A whopping 162 billion emails are identified as spam every single day. And the largest percentage of those spam emails (36%) are sent by sales and marketing teams. Google and Yahoo are cracking down on this flood of unwanted emails with new inbox rules, which went into effect in February 2024. Bulk senders who send more than 5,000 emails a day to personal Gmail accounts (aka most companies with a decent-sized contact list) will need to authenticate their emails, offer one-click unsubscribe, and stay under a reported spam threshold.
While the current rule changes only apply to personal email inboxes, the rule changes offer an opportunity for all senders to revisit their email marketing programs and ensure that they’re providing personalized and highly relevant value to contacts in every single email sent. If the thought of personalizing every single email makes you start to panic - don’t! It’s possible to do this at scale across your entire go-to-market organization - and it’s easier than you think using an AI-powered sales tool. By adopting a sales AI tool that helps you visualize and deeply understand a contact, account, or opportunity’s status and history in seconds and then instantly craft an email based on deep understanding and relevant facts.
What are the new inbox rules for Gmail and Yahoo?
Gmail explained the new rule changes went into effect in February 2024. In a very similar announcement, Yahoo stated that they’d also be targeting the first quarter of 2024.
Authentication - Gmail and Yahoo will require bulk senders to strongly authenticate their emails following a new set of documented best practices as of February 2024.
Fast and Easy Unsubscribe - They will also require bulk senders to allow users to unsubscribe in a single click and for those unsubscribe requests to be processed within two days.
Send Wanted Emails Only - In an effort to create “less spammy” inboxes, Google requires bulk senders to stay under a 0.3% spam complaint rate threshold. For perspective, if you send 1,000 emails, only 3 need to be marked spam to reach that threshold! And if that happens, you could lose access to users’ inboxes.
Here are two pivots you can make at your B2C or B2B company now so you don’t lose access to your audience.
Pivot 1: Dodge the spam folder with a value-first email strategy
Email’s efficiency as a communications channel depends on our recipients’ overall inbox experience. Every email you send should adhere to the same standards as the rest of your content.
Is it providing immediate value to the intended recipient?
Is it personalized to speak to that person’s relevant pain or problem?
The upside of the new spam rules is that highly relevant emails will be rewarded with more room to shine in less-full inboxes. For companies whose emails are not currently meeting those standards, communications could get flagged repeatedly as spam. And if that happens, Gmail and Yahoo’s new inbox rules will definitely hurt.
If the prospect of sending thousands of personalized emails makes you feel panicky and uncertain, you’re not alone. Many organizations don’t know where to begin when it comes to developing personalized emails at scale. But there is a solution available - a truly great AI sales and marketing tool. The right tool will help you optimize productivity and enable instant personalized outreach across all go-to-market channels, including email.
If you’re at a B2B organization and think that none of this applies to you, think again. Business inboxes could be next. It’s time to think about how to achieve business goals without constantly blasting inboxes with generic, unhelpful emails. Adopting a personalized email strategy now using AI will set you up for success when the next changes are announced. Plus, your prospects and customers will appreciate it.
Bonus pivot: You need to offer one-click unsubscribe, but it’s to your benefit to take it one step further. Don’t hide your unsubscribe. Make it clear and easy to click. If your reader can’t find it, they may just mark you as spam.
Pivot 2: Goodbye, cold unwanted emails. Hello, highly relevant emails at scale.
The old way of running an email program is to send cold, generic emails to massive target lists of accounts and contacts purchased based on firmographic data, title, and relevant tech. Not only are these emails not well received by most recipients, many of them are reported as spam, which, as we discussed, is going to be a no-no going forward.
The solution is an AI-powered sales and marketing tool that allows any person in your organization to deeply understand an account or deal’s current state in seconds - including risks and recommended next steps. From there, anyone (AE, BDR, marketer, etc) can instantly craft a highly personalized email that takes into account every single detail of their history with your company.
Here’s how it works: The AI sales tool automates contact and activity capture and then accurately maps those activities to the correct contacts, accounts, opportunities, and leads in your organization’s CRM. That data is then enriched to ensure that current information about a person’s seniority, title, company, and persona-related challenges are documented. This allows your GTM organization to capture vast amounts of relevant data and make it accessible to sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
Once all that data is captured and accurately matched in the CRM, email marketers and sales reps can leverage generative AI to easily generate highly personalized emails for each recipient.
But not all sales AI tools are created equal. Many “AI” sales and marketing tools are hastily-built AI capabilities layered on top of existing products. Forrester predicts that in 2024, thinly customized generative AI content will lead to purchase regret in 70% of B2B buyers.
The best way to produce consistently true insights and highly personalized content at scale from genAI is to select a vendor that has purpose-built their tool for a specific function and has the right business function-specific data foundation in place. The most highly personalized, accurate, and well-received emails will be created using data from a variety of sources. Goodbye cold generic emails, hello warm personalized emails every single time.
Learn more about how Sales AI can help you easily meet the new Gmail and Yahoo email standards by generating highly personalized emails in real-time and at scale.