In a move that could have a big impact on some email marketers, Google will begin deleting inactive email accounts this week.
Google originally announced the plan in May, which only applied to accounts that have been inactive for at least two years, and gave users six months to act.
Inactive email accounts do not engage with marketing emails and do not respond to messages or make purchases. So it's possible that Google is doing his email marketers a favor on some level by presenting this purge. But not all email marketers think so.
quantity and quality
“For years, businesses have relied on inactive accounts to power their email. [list] Ryan Phelan, co-founder of digital marketing services firm RPEOrigin.com and MarTech contributor, said: “Especially if the majority of your email list is inactive addresses, that seems like a sign of competition or success.”
Phelan said focusing on list size over list quality is a sign that marketers are thinking tactically rather than strategically. He has his two pieces of advice for email marketers.
“First, inactive accounts clearly signal to recipients that you may not be focused on engagement, but scale. Especially in this case, the threshold is two years. ” Phelan said. “Second, we should remind marketers that list culling is not a bad thing and that they should take appropriate strategies for revitalization.”
The email purge portends big changes for email marketers in early 2024. That's when both Google and Yahoo! We plan to crack down on high-volume email senders whose emails fail to authenticate and fall below our reported spam threshold.
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“If you look at it, [the deletion of inactive accounts] As an indicator of the future, by 2024 we will see receivers adopting policies like this to ensure volume is controlled and marketers focus on strategy rather than a tactically-driven approach,” Phelan said. said.
security risk
Why does Google delete inactive accounts in the first place? Safe.
In a May announcement about the upcoming takedowns, the company said an internal analysis found inactive accounts were 10 times less likely to undergo two-factor authentication and received fewer security checks from users than active accounts. He said he did. They also tend to use bad passwords or reuse the same passwords for accounts on other platforms.
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Google has decided to delete inactive accounts to avoid the risk of them being compromised and used for illegal activities such as identity theft and other fraud.
Read our May announcement about policy changes.
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