How do you keep your email spam rate below 0.3% ? This is the best question for all marketers in 2024. This quandary is not a challenge just for the email team. This is an all hands on deck challenge.
It should be simple enough to follow the strict guidelines that Google and Yahoo have provided…right? Wrong. Just like SERP positioning, SEO, ads, keywords, Google is not making this easy for us. Yay.
So what should you do? Stop sending emails? That is probably not the best go-to-maket strategy for 2024.
Combat email spam requirements
These changes are not something to be feared. We just need to get better; deliver content that your subscribers actually want to read at a relevant time. This concept is not new but still remains important and needs to be in the forefront of all marketers.
To mitigate the risk of Google and Yahoo blacklisting your emails, organizations need to:
- Stop spraying and praying today and redirect your demand efforts towards marketing automation to implement responsive email campaigns
- Befriend Google postmaster tools.
It’s finally time to kill one off email send program
That’s right. I’ve said it. Email sends need to be hyper-targeted and responsive. This means you need an email tool that accurately tracks email reads. This already is a challenge for email marketers thanks to Apple and privacy concerns. The best way to do this is to make content that people want to click. Email marketers can see clicks. This is where the team sport mentality comes in. It’s not just the email marketers problem.
Remember last year when we thought ChatGPT was going to kill all marketing jobs? Turns out, AI is not a replacement for humans writing specific, relevant, ensuring that CTAs make sense, and that when the visitors get to where you send them, the content on the website or within the product finishes the journey. But I’ll leave PLG or MLG topics for another blog.
2024’s email marketing strategy requirements
Step one is to call the marketing team together and update your email marketing strategy.
What do these changes mean for your email campaigns this year?
- Smaller sends
- More targeted lists,
- More responsive content
- Close analysis on Google postmaster tools
What is Google postmaster tools?
Postmaster Tools is a free online tool provided by Google that gives you direct access to information about your domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, encryption, and performance diagnostics. These tools are easy to set up with the assistance of your IT team and allows you to easily access data to help you diagnose your email send problems.
If Google does send you to spam pergatory. It isn’t the end of the world.
In 2023 the Yellow House worked with a client to improve their email send performance. Upon closer review, it was obvious that many of their emails were undelivered or blocked by spam. We were putting in so much effort to devise clever campaigns with great content, that wasn’t even being delivered.
To repair email sending reputation and email deliverability, The Yellow House developed an email deliverability improvement plan. Our goal was simple: To improve email deliverability/sender reputation and therefore improve the conversion rate of all emails.
The plan included some drastic actions such as:
- Immediately suppressing non-engaged accounts
- Cutting our send list to trusted recipients
- Launching a data quality review
- Re-Warming up the IP and domain
The moral of the story is that all brands sending email in 2024 will need to critically look at their email distribution strategy. Moving away from email blasts and moving towards responsive emails that deliver timely, relevant content through marketing automation will need to be a priority.
Want to get a jump start on the changes? Schedule a call with our team today!
