Google’s New Email Sending Requirements

In a move to protect consumer inboxes, Google is shifting some email best practices to hard-and-fast rules. Here’s what you need to know. 

Marketing email can be a complicated process to undertake. You want to personalize messages, but not be creepy. You want to stay on someone’s radar, but not inundate them with meaningless emails. And all the while, you should be engaging in line with the industry’s best practices. And starting this year, as early as February, in some cases those best practices are going to be requirements.

The quick take: You have to authenticate outgoing email, avoid sending ill-received mail, and make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe.

…. Lucky for you, THIS has been where Stirista has thrived for some time now.

Who are these requirements for?

These regulations will apply for marketing messages sent to personal emails ending in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com. Though B2B Google Workspace emails are exempt and Gmail users make up less than a third of all email users, Yahoo is following in Gmail’s steps with its own email compliance moves as well, and as the most popular email platform, Gmail’s new regulations promise to catalyze new regulations across the board.

Not only will the requirements apply to all promotional emails, but there are additional specific requirements for bulk senders (those who send 5,000 or more emails a day). And once Google determines you’re a bulk sender, that tag is permanent. So regardless of whether you’re a small business looking to eventually scale up (or a bigger one looking to avoid the guidelines), you should be paying attention.

The requirements

Though the guidelines are mostly aimed at bulk senders, whether you’re a small business sending 50 marketing emails a day or a media giant sending tens of millions, all will have to comply with the majority of the regulations. The most important ones are below:

• Authenticate your email.
  • For senders of over 5,000 emails, you need to implement both SPF and DKIM authentication, and you also need to verify your domain through DMARC. DMARC lets you tell receiving servers what to do with messages from your domain that don’t pass either SPF or DKIM, making it more difficult for phishers to impersonate domains and send predatory emails
  • As the infrastructure owner and administrator, Stirista will ensure all sending domains are fully authenticated with the necessary SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. 

• Keep spam rates below 0.3%
  • While Google recommends you keep spam rates below an even lower threshold–0.10%–they are considering 0.3% the upper limit, after which messages will remain undelivered at higher and higher rates once enforcement begins in April. 
  • Stirista already engages in best practices here, too. Stirista’s email audiences are campaign verified and approved. We suppress complaining recipients and remove bad addresses, so the emails we send on your behalf arrive with a higher likelihood of being opened and a lesser likelihood of being submitted as a spam complaint.
• Support one-click unsubscribe.
  • While this guideline applies specifically to high-volume senders of over 5,000 emails per day, it’s an important thing to include in your promotional emails regardless of whether you’re a small mom-and-pop business or a tech giant.
  • Stirista already supports one-click unsubscribe. We can help you incorporate this into your existing unsubscribe and email preference management processes.

Additional requirements

The rest of the guidelines get more granular. Things like following Internet standards, not impersonating Gmail headers, adding ARC headers, ensuring valid DNS records, using TLS connections, and for our bulk senders, DMARC alignment. It’s a collection of technical practices that add up to authentic, compliant, and best-practice emails.

And have no fear … if any of this still leaves you scratching your head we’re always here to help answer any questions you might have or provide counsel. 

What happens if you don’t comply?

Your messages can be rejected, sent to spam, or your whole domain can be blacklisted. Full consequences will be implemented gradually, however, starting in April.

What does this mean for me?

It means you have to get your email marketing team in the game! Otherwise, your domain is at risk of being blacklisted, and your marketing messages won’t get through to your targeted audiences. 

Does Stirista have my back?

Yep, of course we do. We understand everything that needs to be done and in fact, we’ve been following these best practices for years.

It all starts with the data. Our clients leverage Stirista B2C demographic data for a deeper understanding of their existing customers so that they can retain their best customers and improve prospecting efforts.Our assets are fueled by our in-house Email Sending Platform (ESP) and Demand Side Platform (DSP). No competing data organization has the level of feedback on all data points that we do, nor the ability to update the data as quickly.If you have questions about your email sending and how Stirista can help you meet these requirements, please let us know.