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New email rules from Google and Yahoo will change your inbox (and your communication strategy)

April 29, 2024 No Comments

New policies signal a major change for brands that have relied on ‘spray-and-pray’ techniques to drive sales.

We all know the pain of misguided sales spam—and lots of it—cluttering our inboxes. Whether it’s emails to our personal addresses that assume our buying habits of a decade ago are the same today, or sales pitches to our work addresses that are completely irrelevant to our roles and responsibilities, we’ve become overwhelmed with poorly targeted emails. Statista found that spam accounted for 45% of the 333 billion emails sent daily in 2022, while research from Gong shows that only 4% of emails are ever even opened.

Why are business leaders still accepting this antiquated and ineffective way of doing things?

This month marks the beginning of new policies from Google and Yahoo to limit the bulk email sends that result in billions of irrelevant and poorly crafted sales pitches emailed daily. This signals a major change for brands that have relied on “spray-and-pray” techniques to drive sales. And for B2B brands, this too should be a wake-up call.

How will these new policies reshape how sales teams think about attracting customers?
Will mass emails become generally unacceptable in our professional inboxes, in addition to our personal ones?
And how will the disruption of a commonly used sales tactic impact bottom lines?

THE HISTORY OF SPAM

The first bulk emails were sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a computer company, to promote the company’s products to some 400 people. Thuerk said in a 2007 interview that “complaints started coming in almost immediately” after sending the emails, but more importantly, the company “sold $13 million or $14 million worth of DEC machines through that email campaign.” With that, cold emailing as a sales tactic was born.

In the decades that followed, the practice grew, and email marketing tools enabled sales teams to contact an ever-growing list of potential customers, forsaking personalized outreach for a broader pool of recipients.

While more data-driven approaches to sales emails have been introduced over the years, the overwhelming volume of irrelevant sales pitches has led to widespread fatigue. In fact, Gong’s research found that 87% of buyers say that the emails they receive are not relevant to them.

This practice can convert to sales. Even if only 4% of bulk emails are opened, that translates to 40,000 people opening those emails for every million sent by a salesperson. But companies need to ask themselves if irritating and alienating the other 960,000 people is an acceptable sacrifice. And, even more importantly, are they missing out on valuable opportunities by not sending thoughtful, personalized messages to the appropriate buyers out there?

RETHINKING SALES SPAM WITH AI

The technology industry is at a pivotal moment. AI is transforming the ways we work, live, and interact with each other. Now bulk emails can be drafted by generative artificial intelligence far more quickly than by a marketing and sales pro.

The potential impact for teams sending out large email campaigns is significant. Will the rise of gen AI mean that inboxes are flooded even more? Can AI make a difference in how these companies communicate with prospects?

AI can also bring new knowledge and perspective. Using AI to draft emails based on a few lines of context isn’t new, innovative, or effective. But done right, it can actually help companies cut down on the volume, and instead target the right customers with the right message.

We’re seeing new applications of AI that capture and analyse customer interactions to create content and thoughtfully personalize outreach based on a holistic view of the relationship. These applications might be the new approach that could reshape how sales teams develop and assess their outreach programs, from the initial outreach to a prospective customer . . . and over the entire relationship.

The era of relying on volume over strategic precision is over.

AI as a blanket solution won’t solve this problem for businesses. Not all of these tools are created equally, and those without the proper knowledge will only exacerbate the problem. However, there is potential for well-designed AI tools to help teams change their approach.

HOW TO CREATE CHANGE

Google’s and Yahoo’s rules are a positive first step to end spray-and-pray practices, but sales teams will need to do more. The good news is that there’s a path forward that not only doesn’t harm the bottom line but also can improve it.

Business leaders need to stop accepting this practice as the status quo and rebuild these programs from the ground up. Teams have often been measured and evaluated on “activity metrics”—how many emails have been sent, how many phone calls have been made. They should instead be measured by meetings booked and qualified opportunities, giving sales teams the motivation, time, and resources to focus on targeted, relevant outreach.

Similarly, leaders should make sure that their teams haven’t become over reliant on email. Research from McKinsey shows that the number of channels that B2B companies use to interact with other businesses has doubled in the past five years, and includes email, phone, web conference, chat, and social. Leaders should ensure that their teams can meet those potential customers where they want to be met.

The onus is on business leaders to evolve their strategies. While a spray-and-pray approach may have worked in the past, the tides are changing, and to stay competitive, businesses need to take a step back and reimagine how their sales teams operate. And they need to do it soon, before their last emails go unanswered.

Feature Image Credit: 84 Video/Unsplash

BY AMIT BENDOV

Amit Bendov is the CEO and cofounder of Gong.io. More

Sourced from FastCompany

In News

Google’s new bulk sender guidelines spell trouble for B2B

April 22, 2024 No Comments

By Larry Kim

Spam complaint rate rises across the B2B space

Back in October, Google and Yahoo unveiled a pivotal update to their bulk sender guidelines.

Launching February 1, these new regulations, which impact both bulk emailers (those sending over 5,000 emails daily to Gmail accounts) and general Gmail users alike, introduced authentication requirements and defined thresholds for spam complaints. Specifically, they defined a spam complaint threshold of 0.3%.

Our preliminary analysis of the announcement was that this 0.3% threshold wouldn’t be a major problem for most email marketers. In fact, for large companies with established customer bases and large inbound lists, this update would probably help those companies. They likely have low existing complaint rates and can more easily and safely expand their outbound efforts.

However, the smaller, less established companies, specifically, those in the B2B space that may be using more aggressive outbound email marketing strategies or have been leaning on ABM to establish their brand, would likely be in trouble.

And it turned out that we were right.

Spam complaint rates across the B2B space

To better understand how these new sender guidelines would impact outbound marketing and sales, particularly in the B2B space, we studied spam complaint rates across various industries.

Our findings showed that complaint rates were well beyond the 0.3% threshold laid out by Google and Yahoo. In fact, it wasn’t even close! The average spam complaint rate across the B2B space was 2.01%, with a range between 1.1% and 3.1%.

Even worse, for the top 9 spammiest verticals, we couldn’t find a single sender that was able to score below the 0.3% threshold. When you break it down by industry, it becomes ever more clear who the top offenders are:

B2B Software: Spam complaint rates peak at 3.2%, with a range of 1.3% to 4.3%.
Political Issue & Electioneering Communications: Rates hover around 2.9%, ranging from 1.5% to 3.4%.
Sales and Marketing Services: Experience a 2.8% rate, with a broad spectrum from 2.0% to 5.3%.
Recruiting: Faces a 2.1% rate, ranging between 1.7% and 3.1%.
Retail and E-Commerce: Encounter a 2.3% rate, with variations from 0.5% to 2.9%.
Real Estate: Deals with a 1.9% rate, spanning 1.5% to 3.4%.
Education and Training Providers: Show a 1.7% rate, within a range of 0.4% to 2.1%.
Financial Services: Encounter a lower rate of 1.1%, ranging from 0.7% to 1.9%.
Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals: Have the lowest rate at 0.9%, with a range of 0.7% to 1.4%.

This data isn’t entirely surprising when you think about it. B2B software companies and sales and marketing companies tend to do a lot of outbound. Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals on the other hand are beholden to pretty strict laws and regulations around communication.

B2B sales & marketing teams must adjust quickly

This data signals a critical issue for B2B outbound marketing. For businesses that rely heavily on outbound emails for lead generation and sales, this is a significant hurdle. Meeting the new sub-0.3% threshold appears daunting, if not impossible. The good news is there are strategies to mitigate these hurdles:

Boost transactional email volume: If we want to reduce the spam complaint rate %, we may want to increase total emails sent and optimize email volume. Increase the volume of non-spammy, transactional emails such as order confirmations, tracking updates, or purchase follow-ups. These are less likely to be flagged as spam and can balance out your overall email metrics.

Prioritize warm leads: Focus your emails on high-intent users (think those who visited your pricing page or added something to their cart). Tools for website visitor identification can be invaluable here.

Provide clear & numerous unsubscribe options: The unsubscribe option should be easily accessible and in multiple places. Hidden or hard-to-find unsubscribe links increase the likelihood of being marked as spam.

Utilize intent-based email lists: In some instances, there is no getting around cold emails. What you can do however is use intent-based email lists that can help you create more appropriate messaging that will resonate with prospects. The more you know about what your audience is interested in, the more personalized messaging you can create.

For B2B companies, adapting to these new guidelines is crucial. While outbound isn’t gone, it is more challenging. The good news for users is that this new complaint rate threshold should improve the email marketing and outbound space as a whole.

These new guidelines will force B2B marketers to evolve their outbound strategies and build better campaigns. For users this means less spam and more relevant emails. For marketing and sales teams, this should mean better targeting, more personalization, and less laziness.

The result? Improved sales to lead time. At the end of the day, large email providers like Google and Yahoo are focused on creating a better user experience and this means less spam. For B2B teams, the answer is simple…don’t be a spammer.

We’ve listed the best sales management software.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock/Billion Photos

By Larry Kim

Larry Kim is the CEO of Customers.AI.

Sourced from techradar pro

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

In News

New email rules from Google and Yahoo will change your inbox (and your communication strategy)

April 4, 2024 No Comments

BY AMIT BENDOV

New policies signal a major change for brands that have relied on ‘spray-and-pray’ techniques to drive sales.

We all know the pain of misguided sales spam—and lots of it—cluttering our inboxes. Whether it’s emails to our personal addresses that assume our buying habits of a decade ago are the same today, or sales pitches to our work addresses that are completely irrelevant to our roles and responsibilities, we’ve become overwhelmed with poorly targeted emails. Statista found that spam accounted for 45% of the 333 billion emails sent daily in 2022, while research from Gong shows that only 4% of emails are ever even opened.

Why are business leaders still accepting this antiquated and ineffective way of doing things?

This month marks the beginning of new policies from Google and Yahoo to limit the bulk email sends that result in billions of irrelevant and poorly crafted sales pitches emailed daily. This signals a major change for brands that have relied on “spray-and-pray” techniques to drive sales. And for B2B brands, this too should be a wake-up call.

How will these new policies reshape how sales teams think about attracting customers?
Will mass emails become generally unacceptable in our professional inboxes, in addition to our personal ones?
And how will the disruption of a commonly used sales tactic impact bottom lines?

THE HISTORY OF SPAM

The first bulk emails were sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a computer company, to promote the company’s products to some 400 people. Thuerk said in a 2007 interview that “complaints started coming in almost immediately” after sending the emails, but more importantly, the company “sold $13 million or $14 million worth of DEC machines through that email campaign.” With that, cold emailing as a sales tactic was born.

In the decades that followed, the practice grew, and email marketing tools enabled sales teams to contact an ever-growing list of potential customers, forsaking personalized outreach for a broader pool of recipients.

While more data-driven approaches to sales emails have been introduced over the years, the overwhelming volume of irrelevant sales pitches has led to widespread fatigue. In fact, Gong’s research found that 87% of buyers say that the emails they receive are not relevant to them.

This practice can convert to sales. Even if only 4% of bulk emails are opened, that translates to 40,000 people opening those emails for every million sent by a salesperson. But companies need to ask themselves if irritating and alienating the other 960,000 people is an acceptable sacrifice. And, even more importantly, are they missing out on valuable opportunities by not sending thoughtful, personalized messages to the appropriate buyers out there?

RETHINKING SALES SPAM WITH AI

The technology industry is at a pivotal moment. AI is transforming the ways we work, live, and interact with each other. Now bulk emails can be drafted by generative artificial intelligence far more quickly than by a marketing and sales pro.

The potential impact for teams sending out large email campaigns is significant. Will the rise of gen AI mean that inboxes are flooded even more? Can AI make a difference in how these companies communicate with prospects?

AI can also bring new knowledge and perspective. Using AI to draft emails based on a few lines of context isn’t new, innovative, or effective. But done right, it can actually help companies cut down on the volume, and instead target the right customers with the right message.

We’re seeing new applications of AI that capture and analyse customer interactions to create content and thoughtfully personalize outreach based on a holistic view of the relationship. These applications might be the new approach that could reshape how sales teams develop and assess their outreach programs, from the initial outreach to a prospective customer . . . and over the entire relationship.

The era of relying on volume over strategic precision is over.

AI as a blanket solution won’t solve this problem for businesses. Not all of these tools are created equally, and those without the proper knowledge will only exacerbate the problem. However, there is potential for well-designed AI tools to help teams change their approach.

HOW TO CREATE CHANGE

Google’s and Yahoo’s rules are a positive first step to end spray-and-pray practices, but sales teams will need to do more. The good news is that there’s a path forward that not only doesn’t harm the bottom line but also can improve it.

Business leaders need to stop accepting this practice as the status quo and rebuild these programs from the ground up. Teams have often been measured and evaluated on “activity metrics”—how many emails have been sent, how many phone calls have been made. They should instead be measured by meetings booked and qualified opportunities, giving sales teams the motivation, time, and resources to focus on targeted, relevant outreach.

Similarly, leaders should make sure that their teams haven’t become over reliant on email. Research from McKinsey shows that the number of channels that B2B companies use to interact with other businesses has doubled in the past five years, and includes email, phone, web conference, chat, and social. Leaders should ensure that their teams can meet those potential customers where they want to be met.

The onus is on business leaders to evolve their strategies. While a spray-and-pray approach may have worked in the past, the tides are changing, and to stay competitive, businesses need to take a step back and reimagine how their sales teams operate. And they need to do it soon, before their last emails go unanswered.

Feature Image Credit: 84 Video/Unsplash

BY AMIT BENDOV

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Google and Yahoo Are Now Enforcing New Rules For Email Senders — Here Are 3 Changes You’ll Need to Adopt By February 1st.

February 6, 2024 No Comments

BY LIVIU TANASE

Google and Yahoo are enforcing new rules for mass email senders. By February 2024, you must authenticate your emails, allow people to unsubscribe easily and keep your spam complaints at bay.

re you sending more than 5,000 daily emails to Gmail and Yahoo users? If you are, you’ll have to make some changes in your email marketing. The two tech giants partnered to fight spam, spoofing, and phishing attacks, creating a new set of guidelines for individuals and organizations sending mass emails.

While these best practices have been around for years, you must adopt them by February 1, 2024, if you want your emails to land in your customers’ inboxes.

What you need to change in your email marketing

To stay in Google and Yahoo’s good graces and keep your emails out of spam, make sure to follow the new guidelines:

Authenticate your emails. Use security protocols to protect your email domain from spoofing and impersonators sending malicious messages on your behalf. Email authentication helps mailbox providers verify that an email was sent by you and not someone faking your domain.
Enable one-click unsubscribing. Make it easy for people to opt out of your email list and ensure you have an unsubscribe link in every email you send. Additionally, Google and Yahoo ask mass senders to honor unsubscribes within two days.
Keep a low spam complaint rate. If you get more than three spam reports for every 1,000 emails you send, your reputation suffers and your campaigns may start going to spam.

As you can see, Google and Yahoo’s new guidelines focus on creating a better, safer experience for email users. While these rules target organizations that send more than 5,000 emails a day, you’d be smart to follow them even if you send fewer campaigns. That way, you’ll stay out of the spam folder and see a higher ROI from your campaigns.

How to implement Google and Yahoo’s new email-sending rules

Next, let’s break down the three rules and see how you can integrate them into your email marketing. Doing so before February 2024 will give your email deliverability a boost.

1. Authenticate your emails

For your emails to pass increasingly tough spam filters, you must verify that you — and not a bad actor — are the source of all the messages sent from your domain. Google and Yahoo’s focus is “a crucial aspect of email security: the validation that a sender is who they claim to be,” explains Google’s Group Product Manager Neil Kumaran.

To authenticate your emails, implement these three protocols:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) — SPF specifies which IP addresses can send emails on behalf of your domain, thus preventing email spoofing attacks.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) — DKIM uses cryptographic signatures to validate the identity of a domain.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) — DMARC aligns your SPF and DKIM protocols and provides instructions on handling emails that fail authentication. Unauthenticated emails will either be marked as spam, rejected or quarantined.

Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC can be daunting. If you don’t know how to start, there are email platforms where you can get all the support you need. Advice from your email marketing platform can also point you in the right direction.

2. Allow your subscribers to opt-out easily

If signing up for an email list takes only seconds, so should unsubscribing, Google and Yahoo believe. “We’re requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click,” Google’s Neil Kumaran says.

Marcel Becker, Senior Director of Product Management at Yahoo, states that the email provider has been promoting this standard “for some time,” but few organizations have adopted it. Starting in February, one-click unsubscribes will be a requirement.

If your emails don’t already allow for speedy unsubscribes, check with your email marketing platform and update your policy soon. Also, Google and Yahoo require that mass senders remove unsubscribed contacts within two days. Doing this will not only allow for a better user experience – it will also prevent you from getting spam complaints.

3. Keep your spam complaint rate under 0.3%

Spam complaints are a key indicator for mailbox providers like Yahoo and Google to determine whether a sender belongs in the inbox or in spam. A high spam complaint rate shows that email users are unhappy with your content. When they repeatedly hit the Mark as spam button, your messages may go to spam.

So, how do you know if you’re getting too many spam complaints? The accepted industry standard for spam reports has been 0.1%, meaning one report for every 1,000 emails. However, in its initial blog post – which has been edited in the meantime – Google offered a more generous threshold: 0.3%.

To be safe, consider one report for every 1,000 emails acceptable. Anything above that is reason enough for you to reassess your strategy. Here are some questions worth pondering:

Have all your contacts opted in to receive emails from you? Do not reach out without permission.
Do all your emails include an unsubscribe link? Never send an email without giving your subscribers an easy way out.
Are you removing people from your list promptly? Do it within two days.
Is there ever any reason for your audience to believe your emails are coming from someone else? Make sure your content and design are on-brand.
Are you sending too many emails? Readjust your sending schedule. Sometimes, people will mark your messages as spam just because you’re emailing them too often.

Google and Yahoo’s new sending requirements for mass senders are common sense, and you may already be following them. If certain elements are missing from your program, now is the time for updates. With more than $4.2 billion email users worldwide, email marketing is a channel worth your while. But to make email work for your business, you have to play by the rules.

BY LIVIU TANASE

Sourced from Entrepreneur

ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK® CONTRIBUTOR

Founder & CEO of ZeroBounce. Liviu Tanase is a serial entrepreneur and telecommunication executive with extensive experience in the creation, growth and sale of novel technologies. He is currently the CEO of ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability platform.

In News

All of the anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic ad-targeting options offered by Big Tech

October 4, 2017 No Comments

By Mike Murphy.

Over the last few days, a slew of reporting, inspired by ProPublica, has revealed that it’s actually quite easy, through the programmatic structure of most online advertising, to create ads meant to target those who have espoused racist, antisemitic, or other hateful ideas.

Here’s a quick rundown of the major internet companies, and what has been discovered about their advertising platforms:

Facebook

On Sept. 14, ProPublica reported that Facebook allowed advertisers to target categories and ideas such as “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world,’” based on interest Facebook users had expressed on the social network and terms with which they had used to describe themselves.

While Facebook removed those categories after ProPublica’s investigation, Slate then discovered that there are dozens of other racist, sexist, and xenophobic categories which advertisers could potentially target. It took Facebook less than a minute to approve ads against phrases like “Kill Muslimic Radicals”and “Ku-Klux-Klan,” and Slate found myriad other options, like “Killing Bitches,” “Killing Hajis,” and “Nazi Party (Canada).”

Facebook released a statement yesterday after ProPublica’s report, saying in part:

Keeping our community safe is critical to our mission. And to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue. We want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook.

Google

BuzzFeed discovered similar targeting issues on Google’s AdWords platform, which runs the advertisements you see on Google search results pages. Typing in keyword suggestions (which advertisers use to build their ads and figure out who to target) like “why do jews ruin everything” led to the system generating more keyword suggestions like “jews ruin the world” and “jewish parasites.” Buzzfeed was also able to build and launch a campaign around the phrase “black people ruin neighborhoods.”

When Quartz attempted to recreate BuzzFeed’s efforts using similar terms, or terms like those used by ProPublica and Slate, no keyword suggestions were returned. Google has since disabled many of the keywords that BuzzFeed tested.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president in charge of ads, told Quartz in a statement:

Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.

Twitter

The Daily Beast was able to target similarly derogatory demographics on Twitter. It reported:

Twitter’s advertising platform tells prospective marketers it has 26.3 million users interested in the derogatory term “wetback,” 18.6 million accounts that are likely to engage with the word “Nazi,” and 14.5 million users who might be drawn to “n**ger.”

A Twitter representative told Quartz about the Daily Beast’s report:

The terms cited in this story have been blacklisted for several years and we are looking into why the campaign cited in this story were able to run for a very short period of time. Twitter actively prohibits and prevents any offensive ads from appearing on our platform, and we are committed to understanding 1) why this happened, and 2) how to keep it from happening again.

Snapchat

Quartz checked on Snapchat’s advertising platform to see if we were able to target using similar terms used on the other platforms. We were not able to: It seems that Snapchat’s demography isn’t quite as granular as the other platforms, which are far more text-based than Snapchat, and so it’s likely easier for them to glean what sorts of things its users are sharing than through all the videos and images posted to Snapchat.

Bing

Microsoft’s second-placed search network seems to have a similar problem to its other platforms. When Quartz created a test advertising campaign on Bing Ads, we weren’t able to directly target specifically loaded terms, but searching for just about any phrase in Bing’s “keyword suggestions” generator will generate specific keywords that you might want to try to target instead. Here’s one example, using “Hitler” as the search term:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 5.51.52 PM — (Screenshot/Bing Ads)

A representative for Bing told Quartz:

We take steps to ensure our Bing Ads always meet reasonable standards. We are committed to working with partners who share our vision for relevant, impactful brand interaction and respect the integrity of consumer choice.

Yahoo

Quartz attempted to create an ad campaign on Yahoo, but it seems there’s no simple way to create one online without speaking to a representative from Oath (Yahoo’s parent company) first. And presumably fewer people would feel comfortable telling a sales rep the sorts of things they’re targeting than they would inputting them into a computer system. Hopefully.

LinkedIn

Microsoft’s professional social network doesn’t seem to let users target based on arbitrary phrases or demographics. Other than geography, these are the only things you can target against on LinkedIn:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 6.01.21 PM — (Screenshot/LinkedIn)

The only section that might have the potential for hateful terms would be in “Member groups”—but a cursory search of terms like those used above didn’t reveal many professional hate groups to target on the platform. We did, however, come across this group:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 6.03.39 PM — (Screenshot/LinkedIn)

Upon further inspection, however, it seems that this group was set up by a LinkedIn employee trying to see whether they could set up a group with a title like this. Obviously, it worked:

LinkedIn sent Quartz the following statement:

Hate has no place on LinkedIn and will not be tolerated. When we are made aware of such content, we act swiftly to enforce our policy and remove said content. On Friday, a member of our team created a group solely for internal testing purposes and after a brief testing period, we took the group down.

By Mike Murphy.

Sourced from QUARTZ