Manage Newsletters in Gmail

It's a fact that email marketing is enjoying a golden age in Spain.

Whether you're self-employed and sell services or run any type of digital business, the truth is that, if you do it reasonably well, this channel can only bring you good news.

But what's the downside?

Your personal email inbox is probably packed with good emails (I'm assuming you unsubscribe from the bad ones).

And then you may be like me and feel a bit overwhelmed when you see a full inbox.

That's why I'm writing this article: to explain the two ways I manage my subscriptions across different Gmail accounts, my personal one and (one of) my work accounts.

One is simpler, the other more complex. So I imagine one of the two will suit you.

By the way, before we start, if you want to learn more about this tool, here are a few more articles about Gmail:

• How to get more space in your account.
• How to use Gmail with your own domain.
• How to create an out-of-office automatic reply.

An easy way to manage newsletters and subscriptions in Gmail

The easiest way is with a trick.

Yes, because when you sign up for any newsletter, if you add a "+" to your Gmail username, anything after it won't matter and the message will land in your inbox as usual.

That is, if your Gmail account is yagogonzalezsantamaria@gmail.com, you would only need to sign up with the email yagogonzalezsantamaria+newsletters@gmail.com and you'll receive the emails correctly.

What's the point of this?

Well, you can create a filter like this:

And with these options:

This way, you only have to subscribe using the address you've added to the filter in the forms:

All emails you receive at that address will automatically go to the chosen tab (in this case "Newsletters"), waiting for you to read them on Friday or over the weekend:

And your inbox stays clear for the most important emails.

You can take the system a step further and create a filter with a unique address for each subscription, for example yagogonzalezsantamaria+israbravo@gmail.com or yagogonzalezsantamaria+xataka@gmail.com.

This would make all the emails land in the same "Newsletters" folder.

The advantage of doing it this way is that, if we receive emails from a source we never subscribed to, we can identify which legitimate subscription sold our email address.

Not bad, right?

Manual way to manage Newsletters in Gmail

The old-fashioned way:

1. You create all the labels you need.
2. The emails start coming in.
3. You move them manually to the appropriate label.

Disadvantages

1. It's soooo much slower this way.
2. It's much easier to make a mistake and put an email in the wrong label / folder.
3. Overloaded inboxes.

Advantages

More control: when you open your inbox, it's harder to miss an email you actually want to read.

Bonus: my trick for finding inspiration

Okay, so far everything is very simple, right?

Now here's a trick that, if you're not already doing it and you send emails, I think could be useful.

It's this:

These are the folders and subfolders I use to save newsletters and emails I like.

This way I quickly have:

• Email ideas for each project.
• Examples I've liked, for their content or design.
• Complete launch funnels.
• Personalized emails for customers (RFM).

Quick inspiration close at hand, from many different sources and top experts.

As I said, if you send emails to a database, those labels, at the very least, shouldn't be missing.

I guarantee it's a very good way to beat blank-page syndrome.

So, now that we're done, what do you think of my Newsletter management system?

Want to give it a try?