It’s Time to Give a Damn About the Company’s (Bad) Email Sender Reputation
Quick » Name the 4 email sender requirements Yahoo & Google enforced starting Feb 1 (⤵)
Navigating email sender requirements just got more demanding since Gmail is making it easier to unsubscribe from emails — this includes Workspace accounts! Gmail rolled out an unsubscribe button to display as a hover action in email thread lists. The link next to “From” once an email is opened is also larger and blue.
Admittedly, from a user perspective, we’re loving it! It’s easy to clean out emails you no longer want. And sender beware: once a user unsubscribes, they’ll see an option to ‘move to spam.’
Eh hem… ok back to what matters to marketers.
First, let’s cover zero-party data
I know what you may be thinking. What does zero-party data have to do with email marketing?
Well, email lists are zero-party data. Ideally, email lists are filled with authentic people who have provided the exact email address they want senders to use to communicate with them.
Read that again: email addresses = authentic people. We marketers are humans talking to other humans, after all.
So, the quality of the email addresses captured, and managed, directly impacts the possibility of reaching inboxes.
And, in case you missed it, mailbox providers are strictly holding marketers to having these four (4) protocols in place for a better, safer inbox for said humans.
- Bounce rate less than 2%
- Clear spam threshold of 0.3%
- One-click unsubscribe and honoring your unsubscribe requests right away
- Stronger authentication is required — for example, emails sent without DMARC, DKIM, and SPF set up will be bounced
This means poor email list quality will stain a company’s sender reputation and put future emails at risk of being bounced or going to spam.
Strategic Recommendation
Overall, this is healthy for email marketing. This is a long overdue back-to-basics move. Bigger numbers of email addresses have never meant a better list.
CAN-SPAM laws have always required email marketers to capture ‘explicit permission’ from subscribers. If CAN-SPAM isn’t your jam, this concept is traced back to Permission Marketing, coined and written by Seth Godin 🌔, circa 1999. And why buying email lists is a huge no-no.
Minifying your email list will hurt at first, but as Alison Gootee, email deliverability guru, said in a recent Litmus webinar, “Less crap in the inbox means people are going to see your stuff sooner, better, more accurately. . .It’s good for everyone. Eat your vegetables.”
This focus on reducing spam is the latest in the sea change of tech providers improving consumer privacy and user experiences. And, while these changes may be tough to swallow, they help us pursue better ways of reaching real people, like strategic storytelling, improving email list quality, and more meaningful email KPIs — read rates, sender reputation monitoring, and inbox placement tracking.
Action Plan
- Get ready for a large influx of opt-outs. Depending on how the company’s unsubscribe is implemented, some may be sent to an inbox. You’re now responsible for removing them in two days.
- Follow up with an unsubscribe confirmation email that allows people to re-subscribe.
- Clean email lists (robot helpers optional). The size of a list only matters if people on it engage. Clear out addresses who haven’t read, opened, or clicked in 2 years — they’re ghosts and zombies, not actual humans.
- Stop spamming. This is a list of humans/people who choose to hear from you. THAT MEANS: be intentional about who you’re talking to and what you say. Otherwise, they may feel harassed and retaliate by clicking ‘move to spam’.
- Make sure DKIM is set up. Without it, messages sent from your company could be marked as spam by receiving mail servers.
Get Internal Buy-In
Hopefully, your company’s entire leadership team understands the importance of staying off ISP blacklists and the economic impact of $51,000 CAN-SPAM penalties per incident. A simple email — these are the rules and here’s how we’ll comply — should do the trick.
If the plain and simple facts don’t work, blast ‘Bad Reputation’ by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts throughout the office and dance with abandon until the message is received: it’s time to give a damn about your bad (sender) reputation.
Calling #marketing leaders: On a scale of 1–5, how hard will it be for you to get buy-in to comply with sender requirements? (tell us on LinkedIn)
Originally published at https://digitalmeaning.co on February 22, 2024.
