Email is a technology that revolutionised communication in a way we’d never seen before.

And email marketing is still one of the BEST ways to reach the audience who love to hear from you.

But people are sending more emails than ever before. And this means that spam is a constant problem for all of us.

The largest email hosts in the world – Gmail – are looking at ways to reduce the amount of spam that hits our inbox.

And so, Google has recently announced some major changes to Gmail that will have an impact on whether or not your marketing emails reach the inboxes of the people who want to read them.

I can’t stress this enough – if you don’t get your email marketing technology up to speed before the changes to Gmail happen, you are at risk of having your marketing labelled as spam. And once you’re blacklisted, it’s nearly impossible to come back from it.

In this article, I’m going to explain why these changes are happening, what they are, and what you need to do to be ready.

Why is Google making changes to Gmail?

Google is all about user experience.

And I think we can all agree that spam doesn’t create a good user experience.

Now, while Gmail already has lots of protections in place to prevent the type of “scammy” spam, we’re all familiar with, Google is also looking for ways to help users better manage their inbox when it comes to marketing emails (the most recent attempt to help users with this was the Promotions tab).

The key reason, is definitely a dollar driven one.

In addition to more people sending email than ever before, they’re also abandoning email accounts at a record pace.

And email providers can’t make any money from abandoned email accounts, because they can’t collect data from them.

What Do Email Marketers Need to Do to Be Ready for the Changes to Gmail?

All the changes that are happening have to do with authentication (a digital signature that confirms the email you’re sending is actually coming from you), and engagement (that people who receive your emails are actually reading and opening them).

There are three major things you’ll need to do in response to the changes which will go live on February 1, 2024.

If you use a gmail.com email address for your business, it’s time to upgrade.

Google will no longer let you use a Gmail account to send bulk marketing messages.

So, if you’re still sending marketing emails from a gmail.com address, it’s time to invest in yourself and your business. Get a business domain and connect your email to it.

Now – this doesn’t apply to you if you have a business domain that’s hosted through Google (which is what I use). It only applies to gmail.com accounts.

Take action – Get a business domain, and a business email address.

Authentication used to be best practice. Now it will be essential.

I don’t like to get too technical, but it’s hard not to, because authentication has to do with the way your email marketing is setup on the technology side.

On your domain, you’ll need to make sure that your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are setup correctly so that your domain can be authenticated by Google.

These records act like a digital signature. They tell Google (and other email providers) that the email you’re sending is actually coming from you.

Having these records in place helps prevent scammers from cloaking your email address and spamming people with emails that look like they’re coming from you, but they aren’t.

Setup of authentication records used to be best practice. Now it will be essential if you don’t want your marketing emails flagged as spam.

Take action – You’ll need to get in touch with your domain host to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC records as soon as possible.

If you’d like help to do this, I highly recommend my friends at Email Smart, who offer complete support for authentication setup as a service.

Engagement will be more important than ever.

If you’ve been doing email marketing, then you’ll know about engagement, even if you’ve never heard that word before.

Open rates and click throughs are engagement. But you’re going to need to do more than simply look at the numbers and smile or frown. You’re going to need to make sure you’re maintaining a healthy list.

Google are going to change the spam complaint measurement, making a list full of contacts that don’t engage with your emails a massive problem for your marketing.

This is where list quality, over quantity comes into play.

It will no longer be enough to just watch the numbers. You’re going to need to monitor engagement and manage it.

You’ll need to change the way you look at engagement management and make sure you build engagement into your customer journey by creating email sequences your audience want to open.

You can no longer leave email addresses that are not engaging with your emails on your list and keep emailing them – you WILL end up flagged as spam.

Take action – You need to get across your open rates and engagement rates and not all email marketing platforms do this well.

If you want to see how your list performance is tracking, there’s an awesome tool that let’s you do this - EmailSmart’s Deliverability Dashboard. And there are some engagement stats that you can get through the dashboard for FREE (so there’s no excuse not to be tracking your engagement performance).

There are no quick fixes and no workarounds.

If you want to continue to successfully use email as a marketing tool, then you need to make these changes and start managing your list engagement BEFORE Google implements the platform changes on the 1st February, 2024.

It might seem scary.

And in some ways it is. Because legitimate marketers are going to get caught in the crossfire.

But at the end of the day, stronger protection against spam is better for all of us and will work to protect our brands from cloaking and other spam activity.

The challenge as business owners is to create messaging, marketing and emails that our audience wants to read.

And to make sure that our technology is setup correctly.

Don’t wait. Take action today to protect your valuable email marketing list.