How to receive emails in Gmail primary inbox – Handling Gmail tabs

Have you subscribed to any email newsletters and not at all receiving any one of it in your inbox. That may be because those email newsletters delivered to your Gmail promotional tab which in most cases we do not open it. Is your business hugely depends on email marketing if so then are you gathering data on your email campaigns, if yes then how is the stats? Do you feel that the email click through rate or open rate is low, even that may be because your email lands straight to your recipients promotional tab and not on primary tab?

You know that in Gmail you can see three tabs at the top such as primary, social and promotional. I personally love that feature of mails getting organized. Also I can see that 50% of email lands in my promotional tab, 30% email lands in social tab and only 20% of email drops on primary tab which is personal and highly relevant. Why is that? In the middle of 2013 Google updated Gmail with this new interface adding three different tabs (primary, social, promotional) which are used for categorizing incoming emails. This feature is designed to make user inbox clear and organized. It will be helpful for them to see the most priority emails first. Also this email classification will be very useful for users to spotlight and read important messages on same category all at the same time.

Also read: Importance of email marketing

Here is how your mails are categorized into following tabs

Primary – Messages that are highly relevant and personal will land in this folder such as mails from friends, family and whatever that doesn’t suits on other tabs.

Social – You know that most of your social networking site notifications and messages will land on social tab. Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Gaming sites, dating sites etc.

Promotional – It is the place for junk emails. All deals, offers, marketing emails and any promotional emails can be seen here.

Other than this there are two other tabs such as updates and forums which you can enable it if you want. To enable these two tabs click on the + sign next to promotional tab and then select the tabs to enable.

Updates – This is where you will receive auto generated messages, confirm messages, update notification, statements and bills.

Forums – All your online discussion board, mailing lists, and messages from online communities will appear in this tab.

This feature is useful for Gmail users, but how about a marketer who’s business greatly relies on email marketing. Just like the spam folder, the promotional tab in Gmail is a folder where most of the junk emails are filtered. E-commerce promotions, new product deals, services, automatic emails like newsletters, RSS and even  important banking messages will mostly end up in promotion tab. Recently I found to be not receiving any email newsletters from the blog’s that I personally love reading and subscribed to. Lately I found that all those emails are delivered to my Gmail promotional tab which I don’t open most of the time.

This promotional tab not only concerns business owners, but also blogs that send daily and weekly newsletters are also affected a lot. So if you are a user who missing your favorite blog newsletters then know how to receive emails in Gmail primary inbox. If you are the one who feel like your email newsletter open rate is low then be sure to educate your recipient about moving mails from promotional tab to primary inbox.

Also read: How to access multiple Gmail accounts in one browser

How to receive emails in Gmail primary inbox – Handling Gmail tabs

Whenever you receive a new mail you will see an indicator on each tab telling how many new messages you have received since you last checked. Mostly you can see lots of new messages in promotional tab. All those email are automatically sorted to such tabs by Gmail which you can handle it according to your own preference. If you find any of your private, personal or most important conversation landing on any other tabs instead of primary tab then you can move it permanently.

Left click on the email, hold it, drag the email to primary tab or just right click on any email, click move to tab and select the tab where you wish to move the email. When done you will see a small notification at the top telling “The conversation has been moved to “primary” Do this for feature messages from “this sender “. Click on yes to permanently receive all messages from that sender on your primary tab. Now all the upcoming emails from that particular sender will land on your Gmail primary tab and not on promotions tab.

Also read: How to create signature in Gmail with image, logo and HTML links

Tip for small businesses

Most of the online business (b2b, b2c) engages in email marketing to stay connected with their clients and consumers. Not all people will view their promotions tab so to reach your audience you have to make sure that your email lands on your recipient primary inbox. Also you have to frequently monitor your email analytics like number of open rates, click through rates etc. From my point of experience I found that Google places email to promotional tab that are automated (not human sent) like RSS. Here are few tips to land all your emails in Gmail primary tab

• Mention your recipient name in email


• Be sure to add subject in emails


• Keep the message short and clear


• Avoid using more images in the email body


• Try not to add more links in the email; if you do so then it is a sign of promotion.


• Lastly make sure to educate your audience about receiving emails in primary inbox.

Hope this article helped you to manage Gmail tabs effectively, receiving email in Gmail primary inbox and few tips to land your emails in recipient’s primary inbox. If you like this article then please share it on social sites and to receive more useful updates we suggest you to subscribe our RSS feeds.

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How to fix Feedburner feed double titles issue – Quick tip

Most of the wordpress users syndicate their RSS feeds using Feedburner. For those who do not know, Feedburner is a service that delivers your recent blog posts via email to your subscribers. Have you ever seen your Feedburner subscriber stats count jumping up and down, it goes crazy at times and it is a glitch! Recently we found some different issue with our Feedburner feed that it is showing two feed titles like this (blog title blog title), look at the image below. We couldn’t identify the problem that is causing this issue until we found the solution online. So is your Feedburner feed showing double titles? If so then it is simple to fix. Here we will show you how to fix Feedburner feed double titles issue.

We still remember that when we configured Feedburner with our wordpress site the title is perfect and the email title and subject that Feedburner delivers is also perfect. But recently after changing to custom theme we found some abnormal behavior of Feedburner delivering the email that is it shows two titles in email and in feed. So we found out that the problem is not with Feedburner, it is with wordpress that is showing double titles in RSS feed. Here is how you fix that.

Fixing Feedburner feed double titles issue

To solve this double title problem you need access to your wordpress files that is via cpanel or ftp. Login to your site’s control panel and go to the file manager where you will see all your wordpress files. Now open wp-includes folder and in that folder you will see two files named feed-rss.php and feed-rss2.php. Just right click on those files, click on edit and then press CTRL + F to search for this line.

After finding it replace that line with the below code and when you done modifying those two files click on save. Now clear your browser cache and check whether the double titles issue is gone, if not then try the Feedburner method below.

How to remove double title in Feedburner

Login to your Feedburner account and then choose your blog feed. Next click on optimize tab and in optimize tab you will see Title/Description burner. Open that one, enter your new feed title and when done save changes and activate the service. That’s it, to make sure the title is fixed go visit your Feedburner feed.

Hope this helped you to fix Feedburner double titles issue, if you like this article then please subscribe to our RSS feeds (you can find the subscribe box above) to get more updates.

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Understaning CSS selectors for beginners – ‘>’, ‘+’ and ‘~’ symbols

CSS is an absolute website beautifier, with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) you can make your website just appear like anything you want. Hope most of you know about fundamental CSS rules, so what we are here to refer is about CSS selectors. Here we will explain some familiar CSS selectors and along with that we will also make you understand what ‘>’, ‘+’ and ‘~’ symbols mean in CSS selectors.

CSS selectors for beginners

In order to style particular element in your website you have to first find out the selector. In CSS, “selector” is an instruction that tells web browser which element to style for that particular CSS. All HTML element that starts with opening tag <> and ends with closing tag are selectors (for example:

Some Text

, Some Link). Other than that there are element selector (p{}), id selector (#container{}) and class selector (.widget box title{}). In the example below you can see the selector that is before the opening brace (.h2 posttitle). Alright, here we will describe CSS selectors one by one in order and this post is for absolute beginners.

 .h2 posttitle { text-align: center; color: blue; font-size: 32px; } 

Universal selector (*)

Yep, it is global and a powerful selector that targets each and every element on the whole document and it is applied using asterisk symbol ( * ).

* {color: green;}

Assume that the HTML document contains elements like h1, h3, paragraph, ordered list, unordered list and preformatted text. So you want to apply green color to all those elements, so instead of writing CSS like this (body, h1, h3, p, ul, ol, li, pre{color: green}) you can use the universal selector.

Element type selector

Element type selector matches every HTML elements in the document tree by its tag name. For example you have a page with three h2 headings (

Some H2 text

), so adding the below CSS applies to all h2 tags.

 h2 { font-color: #444; font-family: helvetica,sans-serif; } 

ID selector – #

Id selector are identified using pound # sign and it matches an HTML element that has ID attribute defined.

For example you can style this element

by applying CSS like this.

 #bodyblock { Padding: 15px; Width: 70% } 

Class selector – (.)

Id’s are just styling single element but on the other hand classes are used to style the group of elements that has a same class name defined. This is the most powerful selector which is used extremely. HTML elements have a class defined like this

and it is called using css .mainheding like this.

 .mainheading { Text-align: center; } 

Descendant selector

Descendant selector matches all the elements that are descendants of the defined element; it targets the nested ones by separating two selectors using blank space. For example you know that you can nest HTML elements inside one another like this.

 
 
First Heading
 
 
Second Heading
 
 
Third Heading
 
 
 
 

So to style just the third heading you can use descendant selector like this.

 div div div h2{ color:red; } 

Attribute selector

CSS can target HTML elements using their attributes for example:

 
 First name: 
 Your Email: 
  
 

To style the submit button you can use CSS like this.

 input[type=submit] { Width: 30%; Cursor: pointer; Color: #fff; Background-color: #000; } 

Understanding ‘>’, ‘+’, ‘~’ symbols in CSS selectors

Alright we have seen the basic and most used CSS selectors, other than this there are pseudo-class and pseudo-element selectors which we are not going to discuss here. Most beginners confuse greater than >, plus + and tilde ~ symbols in CSS selectors, so here lets see that in brief.

Child selector ‘>’

This selector selects the direct children’s of the particular element. For example take a look at the HTML and CSS below. The CSS #sample > h2 just targets the immediate child of div id sample that is the rules will  be only applied to first heading and third heading and not the second heading which is nested inside.
————-HTML

 
 
First Heading
 
 
 Second Heading
 
 
 Third heading 
 
 

————–CSS

 div#sample > h2 { background-color: yellow; color:blue; font-size: 22px; } 

Adjacent sibling selector (+)

Adjacent sibling combinator uses + sign that targets all selectors having same parent but the target is immediate sibling that is it selects all elements that comes next to the first one.

 
 
Para One
 
Para Two
 
block
 
Para Three
 
Fourth Para
 
 

From the example above if we use selector like p + p {} it only gets applied to para two and fourth para. And if we remove that div block then the CSS will be applied to second para, third para and fourth para, leaving the first one.

 p + p { background-color: yellow; color:blue; font-size: 22px; } 

General Sibling Combinator

General sibling selector uses ~ tilde symbol and it is similar to adjacent sibling selector, but the thing is the second selector doesn’t have to immediately succeed the first one. It means it selects every element after the former selector. Take the above HTML what we used for adjacent sibling selector as an example. Now the below CSS will only be applied to second para, third para as well as fourth para.

 p ~ p { background-color: yellow; color:blue; font-size: 22px; } 

Hope as a beginner you have understood common CSS selectors and when to use ‘>”, ‘+’ and ‘~’ symbols. CSS are very fun to learn and implement, try playing with CSS in your website and you will grasp it very easily and also try to use browser developer tool (CTRL + Shift + I) which will be helpful to play around with css. This is our first CSS tutorial and in next coming days we will be posting a lot of HTML and CSS tutorials, so to receive more such updates subscribe to our feeds or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

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