Ensure your email marketing campaigns get through to your contact inboxes by authenticating your email and website tools.
Google and Yahoo have changed their email authentication requirements for all bulk email senders, effective February 2024. These changes are being required to protect their users against fraudulent messages, such as scams and phishing attempts, and will prevent any emails sent from unauthenticated email addresses from reaching the recipient’s inbox. As marketers, we need to do all we can to ensure that our emails get to our contacts’ inboxes. So, recognize that service providers and digital security changes are implemented to reduce spam, enhance user trust and improve Global Cyber Security Standards to contribute to a safer and more standardized email ecosystem.
What does this mean for business marketing teams?
If you are using email marketing tools to communicate to a significant list of recipients, keep in mind that each service provider of your contacts has their own formula to identify spammers. Take the time to authenticate your email account now through your email service provider as well as your verifying and authenticating your website inboxes so your contacts’ email service providers will allow your emails to get to your contact’s inbox directly. Remember that those same email providers may also handle your email, so compliance is mandatory. If you do not comply, your open rates and click through rates will be affected.
What the new email sender requirements mean for you and how you can prepare?
1. Start by self-authenticating your emails with your email marketing service. For more detailed instructions on how to do that, review these instructions from Constant Contact as an example.
2. Set up your sending domain in your DNS settings. You’ll need to make sure you also publish a DMARC policy record for your sending domain in your DNS settings. Setting up a DMARC record helps improve email deliverability and security by preventing email spoofing and phishing attacks. If you need help publishing your DMARC policy, your IT department or webmaster can assist you. Here are some tips on how to get that done.
3. If you don’t have a domain of your own? No worries. Email marketing service providers will likely rewrite your “From email address” to be from their servers. In example if you use Constant Contact, and you do not take the steps to authenticate your email address, they will rewrite your “From email address” from carl@carlscoffee.com to carl@carlscoffee.ccsend.com to include the service provider domain information.
4. Remember that the quality of the content of your email marketing campaigns plays a big role in whether or not your subscribers unsubscribe. Most email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo will be adding unsubscribe to the top of the email sender address. Ensure that you are sending the contacts who signed up to receive your content information that keeps them interested and engages your subscribers.
5. Your email marketing service provider will ultimately be responsible for your results. That is why you need a provider that complies with CANSPAM act and the strict standards so they can get your email marketing campaigns delivered into inboxes with the most reliability. Constant Contact has always set a high standard ensuring that they already have a strong relationship with email service providers with more reliability.
Click here to try Constant Contact which provides trackable Email Marketing, AI content writing, Landing Page creation, SMS Text Marketing, Event Marketing Tool, Social Media Posting and simple Website Page Design— all integrated in one solution package.
If you need help with your marketing strategy or help designing, critiquing or improving your marketing plan, contact Tailor-Made Advertising here or call them at 310-791-6300 to keep your organization thriving.
Liz Harsch is the owner of Tailor-Made Advertising in Torrance, CA. Her firm provides marketing, training and consulting to identify marketing and media alternatives for business owners. As an experienced Marketing Director, Media Planner, Liz has trained small business owners for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, SBA, Cities, MWD and County outreach partners plus many Chambers of Commerce for over 25 years. She can be reached at her Torrance, CA, office at 310-791-6300 or by email at liz@adteamla.com. Visit tailormadeadvertising.com for more information.
