Gmail's new Purchases tab collects receipts and shipping updates in one place, but brands are now stuffing promotional content into transactional emails. This risks confusing customers and breaking email deliverability, so companies need to keep marketing separate from order confirmations.
Purchase view is a really interesting, but it's not about promotional emails at all. It's all about transactional emails and how brands almost need to keep them separate. Did you see this?
That's right. And I think this is one where I think a lot of brands are going to get tripped up, unfortunately, without even realizing it. Gmail created this new purchases view that is going to consolidate all the purchase-related emails, things like your receipt, shipping notifications, order updates into one place. It's going to even highlight packages arriving soon with these scannable cards at the top. And I actually have got them.
I've been ordering like prescription medicines and I've been getting emails actually saying your order is I think as a consumer it's great for us, but the problem is that many brands have gotten into the habit of stuffing promotional content into their transactional emails. Like you order something and the order confirmation has this huge banner that says buy this other thing for 20% off.
That's going to be where the problems happen. Again, Boris, going back to the guy from Omnisend, had a great quote before. He also was really clear about this, saying don't mix transactional content with promotional content. Turning an order receipt into a marketing email isn't just a bad practice anymore. It can actually help compliance issues and negative engagement rates. That could hurt you deliberately. So it actually goes from being something that people think they're being cool and sneaky to now to something that is going to get you into some trouble.
