In October last year, Google announced that it would implement new rules to help it tackle email spam. This was quickly followed by Yahoo, and these changes are due to come into effect on 1st February.
There has been a lot of discussion (and scaremongering) about how these rules might affect B2B marketers, and our ability to prospect and market using cold email outreach.
We've been asked a lot about this in recent weeks, so here I'm going to summarise some of the key points to be aware of.
Why are these changes being made?
For a little context, there are currently 341 billion emails sent every day across the globe, and only 4% of these are replied to or interacted with. According to Forrester, buyers believe that 91% of emails they receive are not relevant to them. There is a problem, and these new rules are designed to help tackle this.
How does this affect B2B marketers?
Some of the reactions to this announcement have been similar to 2018 when, in the lead-up to GDPR coming into effect, a lot of companies were considering completely stopping all outbound marketing, scared by the long list of new requirements.
However, despite the scaremongering, most marketers need not be worried. These rules do not mark the end of cold email outreach and simply formalise what most companies have considered best practices for several years.
What are the new requirements?
You can view Google’s full announcement here but below I’ve summarised the key requirements:
1. Implement DKIM, SPF and DMARC at email authentication – This is predominantly trying to tackle domain spoofing. Requiring email authentication allows email providers to be able to identify email senders and filter out bad actors. This has been best practice for deliverability for many years, with numerous spam algorithms already checking these records when scoring incoming emails. Most marketers will already have had the requirements in place for at least a year now. You can check your email provider’s documentation for guidance on how to set it up.
2. Enable easy unsubscribing – Most companies are already doing this to comply with data protection legislation, but you will now be required to have a one-click unsubscribe option that is processed within 2 days. If your outreach invites prospects to reply to unsubscribe or unsubscribing is hidden behind ‘preferences’ pages, you will need to update your emails to comply.
3. Only send wanted emails – Perhaps the hardest part for marketers, there is now a clear and enforced spam rate threshold. Your outreach tool should already be tracking this metric and well-crafted emails to targeted recipients will keep this below the threshold. Google says you should aim to keep complaint/spam reports below 0.1%, but never reaching 0.3%.
Who do these rules apply to?
These new rules apply to "Bulk Senders", which Google defines as any organisation/domain that sends more than 5,000 emails per day. This is not 5,000 from one single email address, but the total being sent by all users across one domain. Most of our clients at Honch will fall into this category.
Which email data does this cover?
Google and Yahoo are currently the only providers implementing these rules, but Google has stated that the aim is to create an industry standard, so it would be no surprise to see other email providers follow suit later this year.
An important thing to remember is that an estimated 50% of business email domains are provided by Google Workspace. The initial announcement stated these changes applied to Google email addresses, leaving it slightly tenuous as to whether this applied to B2B. However, a recent update from Google specifically refers to gmail.com & googlemail.com addresses.
So, for the time being, it is not thought that these changes will impact B2B email domains. However, many industry analysts believe that it's just a matter of time until this gets expanded to include business emails.
What can you do to ensure you’re protecting yourself?
Aside from the basics around your domain setup and updating opt-out processes, there are a few things we’d suggest:
- Spray & Pray is Over – We have always recommended that you focus messaging and campaigns on select groups of prospects. This is going to become even more important, as the more tailored your campaigns are, the lower your spam rate will be (and of course the higher your clicks and MQLs too).
- Gradually Increase Your Audience Size – There’s nothing wrong with sending large numbers of emails, provided these emails are wanted. Your campaigns will be judged by email providers by spam complaint percentages. If you have an existing audience of 20,000 that you're communicating regularly with, your complaint rate will be very low. If you're gradually feeding new prospects into this at, let's say, 2,000 per week, then you'd have to receive a very high spam rate (660) to get to the 0.3% mark.
- Regularly Clean Your Audiences - Ensure you regularly remove unengaged members from your core audiences, moving into separate campaigns for re-engagement.
- Personalisation – Make sure your campaigns both perform well and remain compliant by personalising all comms for new marketing prospects. Whether that's based on a new job, a promotion, something that's happening in their sector, or that you've spotted their company talking about something specific on LinkedIn, these will always become your best-performing campaigns and those with the lowest unsubscribe and spam rates.
What changes have we made at Honch to help you?
Our Processes - We’ve made some changes to our internal processes to protect data quality and to allow us to continually inform all decision-makers about their inclusion in our platform. We will always do this, and keep bounce rates at an industry-leading low level.
View Email Providers - We’re introducing a new field to the platform, allowing you to see which email providers are looking after which domains. While we see how things progress on this topic in the coming months, clients will have the option to run larger campaigns to non-Google or Yahoo-provided B2B emails, while running smaller campaigns to these groups.
Social Listening - We've expanded our Honch Lists to include the tracking of social media posts made by 70,000 UK companies. These help guide clients to companies focused on areas such as international expansion, product launches, diversity or many other areas, allowing personalisation at scale to become a reality.
We've all got targets to hit and metrics to deliver on, and these new rules shouldn't become a barrier for any responsible business. If managed correctly, you should find that your outbound volume drops, engagement levels increase, and conversion holds steady.
