Google to begin displaying your email marketing content 

In a slightly surprising announcement, Google revealed that they will begin to display brands’ email marketing content on Google results from 3rd April 2025.  Brands will be automatically opted-in to Google searching your email marketing campaigns, looking for content such as new arrivals, sales or ongoing promotions to display in search. 

Google will automatically decide the most relevant content to display Google Search, Shopping tab and Maps, although it is not yet clear how this will look. Initially, everyone is automatically opted in and Google will automatically subscribe to your email lists.  Alternatively you can add Google to your email list by adding marketingemailtogoog@gmail.com. You can opt out at any time within the Google Merchant Centre settings.

It’s not yet known how this content will look on Google or how it will be adapted from emails into Google results, but we are intrigued to find out. 

In the email from Google, they said they would be looking for content such as:

• Upcoming sales or promotions
• New product announcements 
• Highlighted social media content
• Links to primary social media channels

In their email, they said ‘Save time and effort by letting Google automatically pull in the most relevant information from your marketing emails, ensuring your brand and products are showcased effectively’.

A shake-up of the email marketing structure

This may well mean a shake-up of the way brands communicate via email marketing.  If Google is going to be automatically pulling in what it believes to be most important, this will undoubtedly lead to emails needing to be more uniformly structured so they can be read by Google effectively.  This won’t happen immediately, but we would imagine as content begins to get pulled in, brands will want to try and gain some control over what displays and how it looks in the Google results. This could mean much more attention is paid to the structure of individual email campaigns, how crawlable they are and what priority is given to different content and formats.

More thought for your subscriber lists

For some brands, more thought needs to be given to the email marketing lists and what is being communicated in what has always been a relatively ‘private’ space. By private, we mean uncrawlable or searchable.  Brands will need to review how their lists are segmented if they still want to communicate early product releases or exclusive offers only to VIP customers.

Conversion rates and competition

Having your latest product releases, promotions and brand messages within Google results could have a huge positive impact on conversion rates.  For brands who already use effective email marketing, this could be a super easy win on Google!  However, for the brands who don’t use email marketing so much, could this be very detrimental for their conversion rates?  Will these create huge disparities in search results between the brands who are highly active on email and social, and the brands which aren’t?

From a Google marketing perspective, this change from Google has the potential to really shake things up.  Does the role of SEO become a merge of website content, email marketing and social media?  We are intrigued to watch this space and see how this changes the way brands communicate to customers on email and social.