New email authentication and unsubscribe requirements are making inboxes tougher to reach. Ensure your emails land in the inboxes and avoid the spam folder.
Deliverability may not be the most interesting aspect of email marketing, but it is the most important. It doesn’t matter how good your creatives or offers are if they never reach the inbox.
Getting to the inbox is getting tougher. Earlier this year, Google and Yahoo started enforcing new requirements for bulk email senders. Fortunately, the requirements help reputable email marketers by making best practices mandatory.
Here is your guide to why the requirements were implemented, the impact and cost of deliverability problems, and how to ensure your email always goes through.
Why are email deliverability rules getting tougher?
“Google, Yahoo, and many other mailbox providers are getting increasingly frustrated dealing with spam,” said Al Iverson, Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead at Valimail. “So you have requirements that are tightening up, meant to make it harder to send unwanted and unsolicited emails.”
How big is the spam problem?
“The latest figure I saw was something like 347,000,000,000 emails sent daily,” said Cynthia Price, SVP of Marketing at Litmus. “And over half of those, depending on which metrics you look at, are estimated to be spam.” That’s 173,000,000,000 spam emails a day.
“The internet service providers, the Googles and the Yahoos and the Microsofts of the world are trying to do everything they can to hold down the fort and protect our inboxes from mayhem,” said Price.
What are the new requirements for bulk email senders?
The new requirements codify the very well-tested best practices of email marketing.
“Best practices are now transitioning to literally written-up requirements that mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo post on their website and say, ‘These are the things you have to do now,’” said Iverson.
The requirements focus mainly on authenticating outgoing emails, reporting spam rates, and the ability to unsubscribe from email lists easily.
Authentication
Bulk email senders — generally those sending emails to at least 5,000 addresses a day — must use the following:
- The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) helps prevent domain spoofing by allowing senders to identify the email servers sending emails from their domain.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature to outgoing emails, verifying that an authorized sender sent the message and wasn’t tampered with.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) helps domain owners specify actions to take when an email fails authentication and enables reporting on email authentication results.
Also Read: Master Email Deliverability: A Comprehensive Guide
Spam rates
Google says bulk senders must keep their reported spam rate (i.e., the percentage of outgoing messages reported as spam by recipients) in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.1% and “avoid ever reaching 0.3% or higher.”
Yahoo says the spam rate must be below 0.3%.
Unsubscribe
Yahoo and Google require organizations to make it easy for people to unsubscribe.
This means:
- Use of functioning list-unsubscribe header, which supports one-click unsubscribe for marketing and subscribed messages.
- Have a visible unsubscribe link in the body of the email.
- Process unsubscribe requests within two days.
“No more trying to hide the unsubscribe link or sending people to a landing page with a phone number on it,” said Price. “I see lots of that still happening, and that’s just got to stop. People need to be able to remove themselves from your list because if you force them to stay on it, you are frustrating them further and encouraging them to mark you as spam every single time.”
The cost of email deliverability failure
According to Mailtrap, the cost of undelivered emails for U.S. businesses is:
- $164+ million daily
- $1.1+ billion weekly
- $4.9+ billion monthly
- $59.5+ billion yearly
Deliverability problems cost more than $15,000 for every million emails sent, according to a report by Validity.
“A lot of people don’t understand they have deliverability problems until it’s too late,” said Price. “Much like a credit score, it takes time to build it back up and be recognized as a safe sender.”
Email deliverability success rates are increasing
- Over the past three years, the average deliverability rate improved from 94.26% in 2020 to 96.43% in 2023.
- The average bounce rate was 1.98%.
- Over the past four years, the ecommerce industry has seen the biggest improvement in deliverability rates (10.28% rise) and a drop in bounce rates (0.7%).
- The overall average unsubscribe rate decreased 26.32% over the past four years.
- The overall spam rate decreased by 44.4% in 2023 compared to 2020.
Source: Selzy Email Marketing Performance by Industry, 2024 Benchmarks
Also Read: Gmail Tabs: Still a 2013 Problem?
Consumers hate email deliverability failures, too
Businesses are not the only ones upset when an email fails. Consumers want emails when the content interests them and are unhappy if they don’t get them.
According to a report from Mailgun:
- When emails from a brand regularly land in spam, 52.7% of consumers say they would either feel frustrated, lose trust or unsubscribe.
- Over 70% of consumers check their spam folders to see if important emails are missing, and almost 33% find it annoying when they find emails from brands in their spam folders.
Source: Mailgun’s Email and the Customer Experience 2024 report
Email deliverability best practices
Tighter regulations are also clearer regulations. Yahoo and Google are making the requirements very clear to everyone.
“The good news is they are trying to be transparent about their algorithms, how they measure bad practices, and what they look for,” said Price. “It’s important to stay up to speed on what those are. What are you supposed to be doing?”
These best practices can be summarized as “DO NOT SPAM.” Send relevant content to people who want to hear from you.
Monitor your inbox placement rate. This tells you if your email program works and when mailbox providers block messages.
Keep your email lists clean. Ensure there are no spam traps, unknown users, or inactive subscribers. Use a double opt-in process to reduce inactive and spam addresses on your list. Use a contact verification solution on your existing list, and be sure new addresses are verified as they are added.
Send regularly and consistently. Spammers send emails in different volumes and not at set times. Be sure your email volleys are similar in size and sent at regular intervals. “Implement a preference center so subscribers can say, ‘Actually, I only want one email a month from you, or I want every email you’re ever going to send,’” said Price. “You’ll have both types in your audience, but treating them all the same is where people get into trouble.”
Monitor sender reputation. Sender reputation is the combination of IP reputation — the trustworthiness an IP has based on its sending history, and domain reputation — the trustworthiness of an email-sending domain based on engagement, spam complaints, bounce rates, and more. It is one of the main factors mailbox providers use to determine whether messages should go to the inbox, the spam folder, or be blocked entirely. A Sender Score is a numerical representation of your sender reputation; you can check it for free at SenderScore.org.
Also Read: Mastering Marketing Automation: A Comprehensive Guide
Use BIMI to boost trustworthiness
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) place a brand logo on your emails; this proves your emails are from a verified, trustworthy sender and are OK to open.
“There are a couple of simple things that should be at the top of my mind, but the most basic of which is just to make sure that the content you’re sending is relevant and valuable to the audience,” said Price. “And that’s the hardest thing to solve for, but that will keep people from thinking of you as spam and marking you as spam.”
UPDATE: Google made BIMI even more important by adding further verification to Android and iOS. Last year, Gmail added a checkmark icon for senders using BIMI to more clearly “identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators.” However, Gmail wasn’t available for people using their phones until now.
“BIMI-verified check marks are now displayed on Android and iOS,” the company said in a blog post. “Gmail on the web will display a verified checkmark for senders who have adopted BIMI with a registered trademark (VMC). Over the next few weeks, users will also see those verified checkmark icons while using the Gmail application on Android and iOS (Apple Mail or other mail applications are not supported).”
- Google’s Help Center can assist in setting up BIMI.
- Information about BIMI and the latest news can be found on the working group’s website.
Should I warm up my IP address?
Warming up an IP address involves gradually increasing the number of emails sent from a dedicated IP address over four to six weeks. Is it important for deliverability? Absolutely.
“If you have a dedicated IP, 100% you need to be warming it up,” said Price. “One of the biggest signals for the ISPs when looking at email behavior that’s coming into their systems is somebody sending from a fresh IP with a lot of volume.”
Establishing a safe sender history with ISPs is essential. Doing large mailings without that history is a giant red flag for providers because that’s how most fraudulent emails — phishing, spam, malware, etc. — are sent.
“Feed a little wanted mail at first, growing that volume over time,” said Iverson. “You’re spoon-feeding the baby. Let the baby digest it and understand it won’t hurt them or their users.”
Can sales engagement tools hurt deliverability?
Sales engagement tools like Salesloft, Clari, and Outreach can potentially harm deliverability. The problem is not the tools themselves, though. It is how the sales team uses them.
“There’s a whole spectrum of sales assistant tools; some are good, and some are bad,” said Iverson. “There are tools to find sales leads, intelligence tools to find contacts and information, etc. If you’re using that to target individuals one-on-one, you won’t trip the trigger of a spam filter.”
Problems crop up when sales use them to send large emails while ignoring best practices.
“Nothing is inherent about those tools that make deliverability harder,” said Price. ”It’s just that a lot of times what we have to do is coach sales teams that the same best practices still apply. So it matters who you’re emailing. How did you get the contacts and put them in the system? It’s okay to send a cold email, but again, ensure it’s relevant to the buyer.”
However, as you know, the sales teams’ actions are outside your control, and their email behavior can impact your email reputation.
For one thing, relying heavily on templates can result in inadequate personalization. As a result, recipients are more likely to mark messages as spam in a mass email, which can hurt your reputation. It also won’t help sales because people won’t be responding.
That’s a key point to drive home to sales, who may not understand how the deliverability rules have changed. For both them and you, relevancy is everything.
The improper configuration of email authentication protocols (like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) is also a problem. Many tools automatically take care of this, but it is still worth monitoring when reviewing deliverability metrics.
The most reliable way to protect your brand’s email rep is to set up a separate IP address for sales. That way, you don’t have to worry about being harmed by someone else’s behavior.
Also Read: AI in Email: Focus on the Basics
10 words to avoid using in emails
Email marketers know which words to use to get readers’ attention. Unfortunately, so do email scammers.
A recent study by ZeroBounce analyzed spam emails to identify the 10 most dangerous words. The study used machine learning to analyze large datasets and assigned a weighted score based on frequency, click-through rate, and damage. Keep them in mind when writing email campaigns and checking for spam issues.
Source: ZeroBounce
Unsurprisingly, these words relate to money, the most popular and riskiest word. The good news is that unless you are in financial services, you won’t need to use them often.
Interestingly, “Free” — the ultimate sales gimmick word — has the highest appearance frequency (2,266) but the lowest click-through rate (0.56%). Maybe we are all getting wiser.
Driving engagement with Gmail’s new summary cards
Gmail is rolling out new dynamic summary cards to improve user experience by making information easier to find. They can also help with deliverability.
The cards — coming first to Android and iOS, provide quick access to key information in messages: package delivery dates, flight times, bill due dates, concert ticket details, etc. Users can also take actions directly from the summary card, like tracking packages, viewing orders, viewing tickets, getting directions, setting reminders, and managing airline bookings.
Deliverability bonus: From a deliverability standpoint, emails that offer dynamic content and immediate value are more likely to be opened and engaged with by recipients. The cards can also help cut down on spam complaints. By providing timely and relevant information through these cards, senders decrease the likelihood of their emails being flagged as spam. Content that users perceive as valuable leads to fewer complaints and a more favorable sender reputation.
Enhanced sender reputation directly results from increased engagement rates, which Gmail prioritizes. Making the most of summary cards should improve open rates, click-through rates, and overall email performance, leading to stronger deliverability and favorable inbox placement.