B2B marketing relies heavily on email marketing for cold outreach and Google’s announced changes to email marketing to gmail and googlemail accounts has raised a lot of questions about what steps need to be taken compared to B2C businesses that would typically have a lot of personal email addresses in their marketing lists. In this blog we outline the changes and requirements, why it’s important for B2B too and ways that you can maintain your audience outreach.
Why Google is Making Changes to Its Email Marketing Permissions
Google is making changes to protect its users from the daily tsunami of spam impacting individual email account holders and they aren’t alone, Yahoo is implementing these changes too. The problem is that criminals are contacting users from gmail accounts. By tightening the requirements for sending bulk emails, the email providers hope to reduce the volume of criminal activity on their platforms and to improve user experience.Â
These changes affect you if you are marketing from, or to, a gmail/yahoo email account. Much has been made of how it only affects those sending more than 5,000 emails a day but it’s highly recommended NOT to ignore these new guidelines even if you are a small sender and have few personal email addresses in your CRM. What we’ve seen time and again is how the policies that are implemented for the larger businesses/senders tend to filter down. And on the plus side, these policies help you protect your own domains from being blacklisted, keep your subscribers safe, keep your email engagement and performance at optimum levels as well as protect your brand reputation.
These email sending guidelines are important whether you send more than 5,000 emails or fewer and even if you’re a B2C.Â
8 Key Items to Check for B2B Email Marketing Campaigns
For the most part, it will impact B2C businesses more as B2B businesses tend to market to email addresses with corporate domains. If all your email marketing lists are to business domains, e.g. themarketingmaven.co.uk, then you have less to worry about. Before you decide that you don’t need to do anything, work through these requirements to make sure you’re fulfilling best practice because best practice will always improve your deliverability.
Authentication - authenticate your outgoing mail boxes to give google or any other domain clear signals that you are an authentic (and safe) email sender. This will raise your deliverability rates. Please make sure you’ve ticked all the boxes for this, even if you’re sending from a third party email platform such as Lemlist. This includes settings such as DMARC and DKIM.
Volume of emails - senders who send more than 5,000+ messages a day to gmail/yahoo accounts need to double-down on email authentication as these guidelines kick in February 2024. But the question remains for B2B is why are you holding so many personal email addresses?
List management - Keep your lists clean. It’s not uncommon for prospects to use gmail addresses when they enter a form on your website or lead magnet. It’s advisable to have a follow-up protocol for email addresses and a decision on whether to include or remove them from your email databases. Double opt-in helps with validation and engagement.
Email database purchase - some lead generation tools (e.g. lead finders or some linked in tools) offer gmail addresses to reach out to prospects. Make it a policy not to use these. For any bought list, specify that your emails should be a business domain only. Even better, focus on generating your own audience lists and then refer back to point 3.
Make it easy to unsubscribe - having an unsubscribe on your emails has been a required standard for a while yet many businesses still struggle with effective unsubscribes to put it politely. A high percentage don’t work at all.. This is a requirement for UK and EU GDPR and an unsubscribe that doesn’t work, at a minimum affects your reputation, engagement and response, worse, it could land you an investigation with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and that could get expensive.
Keep your opt-out rates low - these need to be lower than 0.3% for google but the standard is 0.1%. If it is higher, you need to audit your lists because this will affect your deliverability. Consider having a schedule to remove recipients that never open or read your emails.Â
Email sending accounts - even if you are only sending a low volume it isn’t best practice to send from a gmail account. It is inexpensive to buy a mirror domain (similar to your main domain) and email address from where all your email marketing can be sent using an independent email sending platform such as Lemlist. This provides a professional profile for your business and better protects your main domain from being blacklisted
Drip-feed your email campaigns - it isn’t necessary to send out huge volumes of emails every day. Drip campaigns enable you to send out a smaller volume of emails on a daily basis as part of a longer-term campaign. Your email volume is then warmed up slowly, starting with low numbers and then increasing on a daily basis. This also has a lead generation benefit, making your cold outreach consistent, feeding leads over time rather than a one-off email blast that might not hit at the right time, thereby improving your chances of increasing responses and leads. And… google likes it when you do this.Â
In summary, following best practice for email management is essential whatever the volume of emails you’re sending out and whether they are going to business-to-business domains or to gmail or yahoo. Good list management will increase your engagement and return-on-investment so implementing processes to clean lists will only benefit both in the short and long-term. If you don’t do this, you are risking your marketing outreach potential.
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