Preparing for Google and Yahoo Email Marketing Updates in 2024

Starting in February 2024, Google and Yahoo will require senders to implement email authentication alongside other significant policy changes surrounding consent and engagement. Senders who fail to meet these requirements will see their emails delayed, blocked, or directed to spam.  While this may seem sudden, these changes have always been touted as the standard best practices of email deliverability.

Here are some of the tips for avoiding issues from these changes to email deliverability:

Authenticate their email to eliminate loopholes exploited by attackers that threaten email users.

Authentication is a methodology that empowers senders to legitimize their sending further. There are three primary methodologies that Gmail and Yahoo will now require – SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Unauthenticated emails may be bounced with a 5.7.26 error or marked as spam.

Simply configuring your Email Sending Domain doesn’t cover all the bases. Verifying that your ‘from addresses’ are actively using your connected domain and ensuring it’s authenticated with DKIM or SPF is crucial. When crafting marketing emails, remember the ‘Suggestion’ prompt that alerts you if you’re about to save or send an email without utilizing a connected domain. We also recommend going through your active campaigns to check for this suggestion and update your ‘from address’ accordingly. Here are all the resources you need to ensure you meet the authentication requirements if you are using HubSpot Marketing Email:

1. Set up DKIM by connecting an email sending domain

2.  Add HubSpot to your SPF record

3. Use a DMARC policy with HubSpot

If you are using another product to send emails and have questions about DNS authentication, please contact your Network Administrator or IT team for additional assistance, as these settings are not managed within your HubSpot account. For more information about the importance of email authentication and its impact on your overall deliverability, please check out the following blog post.

Enable easy unsubscription from commercial emails and process unsubscription requests within two days.

Senders will now need to make unsubscribing from emails as easy as possible. If people don’t want your emails anymore, they shouldn’t have to hunt down the unsubscribe button or send carrier pigeons.

By default, HubSpot requires unsubscribe links in the footer of every marketing email, so you should already be good to go. Sends from connected email accounts do not automatically include unsubscribe links. To ensure you meet the upcoming requirements, follow this guide to add unsubscribe links to your 1:1 emails.

Adhere to spam rate thresholds:

It’s simple: to ensure email recipients don’t receive unwanted messages. You can read more on the rationale and details from Google and Yahoo.

These best practices will soon become requirements for emails going to Yahoo and Gmail, and if businesses aren’t compliant, bulk emails are at risk of being wrongly classified as spam.

With the uptick of spam and abuse, mailbox providers are finding the balance between unauthorized and legitimate mail by fortifying their systems to further protect their users. You may be left wondering ‘What does this mean for me?” But don’t stress! We prepared the following guide to outline what you need to do to meet the new requirements with HubSpot today.

Ensure You’re Sending Wanted Email:

You wouldn’t want a stranger in your house making themselves tea uninvited, so you shouldn’t be sending emails without explicit consent.

Senders with spam complaints consistently averaging 0.3% or more will experience performance issues such as delays, spam foldering, or bounces if not properly addressed. All senders should aim to maintain spam complain levels at 0.1% or less to ensure their emails are successfully handed off for delivery to their contacts’ respective mailboxes.

Yahoo spam complaints are accounted for within the HubSpot app under the Spam Reports. However, Gmail spam complaints are not tracked within the  HubSpot app, as they use a unique feedbackloop program that protects user privacy by generating aggregated reports by sender or campaign. Senders should instead enroll in Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) to monitor Gmail spam complaints externally.

GPT will give you a snapshot of your sending performance with Gmail, including insight into your spam rates, domain reputation, delivery errors, and more. As this is an external program managed outside of HubSpot, please visit the Gmail Help Center for additional assistance with set-up and troubleshooting.

Summary & Takeaways:

While the 2024 Yahoo and Gmail requirements may seem daunting, remember that HubSpot is here to help ensure you are not alone in the email wilderness! You can comment on this community post with any questions or concerns. In the meantime, check out the official guidelines from Google, and remember, we’re all in this together!

For sales emails, the guidance is the same, but the requirements for all senders do not involve changes managed in HubSpot the way that marketing email does. You should work with your IT team to ensure you have SPF or DKIM authentication set up in your DNS records, and a DMARC policy configured. You should also be reviewing your spam rates in Google Postmaster Tools.

If you are a bulk sender, there are a few more requirements. Note: If you’re using the same domain for marketing and sales, it all counts towards that 5,000 email/day consideration, so it’s certainly possible to be a bulk sender of sales email if the overall volume of the sending domain is that high. The unsubscribe requirement for bulk senders is the reason we are recommending opting into unsubscribe links for sales emails. It is unclear how strictly Google will hold non-marketing emails to this standard, but reading the most recent FAQs mentioning “commercial” emails means it is likely. One important note is that Google is starting with personal gmail.com recipients, not Google Workspace accounts, so B2C senders might feel the impact of the changes sooner.

Ultimately, Google and Yahoo aren’t going to tell us everything, and they are going to continue tightening the requirements as time goes on. Our overall recommendation is to start following all the guidelines you can as quickly as you can. Check Google Postmaster Tools to understand what kind of volume and spam rates you have today. If you’re sending close to or over 5k/day, and to a lot of gmail.com recipients, you should strongly consider opting into unsubscribe links for sales email sends.

Some recommended tools for checking the formatting of your SPF and DMARC record would include the following:

https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/

https://dmarcian.com/spf-survey/

To check your DKIM records, you can use MXToolbox. Please note that DKIM records are only populated once upon creation and permanently hidden for security purposes.

Credit: A portion of this article was published by Hubspot and has been republished by BLKDG as a Hubspot Agency Partner.