To the Victor Goes the Spoils

Looking back at the last couple of articles that I have written, it seems that they are a series about what our industry articles calls Yahoogle. Yahoogle is a new requirement created by our friends at Google and Yahoo! where marketers have to adhere to some additional rules for the emails to be delivered to the inbox. The rules are pretty simple.

1. Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC certifications
2. Provide a one-click unsubscribe link in your emails
3. Ensure that the proper encryption protocols are included in your email
4. Keep your spam rate below 0.3%, ideally below 01%

What Happens if you Refuse to Participate?

Let’s say you just hate certifications and you just refuse to set them up? OR…. More realistically, you have a marketing team that is sending a lot of emails to people who are not interested in receiving your content and that is generating a higher than you would like spam rate. There are consequences for that team and those consequences started to be assigned beginning April 1, 2024.

Consequences you Say

We are slow rolling into the consequences,

Delayed Delivery

The first impact that we are starting to see is that email is being delayed before it gets delivered into the inbox. The delay varies from an hour to a couple of days. According to our data-pool, 90% of activity arrives within the first hour of an email’s deployment. if you are starting to see opens and clicks increasing well past when you schedule your emails to be deployed, you might need to institute some remediation sooner rather than later. Tools like Send Time Optimization will fail to function. Emails will be sent out at inopportune times, which maybe we should call Send Time De-optimization.

Delivered to the Spam Folder

The second impact of the regulation, which we should be starting to see immediately in the wild, is increased spam filtering. For those senders who didn’t respond to the delay in email delivery, their email will be sent directly to the spam folder. This action ensures that the email will not be read. Watch your open rates, while this is a metric that is significantly less valuable since Apple’s MPP technology came out, it is very helpful in determining if your email is landing in the spam folder. Email which lands in the spam folder won’t produce an automatic open signal. AudiencePoint has a technology that we developed to help with this specifically where we monitor your open rates and compare them to the rest of the brands in our data pool to determine that your email is not hitting the inbox but the spam folder. This technology is super helpful in both determining that you have a problem and the ability to monitor your improvement as you climb out of deliverability jail.

Hard BOUNCE, Hard Pass

For those of you who refuse to relent on breaking the rules, well your email will start hard-bouncing. Yep, if the receiving email servers will start watching the door and just say, “nope you aren’t welcome.”

But the Good Guys?

Yeah let’s talk about that as well. There will be less competition in the inbox, your email will have to compete with fewer emails for it to get noticed. Technologies like Send Time Optimization become much more potent, because there are fewer emails competing for your subscriber’s attention. Good ethical emailers will get better traction, their purchased technology will work more effectively.

Street Cred at Parties

These kinds of technology investments by the mailbox providers usher in a new era of compliance creating more and more ethical email programs. That translates to a decline in “spam jokes” at parties with your friends and happier and more ethical email marketers.