It’s a big day for email marketers. Starting today, Google and Yahoo are implementing new requirements to keep emails from being delayed, blocked, or directed to spam. The rules aren’t arbitrary or unreasonable; they simply reflect best practices that have been recommended for years — and now they’re mandatory.
The new rules don’t just govern your marketing email blasts; they apply at the domain level, so non-compliance can impact the success of your sales and business development efforts, too, especially if you send a lot of cold emails.
In a hurry? Here’s the tl;dr lowdown on what to do: authenticate your emails, make it easy to unsubscribe, and be judicious about what you send and to whom, so you can maintain a low spam rate.
And here’s the deeper dive:
Email Authentication
Verify with your network or domain administrator that the following authentication measures are in place, or can be put in place as soon as possible:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) helps protect your domain against spoofing (faking a website name or email domain to try to fool recipients) by specifying the mail servers that are allowed to send email for your domain and helps prevent your outgoing messages from being marked as spam by receiving servers.
- Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) provides a way for your business to outline its authentication practices and specifies what actions need to be taken when an email fails authentication. DMARC also allows recipients to report on email that fails authentication.
Easy Unsubscription
Hard to believe some marketers are still sending emails without unsubscribe links, but it’s true. And now, the link itself may not be enough. The link needs to be prominent and you need to allow recipients to opt out with a single click. Sure, you may see a spike in unsubscribe rates, but you’re going for quality, not quantity.
Ensure That Your Emails Are Welcome
If your spam complaints consistently average 0.3% or more, that’s when you’ll see your emails delayed, directed to spam, or even bounced. For optimal delivery of your email, your spam complaints should be 0.1%.
Yahoo and Google provide insights into your delivery stats so you can optimize who you’re targeting and how often. You simply need to enroll in Yahoo’s Complaint Feedback Loop and Google Postmaster Tools and tailor your lists and strategies accordingly.
While these required changes may seem like a nuisance to some marketers, ultimately they should result in much healthier mailing lists and better campaign performance over time.
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