Google provided marketers with a great tool for promotional campaigns in the Gmail app. Emails that get to the Top Deals (Top Picks) section of the Promotions tab can be brought to life by adding annotations.
Before opening an email, a client will see a highlighted discount code, a company logo, and other eye-catching elements of the annotation.
Stripo has tools that allow annotating emails for the Promotions tab with just a few clicks.
Restrictions and prerequisites:
Before you start adding the annotations to emails, it is important to take into account a few important things.
Since the annotations are currently in the beta stage, the annotations are for mobile devices only (Google is going to allow desktop devices in the future).
Besides, the annotations will not work for recipients from the EU.
Google annotations are only for whitelisted senders. To get whitelisted, send an email to Google at p-Promo-Outreach@google.com.
Google uses its own algorithms to determine whether to display the annotation for a particular recipient.
Because of this, single test emails will not work as the annotations are only available for bulk sending. To test the annotations, use mass sends.
On the recipient's side, an annotation will be displayed if the following conditions are met:
The email gets to the Promotions tab;
Subscribers have the Promotions tab available;
The email gets to the Top Deals. It depends on subscribers' preferences, the sender's reputation, the ESP's reputation, and, sometimes, the offer's expiration date: if an offer expires in 3 days, it has a much higher chance of getting to the Top Deals.
How to add the annotation to an email template?
Stripo has two solutions for creating the annotations: the Stripo editor’s built-in tool and the annotations builder on our website.
Both of the solutions are described below.
Using the built-in tool:
Each annotation of the built-in tool can contain up to 5 elements.
To open the annotations tool, go to the "Message Settings" tab at the right side panel, then turn on the control "Annotate email for Gmail".
Now we can see toggle buttons for the 5 annotation elements. By using them, we can add the following elements to the annotation:
The "Offer Badge" for showing current discounts;
The "Promocode Badge", where you can add a discount code;
The "Sender Logo" so that customers could recognize a familiar brand;
The "Promo Image" for adding a wide banner image;
And also the "End of Discount Offer" to set a deadline for promo campaign;
Using the Annotations builder:
The Annotations builder allows the creation of various types of annotations.
Our blog has a detailed guide on how to generate a code for annotation. Here, we will describe how to insert the ready-to-use code into an email template.
1. Open the Code editor;
2. If a particular template element is selected, close its Settings panel by clicking the cross icon. It is done to make sure that the HTML of the whole template is displayed;
3. Copy the code from the Annotation's builder by clicking on the button Copy Code, and choose either the option JSON or Microdata (the options differ, see 4.1 and 4.2 below);
4.1. If you have selected the option JSON, insert the code into the <head> section, right after the <title></title> element, as in the screenshot below;
4.2. If you have selected the option Microdata, insert the code into the <body> section, before the closing </body> tag at the very end, as in the screenshot below.
Thank you for taking your time to read our articles. We hope you will find this information helpful.
If you have any additional questions, please email us at support@stripo.email.
We would be glad to talk with you.