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How to delete all promotions in Gmail

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Filter out those pesky marketing emails with these tricks.

As email has become the de facto mailbox of the web, junk mail has adapted. Almost every site asks for an email address, making quick visits haunt your inbox for weeks. Those useless marketing emails, much like the junk mail that arrives at your front door, take up a lot of space and chip away at your Google Drive storage.

Whether you check your Gmail account on the web, on a trusty Chromebook, or via the app, Google makes cleaning up all those unwanted promotional emails easy. Here’s everything you need to know to take control of your Gmail inbox and banish unwanted promotional emails.

Keeping tabs on your Gmail promotions

A screenshot of the original Gmail beta inbox in 2004
Source: Google

 

When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, emails were lumped into a single inbox. As email increased in popularity and spam became more common, users found that important emails were buried by marketing emails and newsletters. In May 2013, Google announced an updated Gmail with auto-sorted tabs to reign in this inbox chaos. The newly-released tabbed inbox joined keyboard shortcuts to make Gmail more efficient for power users.

A screenshot showing inbox tabs on the Gmail app for Android in 2013.

 

Though Google’s tabbed inbox segregates promotional emails into its own tab, those emails still pile up. You can hide the Promotions tab if you prefer to see marketing emails in the Primary Inbox. You can delete those emails to free up some Google Drive storage. Gmail filters can automate this, so you never have to see a promotion again. Every marketing email can be tracked down and handled with a few easy steps.

How to remove the Gmail Promotions tab

Aside from deleting specific emails, you may want to remove the Gmail Promotions tab. Doing so will land those marketing emails in the inbox, giving you a visual of the emails you don’t want. This can be accomplished in a few simple steps.

Remove the Gmail Promotions tab using your web browser

  1. Open Gmail in your web browser.
  2. Open the Gmail Settings menu by tapping the cog icon in the page’s upper-right corner. The Quick settings menu appears.
  3. In the Inbox type section, click the Customize option.
    the Gmail inbox with an inbox settings pane open
  4. Deselect the checkbox to the left of Promotions in the Select tabs to enable popup menu.
  5. Click the blue Save button in the lower-right corner.
    a Gmail popup with check-boxes to disable tabs

Remove the Gmail Promotions tab using the mobile app

Although we’ve used the Gmail app for Android in this tutorial, the steps are the same in the iOS app.

  1. Tap the hamburger menu icon located in the upper left corer of the Gmail app.
  2. Select Settings and choose the account from which you want to remove the Promotions category.
  3. Tap Inbox categories.
  1. 2 Images
    a list of general and account settings in the Gmail app
    account-specific settings in the Gmail app
  2. Deselect the Promotions checkbox.
    inbox categories settings in the Gmail app

How to delete all promotions

Promotions eat into your Google Drive storage space. Gmail makes it easy to get rid of them all at once or even mass delete emails if your inbox has become overwhelming. Here’s how to do the former.

Delete Promotions on Gmail on your browser

  1. In your inbox, click the Categories drop-down menu on the left side of your inbox to view conversations in the Promotions tag.
    the Gmail inbox with the promotions tab highlighted
  2. Click the checkbox that appears above the first email message in the upper-left corner. Clicking the checkbox only selects emails on the current page by default.
    the Gmail inbox with the select all checkbox highlighted
  3. If you wish to delete all the emails in the Promotions tab, click the Select all conversations in Promotions link that appears above the first email.
    emails selected in Gmail with a select all prompt
  4. Click the trash icon to delete the selected emails.
    emails selected in Gmail with the delete button highlighted

Delete Promotions in the Gmail app

The Gmail app doesn’t have a “select all” option. If your inbox needs a good spring cleaning, the desktop site is the easiest way to go. If you must use the app, the process is still simple, taking only a few extra steps.

  1. In the Gmail app, select the hamburger menu in the upper-left corner to see the Gmail All inboxes menu.
  2. Select the Promotions tab.
  • 2 Images
    the Gmail app with the menu button highlighted
    the Gmail app menu with the promotions category highlighted
  • Tap the sender icon (the round icon with a letter or image that appears to the left of the sender name and subject line) to select a message.
  • Tap the trash can icon in the upper-right corner to delete the selected conversations.
  1. 2 Images
    emails selected in the Gmail app
    emails selected in Gmail with the delete button highlighted

How to find hidden promotional emails

Though Gmail’s automatic categorization works well, sometimes a pesky promotional email gets around it. To find these hidden emails, type “unsubscribe” into Gmail’s search box. This simple search finds promotions and newsletters by the unsubscribe link that most of them include.

How to prevent future promotional emails

Deleting the promotions in your inbox is great in the short term, but it’s better not to see them in the first place. There are a few ways to rid yourself of promotions for good.

Filter and auto-delete promotions

Gmail includes a powerful filtering feature. Filters can use multiple attributes of an email to trigger a filter and carry out selected actions on incoming emails that match those triggers. You can also select specific filters Gmail uses to apply to similar messages you receive in the future.

  1. In your inbox, select the emails you want to delete automatically in the future.
  2. Click the overflow menu (three dot) and select Filter messages like these.
    emails selected in Gmail with an options menu
  3. This creates a filter that is triggered when an email comes from the same sender address as those selected. Click Create Filter to confirm this filter trigger.
    a Gmail filter trigger setup menu
  4. Select Delete it and Also apply filter to matching conversations to delete old messages matching the filter criteria.
    the Gmail filter actions setup menu

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires promotional emails to contain a link to unsubscribe, providing a legally required signature to trigger a filter. As an alternative to filtering by sender, type “unsubscribe” into the Has the words filter trigger field from step 3. Combine this with the default sender-based filter to keep non-promotional emails from the selected senders untouched.

Unsubscribe or block promotional senders

For a more long-term fix to repeat offenders, make sure to unsubscribe, mark emails as spam, or block the sender. On some emails, Gmail shows an unsubscribe button (beside the sender on desktop, in the three-dot menu in the app). On emails where this option isn’t shown, an unsubscribe link is present at the bottom of the email.

Cleaning up your Gmail inbox is a breeze

Though promotional emails are a pain, Gmail makes it easy to clean up your inbox. You can delete promotional emails in your inbox, filter out incoming emails, unsubscribe from mailing lists, and hide the Promotions tab. In addition to these strategies, you can dive deeper into Gmail filters or learn to use Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

By Jacob Estep

Jacob is a designer-developer with a love for tinkering. He loves helping people get more out of their devices and has essentially been his family’s personal IT department since high school.

Sourced from Android Police

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5 Ways to Make Your Marketing Emails More Personal — Without Personalization

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By Jordie van Rijn

Personalization is by no means a guarantee your emails will feel more personal.

I often hear marketers say they want to use more personalization in their marketing. Using profile data to make emails more tailored and user specific. And a lot are doing it. In fact, a recent report from the Data-Driven Marketing Association (DDMA) found that 63% of organizations say that personalized customer contact has already proven its value to them.

But personalization is by no means a guarantee your emails will feel more personal.

Notice the word “feel.” That’s because a personal email isn’t about the amount of data used to personalize, it’s about the email feeling personal. So how to make it feel personal?

A preferred way is to use the content and language to make that personal connection. Let’s look at seven ways to make your email hit harder without using actual personalization or data.

1. For Better Email, Use the Right Ideology Patterns

Your word choice reflects what’s important to you. Brands that write from their own perspective overly use “me,” “myself” and “I” and talk about themselves — a lot. Their brand, their gains, their goals, their interests, their news, etc.

The research “Top Language Tips for Better Email” from Everlytic & BreadCrumbs gives some great insights. They analysed 23,000 words and over 50 emails from the financial industry. Now financials are known for using complex and impersonal text, but the research discovered two very interesting things.

One is the use of ideology patterns. Language reflects what we find important. You can imagine that these themes are the ones they found most frequently in financial industry email marketing. The themes are Incentives, Aspiration, Trust and Support. By setting the ideologies to match the reader, you are setting yourself up for a valued experience.

ideology patterns

 

Switch out your own goals in favour for the readers’ pain (and how you solve it). It is very easy to start writing from a writer’s perspective. But instead, just skip all that. Your message should end with the benefits your reader gets. So not what the writer wants, but what the reader gets. That makes it easier to focus on WIIFM: What’s in it for me. Don’t say, “I hope you will enjoy … ” just skip the whole, “I hope you will.” Even stronger is to motivate those benefits (why should they care?) by focusing on the problem, the pain, first.

2. Get Closer Through Connection-Based Language in Email

What I found even more interesting was the conclusion from the same research by Everlytic:

“Brands that use connection-based language create a better reader experience that results in boosted levels of engagement. And the trend for top mailers is that they all used connection-based language.”

The four most used connection words from the study are “your,” “you,” “we,” and “our.”

Subjective, objective, possessive and reflective. Here is a table that shows the various options in addressing people.

personal pronouns
grammar monster

When using words like “your,” “you,” “we,” and “our,” it helps build a stronger relationship with the person on the other side.

An example to show the difference:

thank you for subscribing
essence of email

 

This is an interesting example of a welcome email we can learn from — it is a great illustration of what goes into connection based language.

For quick and casual readers the email seems to have great copy. It involves the audience in a personal way, and shows personality, so that is already great. But depending on how you read it, it can feel very self-centred (and trying a bit too hard). Now why is that?

The text is self-centred, because the writer uses “I,” “me,” “mine” very often: 12 times. Almost every sentence starts with an action or feeling of the writer.

3. Do the Email We-We Test

It’s pretty easy to spot a selfishly written message, once you know how. Use the We-We test: Count how many times you use “I, me, our, us, our product, company name etc.” vs. “You, your, ours, etc.”, then see how you can reduce the mentions of yourself in favour of connection-based language.

A few small tweaks and an email can feel way less about yourself and more about the reader feeling appreciated and engaged. So when we add more connection-based language, focus on the connection, the reader and the relationship. So yes, the example is a personal letter, and has merits. But as a rule — there has to be value in it for the reader, in contrast with 100% conversion focused emails.

women you tshirt

 

4.  Make the Reader Feel Part of a Group in Your Email

What if we are able to make the reader feel like a part of a group of insiders, a community? Not only would it be focusing on the relationship, it would also redefine what “us,” “our” and “we” means in your writing. For example: “Us both being marketers, we know that…” Or wording like, “let’s,” meaning, “let us both.” In this case the meaning shifts to the connection, the community, the relation.

5. Simply Say It in a Conversational Tone

Hmmm … when you want to make your emails more personal, a conversational tone works like magic. Now how to “go convo”? The easiest way is to write like you talk and like you’re specifically talking to one person.

Take that very literally. So we aren’t writing, we are talking. And not to a group, but to someone specific.

For instance, my man John. This can be a real person you know, or a persona if you have ’em. Start talking with John, move your lips. Now we’re starting to get there.

What happens? Sounds, tiny sentences, exaggeration, emotion, shorthand, contractions, emphasis and lyrical devices start to pop up. Hallelujah, amazing! It is the million dollar tip. Conversational writing comes over way more natural and personal.

A lot of people vocalize your text when reading. That means when they read, they’ll hear it. A voice in their mind. Very weird, I know. But you may be doing the same right now reading this text.

Bonus tip: Use “my” in your call-to-action. This may feel a bit odd in the beginning, but test it. Use the possessive singular in the call to action and buttons. So use “my.” That switch of perspective does make sense for the reader, even if it doesn’t seem to make much sense at first.

Don’t say: “Claim a seat.”

Better:  “Claim your seat.”

Even better: “Claim my seat.”

Conclusion on Getting Personal With Your Emails

A personal email is all about making the email feel personal — 53% of email marketers do not use any segmentation or personalization in their email campaigns. But with language to make that personal connection, you can make your emails more relatable and hit harder. Pick the right ideology patterns, use connection based language, make them part of the group and always keep the text conversational.

 

By Jordie van Rijn

Jordie van Rijn is an independent email and eCRM marketing consultant. Entrepreneur Magazine titled him “One of 50 Online Marketing Influencers to Watch”.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Signed up for 100 Marketing Emails. Here’s What I Learned

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By Chad S. White
From confusing signup forms to dead-end confirmation pages, learn what to avoid to maximize every signup interaction.

I recently signed up to receive promotional emails from 100 B2C brands that span the retail, travel, consumer products and media industries. I noticed five major areas of opportunity for brands to improve their signup processes:

1. Signup Forms Often Hard to Find

Unmissable signup modals and other popups are common, but far from universal. When not used, brands almost always include their email signups in their footers. If nowhere else, consumers expect to find them there, although that doesn’t mean that brands can’t increase their visibility by also including signups above the fold, but few do. Brands should seriously consider that, as many B2C homepages have grown significantly longer in recent years, which means a lot more scrolling.

Brands can also boost promotional email signups by including an actual signup form on their homepage footer. Some merely include a signup link, which is often mixed in with lots of administrative links and therefore easy to miss.

2. Too Many Ask for Phone Numbers

There’s no faster way to crater your signup form completion rate than asking for multiple forms of contact information. For that reason, I always advise brands to focus first on collecting email addresses, which is the form of contact consumers are most open to with brands.

A number of brands were clearly aware of the danger of asking for too much contact info, but instead of asking for mobile phone numbers post-signup, they included an email address field on the first page of the signup and then a required mobile phone number field on the second page.

This is likely to stop many would-be subscribers in their tracks, causing them to abandon the form. Beyond that, it then raises questions about whether the person is subscribed to the brand’s promotional emails and whether they’ll get the signup incentive that was promised. That’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of unanswered questions that have been introduced to the interaction, which may cause the person to become frustrated and angry and look to other brands.

For my part, I wasn’t interested in receiving SMS messages from any of the brands I approached, so I abandoned every signup form when I encountered this scenario. Roughly half of the time, I ended up receiving promotional emails from the brand. The others didn’t capitalize on my interest because of their overreach.

3. Unclear and Misleading Signup Commitments

Part of the issue around asking for mobile phone numbers appears to stem from many of these signup forms actually being for loyalty programs and not email programs, with the former often requiring phone numbers for some reason. That said, based on the signup appeals for these forms, it’s usually impossible to know what you’re signing up for.

That’s because these forms are almost entirely focused on promoting a signup incentive, especially when a modal is used. That emphasis undermines the relationship these programs are trying to establish and sets brands up for higher unsubscribe rates soon after signup.

4. Dead-End Confirmation and Preference Pages

When someone raises their hand and signs up to hear from your brand, that’s a moment of high engagement. Unfortunately, many brands don’t make the most of this positive momentum. In lots of instances, signup confirmation pages only confirm the signup and don’t direct new subscribers to do anything else of value.

Some brands do direct their new subscribers to select preferences — with standouts like CNN, Levi’s and Bass Pro Shops offering lots of detailed choices. However, at the end of that process, many of the brands collecting preferences also let the momentum fade by not trying to drive the next high-value action.

Ask yourself, “What’s the next one or two most valuable things a new subscriber could do?” And then build that into your signup process. Then ask yourself that same question again, and add that in. If you ask people to only do one thing, you’re unlikely to get them to do much more than that. Whereas if you ask folks to do three things, then many will do two of them and some do all three. Be optimistic!

5. DOI Increasingly Used

Eight of the 100 brands I signed up for use double opt-in confirmation for their homepage signup form. While objectively that’s a small percentage, it’s much higher than just a few years ago.

This increase in adoption is a positive sign, given the ongoing targeting of open forms (such as homepage email signup forms) by bots and the launch of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which makes it hard for brands to determine if new subscribers are engaging. There is a wide spectrum of audience acquisition sources, each of which have their own risk-benefit profile. Make sure you’re selectively using tools like CAPTCHA, double-entry confirmation and DOI to protect your brand and email deliverability.

Final Thoughts on Maximizing Email Signups

With businesses preparing for a likely recession, while simultaneously trying to adapt to the sunsetting of third-party cookies and privacy changes like Apple’s MPP, growing first-party audiences has become increasingly critical.

If you haven’t audited the signup process of each of your acquisition sources in the past year, I highly recommend you make it a priority so you can maximize audience growth and create fruitful, lasting relationships.

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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How to easily unsubscribe from marketing emails right in Gmail

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By Andrew Romero

We’ve all been there. Emails are stacking up, and none of them seem important in the least. Fortunately, there’s a feature in Gmail that allows you to unsubscribe from emails with a couple of taps or clicks. This guide will take you through it.

An easier way to unsubscribe

Normally, we tend to answer useless emails by opening them up, scrolling straight to the bottom, and hitting “Unsubscribe.” While this is the tried and true method of unsubscribing from emails, it can sometimes be a little counterintuitive. A major job of a marketing company is to retain prospective clients. The problem they face is if you go to unsubscribe, the company loses out on potential business. This is the reason why a lot of times the unsubscribe page looks jumbled and has material presented in a way to keep you on board.

Google has implemented a way to unsubscribe from certain emails for a few years now. The company has gone through several iterations of this dedicated button – among its many other Gmail experiments – and finally landed on a prompt you can access from specific emails. This button takes away all of the marketing noise you have to crawl through when unsubscribing from some companies and makes it easy to leave the email list with a couple of quick taps. When you hit the unsubscribe button in Gmail, you’ll no longer see emails from that company and you can keep cleaning out your inbox.

How to unsubscribe from emails in Gmail

If you want to make use of this helpful feature, you’ll need to have access to Gmail on a mobile device. Gmail for desktop doesn’t quite utilize the button at this point. On your phone, however, unsubscribing from marketing emails in Gmail is pretty easy. Here’s how to do it:

  1. On your mobile device, head to the Gmail app.
  2. Look through your emails and find marketing or promotional emails you want to unsubscribe from.
  3. Open the email.
  4. Find the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the email and tap it.
  5. A menu will appear. Tap Unsubscribe.
  6. Confirm you want to unsubscribe.
unsubscribe from emails gmail
unsubscribe from emails gmail
unsubscribe from emails gmail

Once you do that, you’re given an option to report the message as spam. Generally, you don’t have to and the emails will halt. This is a great way to easily stop receiving emails from companies and organizations that you didn’t want in the first place.

More on Gmail:

By Andrew Romero

Sourced from 9to5Google

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9 Reasons Why No One Wants to Open Your Marketing Emails

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By Geoffrey James

Even if you’re selling the world’s best product, you won’t win customers if they don’t open the email.

As email marketing continues to grow in popularity, there’s little sign that marketers know what they’re doing. Below are nine marketing emails I received in the past week, all of which make basic, fatal errors.

Quick note on terminology: the “teaser” is the first 20 or so words in the email, which typically appear in the recipient’s Inbox display. Other than the Subject line, the teaser is what causes the recipient to open the email.

Note: all of the email below were sent to me unsolicited, so I’m not bothering to edit out the names or the contact information. Just to be clear, with the exception of #9 (which is phishing SPAM), their product may very well be fabulous.

1. Apologizing for your email.

This example is particularly egregious since it comes from a large sales training firm. They’ve not only wasted the first half of their teaser repeating their corporate name but wasted the second half with the unsubscribe explanation. Doh!

2. Puzzling Subject line and teaser.

When it comes to email marketing, mysterious is the enemy of good. No decision-maker opens an email out of mere curiosity. Unless your email seems immediately relevant, most (sane) people will delete or ignore it.

3. Repeating the Subject line in the teaser.

I see this all the time: wasting the first half of the teaser repeating the information that’s in the Subject line. Once is enough. Ideally the teaser should expand on the Subject line to help provide a compelling case to open the email.

4. Putting the date in the teaser (twice).

Seriously? Every email system in the world displays the date when the email was received. Nobody cares when it was sent. Also note that the first part of the teaser is wasted repeating the identity. Dumb.

5. A self-centered teaser.

Dude, I don’t care what you want and I especially don’t care if you’re available to assist me (as always?). In email marketing you must establish your relevance before bringing yourself into the scenario.

6. An incomprehensible Subject line.

Say whut?

7. A questionable sender’s email address.

Wow. AOL. Is that still a thing? Also, what’s the craziness of putting the contact information at the top? If you’re serious about email marketing, get a serious email address. Not Gmail or Hotmail and certainly not this refugee from the 1990s.

8. “Click to Webpage” in your teaser.

Unfortunately, several email marketing programs default with this ridiculous question in the teaser. It not only wastes the teaser but sounds like it’s something from when email was something new and unreliable.

9. Recipient’s name in the Subject line.

Probably the best way to make certain your email will be deleted. Only SPAMmers do this. Please note that the message is indeed SPAM, but I frequently see legitimate email marketers trying this hackneyed, counterproductive personalization.

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The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Geoffrey James

Sourced from Inc.

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