Using Gmail Product Carousel and Deal Annotation Promotional Image Blocks

Gmail allows you to setup special types of images in their Promotions tab, including a Deal Annotation and a Product Carousel. These types are now supported in Recapture as of April 2025.

These give you special placement in the Gmail Promotions tab and help your emails stand out from others inside the customer's inbox.

They can look like this for a Product Carousel:

Or a Deal Annotation:

To use these in the past, you had to manually add JSON and JavaScript code to your emails and include the relevant data for your promotions, products and deals.

Now Recapture supports pulling this stuff automatically using the new Promotional Deal and Promotional Products blocks in the Email Editor:

Promotional Products Block

This block allows you to create a carousel of up to 4 products, with custom URLs to highlight in the Promotions tab of Gmail. Add the block to your email, and then click on the section.

You can edit the URLs and the products to list on the right hand side:

Promotional Deal Block

This block allows you to configure the Deal Annotation in the preview section of the Promotions tab. Enter the details after you click on the Promotion Deal block:

What You See After Configuration

When you add these items to the email, no products or deals will not show up in any previews that you send or in the preview pane in Recapture because there's nothing to show until this lands in a Gmail inbox (this is supporting something for Gmail only, after all!)

But rest assured, the code is there if you look at the JavaScript in the email:

You can send test emails to a Gmail address, if you like. However, due to Google's platform limits, you may still NOT SEE ANYTHING. (See limitations below)

What are the Limitations of Deal Annotations and Product Carousels in Gmail?

Unfortunately, there are a few of these.

First and foremost, this feature is ONLY visible on Gmail. You will not see in on any other email provider, including, but not limited to: Yahoo, Apple, Fastmail, Protonmail, Hotmail, Outlook, MSN or any non-Google email service provider (ESP). This is ONLY SUPPORTED ON GMAIL.

Second, even if you send to a Gmail address, Google will only display the Product Carousel for SOME customers and only after 100+ customers are receiving this email.

Per Google Support:

I am xxxx from the Gmail Promo Tab Outreach Team.

Currently, the only way to test the annotation is the Preview Tool. If the tool validates the code, you can add it to your email template and include the annotation in your campaign. Whether the annotation appears or not depends on a variety of factors and, as Madeline mentioned, the email must be a mass email (100+ recipients) for the annotation to render properly. We have this as a safeguard to ensure that bad actors don’t abuse the feature and target individual users with inappropriate images, so sending a test email to yourself or a small group of recipients won’t work.

In my experience, the more brands start incorporating the annotation, the more it will be shown to users as users start interacting more with the images. IF for some reason, the annotation doesn’t work in a live campaign either, it won’t affect the deliverability of your email at all - the way the email will appear is the exact same how it would appear in a test send (only that in a live campaign the annotation might show as well.)

I hope this helps!

Lastly, there are restrictions on Product Carousels for EU customers—they are not displayed at this time. Deal Annotations still work fine, but the Product Carousel feature is simply not functional if the end customer lives in the EU (also per Google's Support).