Email Bulk Sending Changes for Yahoo and Gmail
Does your business send a lot of emails? Have a large email list? There are big email bulk-sending changes for Yahoo and Gmail coming next month, February 2024. They’ll impact email senders who push out around 5,000 emails a day.
(That’s not a firm number, just a guidance – if you feel that you may be bulk sending, you should make these changes full stop, even if it’s less than 5,000 per day.)
This update is designed to make meaningful changes for users that improve their inbox security and reduce the amount of spam customers experience. So, let’s look at the main differences around stricter domain authentication, easy unsubscribe mechanisms and spam complaint rates that bulk senders can expect to see with this change.
Why now?
Thought leaders within the email-sending space tell us that it has been a long time since substantial quality-of-life updates were made for email users. These changes are designed to combat the rise in spam emails and enforce best practices for senders. If you have a Gmail or Yahoo inbox, you can expect to see an incredibly streamlined and secure inbox experience from February. And if you are bulk sending emails, you’ll benefit from more resilience to spoofing attacks, increased oversight on possible security weaknesses and boosted trust between your customers and your brand.
What do you need to do?
If you have a Yahoo or Gmail inbox, you don’t need to do anything. These bulk sending changes will enhance your experience from day one and you’ll start to notice a reduction in spam and improved unsubscribe practices.
If you send thousands of emails a day, you need to:
- Make sure you have domain-aligned authentication with DKIM and SPF, enforcing DMARC policies with an initial setting of “p=none” for compliance with these bulk sending changes.
- Include a one-click unsubscribe in the email header that’s separate from the link in the email footer. By having the unsubscribe in the email header, email clients can engage their native unsubscribe feature too. (This part will be enforced from June 2024.)
- If someone does unsubscribe, process that request within 2 days.
- Have less than 0.3% of your emails marked as spam by recipients. It’s only 3 emails out of 1,000, which is easy to achieve if your emails are personalised and full of valuable information for your customers or clients. You should consider using an email marketing performance tool like Google Postmaster to monitor compliance with these bulk sending changes.
- Experts recommend that you send marketing emails from a different subdomain than transactional emails like order confirmations or expiry notices. This will help you segregate analytics and pause bulk-sending campaigns if they are not landing well with your audience without damaging your critical email workflows.
In total, these new measures are designed to improve email deliverability and reduce spam. As bulk sending emailers, you can act now to ensure best practice is followed and avoid getting flagged for compliance issues come February. If you need help navigating these changes, reach out to us for a quick consultation regarding your email marketing hygiene here.
