Yesterday, February 1st, Google started the implementation of their Gmail guidelines.
Changes start rolling out this month of February but will continue up to April.
How does this affect your email marketing?
Google’s inbound is your outbound.
Many guidelines need to be addressed, yet overall, it can affect your email deliverability and reputation.
If you share an IP Address (the highway where emails travel), you must be hands-on with these changes to ensure deliverability, reduce spam, and keep a healthy email-sending reputation.
Not acting could mean being blocked by Google. Of course, no one wants that.
Why should you care?
For email deliverability, you should care:
- If you have Google email addresses as contacts in your lists, if those email addresses don’t follow the guidelines, it will cause a bounce effect and affect your CRM account.
- If for any reason you must have email recipients as contacts in your lists, you must make sure these recipients opt-in to receive your emails.
- Cleaning all lists before uploading new contacts is not an option anymore.
- Google will monitor emails from bought lists and lists in general because they will monitor Gmail email addresses.
- As you may know, email addresses and domains are like DNA over the internet. They’re trackable.
- Periodically you should send messages to confirm that recipients want to stay subscribed.
- Contacts can report your email as spam. We will be unsubscribing recipients who don’t open or read your messages.
What measure we’re taking?
- Since most CRMs depend on a third-party to deliver emails you must avoid Gmail addresses.
- Periodically you should send messages to confirm that recipients want to stay subscribed.
- Your team must review ALL lists looking for Gmail accounts.
- If you identify Gmail addresses, you should confirm these contacts.
- If these can’t be confirmed, they must be deleted from your lists.
- Opt-in campaigns. Start and opt-in campaign. This is one of many guidelines been asked by Google.
- All contacts must opt-in to your lists.
- Although not all contacts might have a Gmail address Google will track email forwarding and replies to Gmail addresses, hence, non-Gmail email addresses could be affected.
- This means that if non-Gmail addresses forward emails to Gmail recipients and these Gmail recipients haven’t opted-in to receive emails from you, it will bounce back as spam to our accounts, jeopardizing the reputation of your account.
- You must advise contacts of these changes and invite them to opt-in to keep receiving your emails.
- Replace the long-form unsubscribe process with a one-time unsubscribe.
- Domains. Monitor the domains used for email sending. These must match your main website domain. Based on the results evaluate if you would need to make additional changes to domains in your CRM.
Why is Google making these changes?
• First, because of the high traffic of spammers using Gmail to commit phishing activities, hack accounts, and commit fraud.
• Second, it’s also part of the cookie-less approach Google started last year, where now advertisements will focus more on contact lists.
- This means contact lists, aside from a business website, have become one of the most valuable assets of your business.
- Rather than following people all over the Internet with unwanted advertising, Google is requiring brands to build their lists of opt-in contacts using their cookies on their websites to ensure people are tracked for advertising of content they’ve decided (opt-in) to consume.
Please know this is an overview of ALL the changes.
We will keep you posted with updates regarding these.
If you would like to take a look at all the Google new guidelines, please click here.
If you have any questions, please reach out.