How to turn Google and Yahoo’s email deliverability requirements to your advantage
Treat email as a vehicle for trust, and your customers will do the same, says John Peters (deliverability manager, Marigold).
Relationship marketing is a delicate process of learning more about your customers in order to send them personalized messages and content in return. It requires asking a lot of questions, analyzing a lot of answers, and sending emails that are both wanted and trusted by your audience.
But all that work means nothing if the email never reaches your intended recipient’s inbox.
That’s not as easy as it used to be. Email of course remains the top channel for driving e-commerce, with more than half of consumers surveyed in Marigold’s latest Global Consumer Trends Index naming it their number one preference for marketing communications.
However, that also means all manner of less-than-scrupulous individuals, or “bad actors,” try to exploit the email medium for their own ends. Spam. Phishing. Malware. AI-triggered auto responses. Without a way to filter out these malicious emails, it would be easy for inboxes to become a mess and drown out the messages you’ve so thoughtfully prepared.
In response, mailbox providers (MBPs) and marketing platforms are addressing the problem with increased user security requirements designed to block unwanted messages and ensure consumers only receive the emails they actually want.
For instance, both Google and Yahoo (with other MBPs soon to follow) have begun enforcing email authentication standards for their respective platforms in order to evaluate the validity of the emails sent to their users.
While this has very real implications for marketers, on the whole it’s more a good thing than another challenge to deal with. In short, consider them a strategic advantage, not a hurdle.
These rules are designed to restrict spam, and in turn reward ethical marketers trying to send authentic messages they know their customers have asked for. It just requires taking a few steps to ensure compliance with these changes.
At Marigold, we’ve made email deliverability a priority, going beyond the minimum requirements of today’s leading email platforms, resulting in an industry-leading 99% delivery rate. So we know what works and what doesn’t. Here are our tips for navigating the coming changes.
What’s changing and what you need to do
Email authentication
Email providers use a series of authentication methods, like a digital fingerprint, to make it safer to send and receive emails. Both Google and Yahoo require all bulk email senders to authenticate their email. This helps MBPS to confirm anyone sending emails are who they say they are, rather than a bad actor using the identity and sender reputation of a trusted sender to bypass anti-spam filters.
What to do: Marketers need to authenticate their sending domains to prove that the messages sent are legitimate. All senders are required to verify their sender identity with standard protocols — SPF, DKIM and publish at a minimum a DMARC policy of “p=none.”
Easy unsubscribe
Recipients must be able to unsubscribe with ease, and senders must process and honor unsubscribe requests within two days. While unsubscribe links in the body of an email have been a legal requirement for many decades, one-click unsubscribe functionality in the email header is a new requirement. What’s more, while some legal standards allow you to process unsubscribe requests within 10 days, Google’s standards have reduced it to two days.
What to do: Marketers should check to ensure their email platform partners meet one-click unsubscribe header requirements (like Marigold). However, if syncing data from separate platforms and CRM tools, it’s important to honor opt-out requests within two days. The more tools or vendors you use to manage consent and permissions, the more difficult it might be to honor opt-outs quickly.
Spam thresholds
Spam complaints are a strong sign to MBPs like Google and Yahoo, which helps them understand how their users view your emails. Campaigns with good engagement like high open and click rates land in the inbox while unwanted emails with low engagement or high spam complaint rates are filtered to the spam folder. Google and Yahoo have published a clear spam threshold of 0.3%, and campaigns with a consistently high spam rate will be filtered to the spam folder or get blocked.
What to do: Building and maintaining a robust relationship with audiences will lead to a strong sender reputation, which is key to good email deliverability.
Here are three simple steps to help avoid a high spam complaint rate:
- Make sure you have a simple way for people to directly sign up for your emails
- Regularly send emails to keep your audience engaged and help you establish performance thresholds
- Audit your database annually to send more emails to your active contacts while removing dormant ones. An email list is like a house plant, you need to prune dead leaves regularly to keep them healthy.
The above steps will help you maintain good deliverability metrics while staying below the 0.3% spam complaint rate.
How marketing platforms can help
We firmly believe that relationships are built on trust and communication. That’s why we constantly and proactively monitor and fine-tune privacy, security, and user preference standards across our email platform, so our users have the best tools at their disposal to communicate with their customers.
This includes:
- A safer and more user-friendly inbox environment that promotes email authentication, honoring unsubscribe requests, and meeting spam-rate requirements.
- A collection of bot-click mitigation detection features to differentiate between real humans opening or clicking on emails from server clicks, which provides and allows for accurate engagement reporting, list hygiene, and campaign attribution activities
- Daily monitoring, customer education, consultation, and intervention from multiple dedicated Marigold teams, including our deliverability and strategic services teams.
Remember landing in a person’s inbox is a privilege rather than a right and these email deliverability standards are meant to protect you and your customers, not to punish marketers. In fact, the more MBPs can do to weed out bad actors and unwanted content, the better your marketing messages will stand out in the crowded inbox and resonate.
After all, you’ve done the work to find customers, learn about their needs, and turn them into superfans. Why should others who haven’t put in that work erode the impact of your best efforts?
Complying with these new email requirements above and beyond the standards set, and working with a relationship marketing platform like Marigold that does the same, ultimately will give you a competitive advantage over those who inevitably will try to skirt the line or bend the rules.
The importance of email as a communications channel justifies the extra effort and attention. Done right, email allows marketers to build long-term loyalty in every interaction, nurture strong relationships, and drive growth.
Treat email as a vehicle for trust, and your customers will do the same.
For more details on email deliverability standards and best practices, download Marigold’s free guides: