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eye-catching

Gmail really, really wants you to look at your promotions tab

The email provider is experimenting with a new grid feature which will turn any marketing emails into picture ads.

FOR THOSE WHO regularly use Gmail, one of the handiest features is the ability to break up your inbox into different tabs, mainly primary, social, promotions and updates.

For most of us, we would focus on the first two tabs while updates would get a check every now and again. However, the promotions tab wouldn’t get much of a look in as it’s mainly full of email ads and newsletters from services we’ve signed up to, but rarely check.

Now Gmail is running a trial feature which turns any marketing emails in the promotions tab into visual ads. Through the trial, it’s allowing users to display these emails either in the traditional list view or in a grid format.

image(GIF: Official Gmail Blog)

The trial is open to English-speaking users with @gmail addresses and you can sign up for it here, although you may not get access to it straight away.

While it might seem strange to make email ads look like this, a visual approach could give Gmail users a reason to at least scan the promotions tab to see if anything catches their eye, but whether it will actually work or not is another story entirely.

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