Google and Yahoo have announced changes that affect your email deliverability
On October 3, 2023, Google and Yahoo released similar communications around a significant change in policy regarding allowing marketing email into their networks. Both organizations are implementing similar restrictions starting February 1, 2024. Unless email marketers (on any platform) apply and enforce these changes, Gmail and Yahoo will reject email from senders that do not meet their requirements, and potentially block the sending domain.
This impacts all Keap customers.
There are 9 items that Gmail states need to be satisfied to ensure email is accepted onto the Gmail network. The good news is Keap already applies five of these for you. However, the following 4 points are absolutely vital, and as much as we’d love to take care of them for you, we cannot. So make sure you do these four things:
- Avoid sending from a free email domain (gmail, hotmail, etc.). That means if you don’t have a domain, it’s time to get one.
- Apply DKIM to authenticate your email. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a security protocol that helps to verify that emails are actually coming from the sender they claim to be from. To apply DKIM to your email, you will need to add a few DNS records to your domain.
- Apply a DMARC policy.
- Maintain a spam complaint rate under 3 per 1,000 emails. We've always recommended the threshold of 1 per 1,000, so we're ahead of the game there.
The timing of these steps is important.
December is the right time to take the above steps.
If you take these steps prior to December, you could negatively impact your deliverability just before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. To be clear, these are good steps you should take anyway, but if you are acquiring a new domain, you’ll want to do that after your Black Friday/Cyber Monday emails have already been sent. It takes some time to warm up a new domain, so you don’t want send a high volume of emails right away with a new domain.
On the same note, because it takes time to warm up a new domain, you must take the above steps before the end of December 2023. That will give you at least one full month to warm up your new domain and allow Google and Yahoo to recognize your authentication setup before they enforce these changes.