Email Marketing:

Are You in Compliance?

Along with the new year came a new set of compliance requirements that all founders and business owners need to understand.

On February 1, 2024, Google and Yahoo implemented a new set of requirements for email delivery. Their stated goal is to better secure inboxes and provide the best consumer email experience.

Google is requiring organizations that send more than 5,000 emails a day to Gmail addresses to follow a series of authentication measures to ensure secure email delivery to its inboxes. While Yahoo does not state a minimum sending requirement, it aligns with Google’s criteria.

While some have called the updates Google’s most significant in 19 years, senders who currently follow best practices shouldn’t have too many changes to implement in order to comply with these new requirements. While 5000 emails per day may seem like a big number to many, it’s still crucial for brands to understand how the medium is evolving to maintain competitive edge and compliance.

While we recommend you review the requirements directly in this article, here are the top three areas every marketing team should focus on:

1. Check with your IT team to make sure email authentication (e.g. SPF/DKIM/DMARC) is set up correctly. Instructions:
   1. Google
   2. Microsoft
2. Make it easy to unsubscribe: A one-click unsubscribe feature is now mandatory, ensuring recipients can easily opt out of unwanted emails.
3. Monitor spam rates and only send emails users want.

Ensure your emails are relevant and engaging. Here’s our quick Email Deliverability Checklist as a useful guide.

Both Yahoo and Gmail will enforce a spam complaint threshold of 0.3%. Senders who exceed this threshold will likely see an increase in the number of blocked emails or emails being directed to the bulk folder. Google now gives visibility into an organization’s spam compliant rates via Google Postmaster Tools.

You can access the full requirements from Google here, and from Yahoo here.

These new standards are more than regulatory changes; they are an opportunity to elevate your email communications. As business owners, you can use these changes to your advantage to reinforce the effectiveness of your digital outreach.

For more marketing tips and insights, please check out our blog.

Want to stay ahead of the curve?

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