Feature
The Gist
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Reduced email control. Automatic Extraction in Gmail overrides preview text, which leaves marketers with less say over how their messages appear.
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Loss of personalization. Deal Cards and Annotations focus attention on discounts, which sidelines custom content and reduces overall email relevance.
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Blurred content lines. Google’s Marketing Content Usage pulls email elements into public platforms, ignores opt-in intent and dilutes exclusivity.
Just like the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” when you’re the biggest online advertising company in the world, everything starts to look like an ad. This thinking appears to be behind more of Google’s recent changes at Gmail.
Let’s examine three programs, starting with an older one that’s undergone big changes and ending with a brand new program.
Table of Contents
- Deal Annotations
- Deal Cards
- Marketing Content Usage
- Summary of Gmail’s Email Programs and Their Impacts
- Why Emails Shouldn’t Be Ads
Deal Annotations
Deal annotations debuted many years ago. It offers marketers the opportunity to use schema code to replace their promotional email’s preview text with elements such as discount amount, discount code, discount expiration date and preview image or carousel image.
However, because of the extra development time required, the lack of clarity on the performance impact, and the fact that deal annotations make emails look very similar (by design) to Gmail’s inbox ads, its adoption rate has never exceeded more than a few percentage points.
Fast forward to early 2024. Gmail began a policy of Automatic Extraction, where AI is used to extract key information from commercial emails in the Promotions tab and automatically create a Deal Annotations code based on that information.
While the accuracy of Automatic Extraction has become much better since its launch, errors are still not uncommon. However, at this point, the bigger issue is that marketers can no longer rely on the preview text they’ve written to display. That means they need to write their subject lines so they stand on their own without clarification by their preview text. That’s a significant loss, especially when the Automatic Extraction information is so often redundant with the subject line.
For instance, when a brand is offering 30% sitewide, they tend to mention that in the subject line because it’s the key message of the email. Therefore, having that highlighted again by Automatic Extraction is likely less effective than having their preview text provide more details.
While brands can’t opt out of Automatic Extraction, they can code their own schema, which reduces errors. It also increases predictability, although Gmail doesn’t always honor schema coding. That said, even with the risk of Automatic Extraction messing up their emails, most of the brands we work with don’t want to use schema because of concerns about time, impact and making their emails look like ads.
Related Article: 7 Irresistible Email Subject Lines
Deal Cards
Launched around the start of this year, Deal Cards are similar to Deal Annotations, except they appear post-open above the email’s content instead of pre-open in the place of preview text. Another difference is that Deal Cards don’t include images or carousels. They only feature discounts, discount codes and expiration dates.
Besides stripping personality from your sales, Deal Cards are likely to focus subscribers much more on the primary message of the email, stealing attention from secondary messages, which again are much more likely to be personalized. This may have the unintended consequence of causing brands to use personalization less in emails that feature primary messages about discounts, as well as causing brands to send additional email campaigns to better highlight secondary messages that were ignored due to Deal Cards or cut due to fears they’d be ignored.
Related Article: Apple and Yahoo Create Worrisome Trends for Email Marketers
Marketing Content Usage
Google’s latest blurring of the line between emails and ads is Marketing Content Usage, a program that extracts content from your marketing emails about new arrivals, sales, social media profiles and other information to display in Google results across Search, Shopping and Maps, among others.
Unlike with Deal Annotations and Deal Cards, brands can opt out of Marketing Content Usage by visiting their merchants.google.com account page and selecting “Do not share data.”
However, brands should think twice before being a part of this program. Let me explain why.
Related Article: How to Prioritize Email Personalization's Perennially Moving Target
Summary of Gmail’s Email Programs and Their Impacts
This table outlines how Google's recent Gmail features affect email marketing personalization, brand control, and subscriber relationships.
| Gmail Feature | Main Function | Impact on Personalization | Marketer Control | Subscriber Experience |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automatic Extraction / Deal Annotations | AI extracts discounts and overrides preview text | Suppresses personalized preview text in favor of generic discount info | Low — schema can reduce errors but can't guarantee control | Redundant or shallow info, less likely to spark engagement |
| Deal Cards | Displays extracted discount info post-open above email body | Draws attention away from secondary, often personalized, messages | None today; limited coding option may come later | Sees email as just a sale—misses deeper value |
| Marketing Content Usage | Pulls email content into Google Search, Maps, etc. | Misrepresents targeted content as mass messaging | Opt-out available via Merchant Center | Undermines exclusivity of opt-in email relationships |
Why Emails Shouldn’t Be Ads
All three of these programs do email a disservice, chiefly by ignoring how email marketing has evolved over the past 15-plus years from a broadcast channel to a much more personalized channel.
Deal annotations and deal cards are reductive. They narrow email campaigns down to just their discounted-oriented primary message, which is far less likely than secondary messages to be personalized. In survey after survey for more than a decade, consumers tell us they want personalized experiences from brands that acknowledge them as individuals.
Deal annotations and deal cards deemphasize personalized email content, and by doing so, they discourage brands from including it in the first place. Over time, these programs will likely make email marketing less attractive to consumers, who currently prize it as their preferred way to hear from brands.
Gmail’s New Features Miss What Makes Email Marketing Work
Marketing Content Usage assumes a brand’s email content is intended for everyone. While that may be the case for some small businesses with unsophisticated email marketing programs, in all other cases, a brand’s email content is largely intended for consumers who opt in to having a closer relationship via email. It’s the opt-in that makes it special. Indeed, the very act of opting in makes a customer much more valuable, even if they don’t engage with your email campaigns. And of course, subscribers who do engage are worth even more.
In exchange for welcoming a brand into their inbox, consumers expect to be rewarded with exclusive content, as well as individualized content in the form of segmented, personalized and automated campaigns. Those kinds of campaigns are significantly more effective than one-size-fits-all messaging, which is why most major brands make great use of these tactics. It’s a huge win-win for brands and their customers.
Admittedly, Marketing Content Usage is very new, so it’s unclear how well (if at all) it would differentiate between broadcast content intended for all subscribers and personalized, segmented and automated campaigns and content that intended for individuals. But even if it did a masterful job, a portion of your broadcast email content should only be intended for subscribers, not just anyone browsing the internet.
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At their core, these three Gmail programs don’t reflect how good email marketing programs function today. Put another way, if you enthusiastically embrace these Gmail programs, you’ll likely find your email program is no longer very good.
