What are Gmail Annotations?

Gmail Annotations are an innovative way to make your emails stand out in a crowded inbox. They allow you to add extra information, images, and details to your email subject lines and preheaders, giving recipients a preview of your email’s content before they even open it. This added context can significantly improve open rates and engagement.

Types of Gmail Annotations in the Promotions Tab

• Product Carousel: Showcasing a carousel of products in your email with descriptions and prices.
• Single Image Preview: Using a single image to preview content inside of the email.
• Deal Annotation: Highlights special offers, discounts, or promotions.

Brand examples from Cordial clients

Discover how a couple of our clients have successfully used Gmail Annotations to boost their email marketing campaigns:

How to set up Gmail Annotations

Getting started with Gmail Annotations is a straightforward process:

• Enable Annotations: Ensure your email sender address is authenticated with the Google Annotations Support Team (you can reach out to your CSM to connect the dots here).
• Provide Metadata: Add the necessary metadata to your emails, including image URLs, offer details, and relevant information. Use the structure provided on Google’s Developer Annotation Site.
• Test Your Annotations: Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that your Annotations are correctly implemented. If you see them show up, then you know you are good to go. If something is broken, it will notify you in the preview screen. 

Optimizing for Gmail Annotations

Deal Annotations, Product Carousels, and Single Images will not show up for everyone that the message is sent to (Google has a secret recipe of who actually receives the annotations and who doesn’t). Google will also recognize when it’s sent to a mass audience to determine who gets the annotation in their inbox. Meaning, it will only appear during sends to a large number of contacts making it tricky to test before the message goes live (see above re: “Test Your Annotations”). 

With these slight limitations in place, it’s best to follow the following tips to optimize your content and make the most of your Annotations: 

• Utilize high-quality product images with little text.
• The setup for the Product Carousel Annotation allows up to 10 images. Use all 10 spaces if possible to maximize the chances of passing through the quality filter. 
• Avoid masking around the edges of images, and ensure all images are the same aspect ratio and file size.
• Annotations provide extra space for text (think of this as a second subject line), so use it wisely to entice recipients to open your email.
• Ensure that the Annotations accurately represent the content of your email to avoid misleading recipients.

Measuring the impact

While Gmail Annotations don’t have a direct reporting function (yet), the impact can be quantified through monitoring your regular email metrics:

• Open Rates: Measure the increase in open rates after implementing Annotations, and compare to emails without Annotations present. 
• Click-Through Rates & Conversion Rates: Analyze how Annotations affect click-through rates and user engagement, sales, and orders. 
• Unique Tracking Identifiers: Include unique UTM parameters in the URLs and Images provided for the Annotations, separate from other links inside your email, to be able to track downstream in your usual reporting tools. 

Gmail Annotations offer a powerful way to supercharge your email marketing efforts within the Gmail inbox. By implementing the right Annotations and optimizing your content, you can capture your audience’s attention and drive higher engagement rates. 

Ready to get started with Gmail Annotations? If you’re a client of ours, get in touch with your Client Success Manager, and let’s take your email marketing to the next level!

The post Stand out in the inbox like bareMinerals & Church’s Texas Chicken with Gmail Annotations appeared first on Cordial.

With various messaging needs and an expanding brand—including an uptick in new ship launches—Virgin Voyages set out to find a new cross-channel messaging partner with a few key goals in mind. First, the ability to create limitless combinations of messages for each guest’s individual needs, and second, the ability to store and easily access vast amounts of data in real time. Virgin Voyages needed a partner that could ensure timely messaging and brand consistency across all communications and channels. 

Virgin Voyages loves the ease of use of the Cordial platform in comparison to their legacy ESP. With Cordial as their partner of choice, the Virgin Voyages team can now easily use all of their data to build campaign orchestrations that trigger relevant, personalized messages to each guest, right when they need it most. Their team has been able to simplify very complex journeys and build campaign orchestrations around the booking experience, including pre-cruise, day-of, and on-ship messages like travel requirements, packing lists, boarding details, customized booking excursions, and onboard dinner reservations and bar packages.

Partnering with Cordial gives Virgin Voyages a data-focused, user-friendly platform that streamlines their online booking process and can scale with the business. The biggest improvement Virgin Voyages has seen from the partnership is time-saving, which is invaluable for a small but mighty team that has a high volume of campaigns running at all times. The ease of making data actionable in Cordial has saved Virgin Voyages over 20 hours per week when it comes to building campaign orchestrations. That’s an extra 1,000 hours per year they didn’t get with their previous ESP—time they can put toward other high-impact marketing initiatives.

Check out our latest webinar with Adweek to see how Virgin Voyages, along with Eddie Bauer and Jerome’s Furniture, are using email, SMS, and mobile push in exciting new ways to skyrocket their engagement.

The post How Virgin Voyages simplifies complex customer journeys appeared first on Cordial.

• Adding Contact Cards to your text messaging
• Enabling custom sound notifications for mobile app messages
• Orchestrating complex cross-channel customer journeys 
• Securing your platform with API key restrictions

Make your brand logo instantly recognizable with MMS contact cards

As more and more brands start to unlock the full potential of SMS and MMS, marketers are looking for ways to stand out from the competition and maintain a high level of trust with their text subscribers. That’s why we’ve introduced a way for brands to add Contact Cards in their text messaging.

A Contact Card (sometimes called a vCard) is a great way for text subscribers to instantly recognize a brand’s logo and name when receiving text messages. The subscriber can easily add a brand’s contact information to their address book on a mobile device, keeping your company visible and top-of-mind to drive long-term loyalty.

Enable custom sound notifications for mobile app

For brands with a mobile app, you know how critical it is to keep your app subscribers engaged. Brands can now add a custom sound to their app notifications in the new feature we added to our Mobile App SDK.

Here’s an example use case: an online wine retailer is letting customers know they have an order out for delivery by sending a push notification accompanied by the sound of clinking glasses. This feature can add a fun and unique enhancement to the customer experience.

Orchestrate complex cross-channel customer journeys 

Podium is Cordial’s robust orchestration builder that allows marketers to build complex cross-channel customer journeys using a variety of data points. Marketers love the visual, flexible layout of Podium, and given the rise in remote work, we had an opportunity to make it even more adaptable to distributed teams.

Cordial now features a new notification, letting marketers know if another teammate is currently editing a customer orchestration workflow. This will help notify marketing teams about current changes being made to orchestrations, so two people don’t try to edit the same workflow at the same time. Since many teams can’t just look across the hall at a coworker’s desk anymore, this feature will help distributed teams work better together within our platform.

Secure your platform with API key restrictions

Marketing teams working with a third-party vendor might need to grant people outside their organization access to their Cordial account, but need to make sure sensitive information and areas of the platform are kept secure and only visible to the approved parties. 

Enhanced User Roles and Permissions settings allow you to grant greater security controls for API endpoints. You can restrict a certain type of access (read-only vs. write) or deny access entirely, depending on your unique scenario. This ensures you grant the proper access needed while maintaining your security.

If you have any questions about these new features or want to put them to use, contact your Client Success Manager. New to Cordial? Schedule a personalized business assessment to learn more.

The post February key features: Custom sounds, contact cards, and enhanced user roles appeared first on Cordial.