By Susan Gunelius
Google rolled out new email marketing rules designed to keep unwanted bulk email messages out of users’ Gmail inboxes. Cannabis businesses that don’t comply will see their rejection rate skyrocket and their deliverability plummet.
In other words, a lot of the email marketing messages you send may not make it to people’s inboxes if you don’t comply with the new rules. But that’s not all. Your future email deliverability could tank as well because Google warns the rejection rate will increase over time.
Before you start thinking email marketing is dead, there are several steps you can take to comply with Google’s new rules. In fact, many senders won’t be affected by the change at all. Let’s break down the most important things you need to know, so your email marketing messages continue to make it to recipients’ inboxes.
Why Google Implemented New Rules for Email Marketers
Google’s goal in releasing the new rules is the next logical step in the company’s ongoing mission to reduce unwanted email messages. Keep in mind, Google refers to any unwanted message as spam, which is why it has been crucial in recent years to segment your audience and only send highly targeted messages that recipients truly want. Doing this makes email marketing more challenging, but it also protects your results. This isn’t new.
The new part is how the new requirements will enable Google to know exactly who is sending what email messages. As a result, it will be more difficult for spammers to hide.
Senders who follow email marketing best practices can continue sending with confidence that their messages will make it to recipients, but spammers should get caught. This means fewer unwanted messages overall.
Google’s New Requirements and the Email Marketer’s To Do List
Google’s rules make it harder for senders to hide who they are because the rules require email authentication from senders as well as security and spam tracking. There are four main requirements:
Set up DKIM Email Authentication
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) uses public key cryptography to digitally sign emails. In layman’s terms, DKIM ensures no one tampers with your messages after you send them. This includes the content of your messages and any attachments.
DKIM protects your business by keeping malicious actors from impersonating you and your sender domain (i.e., the domain you send your email marketing messages from, such as mywebsite.com).
Set up DMARC for Security
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email security standard that “talks” to email providers (such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo, and so on). It tells email providers what to do with your email messages when they receive them so only the real messages get to inboxes.
As a result, imposters, spammers, and malicious actors don’t get to inboxes, so fewer recipients will mark your messages as spam (which hurts your sender reputation and future deliverability).
Send from Your Own Domain for Authentication and Control
If you’re sending messages using an email marketing software and haven’t set up your account to send from your own domain rather than a shared domain provided by the platform, then you’ll need to transition to sending from your own domain to comply with Google’s new best practices.
Most email marketing platforms provide easy instructions to set up your domain for sending, so don’t hesitate to reach out to them if you need help.
Use One-Click Unsubscribe
Any email marketing message you send must include a way to opt out from receiving future messages from you in a single click. Furthermore, you must comply with all unsubscribe requests within two days.
Note that neither hiding the unsubscribe link or requiring that recipients reply to your message to opt out is compliant with the new rules. You must use an obvious one-click unsubscribe link.
Monitor Your Spam Complaints
Based on Google’s new rules, senders should keep your domain’s user-reported spam rate below 0.1% and prevent it from reaching 0.3% or higher. As Google explains:
“The user-reported spam rate’s impact on delivery is graduated, and rates of 0.3% or higher have an even greater negative impact on email inbox delivery. Even today, user-reported spam rates greater than 0.1% have a negative impact on email inbox delivery for bulk senders.”
The key is to only send messages people actually want, so they’ll be less likely to hit the spam button! Fortunately, Google provides a free tool that you can use to monitor both spam complaints and your sender domain reputation (what Google thinks of you as a sender) – Google Postmaster Tools. It’s easy to set up and provides extremely valuable information for email marketers.
Important Things to Note
While these new rules may seem overwhelming, each requirement is actually fairly easy to set up. You can get all of the details about the new requirements in this Google Workspace Help Document.
Here are some additional things to note about the changes:
Yahoo is implementing the same new email marketing rules as Google. The new rules apply to bulk senders only, which Google defines as someone who sends more than 5,000 messages in a day. However, Google also says that’s not a “safe zone” and even people who send fewer messages in a day could be affected. Yahoo has no minimum volume threshold. Google counts the sending quantity based on the number of messages sent from the same primary domain. If you send from mywebsite.com, shop.mywebsite.com, help.mywebsite.com, and so on, the numbers sent for the primary domain and all subdomains are added together to calculate the daily sending volume. Only email sent to personal Gmail accounts will be rejected. Messages sent to Gmail users who access their email through a Google Workspace account won’t be affected. These changes started to take effect in February 2024 and message rejection errors will start appearing in April.Next Steps for Cannabis Businesses
Google and Yahoo are already blocking email messages that don’t comply with the new rules. Over the next month or two, the number of rejected emails from senders who are non-compliant will increase, and some senders could even get blocked entirely. You don’t want that to happen to your email messages, because once a domain is blocked, it affects all messages sent through that domain – promotional, transactional, individual, and so on.
Google has said that beginning June 2024, bulk senders with a user-reported spam rate greater than 0.3% will be ineligible for mitigation, which means once your domain is flagged as a spammer, you’ll have no recourse to fix the problem.
Bottom-line, if you’re investing in email marketing – regardless of daily sending volume – now is the time to make changes to adhere to the new requirements from Google and Yahoo. Not only is it important to follow best practices, but these rules aren’t going away. In fact, it’s highly likely that other email providers will launch similar requirements in the ongoing battle against unwanted messages.