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EMAIL MARKETERS, RESOLVE NOT TO WORRY ABOUT THESE 3 THINGS UNLESS …

6 minute read
By Chad S. White

January 11, 2024

Digital Marketing

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SAVED

As we ring in the new year, let’s resolve to focus our attention on real
challenges and not get riled up by issues that sound worrisome but generally
aren’t.


THE GIST

 * Minimal impact expected. Google's policy to retire inactive accounts should
   minimally affect marketers who maintain regular email engagement.
 * Compliance made easy. Google and Yahoo’s deliverability requirements are
   manageable, with most responsibilities handled by email service providers.
 * Little disruption likely. Apple’s Link Tracking Protection won’t
   significantly impact most email marketers due to its limited scope and
   solutions in place.

Email marketers have plenty of significant challenges to overcome as the channel
continues to evolve. As we ring in the new year, let’s resolve to focus our
attention on real challenges and not get riled up by issues that sound worrisome
but generally aren’t.



Turning your attention to more significant challenges is a better strategy.SOL
on Adobe Stock Photos



Let’s talk about three such issues. We’ll also discuss when you should actually
be worried.


1. GOOGLE’S RETIREMENT OF INACTIVE ACCOUNTS

As of December, Google started retiring inactive accounts that haven’t been
accessed in two years so they can reduce unnecessary storage costs and free up
desirable usernames. Since Gmail addresses are a massive portion of most B2C
marketers’ email lists, this sounds bad.

However, Google has said they’re taking a phased approach and are prioritizing
Google accounts that were created and then immediately abandoned. That means
it’s unlikely that they’ll retire any accounts near-term that have ever had
active Gmail accounts associated with them.



When Google does ultimately shut down accounts that had active associated Gmail
accounts, it’s unlikely they’ll recycle those account names and make them
available again. The risk of identity theft is just too great, and Google
doesn’t want to take on those potential legal liabilities and PR risks.

For perspective, Google’s policy is much less worrisome than that of Yahoo,
which has been retiring inactive accounts after just 12 months since 2013, and
it hasn’t been a source of problems — either for Yahoo or for email marketers.

Marketers should be minimally impacted by this new policy so long as they…

 * Maintain a minimum email cadence of one message a month, which would
   guarantee you’d get a hard bounce from the retired address before it was
   potentially reactivated.
 * Don’t email subscribers have who have been inactive for more than two years —
   which you should already not be doing because of deliverability risks and
   legal risks under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and the EU's General
   Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless … you’re sending out a recall
notice, an annual privacy policy update and other such legally required notices
to customers that you haven’t seen email engagement from in more than two years.
In these instances, it would be wise to space out the sending of these notices
and monitor your bounce rates closely so you don’t exceed a 5% bounce rate over
the course of a month.

Related Article: 5 Truths About Inactive Email Subscribers


2. GOOGLE AND YAHOO’S NEW DELIVERABILITY REQUIREMENTS

In an unprecedented collaboration, Google and Yahoo have announced common
standards around deliverability requirements for commercial senders. The
announcement lays out four requirements, which are that senders… 

 * Keep their spam complaint rates well under 0.3%, and preferably under 0.1%.
 * Honor unsubscribe requests within two days.
 * Include list-unsubscribe headers in their emails.
 * Fully authenticate their email using SPF, DKIM and DMARC.



That first one is solely the responsibility of senders, but shouldn’t be a
difficult bar to stay under. Among Oracle Digital Experience Agency clients,
it’s rare that spam complaint rates rise above 0.1%, especially outside of peak
season mailing periods. If yours is well above that, it’s likely a sign of
problems with your permission practices or inactivity management.


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The next two should be largely handled by your email service provider (ESP).
Even highly distributed organizations (think: insurance brokerage networks)
using overnight batching to share unsubscribe requests shouldn’t have a problem
honoring unsubscribe requests in under two days. But double-check that your ESP
adds a list-unsubscribe header to your emails. If they are, you should see an
Unsubscribe link next to your sender name when you open one of your emails in
Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

It’s the last one around authentication where some marketers may need to worry.

Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless… you’re a large sender and you
haven’t fully authenticated your sender IP addresses and domains. At Oracle
Responsys, we set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for our customers automatically, but
not every ESP does all three, so check with yours. 

Also, if you’re a smaller sender and are using a shared IP address provided by
your ESP, you should ask them how they are complying with these authentication
requirements and if there’s anything you need to do. There’s definitely some
confusion in the industry about how to comply with this requirement.

Related Article: Is the Anti-Spam Law CAN-SPAM Now Meaningless?




3. APPLE’S LINK TRACKING PROTECTION

Email marketers have every right to be traumatized by Apple. Its Mail Privacy
Protection (MPP) has made our jobs significantly more difficult, particularly as
we try to live up to the demands of Apple and other mailbox providers to only
send emails to subscribers who are engaged. Opens have historically been the
metric we used to determine email engagement, and therefore who was safe to
email.

With MPP making opens far less useful, it’s easy to understand marketers’ panic
when they first heard about Link Tracking Protection (LTP). "Apple’s taking
clicks away from us, too?!," email marketers shouted in despair. Without opens
or clicks, how are we supposed to comply with engagement-based spam filtering
algorithms?

Thankfully, LTP won’t affect most email marketers for three reasons. First, LTP
only affects email links that resolve in Safari, which only has about 28% market
share, according to SimilarWeb data. Second, LTP only removes the parameters
listed in the Tracking Query Parameters Tests section on privacytests.org, which
spares most (but not all) email service providers. And third, even the affected
tracking parameters are protected from removal if link redirection is used by
your ESP. 

Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless … your ESP’s tracking parameters are
affected AND you don’t have link redirects turned on in your ESP. Talk to your
ESP if you’re unsure if you’re affected.

Related Article: 4 Stakeholders Every Email Marketing Program Has & What They
Want


OVERCOMING KEY EMAIL MARKETING CHALLENGES: ENHANCING ENGAGEMENT, PERSONALIZATION
AND CROSS-CHANNEL INTEGRATION

With a few exceptions, the chances are good that none of the three things will
affect your email marketing programs in any meaningful way. So double-check that
that’s true, and then turn your attention to more significant challenges, like
improving engagement, reducing list churn, increasing personalization, getting
better cross-channel visibility, and better orchestrating email with other
channels.

Learn how you can join our contributor community.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chad S. White is the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and Head
of Research for Oracle Digital Experience Agency, a global full-service digital
marketing agency inside of Oracle. Connect with Chad S. White:

Main image: Pamela Au on Adobe Stock Photos


TAGS

dxmemail marketingemailantispamdigital marketingmarketing



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For nearly two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the
world's leading community of customer experience professionals.

Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer
experience, digital experience and customer service leaders, the majority of
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Our sister community, Reworked gathers the world's leading employee experience
and digital workplace professionals.


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