Editorial
The Gist
- Minimal impact expected. Google's policy to retire inactive accounts should minimally affect marketers who maintain regular email engagement.
- Compliance made easy. Google and Yahoo’s deliverability requirements are manageable, with most responsibilities handled by email service providers.
- Little disruption likely. Apple’s Link Tracking Protection won’t significantly impact most email marketers due to its limited scope and solutions in place.
Email marketers have plenty of significant challenges to overcome as the channel continues to evolve. As we ring in the new year, let’s resolve to focus our attention on real challenges and not get riled up by issues that sound worrisome but generally aren’t.
Let’s talk about three such issues. We’ll also discuss when you should actually be worried.
1. Google’s Retirement of Inactive Accounts
As of December, Google started retiring inactive accounts that haven’t been accessed in two years so they can reduce unnecessary storage costs and free up desirable usernames. Since Gmail addresses are a massive portion of most B2C marketers’ email lists, this sounds bad.
However, Google has said they’re taking a phased approach and are prioritizing Google accounts that were created and then immediately abandoned. That means it’s unlikely that they’ll retire any accounts near-term that have ever had active Gmail accounts associated with them.
When Google does ultimately shut down accounts that had active associated Gmail accounts, it’s unlikely they’ll recycle those account names and make them available again. The risk of identity theft is just too great, and Google doesn’t want to take on those potential legal liabilities and PR risks.
For perspective, Google’s policy is much less worrisome than that of Yahoo, which has been retiring inactive accounts after just 12 months since 2013, and it hasn’t been a source of problems — either for Yahoo or for email marketers.
Marketers should be minimally impacted by this new policy so long as they…
- Maintain a minimum email cadence of one message a month, which would guarantee you’d get a hard bounce from the retired address before it was potentially reactivated.
- Don’t email subscribers have who have been inactive for more than two years — which you should already not be doing because of deliverability risks and legal risks under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless … you’re sending out a recall notice, an annual privacy policy update and other such legally required notices to customers that you haven’t seen email engagement from in more than two years. In these instances, it would be wise to space out the sending of these notices and monitor your bounce rates closely so you don’t exceed a 5% bounce rate over the course of a month.
Related Article: 5 Truths About Inactive Email Subscribers
2. Google and Yahoo’s New Deliverability Requirements
In an unprecedented collaboration, Google and Yahoo have announced common standards around deliverability requirements for commercial senders. The announcement lays out four requirements, which are that senders…
- Keep their spam complaint rates well under 0.3%, and preferably under 0.1%.
- Honor unsubscribe requests within two days.
- Include list-unsubscribe headers in their emails.
- Fully authenticate their email using SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
That first one is solely the responsibility of senders, but shouldn’t be a difficult bar to stay under. Among Oracle Digital Experience Agency clients, it’s rare that spam complaint rates rise above 0.1%, especially outside of peak season mailing periods. If yours is well above that, it’s likely a sign of problems with your permission practices or inactivity management.
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The next two should be largely handled by your email service provider (ESP). Even highly distributed organizations (think: insurance brokerage networks) using overnight batching to share unsubscribe requests shouldn’t have a problem honoring unsubscribe requests in under two days. But double-check that your ESP adds a list-unsubscribe header to your emails. If they are, you should see an Unsubscribe link next to your sender name when you open one of your emails in Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
It’s the last one around authentication where some marketers may need to worry.
Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless… you’re a large sender and you haven’t fully authenticated your sender IP addresses and domains. At Oracle Responsys, we set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for our customers automatically, but not every ESP does all three, so check with yours.
Also, if you’re a smaller sender and are using a shared IP address provided by your ESP, you should ask them how they are complying with these authentication requirements and if there’s anything you need to do. There’s definitely some confusion in the industry about how to comply with this requirement.
Related Article: Is the Anti-Spam Law CAN-SPAM Now Meaningless?
3. Apple’s Link Tracking Protection
Email marketers have every right to be traumatized by Apple. Its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has made our jobs significantly more difficult, particularly as we try to live up to the demands of Apple and other mailbox providers to only send emails to subscribers who are engaged. Opens have historically been the metric we used to determine email engagement, and therefore who was safe to email.
With MPP making opens far less useful, it’s easy to understand marketers’ panic when they first heard about Link Tracking Protection (LTP). "Apple’s taking clicks away from us, too?!," email marketers shouted in despair. Without opens or clicks, how are we supposed to comply with engagement-based spam filtering algorithms?
Thankfully, LTP won’t affect most email marketers for three reasons. First, LTP only affects email links that resolve in Safari, which only has about 28% market share, according to SimilarWeb data. Second, LTP only removes the parameters listed in the Tracking Query Parameters Tests section on privacytests.org, which spares most (but not all) email service providers. And third, even the affected tracking parameters are protected from removal if link redirection is used by your ESP.
Marketers shouldn’t worry about this unless … your ESP’s tracking parameters are affected AND you don’t have link redirects turned on in your ESP. Talk to your ESP if you’re unsure if you’re affected.
Related Article: 4 Stakeholders Every Email Marketing Program Has & What They Want
Overcoming Key Email Marketing Challenges: Enhancing Engagement, Personalization and Cross-Channel Integration
With a few exceptions, the chances are good that none of the three things will affect your email marketing programs in any meaningful way. So double-check that that’s true, and then turn your attention to more significant challenges, like improving engagement, reducing list churn, increasing personalization, getting better cross-channel visibility, and better orchestrating email with other channels.
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