We recently signed up for a preview of a new toggle feature Gmail is testing. They’ve made an option to view their “Promotions” tab in a grid view. Making it much more image heavy. To the point where it closely resembles the layout of Pinterest.

Most of the emails that will fall into the Promotions tab are your typical email newsletter campaigns. Which we think is pretty cool, as most of the time it’s the imagery that’s so vital to a campaign.

However, this new feature will also have to be coded into the html of your email if you really want to control the presentation of it. Right now most aren’t accounting for this change, as it’s still in a testing phase, but just to give you an idea of how it can make or break things:

As you can see, some things work out well, and some are just completely lost.  Just boring text, no Google + image, etc.

Most of this is just by chance since this new layout most likely wasn’t taken into account when delivering these email campaigns. Even we got lucky with how our last email looked:

Still, you can hard code the following options to control the results of this new layout:

-Company Name
-Company Homepage
-Google + URL
-Featured Image URL

So add that to one more thing that should be thought about when it comes to email campaigns. It’s not too bad though, as it’s just a couple extra lines of html. Granted, this is still just in the testing phase, but it’s so cool that we think it will eventually be rolled out as a standard option for GMail users.

And with Gmail still being the most widely used webmail client, it’s a simple fix to maximize your presentation.