My campaign emails are being sent to the "promotions" tab in Gmail. How can I make sure they go to a user's primary inbox?

Google started more strictly enforcing its bulk send rules in November 2025, which has impacted how emails are being delivered to Gmail users.

Here are some steps to make sure your campaign emails are making it to a user's primary inbox in Gmail:

• Review the email deliverability guide and ensure you're following all technical best practices.
• Make sure your emails aren't too large in size, which risks them getting flagged as spam or promotional. Appeals with lots of images, moving graphics, or other heavy HTML are more at risk of being delivered to tabs other than the Primary tab. 
• Ask your readers to manually move emails into their Primary tab by dragging and dropping into the correct tab or using the "move to tab" function in Gmail. You could add this request to "move us to Primary" as a P.S. in editorial or fundraising appeals, or add this line to welcome email automations (see an example from The Trace here).
• Use a subject line checking tool like this one or this one to avoid spam filters and flag any phrases or words that might harm performance. In the case of fundraising emails, phrasing like '4 hours left' or 'time is running out' might get read along the same lines as sale emails from brands, which could be why messages are moved to the promotions tab. 
• Be mindful of the sender, since fundraising appeals sometimes go to the Promotions tab if they're sent from an email address like membership@org (instead of newsletters@org for editorial products). This is generally contingent on the user's settings.