Abstract
- Minimal impact is expected. Google's policy of decommissioning inactive accounts will have minimal impact on marketers who maintain regular email engagement.
- Compliance becomes easier. Google and Yahoo's delivery requirements are manageable and most of the responsibility is handled by the email service provider.
- There will be little confusion. Apple's link tracking protection is limited in scope and solution, so it won't have a significant impact on most email marketers.
As the channel continues to evolve, email marketers have many significant challenges to overcome. As we enter the new year, let's resolve to focus our attention on real-life issues and not get upset over issues that may seem worrying but generally aren't.
Let's talk about three such issues. We'll also explain when you should actually be worried.
1. Google retires inactive accounts
As of December, Google began decommissioning inactive accounts that haven't been accessed in two years to help reduce unnecessary storage costs and free up desirable usernames. This seems bad since Gmail addresses make up the majority of most B2C marketers' email lists.
However, Google says it is taking a phased approach and will prioritize Google accounts that are created and abandoned soon after. This means that it is unlikely that he will retire the account to which his previously active Gmail account was associated in the near future.
Even if Google eventually closes down the accounts that active Gmail accounts were associated with, it's unlikely to recycle those account names and make them available again. The risk of identity theft is too great and Google doesn't want to take on these potential legal and PR risks.
From one perspective, Google's policy is much less concerning than Yahoo's, which has retired inactive accounts in just 12 months since 2013, and is a problem for both Yahoo and email marketers. It has not been the cause.
Marketers should minimize the impact of this new policy as long as they:
- Maintain an email frequency of at least one message per month. This ensures that retired addresses receive a hard bounce before they are reactivated.
- Don't send emails to subscribers who haven't been active for more than two years. This should no longer be done due to delivery and legal risks under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Marketers don't need to worry about this unless they're sending recall notices, annual privacy policy updates, or other legally required notices to customers they haven't seen from email communications in two years or more. there is no. In such cases, it is wise to space out the sending of notifications and carefully monitor the bounce rate so that it does not exceed his 5% in a month.
Related article: 5 truths about inactive email subscribers
2. Google and Yahoo's new delivery requirements
In an unprecedented partnership, Google and Yahoo announced common standards for delivery requirements for commercial senders. In this announcement, the sender presents her four requirements:
- Keep your spam complaint rate below 0.3%, preferably below 0.1%.
- Unsubscribe requests will be accepted within two days.
- Include a list-unsubscribe header in your email.
- Fully authenticate your email using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
The first one is the sender's responsibility, and it's not difficult to protect. Among Oracle Digital Experience Agency's clients, spam complaint rates rarely exceed his 0.1%, especially outside of busy email seasons. If it's much higher than that, it could be a sign of a problem with setting permissions or managing inactivity.
The next two are primarily handled by email service providers (ESPs). Even highly distributed organizations (such as insurance brokerage networks) that use overnight batch processing to share unsubscribe requests have no problem processing unsubscribe requests within two days. However, double check that your ESP is adding a list-unsubscribe header to your email.If you do, when you open the email in Gmail or Yahoo Mail, you'll see a message next to the sender's name.[配信停止]A link should appear.
This is the last authentication issue that some marketers need to worry about.
Marketers don't need to worry about this unless they are a large sender and have not fully authenticated sender IP addresses and domains. Oracle Responsys automatically sets her SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for customers, but check with your ESP as not all ESPs do all three.
Also, if you are a small sender and are using a shared IP address provided by your ESP, ask your ESP how they meet these authentication requirements and if you need to do anything. is needed. There is certainly some confusion in the industry as to how to comply with this requirement.
Related article: Is the anti-spam law CAN-SPAM no longer meaningless?
3. Apple link tracking protection
Email marketers have every right to be traumatized by Apple. Its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) significantly reduces our work, especially as we seek to meet the demands of Apple and other mailbox providers to send emails only to engaged subscribers. It's getting difficult. Opens have traditionally been a metric used to determine email engagement and, therefore, who is safe to send an email to.
It's easy to understand the panic of marketers hearing about Link Tracking Protection (LTP) for the first time, as MPP has significantly reduced its open usefulness. “Is Apple stealing clicks from us too?!” cried email marketers in despair. Without opens and clicks, how can you comply with engagement-based spam filtering algorithms?
Thankfully, LTP doesn't affect most email marketers for three reasons. First, LTP only affects email links that are resolved in Safari, but Safari only has about 28% market share, according to data from SimilarWeb. Second, LTP only removes the parameters listed in the “Tracking Query Parameter Tests” section of privacytests.org, so most (but not all) email service providers are not removed. And third, if link redirection is used with ESP, the affected tracking parameters are also protected from deletion.
Marketers do not need to worry about this unless their ESP's tracking parameters have been affected and their ESP does not have link redirects enabled. If you are unsure whether you are affected, please consult your ESP.
Related article: The four stakeholders involved in each email marketing program and what they want
Overcoming key email marketing challenges: Enhance engagement, personalization, and cross-channel integration
With a few exceptions, none of these three factors are likely to have a meaningful impact on your email marketing program. So double check that it's true, then increase engagement, reduce list abandonment, increase personalization, increase cross-channel visibility, improve email integration with other channels, etc. , turn your attention to more important issues.
Find out how to join our contributor community.
