Starting this month, marketers who send more than 5,000 emails at once to Yahoo or Gmail addresses will be blocked if they don't follow authentication protocols.
This comes on top of Google's plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome this year, starting last month for 1% of users. Google plans to phase out third-party cookies for the remaining Chrome users (which make up nearly two-thirds of global browser users) in the second half of 2024.
All of this leads to data pressure for marketers. As privacy standards tighten, AI and personalization software will need more and more data to accurately market to individual customers, and you'll need to find new data sources to power your campaigns.
Email channels get smarter
Google and Yahoo have jointly announced the adoption of three well-known email authentication standards: Email identified by DomainKeys. and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). These are all email spoofing tactics used by bad actors to gain access to corporate networks, or spoofing and unethical marketers used to take over legitimate servers and send out large amounts of spam. We work together to fight.
Updating email policies is easy for users with permission to edit email metadata or for Cloudflare accounts with DMARC management tools. It's even more complicated for large companies, where red tape can delay the update process, or for marketers who use third-party bulk sending services.
The problem gets even more complicated. If a business is spoofed by a spammer, Google and Yahoo will count the spoofed email toward the 5,000 emails they can send to users at one time. If that's not enough, by June Google and Yahoo will require mass emailers to provide an effective unsubscribe mechanism for email recipients.
Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said Yahoo and Google's anti-spam efforts are similar to the U.S. government's efforts to limit robocalls and telemarketing sales. But with email, it's very difficult.
“Unscrupulous and unethical companies that abuse email as part of their scams have finally found a way to circumvent most email verification efforts,” Miller said. “What Google, Yahoo, and other email providers are trying to figure out is '[How do] We think the same way about protecting our users. [telephony] Are carriers doing this to protect their customers? ”
Still, email remains the primary marketing channel. But startups like Cohora are offering another way to reach customers by generating more first-party data that businesses can own. Cohora builds customer community sites and hosts reviews that allow businesses to interact directly with their customers.
“Email has stood the test of time because it continues to deliver results, especially when consumers engage with brands,” said Manu Mathew, CEO of Kohola. Stated.
“I think one of the reasons Google and Yahoo introduced these things is to generate leads.” [on a mass scale]”And some brands fail to build a relationship with you. Even if the relationship has been going on for five years, or you haven't been in touch for four years, and they [continue] This is to send you a large number of emails. ”
Another element of the email disconnect, Matthew said, is when e-commerce platforms act as communication intermediaries between customers and the businesses they buy from. For example, Shopify manages many notifications for approximately 5 million stores. Messages such as unsubscribe requests often get lost or remain unforwarded for some reason, disrupting customer relationships.
Third-party cookies are slowly disappearing
Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies continues, just as Google and Yahoo may block some email responses that businesses might receive in marketing campaigns. Google announced plans to phase out these cookies several years ago, but the development of alternative audience grouping mechanisms for ad platform customers and antitrust oversight by the European Union have led to numerous delays. occured.
But now it's happening. Miller said the end of third-party cookies opens the door for technology vendors and services focused on first-party data, and some customers are reacting to this by marketing their products to work without third-party cookies. He said he had reconsidered his activities.
The focus on first-party data is likely to lead more companies to demand high-quality first-party data from their contact centers. After all, they have a long-term record of customer relationships, and agents are the front line in maintaining customer relationships across communication channels.
Cresta CEO Ping Wu, a member of the Google Contact Center AI launch team, said Generative AI makes contact center data more relevant and provides more insights than ever before. He said generative AI's ability to synthesize information from contact center records, including phone calls, social media, web, email, and mobile app interactions, gives marketers accurate and comprehensive information in a single channel. He said he believes he can get a customer profile. You can't do that with email or web advertising.
“Contact centers have always been cost centers,” Wu says. “Two things are changing now. One, we have large-scale language models that understand conversations really well. You can pass AP Biology, right? At a level of detail that wasn't possible with previous technology. You'll be able to really understand the conversation.2 The removal of third-party cookies means that many ad tech [at least] — It doesn't work. ”
Meanwhile, many marketers are putting off making the switch to technology and still rely on third-party cookies to power their online advertising campaigns, but this week they're getting their first taste of what the post-cookie world will look like. That's true, Miller said. Will web ad campaigns become diluted, spend results less successful and retargeting efforts fail?
“A grand experiment has begun,” Miller said. “One percent of Google's global users is equivalent to the population of Texas. So Texas is out of the building. Let's see what happens.” [bad] Everything is like that. ”
Don Fluckinger covers digital experience management, end-user computing, CPUs, and a variety of other topics for the TechTarget Editorial. Any tips? Please email him.
