From Gmail's Promotion Section to Primary Section.

Hi @USMarketer, 

Thanks for your question. Inbox placement is a critical concern for email marketers, as we all strive to position our emails as visibly as possible to our subscribers. Unfortunately, this is an area where we have minimal control, since inbox placement (including Gmail tabs) is determined primarily by the inbox provider (and the actual Gmail user). Furthermore, it is good to acknowledge that many of our marketing emails ARE promotional and SHOULD land in the Promotions tab. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many users are aware and know to look in the Promotions tab for our emails (which can make users more apt to engage with our emails in the right place at the right time).

There are some best practices we can (and should) follow as email marketers to protect and improve our sender reputation. These can help improve our odds for placement in the Primary tab. 

1. Follow Gmail’s bulk-sending guidelines, including domain authentication. This is simply mandatory. <link>
2. Send only to engaged subscribers. Subscriber engagement with our emails is a positive signal to Gmail. 
3. Send relevant, personalized content. Same as #2, more engagement = better signals to Gmail.
4. Don’t overdo it with complex HTML, images, and links in emails. These are core signals of promotional emails for Gmail. 
5. Ask your subscribers to drag your emails to the Primary tab or to add your sender address to their contacts.

*Essentially, our guiding principle should be to understand our audience’s preferences and send them emails that they actually want to receive, open and click. 

Finally, yes...there are several online tools you can use to monitor the inbox placement of your emails. You can also create a seed list of test inboxes, periodically send one of your emails to your seed list, and evaluate the tab placement within those test accounts. 

I hope this helps! Please reach back out if you have further questions.