored.^[6] The newer figure is self-reported: in a ZeroBounce survey of 1,091 people (run in 2023, updated in January 2026), 25% said they never check their Promotions tab, without saying which mail service.^[7] Your own Gmail clicks, in the example below, are the current number that counts.

The one recent change is Google’s own. In September 2025 it announced a “most relevant” sort for Promotions in the Gmail mobile apps, for personal accounts, to surface “senders and brands that matter most to you — including ones you engage with the most”.^[9] Two months earlier it added Manage subscriptions, a view on web, Android and iOS that lists a reader’s subscriptions by how often each sends, with one-click unsubscribe.^[8] The senders who mail most often sit at the top of that list, next to the unsubscribe button.

What you can control, in order#

One thing comes first and is not a lever. Every sender to Gmail needs SPF or DKIM, settings published where your domain is managed that prove the mail is yours (explained in plain terms in DKIM, SPF and DMARC explained), and a bulk sender, one that has sent close to 5,000 or more messages to personal Gmail accounts in a day, needs more, and keeps that status for good.^[10][11] Those rules decide whether Gmail accepts your mail and keeps it out of spam. The tab is chosen among mail that has already arrived, and Google does not describe authentication as a tab signal, so meeting the rules is the floor, not a route to Primary. To check you meet it, open one of your emails in Gmail on a computer, choose More (⋮), then Show original, and look for PASS beside SPF, DKIM and DMARC at the top (the spam guide shows the steps). A FAIL on SPF or DKIM means fixing that comes first: send the screen to whoever manages your domain. A missing DMARC line matters if you are a bulk sender, and is worth adding anyway. With that in place, these are the levers, strongest first:

1. Give receipts and promotions different From addresses#

Google’s sender guidelines ask for one From address per category of mail (its examples are sales@ for receipts, deals@ for promotions and alert@ for account notices) and for no promotions inside receipts.^[10] In practice that is at least one more address on your domain, such as orders@example.com for receipts and news@example.com for campaigns. Create it where you manage your domain’s email; an alias that forwards replies to the inbox you already read is enough, on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 as anywhere else.

Then tell each system which address to use. On Shopify, one Sender email (Settings, then Notifications) is the From address for order notifications and for marketing email sent from Shopify,^[15] so a store that sends both from Shopify cannot split them there. Keep receipts on Shopify and send campaigns from a separate email tool that lets you set an address such as news@. WooCommerce sets the From address of its order emails under WooCommerce, then Settings, then Emails, in Email sender options,^[16] and your newsletter tool sets its own. That tool will ask you to add records to your domain: a DKIM record of its own, and an addition to your SPF record, the one line that lists who may send for you. Add to the existing line rather than creating a second one, because two SPF records give an error that fails SPF, and each addition counts toward SPF’s limit of 10 lookups. If someone else manages your domain, ask them: do we have exactly one SPF record, and does it cover both tools?

2. Mail people who want it#

Google says the 2025 “most relevant” sort favours the brands a reader engages with most.^[9] The spam filter runs on the same input: “If messages from your domain are frequently reported as spam, future messages from you are more likely to be marked as spam.”^[10] Confirmed opt-in (see how double opt-in works) and dropping subscribers who never engage do more than any subject-line trick, and keep complaints under Gmail’s limit (see the spam complaint rate guide).

3. Let readers who want you in Primary move you#

The only lever that puts a marketing email in Primary for certain, one reader at a time. The next section covers how to ask.

4. Content: the lever everyone reaches for first#

Content is one of the named signals, but no published study shows that removing images, links or prices moves marketing mail into Primary. Write the email your readers want. Tricking a promotion into Primary risks what Litmus calls “a point of friction between your brand and the recipient”.^[12]

How to ask subscribers to move you to Primary#

Google documents four ways a reader can move you:

1. On a computer: drag the email from Promotions onto the Primary tab. A confirmation appears at the bottom left, and Gmail offers to remember the choice for future mail from that sender.^[1][2]
2. In the Android app: open the email, tap More, then Move to, and choose Primary.^[13]
3. In the iPhone or iPad app: open the email, tap More, then Move to, and choose Primary.^[14]
4. Anywhere: add the sender to contacts, reply, or create a filter that sends the sender’s mail to a chosen category.^[2]

Play video: Organize a tabbed inbox in Gmail

It names one reason to bother, gives the exact gesture, lets people who are happy in Promotions ignore it, and invites a reply, which Google counts as a sign the reader knows you.^[2] Each move teaches Gmail “your preferences”, the reader’s own; nothing Google publishes says it changes placement for anyone else.^[1]

Expect few readers to act. In 2013, while major retailers ran “move me” campaigns, 61 of 65,507 of their emails in Return Path’s panel of consumer inboxes were in Primary, about 1 in 1,000 (counting emails, not people).^[5] We suggest asking once, in the welcome email: the few readers who act are the ones who want you most, and it costs everyone else one sentence. The welcome email guide covers the rest of that message.

Which emails belong outside Promotions, and which in it#

Promotions is a small cost for a newsletter and a real one for a password reset or a receipt. Gmail’s help describes Updates as “Automated confirmations, notifications, statements, and reminders that may not need immediate attention.”^[1] Google’s 2025 update also added a Purchases view that gathers order and delivery emails in one place.^[9] The table is our reading of Google’s no-promotions-in-receipts rule and of the US CAN-SPAM “primary purpose” test, which the marketing email guide sets out with other countries’ rules.

If a receipt or password reset lands in Promotions: take out discount codes, product picks and banners, send it from the receipts or account address rather than the campaign one, and keep the subject about the order or the account.^[10] Then check it again on a seed inbox (below). How to send each kind is in transactional vs marketing email.

If you use Rasket: each campaign has its own From address, on any domain of yours verified for sending, and every recipient gets their own message, carrying the headers that give Gmail its one-click unsubscribe button.^[22] So the From addresses and domains you choose are what separate the two in Gmail’s eyes. If your shop platform already sends receipts and newsletters from separate addresses, switching providers will not change your tab: no provider can.

How to check where your email lands#

Placement depends on each reader’s history, so no single inbox can tell you where your mail lands for everyone. Change one thing at a time (the From address, the template, the audience), give each change a few sends, and use three views:

• Seed inboxes. Two or three fresh Gmail accounts on the Default inbox type, subscribed like any reader, show how Gmail files a message for someone with no history with you (the spam guide’s seed test sets one up). An indication, not a verdict.
• Postmaster Tools. Google’s dashboards cover compliance status, spam rate, authentication and delivery errors for mail to personal Gmail accounts.^[24] None of them shows tabs; use them to rule out a delivery problem. Setup is in the Postmaster Tools guide.
• Your own clicks and orders, split by address as in the worked example above. Not opens: “Google doesn’t track open rates” and says low open rates “aren’t necessarily an accurate indicator” of problems.^[10]

Does open or click tracking push mail into Promotions? Google has never named tracking among its tab signals. In Rasket, open and click tracking are set per domain:^[23] the domain’s page shows whether each is on, under Enable tracking metrics, and you can switch either off there. The deliverability guide covers what else to watch once mail is flowing.

For whoever edits your HTML: Promotions annotations#

For mail that belongs in Promotions, Google offers annotations: markup that adds a deal badge with your discount code, a single image, a product carousel or a deal card to the email’s entry in the tab. Only personal Gmail accounts see them, not Google Workspace users.^[17] The markup goes into your email’s HTML, so if your store’s email tool has no HTML editor, ask its support whether it adds Gmail annotations for you.

A deal badge is a DiscountOffer object in a JSON-LD script (structured data in a script tag) in the email’s head. Google needs at least one of a description, a code or an end date, and recommends a start date. Image previews and carousels use a different object, PromotionCard.^[18]

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
      [{
        "@context": "http://schema.org/",
        "@type": "DiscountOffer",
        "description": "20% off sitewide",
        "discountCode": "AUTUMN20",
        "availabilityStarts": "2026-10-20T09:00:00-05:00",
        "availabilityEnds": "2026-10-27T23:59:00-05:00"
      }]
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- Your email as usual, with the code AUTUMN20 shown in it. -->
  </body>
</html>

Paste it into Google’s preview tool before you send,^[19] and expect it not to show to everyone: “quality filters and frequency limits” decide whether an annotation appears.^[18] If the system that builds your email strips script tags, Google documents Microdata as an alternative that can sit anywhere in the HTML.^[20] Judge annotations by Gmail clicks on annotated sends against comparable sends without.

Rasket has no annotation builder, and its docs do not cover annotations. However you add the markup, open a test send with Show original, as in the authentication check above, and make sure the script is still in the message before you rely on it.