Every day, Gmail blocks around 15 billion unwanted emails and prevents 99.9 percent of spam, phishing, and malware from accessing inboxes. However, the challenges users and companies confront today are increasingly intricate.

Closer to the end of 2023, Google and Yahoo introduced revised email-sending policies that may have ramifications for marketers. The policies mandate email authentication, single-click unsubscribes, and low complaint rates. Let’s explore it step-by-step.

What are the New Rules

The new regulations will be implemented in February 2024 for Gmail and in the first quarter of 2024 for Yahoo and AOL email clients. The brief overview is included in the table below.

Most respectable senders have already embraced these policies. Here are the main of them in detail:

Email messages must be authenticated. For ages, the finest marketers have validated their emails, yet unauthenticated messages will be considered spam beginning in 2024.

This means that email senders must adopt the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) records by 2024.

The policy applies to all emails, including transactional and marketing ones. 

Send communications that individuals desire. The following policy does not constitute a modification. Yahoo and Google desire email senders to deliver messages that recipients want. Although this has always been the case, it is now mandatory.

In particular, email senders must maintain spam rates recorded in Google Postmaster Tools at or below 0.3%. This rate is currently shared by Yahoo with a select group of email senders, but it may shortly be made public via its Sender Hub. 

Two simple rules can save the situation:

1. Initiate mailings only when there is something valuable to communicate to the audience.
2. Ensure messages are clear, concise, and engaging.

DNS configuration. To establish a connection between an authorized sending domain and an authorized sending IP, a sender is required to have a configured fully qualified reverse DNS (FQrDNS), also known as a forward confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS). To learn more, Yespo team offers this step-by-step guide that will help you with the settings.

Unsubscribing should be simple. Senders that send 5,000+ emails to Gmail or Yahoo Mail during 24 hours must provide a one-click unsubscribe link. Companies should process users' requests within two days.

This should put an end to manipulations, such as disguising the unsubscribe link to match the background color of the email or requiring extensive surveys to opt out of the mailing list.

What if you experience some difficulties with creating and launching email campaigns? We at Yespo CDP offer help with email marketing. You don't need engineers or designers to make engaging, tailored email campaigns thanks to our tool. You can send 2,500 emails for free after a fast sign-up. 

Aside from sending, Yespo allows tracking the results of mailings, analyzing open rates and other metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns.

How to Get Ready for New Changes

If you've been sending emails without sender authentication, it's time to fill the gap. The Yespo team has created a detailed guide on what you need to do to set up SPF and DKIM digital signatures.

Also, the Yespo CDP editor easily solves the issue of allowing users to quickly unsubscribe from your marketing campaigns. All our email templates have a standard explanation of why the user received the email, with a prominent unsubscribe link. You can freely customize it as you wish.

Ensuring compliance with the new standards, as well as proper email setup, should lead to an increase in the number of email marketing communications that reach inboxes.
However, there are some important nuances to keep in mind. The following tips will help you communicate effectively with your subscribers and prevent spam complaints:

• Set up the Double Opt-in. This involves sending an email to a new contact asking them to confirm their subscription to the newsletter. DOI helps you fill your customer base with only those subscribers who are truly interested in receiving news and offers from your company.
• Audit your contact database on a regular basis. Clean it of invalid email addresses that were added to the list by mistake. Delete inactive subscribers' contacts, as they negatively impact delivery metrics. This optimizes the cost of campaigns by not wasting the budget on inactive readers. Also, it protects your domain from being blacklisted or blocked by email clients.
• Optimize your content. Don't use red fonts in your emails, avoid writing a lot of text in all caps, and don't overuse exclamation points. These are all negative signals to spam filters. Yespo's CDP editor has a built-in AI assistant that helps you create the best possible content for your emails, such as the subject line and body of the email.
• Implement a campaign frequency strategy to avoid bothering subscribers with too many messages. By mindlessly "bombarding" customers with campaigns, you increase the risk of spam complaints, unsubscribes, and decreased loyalty. You can easily avoid these threats by setting in Yespo an Annoyance level for your campaigns to limit the number of emails each subscriber receives for a selected period of time.

Summary

So, here are the main points of new policies implemented by Google and Yahoo that would affect businesses:

• Decrease spam and maintain a complaint rate under 0.3%.
• Authenticate emails using DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
• Allow customers to unsubscribe by clicking just one link.

In general, the updated policies will affect marketers in a way that they will be able to boost the number of email marketing communications that reach inboxes. Also, new rules will allow users who don’t feel interested to unsubscribe easily. Finally, businesses will be able to enhance their deliverability rates, and, overall, avoid issues that could damage the brand.

If you're having trouble creating and launching email campaigns that follow the new rules, don't hesitate to ask for help from our support team in chat. Also, you can contact Yespo marketing agency. Experienced marketers will guide you through the process of setting up digital signatures, analyzing your contact database, and providing recommendations on how to improve your email campaigns.