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2024: The Year Cold Email Prospecting Died
Google and Yahoo have banded together to usher us into a new era, and perhaps for some of us the end, of email marketing. What am I talking about? Per ZDNet and MeetMarigold, changes will be introduced in February that require users sending to Gmail or Ymail addresses employ:
- Sender Authentication
- Easy Unsubscribes
- 1 Click Report Spam button
- < 0.3% Spam threshold
Given the size of the email market Google and Yahoo process and control, these new requirements are more or less the new laws of the land.
So is it the end of email marketing? For a few folks, absolutely. Cold emailing will likely cease to exist. What is cold emailing and why is that? A cold email is any prospecting outreach where no previous relationship existed. Cold email prospecting has had occasional merits if the price points and commitments to engage were incredibly low, but it required numbers—big numbers! Google and Yahoo are choking off the scale of those numbers (and the email they process) with the 0.3% spam threshold. 1000 emails, 3 easy clicks reporting abuse? Your domain is toast.
Business development reps won’t be empowered to fish for opportunities via email reach out (at least on company domains) any longer. Can they keep pestering us via their personal accounts? Sure. But once you’re forced to disconnect from company domains to continue outreach you’re already losing some of the efficiencies and scale of your company’s martech infrastructure. Reach outs from personal accounts will appear less credible, convert even less, and eventually cease. New rules will give rise to new cheaters but those who prefer to operate legitimately will either find new prospecting routes or new jobs.
For those engaged in warmer temperature emailing, don’t despair. Validate that your email system provider offers the types of authentication Google and Yahoo will require. Your biggest internal hurdle is upgrading templates for compliance. A 0.3% spam threshold sounds scary, but people are typically patient with emails that have transactional relevance or value to their lives. It’s likely your bigger concern was the rate you already have visibility into: the unsubscribe rate.
Also, while you’d assume Google and Yahoo have tested the 0.3% threshold to reach optimal UX balance, it’s always possible it could change. In practice the threshold could prove too aggressive for any number of reasons. If you send emails based on good-faith and established business relationships, your email marketing initiatives should survive the new world order. Take the opportunity to increase your relevance to your prospects’ interests. We’re all in a never-ending battle to add value.
