4 Things You Need To Know about Google and Yahoos new Spam Rules!

4 Things You Need To Know about Google and Yahoos new Spam Rules!

After what feels like an age, Google and Yahoo are finally coming to call on their long-awaited crackdown on bulk email senders. If you are active on LinkedIn, you will be treated to article after article of doomsayers, gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes about how this spells the end of cold emails. Don’t throw away your lead lists just yet, there’s plenty of information out there and the news about these latest spam rules isn’t as bleak as you may at first read.

But what if you don’t have time to attend 15 different hour long webinars or read through all the information on the new standards? Well don’t worry, because we’ve done a deep dive on the new standards, and have put together a handy guide for you. 4 things you need to know about the new google spam rules.

Background

These new rules and regulations have been in the pipeline for some time now. The initial announcement caused widespread panic and resulted in a grace period being offered by Google and Yahoo, who announced they wouldn’t bring the regulations into place until February 2024.

Which brings us to today. It is officially February 2024, and despite the grace period, many B2B companies still believe they aren’t ready for the changes.

According to Google:

“In April 2024, we’ll start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant email traffic, and we’ll gradually increase the rejection rate. For example, if 75% of a sender’s traffic meets our requirements, we’ll start rejecting a percentage of the remaining 25% of traffic that isn’t compliant.”

• Google Email Sender Guidelines.

Will the New Spam Rules Affect my Business?

Let’s start off with an easy one. For a great many businesses, these new spam rules and regulations will not have a huge impact on their day to day. The new rules are targeted at companies which send a large number of cold emails per day. Google defined this as more than 5000 emails to google addresses in a day.

Whilst I can already hear most of you heave a sigh of relief and prepare to exit the blog, there are still some important practices that are relevant to businesses of all sizes.

The guidelines focus on 3 areas, each of which is good practice in your email marketing anyway, so if you haven’t got these set up now is a great time to look into them.

The three areas of focus for the new guidelines are:

• Reported Spam Rates
• Authentication of Outgoing Emails
• The ability to easily unsubscribe from email lists.

What are the new authentication requirements for Bulk Senders?

Google in particular have called for bulk email senders to use what they are calling “well-established” best practices. Now without a technical background, the names of these 3 essential mechanisms could give you a bit of a fright. The 3 authentication mechanisms you need to pay attention to are as follows:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This allows senders to identify the servers they are allowed to send emails to from their domain.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This adds a digital signature to all your outgoing emails. This tells mailboxes that you are an authorised sender, and that the mail hasn’t been tampered with on its way to the mailbox.
• Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): This helps owners specify what happens when an email fails any authentication processes. It also enables reporting on email authentication results.

You need to have all of these set up if you are a bulk sender, and generally it’s a good idea to set these three up even if you are below the threshold google set up. Your IT team should be able to handle this for you, but if you don’t have an IT team, reach out and see if we’re a fit!

Ensure your Reported Spam Rates are up to Standard!

The next area you need to turn your attention to is your reported spam rate. This is not the amount of processed breakfast meat your team consumes, rather it is the percentage of messages you send that end up being reported as spam by recipients.

According to google, you need to keep your reported spam rate below 0.10% and will start noticing some serious negative effects at 0.3%. That sounds tiny, but it’s just one in 1000 people. If you catch 3 people on a bad day, you could be in deep water. Reporting an email as spam is incredibly easy on both google and yahoo, so you need to do your best to make sure your emails are worthwhile and not being picked up as spam.

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first and easiest way is to pay attention to your send times and ensure you aren’t sending all of your email marketing in one huge block instantly. Use a service like Apollo to spread out your emails over a period of time, being careful not to send them all in one day or even one hour.

Add an Easy way to Unsubscribe.

I know, I know. Why would you want to let somebody unsubscribe from your list? You worked hard to develop your leads database, and you don’t want a potential customer to unsubscribe just because they’ve had a bad morning and received 20 cold emails.

At the end of the day, if somebody wants to unsubscribe, you need to let them. Adding an easy way to unsubscribe is no longer optional for bulk senders. Either a single click opt out or a banner above the email with an unsubscribe button will help you in the long run. It may seem counterintuitive but in the long run this will keep your domain squeaky clean.

Conclusion

We hope this has helped assuage some of your fears over googles new spam rules. If you’re still worried about the spam police showing up to your door, give our team a call today. We’ll be happy to nip in and help you get set up for success!