New Bulk Email Sender Requirements: How you can stay in the primary inbox

Does your brand have a clear strategy in place to address Google and Yahoo’s new bulk sender requirements that are going into effect right now? According to Sendlane CEO Jimmy Kim, “This change to email will be as big as iOS14 was to paid media.”

What change, exactly? According to Google, the three main categories for change are this:

• authenticate outgoing email

• avoid sending unwanted or unsolicited email

• make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe. 

Since the first and third are outside our area of expertise, the focus of this article will be on the second: avoid sending unwanted or unsolicited email. But before we jump into how to prepare for this new requirement, let’s take a look at what it really means for email marketers.  

Formerly a “best practice” for email marketing, bulk senders that send more than 5,000 emails a day will now be required to keep reported spam rates below 0.10%. This is the primary metric Google will use to ensure that unwanted email isn’t landing in the inbox. Keeping the spam rate within this boundary will allow for occasional spikes in negative user feedback, without going over an absolute threshold of 0.30%. 

In the past, having a high spam rate would lower a sender’s reputation and impact email deliverability, making it harder for your emails to land in the main inbox. But a few spam reports now and then didn’t have a major impact on this; they were more of a directional signal to help you do better on your next campaign. 

This is no longer the case. According to Google, “Maintaining a high spam rate (above 0.10%) will lead to increased spam classification. It can take time for improvements in spam rate to reflect positively on spam classification.” Not only will a high spam rate land you in the spam folder, but it will be hard to dig your way out. 

During a two-month roll out period (from February - April 2024), users will first receive a temporary error, giving them time to rectify the problem. After April, email traffic will begin to be rejected, putting the results of your entire email marketing program in jeopardy. 

Whether you’re well prepared for the new bulk sender requirements or whether you’re in the middle of a mild freakout because progress has been slower than anticipated, there’s time to make meaningful change before February.

How does an email get marked as spam?

According to Postmaster Tools by Gmail, “The spam rate is the percentage of emails marked as spam by users vs emails sent to the inbox for active users.” More plainly, an email gets flagged as spam when a recipient selects the check box next to an email and clicks “Report as spam” or “Mark as spam.” 

So what causes customers to mark an email as spam? The simplest reason …they don’t want to receive the email. This could be because they never opted-in in the first place (maybe you bought a list or from an abandoned cart flow). It could be because they just hate getting marketing content. Or maybe they’re just annoyed that you’ve emailed them too many times or at the wrong time (like with a sale promo right after they’ve made a full price purchase). 

How to avoid getting marked as spam: a clean email list 

The best way to avoid getting marked as spam is to actually send emails that people want. If you’re doing things right, the recipients have signed up to receive emails from your brand because they’re interested in what you’re selling. You have a captive audience, now the rest is up to you. But after you’ve perfectly crafted your campaigns and content, it gets complicated. 

There’s no shortage of articles and guides to help marketers reduce the number of spam complaints. Almost all of them make the point that email list cleaning is critical to success. But then the advice will go on to recommend that brands clean their email list every six-12 months to remove outdated accounts… and leave it at that. There’s actually a lot more that goes into it. There are three primary steps required to get an email list in great shape and make sure the right accounts are receiving your content: 

1. Remove spam and bot accounts

2. Combine duplicate accounts under one main profile

3. Identify the unique shopping habits of your brands’ buyers to measure engagement

While the first two steps might not directly contribute to the spam complaints you receive, dealing with these bad actors is critical to understanding the unique shopping habits of your brands’ buyers. Having them on your list also waters down your audience segments and will significantly skew your engagement metrics, like click through rate. Any brand who’s taking steps to improve email deliverability and stay out of the spam folder needs to tackle these important steps. 

The third, and more complicated, piece is using data to identify the unique shopping habits of your brands’ buyers to understand a) when an unengaged contact is likely to churn and b) at what point in the purchase cycle a shopper is most likely to respond to a marketing email. 

This will allow you to either permanently remove a contact from your list at the right time, not losing out on revenue or paying to email someone who’s already got both feet out the door. It will also allow you to temporarily suppress contacts during the time in the purchase cycle that they’re not likely to respond to your emails. Both of these actions remove opportunities for recipients to mark your email as spam, and they both improve deliverability significantly. A win for compliance, and a win for your bottom line. 

How to avoid getting marked as spam: optimized sending practices

Equally important to sending emails that people want, is sending emails when people want them. Every brand has a different purchase cycle, and every customer is in a different place in the purchase cycle at any given moment. So, what specifically do we mean by optimized sending practices? It’s all about using your brands’ first-party data to:

1. Send emails at the right time in the purchase cycle 

2. Send emails at the right frequency

Today, ESPs offer the ability to send automated emails in response to a certain trigger. A purchase or an abandoned cart will trigger an automated email, for example. What’s not possible is triggered account suppression. Hence the quintessential faux pas: sending an email for a promo to a customer a week after they made a full priced purchase. Even though the customer received the automated emails following their purchase, they are still part of your “discount-only shoppers” segment and receive your regularly scheduled marketing emails to that audience. 

Keeping all of your customers on your email list all the time leads to over emailing and thus a higher likelihood of being marked as spam. 

To really reduce your brands’ chance of being marked as spam, each email send needs to go only to customers who have the highest likelihood to be in the market to buy your product. Since triggered account suppression isn’t a thing, a clean email list that’s continuously updated based on shopper activity, engagement and purchase cycle, is the best way to ensure that this happens. 

Finally, after you’ve got the right people on the list at the right time, it's important to nail frequency. Even brands in the same category and price point see drastically different data related to the optimal frequency due to their brands’ unique style. The only way to know the right frequency for your brand is to look at the data. 

How to efficiently and effectively increase send volume

The new email sender requirements also address sending volume. While seemingly separate from email list cleaning and optimization, Google’s recommendation to avoid email deliverability problems is to “start with a low sending volume to engaged users, and slowly increase the volume over time.” 

Since your engaged users are always changing based on purchase cycle, the accounts that should make this list will be consistently different. The only way to make sure emails are going to engaged users is to constantly suppress and reactivate customers based on their history with your brand.  

Another recommendation for avoiding delivery issues due to sending volume is to “avoid introducing sudden volume spikes if you do not have a history of sending large volumes.” But what about BFCM? Or your mid-year sale? These events deserve increased volume, and the email program can drive significant revenue during these time periods by getting in front of enough shoppers. The answer is no different: slowly increase send volume leading up to marquee events, by starting with the most engaged shoppers who are most likely to be in the market to buy. 

Dangers of not acting or over-acting

February 1st is here, but there’s still plenty of time to get this right. The latest update outlines a slow roll out, giving brands temporary warnings so they can get things in order by April, when more permanent action will be taken. But if your brand waits too long to tackle email list cleaning and data-driven sending optimization, the chances are high that you’ll spend the foreseeable future digging your way out of spam. At the same time, if you pare back your program too far (with a smaller email list and fewer sends) you will lose out on revenue. 

Finding the right balance will not only bring your brand into compliance, but also lead to increased revenue from your email marketing program. 

You already have a clean email list and optimized sending practices, is there room to improve?

Perhaps your brand has long prioritized email list cleaning. You’ve implemented processes and technology to help clean your email list and use data to optimize your sending practices. You log in to your ESP every month and manually suppress or reactivate accounts based on where they are in their purchase cycle. What’s next? Take a minute to ask yourself a few questions:

• For brands that have long realized the importance of these two factors, how much time does it pull away from content and strategy? 

• Are you cleaning your list and evaluating your sending practices often enough to get the most revenue out of your email program? 

• Are you suppressing too many inactive accounts to avoid poor engagement metrics and being marked as spam? 

We’ve never met a brand marketer that didn’t have room to improve in these areas; nor one that wasn’t happy to spend their time on strategy instead of these tedious tasks. 

In summary 

Why should you take our word for it? Creating a squeaky clean email list and using data to optimize your brands sending practices is a challenge. Not only are these tasks arduous and time consuming, but they require serious data science skills and resources. Which is why we’ve created a software to tackle these things for you. 

Orita’s DTC customers have improved their click through rate by an average of 41% since outsourcing their list optimization to us. (Oh yeah, they also benefit by averaging a 33% reduction in their ESP bill!) While Google hasn’t set requirements around this engagement metric because it’s not something they measure directly, we think the data speaks for itself. 

When customers receive an email they want, when they want it, they engage with the content.