Open Gmail recently and you might notice things look… tidier.
Order confirmations and shipping updates have been moved to a new Purchases tab. The Promotions tab seems to surface the offers you actually care about. And when you finally go to unsubscribe from a brand that’s been emailing daily since 2017, there’s a sleek new Manage Subscriptions section that makes it easier than ever to clean house.
These changes might sound cosmetic, but they signal one of Gmail’s biggest reorganizations in years, reshaping how marketing, transactional, and subscription emails are displayed and prioritized in your customers’ inbox.
To understand what’s new and how it affects senders like you, we spoke with Intuit Mailchimp’s David Broughton, a Solutions Consultant, and Senior Onboarding Specialist Mike Flappan, who help businesses of all sizes navigate deliverability every day.
Here’s what’s new
1. Promotions: now ranked by engagement
The biggest update is to the Promotions tab, which can now be sorted by “Most Relevant.” Instead of showing emails purely by recency, Gmail will now use engagement signals like opens and clicks to determine which senders appear near the top.
For marketers, that means visibility in Gmail isn’t just about when you send, but how much your audience interacts with what you send. If your subscribers consistently open, click, and engage, your emails will appear higher up in their Promotions feed.
“Put your head in the mind of the customer,” says Broughton. “What do they want to receive? What are they going to respond to? For somebody who's frequently interacting with you, your email might be right at the top of Promotions. Whereas for somebody who hasn't interacted in a while, it's probably going to be lower down.”
Gmail’s logic is simple: people interact with the emails they actually want. The new ranking system mirrors how users already behave, rewarding genuine interest over frequency. The inbox is evolving to look similar to social media algorithms – less an RSS feed, or even a filter, and more a reflection of human attention.
For engaged audiences, this update is a win. It rewards strong sender reputation and punishes batch-and-blast campaigns that don’t earn attention.
2. Purchases: transactional emails get their own lane
Next, Gmail has introduced a Purchases tab, a dedicated home for receipts, order confirmations, and shipping notifications. It’s Gmail’s way of sorting transactional from promotional content.
This change matters because Gmail now expects transactional messages to stay strictly transactional. “A transactional email is for when a recipient does something that you need to respond to, and that's the end of the transaction,” says Broughton. Think: “Here's your password reset.” Or, “Here's your order notification.”
Including upsells, banners, or “while you’re here” CTAs in those emails could cause Gmail to reclassify them as promotional, moving them out of the Purchases tab and potentially lowering visibility.
Flappan advises keeping channels clearly separated: “You don't want Gmail’s algorithms to flag a transactional message as promotional and put it into the Promotions folder.” One way to do that is to give your transactional emails a separate subdomain (see Your playbook for Gmail’s new inbox, below).
3. Manage Subscriptions: unsubscribing just got easier
The new Manage Subscriptions area gives Gmail users a single place to view all their active subscriptions and see exactly how many emails each sender has sent recently. Heavy senders appear first, making it much easier for users to unsubscribe with a single click.
If you’re sending too frequently, especially to people who rarely open, expect to appear high on that list. “If you're sending every day,” says Broughton, “they're going to go to Manage Subscriptions, see that they’re getting tons of emails from a particular sender they haven’t opened in forever, and decide that they're going to unsubscribe.”
But it’s not all bad news. Gmail’s new setup could actually improve performance by surfacing your most engaged subscribers. “Open rates should go up, because people are probably going to unsubscribe more,” says Flappan. “As people unsubscribe, you're going to have more engaged people on your list. That's a good thing! You’d rather have people unsubscribe rather than be unengaged.”
This reinforces a familiar best practice: make it easy for subscribers to control their preferences, or opt down instead of opting out altogether.
Why Gmail made these changes (and what it means for you)
At its core, this is about Gmail improving the user experience. Google wants its customers to spend more time on its platform, and that means helping them see the messages they actually want.
“They’re essentially trying to make a better user experience so that you're on the Google platform longer,” explains Flappan. The more useful Gmail feels, the more likely people are to keep using it, and that means better engagement for everyone, including marketers.
As Broughton puts it, Gmail is simply “organizing in a way that’s most helpful for their customers.” These updates aren’t designed to punish businesses—they’re about rewarding relevance.
Gmail’s changes reflect a broader truth in modern email: engagement is the new deliverability.
Pre-2023, many marketers assumed that if they had a subscriber’s email address, they had a guaranteed spot in the inbox. That’s no longer true. It’s been said that marketers once had a right to the inbox, but now the inbox is a privilege. That privilege is earned through sending valuable, expected, and respectful content.
So while Gmail’s algorithms have become more sophisticated, the best strategy remains the same: focus on engagement, segmentation, and consistency.
Your playbook for Gmail’s new inbox
- First, take a deep breath. Gmail’s changes shouldn’t impact your approach all that much, assuming you're already following best practices, says Flappan. That means “sending to your engaged contacts, making sure that people are explicitly opted-in, and sending them content that they want rather than content that you want.” If you’re already doing this, keep going—and congrats.
- Prioritize engagement over volume. Send more frequently to your most engaged subscribers, those who regularly open, click, and interact with your emails. This tells Gmail your messages deserve to be seen and it keeps your reputation strong.
- Segment dynamically. Move unengaged contacts out of your main campaigns, adjust the send cadence for quieter subscribers, and create re-engagement flows for those who’ve gone cold. Dynamic segmentation signals health and relevance, and it also enables you to better personalize your emails with better, intentional relevance. This keeps your list fresh and responsive.
- Send consistently, but not constantly. Aim for a steady rhythm. Sending at least every two to three weeks helps maintain recognition and reputation, while over-sending can cause fatigue. Gmail rewards regular engagement more than sudden bursts of activity.
- Separate transactional from promotional. Keep different types of communication in distinct streams. You can even use separate subdomains (for example, notifications.yourdomain.com) for receipts and order updates so Gmail doesn’t confuse them with promotional messages.
- Keep automations fresh. Your automated emails, especially welcomes and onboarding sequences, set expectations for your relationship. Ensure your welcome email goes out immediately, explains what subscribers can expect, and points them to your Mailchimp Preferences Center, a place where they can choose what type of content they want to receive, and how often.
- Running out of content? Ask for reviews. Sometimes busy business owners think they don’t have enough content to send more than once a month. One creative way to create email content is to ask your most active, engaged customers for reviews in exchange for a discount.
- Don’t fear unsubscribes. A clean list is a healthy list. Let uninterested people go. It improves engagement rates and helps Gmail view your audience as genuinely responsive. Where possible, give subscribers the option to reduce frequency rather than leave entirely. You can also set up a reactivation campaign to win back these less-engaged subscribers.