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EP 22: 3 Must-Know Changes to Google’s Email Sender Guidelines
70 Plays9 months ago
This week's episode is for ANYONE (business owners, marketing service providers, and freelancers) who uses an email marketing platform. Buckle up and listen for three must-know updates to Google's 2024 email sender guidelines and how to ensure your accounts are compliant.
Google is cracking down on its sender guidelines to help alleviate the amount of spam that hits users' inboxes. This information is pretty technical and has many parts, but Lindsay goes over all of the nitty-gritty details in an easy-to-digest way.
After you listen, be sure to download a few free resources that Lindsay has complied to help you get your email game up to par. >> https://lindsaywhite.co/email
Additional resources mentioned:
- MX Toolbox: https://mxtoolbox.com/
- Postmaster Tools: https://gmail.com/postmaster/
Follow The Business Playdate online & come say hi!
- The Business Playdate Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebusinessplaydate/
- Lindsay White's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaywhite.co/
- Betsy Moorehead's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/betsymoorehead.biz/
- Learn more about Lindsay's marketing program here: https://lindsaywhite.co/
- Learn more about Betsy's marketing services here: https://betsymoorehead.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Business Playdate
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Business Playdate, a podcast hosted by Lindsay White and Betsy Moorehead, two internet strangers turned business besties. We're two marketing professionals living across the country, raising our kiddos while running our own individual businesses. We built these businesses based on our experiences working in corporate management roles with the end goal to be able to show up for our families first. And we did it. We're so happy you're here with us. Now let's get into this week's episode.
Balancing Family and Work Struggles
00:00:30
Speaker
Hey guys, welcome back to the business play date. Lindsay, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm very tired. Me too. I am so tired. Alan has been traveling, which is fine. And the kids were actually great sleepers while he was gone. And he came back last night and they were just terrors the whole night. So I was like, I mean, I'm glad that you were really good while he was gone. But man, we had a brutal night last night.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, I feel you. This has been a tough week of sleep at our house too, but I am tired because of some self-inflicting fun I had last night, but it was like mom's night dinner after dance. And then I came home and shaped my sourdough and it was an epic fail because I totally messed up the recipe yesterday, but, um, you know, I had another glass of glass of wine anyway. And then.
00:01:27
Speaker
I'm woken up by a four-year-old tapping me on the shoulder this morning saying, Mommy, is it morning time? And I was like, is the sun up? No, it's not. It's Friday. This is the day we sleep a little longer. Did you not get the memo? I know. When did they start getting the memos? I don't know.
00:01:46
Speaker
I know. I've been considering getting Ellie one of those red light, green light alarm things for her room. I just don't think this little girl's going to care. She's just going to be like, I do what I want. Kids that care about that, love it. Love that for those parents. My kid would not care. She'd be like, what light?
00:02:05
Speaker
Right. Like how do I turn, how do I unplug it? How do I turn it off? Yeah. Yeah. She's also like terrified of any new thing that has brought into her room. So like she just realized that her, we still have a, um, camera monitor in her room, but she has just noticed the green light that's on her like camera monitor. And she like ran out of her room the other night in the middle of the night.
00:02:26
Speaker
Mommy, what is that green light? I was like, it's always been there. What are you talking about? Oh my gosh. Oh geez, but yes. The joys of preschoolers, you know? Yeah, the joys. Their imagination is wild. They're testing me lately. Mm-hmm. They're testing me. The toddler running around, that's always fun.
00:02:51
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Always fun.
Google's 2024 Email Guidelines
00:02:55
Speaker
Well, speaking of fun, let's talk about email marketing. So fun. It's so fun, guys. Well, today we are going to be talking about the changes that Google is making to their 2024 sender guidelines, which sounds super dry and boring, but it impacts all of us. And if it doesn't impact you directly, it likely is impacting your clients.
00:03:18
Speaker
So it's something that we found was really important to talk about. It's very convoluted. It's very difficult, but we're gonna try to talk about it in a really simple way so that you can understand the basics, the bones, the why and what you need to actually change going forward so that it's easy to digest and easy to implement.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I feel like we've been trying to talk about this on the podcast for a little while. Like you've hinted at it a couple of times, but having a dedicated episode to it, I think it's going to be really good for people to be able to refer back to because guys, Lindsay knows everything about this. She's going to do the meat of the talking today. And I'm just going to like ask some questions because I have no clue what's going on.
00:03:56
Speaker
My eyes just got so wide. I know a good bit. I know a good bit. I have been in email marketing for my entire career really with my old corporate job. When I left, they were actually creating a position for me around specifically data and email marketing and segmentation and creating segmentation data-driven strategies.
00:04:22
Speaker
This is something that is, I don't know if that I would say near and dear to my heart, but it's just something that I have been deep in the weeds up for a very long time. Yeah. You always have. I feel like even when I first got to know you, email marketing was always really a good strength of yours. I know the important things about it, but I'm not as in the weeds with it as you have been or know near as much about.
00:04:44
Speaker
the segmenting the audiences and all the things that different, like all the ways to really like utilize your email marketing to your highest benefit. Yes, definitely. And there's so much you can, I mean, that's why I love email marketing is it should be the cornerstone of almost every person's marketing strategy, but it also, there's so much you can do with it and it's yours. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it, which is the best part. Um,
00:05:12
Speaker
So I don't know. I think email marketing is really cool just because there's so much you can do on the back end and from a strategy perspective to learn about your list, learn about the people who are reading your stuff and figure out what they want without them knowing that you're getting all of this information from them. Right. Yeah. And you know, I think this episode is email marketing in general, and we're going to dive into like the Google changes and not make, making sure people understand that a little bit better. Um, but to just like, like you were just talking about like the importance of email marketing, how to use it to its base.
00:05:41
Speaker
benefit and potential. Um, and like, I remember from my time in like event marketing, um, and now e-commerce, I mean, conversions happening in email and your inbox is like one of the highest places conversions happen. And so, I mean, if your email marketing is tightened up and has a good strategy to it, you could really see a potential for massive gain.
00:06:08
Speaker
if that's the right word there. But I do think that not enough people in our space realize that it should be the cornerstone of their marketing strategy.
Email Segmentation and Tracking Tips
00:06:21
Speaker
Well, and I think too, a lot of people are like, Oh, yeah, you need to be doing email marketing. But yeah, anyone can send out a freaking email like, right? But what is actually can do that? Yeah, what's in that email matters. And also what matters almost more than what's in the email is how you're structuring it on the back end.
00:06:42
Speaker
how you're designing it within MailerLite or MailChimp or whatever you're using, how you're structuring it and gathering the data on the backend is so important because if you are getting any tracking on the links that you're putting in your emails, you are missing out on the largest marketing opportunity as it pertains to email and honestly, one of the easiest to convert marketing opportunities.
00:07:04
Speaker
When you say that, the tracking stuff, do you mean like UTM codes or like stuff you can track in Google analytics or segmentation? Like what do you mean by that exactly? I don't do any UTM codes, but you can if that's the way that you want to do it. I actually don't even know if that would work. What you want is you want to be using an email marketing system that allows you to track who is clicking on your links. And then ideally what you want to be able to do is take, so let's say that I send out an email.
00:07:32
Speaker
I'm going to send out an email, let's say that I am a food blogger and I'm sending out an email that has a link to a product on Amazon. And it also has a link to a recipe and it also has a link to something super random like
00:07:52
Speaker
a dog leash. I don't know, something totally different, right? So these are three different categories of types of content within my email. So then I sent out this email and you Betsy, you click on the recipe link. Great. So now I want to target anyone who clicks on that recipe and put them in some sort of tag. So some sort of segment that's like,
00:08:13
Speaker
interested in recipes. Now I know if I launch a recipe book for sale for $17, those are the people who are most likely going to buy it because they like recipes. So it makes it a way for you to easily see who's engaging in your content, what they're most interested in, and then create these hot or not lists essentially so that you can
00:08:36
Speaker
then have conversations. I work with a lot of relationship-driven businesses, and so they have a lot of one-to-one meetings with their clients, and they send out an email that's like, hey, I work with a lot of financial institutions. They send out an email that has a link to a 401k program and a link to a credit card program.
00:08:56
Speaker
and their clients are clicking on this credit card program and their next meeting with this client, they know, hey, you might be interested in a credit card. This is a product I can sell you. This is a way to deepen our relationship together. This is what we can be talking about. Yeah, there's so much opportunity there. Yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can use it. So you got to figure out what works best for you or for your client. But email marketing is one of the strongest tools that you can be using.
00:09:22
Speaker
I guess I didn't realize that I knew that you could do click segmentation in some email list, but is it, is it mostly or in some email, like service platforms, platforms. Thank you. Um, but is it, is our most emails platforms like that now, like where it's automated? I know that flow desk, I don't know anything about flow desk. So this isn't necessarily a knock against it, but I've heard that.
00:09:48
Speaker
they don't have the best data. It's very pretty, but it's hard to gather data. So I don't know if you'd be able to do it in something more simple like that. Um, but I know constant contact has it. Yeah. Constant contact has it. I don't know about Mailchimp, but Mailchimp has it. I don't know about mailer light. Um,
00:10:08
Speaker
Entreport is what I use. Entreport has an active campaign has it. HubSpot has it. So that's something, if you're looking at new email platforms, that's something that I would take into consideration is what kind of data and analytics are you able to pull from there and what kind of automations are you able to build on the backend of that data and analytics? Yeah, that makes sense. I know like, um, we're going to talk about it, but like a lot of the regulations around email, you know, has changed. And I think a lot of the email platforms have, um,
00:10:37
Speaker
I had to change what they're doing to make sure that it's more user friendly and more accurate and more kosher. And then it's all working because we say this a lot and I hear a lot of people say this, but if social media goes away, sometimes I hate that, but I get it. If social media goes away, your email list, you want to make sure you have that. Those are the people, that's your audience that you can talk to. And so you want to make sure you're doing everything the right way.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah. And like another thing too is if you don't want to use the, if social media goes away analogy or if you don't want to use it or if you don't want to be on social media, my favorite thing to consider. Um, I've not made the just have not pulled the plug yet. Um, but is I have a bunch of social media followers, right? And I don't know anything about them. I see their username. I can see what name they have entered on their social media profile, but that's all I've got.
00:11:31
Speaker
You know, an email, when you're building this email list, oftentimes cookies and data that you're not even getting gets inputted or you can collect more data from them and save that in your list. And so, you know, I have some clients who have email marketing capture lists where they require an address, they require a phone number, they require all of these things and
00:11:59
Speaker
you know, in their particular line of business, it makes sense, but it allows them to know so much more like they have
00:12:06
Speaker
perfect geographical map of where all of these potential clients are. You can just capture so much more data. Yeah, you can. And in the e-commerce world, so Shopify, Klaviyo is the email system that's like Shopify syncs with it. Yeah. It's almost like a CRM system. I mean, you can see the value of your customer. You can see all these things. They have customer profiles. And then when I was in the ticketing world in the event space,
00:12:33
Speaker
Like the ticket providers that we use like had a email system that synced all that information to it too. So it was called Hive.co and it basically acted as a CRM system. So yeah, you could see people who.
00:12:48
Speaker
purchased tickets in 2021, but didn't in 2022. And so you want to hit them back in 2023, or you could see people who purchased tickets and also bought something else on the website or purchased tickets or another thing. I mean, there's just so many ways of like the click segmentation that's happening to segment these audiences. And another cool thing too, and I don't know if, I'm sure you can do this in
00:13:15
Speaker
non e-commerce related like non like Shopify or ticket sales. But like if we were running say we're running like a flash sale on something, we could set up like a live audience. And then we'd be running we could connect it to Facebook and make a custom audience on Facebook. And we could make sure that either the
00:13:36
Speaker
ads were going to people who weren't already getting the emails or hadn't already bought the tickets or we could not make sure we weren't sending like the multi-day flash sale emails to people who'd already purchased. So you can exclude different segments from the audience and you can set up these automations. So I think email marketing has just come so, so far. So far.
00:13:59
Speaker
five, 10 years, but even just in the most recent few years, there's been so much more, which I guess leads us into this whole, it's changing again and Google has some more, some more shit we gotta do.
Purpose Behind Google's Guidelines
00:14:13
Speaker
Well, the purpose of today's conversation is to talk about the Google email center guideline changes, which actually took place February 1, 2024.
00:14:25
Speaker
And Yahoo is following suit, and I am sure a plethora of other email providers will be doing the same. But this is the first time in 19 years that Google has changed their sender guidelines, which is kind of wild. So honestly, I think that the
00:14:45
Speaker
reason behind these changes is A, to look out for the consumer, right? To look out for all of us who are getting email marketing emails and make sure that we're not getting scammed, make sure we're not getting phishing emails and just
00:14:59
Speaker
the bad things that can happen in email, but also to establish like, Hey, we care about our consumers and we have your best interests at mind. And so yes, for the rest of us as email marketers, that means we need to make a couple of changes and tweaks because we also should be caring about the consumer and the people who are looking at our emails. So I know a lot of people are a little annoyed by the changes, but as email marketers, we should also be caring about these people as well.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah. So what do I need to do as a service provider to ensure that this is happening? Not for my business, but for my clients. Yeah, definitely. So I would say the changes kind of are taking place in three different areas. The first area is authentication. So we'll walk through what those changes need to be. The second section is subscription status and what your subscriber list looks like, that kind of stuff.
00:15:53
Speaker
And then the third area is going to be your sending and those sending practices. So within that first area that we're going to talk about is authentication. So there's three things that you need to make sure the email servers have to be properly authenticated. And that's a proper SPF record, a proper DKIM record and a proper DMA RC record. So DKIM, Demarc and SPF.
00:16:21
Speaker
They're so freaking technical and it's like, I know just enough to be dangerous on these three things. I know where to go to change it. I know what to change it to.
00:16:33
Speaker
What are they actually for? I'm not really sure. One fact, nothing makes me sound or feel more smart than when I'm sending an email to a client. I'm like, we need to update your DNS record. And I'm like, look at me, knowing all these technical terms. And then I'm on the side, like Googling, sometimes like, what is a DNS record? Well, so what's funny is I have a client who, or a past client who
00:17:00
Speaker
had unhealthy email practices like five to 10 years ago, and it's just continued to compound into this bigger issue for them. And we'll talk more about that as we continue down this path, but it was causing issues. And so one of the main things that we needed to get updated was updating these authentication records for them. This was like the first step in getting their email marketing back on track. And they had a full tech team, full IT, like
00:17:28
Speaker
outsourced IT department. So I got on the phone with their outsourced IT department and they had absolutely no idea how to change any of these records. What? Yes.
00:17:39
Speaker
Isn't that wild? Like on their server? Yes. They were like, oh, we can't do that. That doesn't fall under us. And I was like, that does fall under your IT. That's wild. That falls under you. And so I think it's very interesting. Those in IT, this is a huge opportunity for you because clearly no one knows enough about this stuff. It's kind of this wild, wild west of email authentication where it's like, you know,
00:18:05
Speaker
bouncing the ball away, like two square, just no one wants to take claim of that ball. So how do you like find out what these need to be? Cause isn't, doesn't that come from your email platform? So like I logged into my client's constant contact and I got like a pop-up notification.
00:18:23
Speaker
Cause it was after February 1st and it was like, you need to make sure that the DNS record that the domain has been updated and all these things are good and kosher and ready to like move forward with. Um, so do you get all of the like code that you need to then send to it from the email platform? So it kind of depends on each of these things. The SPF record is going to come from your email marketing platform and it needs to be inputted into your domain provider. So like your name, I use name cheap. So your name cheap.
00:18:53
Speaker
Um, and then the DKM record is also going to be input into your DNS records on your domain provider. So your name, and that will also come from your.
00:19:07
Speaker
email marketing provider. Most of the time, the client is the one that has access to this or their IT people. It's not something that US marketing service provider should know how to do. No. That's what I thought. Do I know how to go in and do it? Yes, if I had to. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing this for any of my clients personally. I would want someone who
00:19:37
Speaker
is managing that stuff for them to be doing it. And the same thing with the demarc record. I mean, and a lot of these, like Namecheap has great chat customer support. I use Entreport, so I needed to kind of go between Entreport and Namecheap to figure out what needed to be changed and how to change it and what to change it to. And both of them had great customer chat support, and everyone was super helpful. A lot of these email marketing platforms, they know this is happening. This isn't a surprise. And a lot of them are doing things to proactively help their users.
00:20:07
Speaker
So is it a little technical? Yes. But is it, you know, someone can figure it out and implement it. Yes. It's an easy, easy switch. It just, you need to figure out what to input. I mean, it had to have been done to set up the email marketing in the first place to authorize the domain to like send from at Betsy more head.com. Like I remember whenever I said a blow desk, I had to do that.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the main one that most people are missing right now is the demarc. I never even heard of that one. So yeah. So that's, that's the one that I've note when talking with people, that's the one that they tend to be missing. Yeah. So all this is done on your domain provider, like your name, chief, your go daddies, your cloud players, all of that. Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Maintaining Healthy Email Practices
00:20:50
Speaker
So that's a one-time setup, set it, forget it, you no longer need to worry about it. And it's not too late, right? Even though we're after February 1st. No, no, no, no, no. Go jump on it. So the next areas that we're going to be talking about are much more on healthy email practices that I'm sure a lot of us are doing. But you'd be surprised, especially us as marketing providers, we all most likely are engaging in healthy email practices. I've had a lot of clients, though, who I started... But don't.
00:21:18
Speaker
doing outsourced marketing five years ago. And prior to that, things were a bit sketchy in their world. They were. And some people still run with it that way. They do. And some people still think it's okay. So email blacklists, they're a real thing. Server blacklists, that's a real thing. So these are really important. But the reason they're so important is these Google email sender guidelines are changing and you're not going to be getting into Google inboxes if you're not
00:21:47
Speaker
participating in healthy email practices like this. So the first thing anyone with an at gmail.com email. Yes. Anyone with an at gmail.com or at Yahoo. Um, and I also want you to take into consideration like my email address, uh, you know, the white label creative for my agency is Google. It's a Google. It's all, it's Google. Um, so just different things to think about, but you know,
00:22:17
Speaker
The basics, did your email list opt in? That should be, you should have opted in. It shouldn't be, have you purchased an email list? Your answer should be no. Do you ever send emails to people who've not opted into your list?
00:22:32
Speaker
The answer should be no. Um, so some of these really basic things, one thing that they're really cracking down on is it, is it easy to unsubscribe to your list? So having an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your emails, I think most people are doing this. And I think most email marketing providers require that. So, you know, some of those basics of just, is it easy to unsubscribe? Do you have a healthy list of people that you haven't purchased? Let's check off those basics. So after you kind of check off those basics and
00:23:01
Speaker
You know, you might need to do some tweaking to your client's list. They probably have purchased a listing. There is nothing worse than not being able to figure out how to unsubscribe from an email address. Oh my gosh, nothing.
00:23:11
Speaker
I have done a lot of unsubscribing lately because I'm trying to clean up my inboxes. If you've listened to several episodes ago, I have very poor personal email health. And so I'm trying to like get my inbox cleaned up and one day down to zero, but I've been doing a lot of unsubscribing. It never happened for me either. 33,000 emails. I'm just like bulk deleting. I'm like, I don't even care if it's from more than six months ago, don't care.
00:23:40
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and I've found that it's, some people make it very difficult to unsubscribe. So really interesting. Yeah. So that's something that's really important. So make sure that your emails are easy to unsubscribe from. So another couple of things that I want to touch on that are a little bit more technical, your spam rate, you should know what your spam rate is. You can figure this out by using postmaster tools. It's a Google type of program.
00:24:10
Speaker
Um, but you want to make sure that that spam rate is within a healthy space and also that it's not dramatically jumping. So maybe even set yourself a reminder once a quarter to check your spam rate, but that's something that. So before these were even announced like this, these changes were announced back in October, but my client had issues with this a year ago. And when I started digging this, their spam rate was through the roof.
00:24:38
Speaker
and they were blacklisted on a bunch of different email servers. They weren't getting through to inboxes. They were hitting spam with people that they regularly email, like wild things like that.
00:24:53
Speaker
It was all because they had the high spam rate. They had purchased lists in the past, so they were getting a lot of people reporting them as spam. They didn't have easy email marketing practices. We fixed it. Over the course of the last year, we have fixed these problems, but it takes time and it's a huge headache for everyone.
00:25:18
Speaker
How easy is that to explain to your client? Really hard. It's just like, why is this not working? It's really hard. And they're actually not the only person who's come to me in the last year or so, year and a half with these issues. Three separate people come to me saying, I don't know what's going on with our email, but do you think you and your team can figure out how to fix it? And how are they with all of them? Yeah.
00:25:44
Speaker
been purchased lists in the past and really high spam scores because people were never opted into these lists, had never heard of them before in reporting the emails as spam. That's crazy. How are they realizing something was wrong with their emails? Like their open rate went down or they were just getting- Their open rates went down dramatically, like cut in half almost. Yeah. And one of them specifically started getting emails from people they normally talk to and saying, hey, by the way, this hit my spam inbox.
00:26:14
Speaker
And so that's how, that was where I was like, oh, wow, there is, something's going on and it is not, it's a systemic issue. It's not just a you issue. It is a systemic issue. Like there's clearly been crackdowns on email practices. And yes, these changes took place February 1 of 2024, but for the last year and a half, you can tell just through what's been going on with people's email marketing.
00:26:43
Speaker
that there have been big crackdowns on spam rates. The servers have been blacklisting emails, like email programs and different.
00:26:51
Speaker
P addresses because the spam rates are so high. That's crazy. I want to dive into this postmaster thing a little bit. I just pulled it up. So it's gmail.com slash postmaster. What is it? Postmaster tools. Hang on gmail.com slash postmaster P O S T M S T E R. So then, so then what do you do? So you go into here and then you need to have like your text record from your domain added in.
00:27:18
Speaker
I think so. I don't know enough about what I'm looking at. I'm looking at this. So I know you have to connect and I have actually my email addresses and all of my clients domains in here so I can see what their status are. And yeah, you need to pull in.
00:27:39
Speaker
It says it's through an API maybe. Yeah. You'll need to go get a text record from your domain to do this. Go to your domain platform, like your name, cheaper, your go daddy or whatever text record under advanced DNS settings. And then if they don't have enough data.
00:27:55
Speaker
Um, you can usually find some of that from your email marketing platform, but okay, interesting. I'll have to do this postmaster tools. I have one client that, um, we, they have a pretty healthy list. I feel like we do a pretty, everything's set up pretty good. Um,
00:28:11
Speaker
but I would love to know their spam rate because when I hear that, my mind just goes to like your unsubscribes or like what your email marketing platform tells you, you know, it'll tell you like how many, how many times you want to spam. Yeah. Um, another good, uh, program to use is MX toolbox.com. So if you go to MX toolbox.com, you can enter in your domain name and you can actually see in here, if you're blacklisted on any email servers,
00:28:41
Speaker
Um, if you're working, you can see, you know, a lot of information. Now, is it going to look really technical? Yes, absolutely. You can get a lot of information from in here. I just did betsymorehead.com and let's see. And there's like zero problems. Wait, hang on. Three errors.
00:29:09
Speaker
We'll have to look into that after this. So there's like a little dropdown where you can actually pick different kinds of checks to do. So you can do a blacklist check and it'll give you, you know, like your where you're at. So I just put in a random like email domain and I see these people are blacklisted on two lists. Um, so you can see what your status is and then you know, okay, clearly I need to make some changes.
00:29:37
Speaker
This is wild. I really hope you guys are learning during this episode because my mind is absolutely blown.
00:29:45
Speaker
We should try to drop some of these links in the show notes. I know we always say we're going to do that. And then I always forget to do it. Sorry guys. Just DMS if you're interested in anything. This is wild. Okay. So, so that is all part of like your subscription status, that like section. What else in that area? Does your list size matter? Like what?
Impact of Guidelines on Bulk Senders
00:30:08
Speaker
Getting back to like the Google updates, making sure everything's good.
00:30:14
Speaker
We've gone over unsubscribe, spam rate, all of those things. One other thing that I want you to consider is your subject lines, making sure you have subject lines that aren't misleading. And I know it has been, you know, over the years, like there has been some catchy, trendy subject lines that you see coming through. But I think as a industry, we all need to be better about
00:30:42
Speaker
using accurate subject lines that are just like, we need to be a little more basic. Like what are they going to see inside of this email? Um, we don't need, you know, clickbait. So avoiding that now list size. So that's something we definitely want to talk about because that's another one of the major changes. If you are, if you have a list of 5,000 folks or more who are Gmail specific users, then you're considered a bulk sender. Now this will be a lot of
00:31:12
Speaker
B to C type of like you were talking about Shopify. Like I think a lot of e-commerce is going to find, you know, everyone's email addresses, Gmail these days.
00:31:20
Speaker
So if you have a list of 5,000 or more, you might want to just consider yourself in this box because it's really hard to figure out how many of your list people are Gmail users if they have email addresses that are at the white label creative. So if your list is over 5,000 people, you are considered a bulk sender. And the way bulk senders are being treated now is they are not allowed to email out to more than 5,000 people in a 24-hour period. Oh, wow.
00:31:49
Speaker
This is a twofold situation. So the first is you're not allowed to email to more than 5,000 people in a 24 hour period of time. Now, what does that mean? If your list is 35,000 people or more, you are going to have to think about what your email communications look like because that's seven full days of emails. If I have an email list and I send out an email, like a weekly newsletter to 35,000 people,
00:32:19
Speaker
That weekly newsletter can't just go out on Mondays to everyone anymore. It needs to go to 5,000 people on Monday, 5,000 people 24 hours later, so June plus five minutes, Tuesday, 5,000 people on Wednesday, and so on and so forth. And that impacts the relevancy of your content.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. That's wild. So something to think about. I mean, that's a huge strategy shift. Huge strategy shift. And I mean, I have a lot of ideas in my head on changes from a strategy perspective that we can shift, but that's a huge shift. And the twofold part of this
00:32:57
Speaker
is another thing that Google is strongly prioritizing is they want to see that you have a regularly cadenced email going out. They want to see that you're regularly engaging with your audience. They want a weekly newsletter, a monthly newsletter, whatever makes the most sense with you and your audience, but getting in their inbox regularly, showing up, being authentic and letting your audience know like, Hey, I'm a real,
00:33:26
Speaker
business. I am frequently going to send you emails. You know what to expect when I email you. They know what to expect. They're engaging with your emails or they're unsubscribing. Unsubscribes are not bad, but you want to be regularly getting in inboxes. Yeah, I would say definitely unsubscribes aren't bad because it just continues to keep the right people in your bucket, so to speak. Exactly. This is really interesting about the 5,000 a day because
00:33:57
Speaker
I mean, I think from a small business perspective, it's not going to impact smaller businesses with smaller sizes. But if we're looking at these bigger businesses with bigger list sizes, like e-commerce, I think is an area that is going to be dramatically impacted. I think we need to be starting to get a little more in the weeds of segmentation strategies.
00:34:20
Speaker
Do you think that if somebody didn't realize this and they go to send an email to their 35,000 people list, that it'll just say it can't send or it'll only send to 5,000 people? Is there something to look out for? It'll send. No, it'll still send. But your spam score is going to start going up and you're going to start hitting spam in boxes. Interesting. Interesting. So instead of hitting the inbox, you're going to hit the junk holder. Interesting.
00:34:48
Speaker
So definitely I think that that is the biggest change. And I think those of us who are marketing providers, it's not going to impact us directly, but it is going to impact our clients dramatically. Yeah. And you want to know what you're talking about. Cause when you're doing this for them, it also creates a really great opportunity for us as marketing providers though, because think about all of the strategy that now needs to go into email marketing where there's been like strategy has been.
00:35:18
Speaker
like a smart move, but it hasn't necessarily been necessary. And now, if your list size is over 5,000 people, especially over 35,000 people, strategy is required. Yeah, absolutely. Or you're not going to be moving the needle.
00:35:34
Speaker
There's no more willy nilly. Let's just send an email today and see how it does. That's why the regularly cadenced email is so important too because the willy nilly emails are creating issues with your sending volume. So your sending volume is that third thing that Google's looking at. And so they want to see that your sending volume
00:35:56
Speaker
is not dramatically changing month to month. And when I mean dramatically, I mean that your list size should be growing. Everyone's lists should be growing over time, but we should not see some wild increase in
00:36:09
Speaker
your list showcasing that you might've purchased a list. We should have a strategy in place that's just regular growth, like organic growth. And yeah, maybe sometimes we're involved in a conference and we gain a bunch of lists. Yeah, like that's fine, but we should have these regular emails so that our percentage of growth
00:36:31
Speaker
is pretty steady rather than, oh, I sent an email in January, I'm going to send one in October, and then I'm going to send one in November. And then it's like, okay, you had this massive growth.
00:36:41
Speaker
from email one to email two, but then email two to email three, you had no growth. That's like a red flag. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I, for one of my e-commerce clients right now, we are running a lead generation ad on Facebook and it is performing very well. And we've added maybe a thousand people since mid-December to their list, a little over a thousand people. So that's interesting because I wonder
00:37:06
Speaker
If something like when you do like a lead generation campaign and you get a bunch of leads and they automatically go to your, you know, guest, if that, if that matters, like this is a pretty steady growth, I would say it's not like, yeah, dramatically. I think that now that February one has hit, we're going to start to see what the impacts of these changes really are. You know, I mean, Google has told us this is how to get out of the spam and box, but like, what are the actual impacts? I think too.
00:37:36
Speaker
marketing is changing as it always does. The landscape is changing, consumers are changing the way that they consume content, the way that they purchase, like purchase behaviors are changing. And I think this is the start of, I mean, marketing strategy has always been so important, but it's just going to continue to get more important because we can't just throw spaghetti at the wall because it's going to create these massive spikes and like
00:38:05
Speaker
the algorithms, the clouds, the people that are like the jurisdiction of where our marketing efforts are going in this digital space, they don't want to see these massive like highs and lows. They want to see kind of steady Eddie, like your authentically and organically
00:38:21
Speaker
growing your business and your marketing efforts.
Strategic Email Marketing Amidst Change
00:38:24
Speaker
It's interesting because I feel like this goes with a couple of episodes we've had lately about the authenticity, the, you know, um, being in this space, like personal professional growth, like knowing these types of things as marketing service providers, being the authority in this topic for your client is so, is more important now than ever. Like sure you can go in and be like, I can help you with your marketing.
00:38:49
Speaker
But knowing these additional regulations, knowing these additional what is happening in the industry, being on top of it, like when Google analytics changed over from universal analytics to GA4.
00:39:02
Speaker
walking your client through why we have to do all of this, why you need this information, what the ramifications could be if we don't handle it. That is job security for marketing service providers, especially when there are so many small businesses who the business owner is doing the bulk of
00:39:21
Speaker
like everything and they don't have time to learn about this. They don't have time to understand why their emails are going to spam and all this hard work is not working for them. That's when people like us can come in and learn this stuff tooth and nail or
00:39:36
Speaker
learn from someone like you or from this podcast, you know, or like take time to pull in an expert, you know, an expert. Yes. Like, Hey, you need to pull in an expert on this. Yes. Like I am not an email marketing provider, like a expert, like that is not a key of mine, but I'm a marketing strategist and I know that it's key for the strategy. So like a couple of my clients who are my ad clients, I've talked to them about their emails and we've kind of figured out like, Hey, how can we get everything kind of synced up with your entire marketing strategy with your ad plan?
00:40:05
Speaker
And they have all, they're all now using as a Shopify Clavio, like email expert for all of their stuff. And I'm like, thank God you have this in place, especially now. And she knows shout out to Ashley, like she's wonderful. She knows like what is happening in this space and what needs to be, I mean, getting, even if you can't be that for your client, like you just said, bringing in an expert, helping them find somebody who is, who can make sure that they can continue to just
00:40:33
Speaker
Like turn conversions, like get sales, get leads, do whatever they need to do, um, accurately without any damage being done. Yeah. And I think that just being able to talk about this stuff with clients is showcasing you as a marketing authority, even if you're not the person to create their authentication records for them. Right. But being able to talk about this and say, Hey, like this is important. You need to talk to your tech team about this or this is important. You need to.
00:41:01
Speaker
dive into this a little bit more, jump in the chat with Namecheap and figure out how to make these changes. But I think that it's so important. And again, like you mentioned, I think we've been seeing this kind of change of tides, but this authenticity in marketing is so important. And the
00:41:24
Speaker
Industry is showing us that it's important and the consumers are showing us that it's important and everyone's bottom line is showing us that it's important. Well, yeah. The end consumer, they want to feel secure. They want to feel like they're not...
00:41:39
Speaker
their privacy is not being infringed on and that it is a safe place to be in the digital world. I think cookies are going away soon. It's more important now than ever to really hone in these skills and understand what's happening. Understand what's happening. You don't have to know how to make the changes. Like I said, this is a great opportunity to hone in on some email marketing strategies. It could be a great opportunity
00:42:08
Speaker
for you as a marketing provider to maybe pivot a little bit and become an email strategist because
00:42:15
Speaker
The opportunity is going to be out there. Things are shifting. Yeah. So I think let's link a couple of things in the, um, and the show notes. I know you have some resources we could link in there. We'll link some of these like postmaster and some of the other, um, toolbox, but go ahead to the show notes, look at some of those links. If you have any questions, um, feel free to like shoot one of us a DM or on the business play date, um, or leave a review. Like if this episode was really.
00:42:43
Speaker
It's exciting and insightful. And you learn something new because we, I know we say this every time, but we just love seeing your reviews. We love hearing how much you guys are enjoying this podcast because it's something that we definitely look forward to every week. And we, um, we love seeing you guys be a part of the community too. Yeah, we enjoy it. Well, thank you for your wealth of knowledge. I'm so glad that you
00:43:08
Speaker
just really invested in learning about this because I learned a lot today and that I had been like trying to learn about it. I just hadn't really been able to sit down and dive into it. And so this is hard. I mean, it's hard. And when I actually first started diving into it, it's kind of funny because I was seeing a lot of blog posts around like
00:43:27
Speaker
what the changes were. And they were all just sales pitches for whatever their program was, whatever they're like, yes, I remember seeing that. Yeah. And so I just dove into Google's resources because I was like, I don't want to be sold a lie. For someone else's profitability and gain. I want to know what the actual changes and implications are for my clients. And
00:43:50
Speaker
So yeah, that's why I got all this information. I didn't go to a Facebook group for advice. I didn't go to a Facebook group. No, I didn't. I'm also not providing guidance in Facebook groups about this. Yes, I know. I just think it's so important to stay informed and to stay informed from the source. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Well, this is great. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Yeah, hope everyone enjoyed it and we'll talk to you all soon. Yeah, bye guys.
00:44:26
Speaker
you