Google's New Email Sending Guidelines

Are you sending more than 5k emails to Gmail accounts and is your spam rate <0.3%? 🤔

It's not a question you would have asked yourself early 2023.

Google's latest announcement around new Gmail requirements as of Feb'24 will mean a good amount of companies will need to review their email-sending practices very soon if

A) they're sending over 5k emails per day to Gmail users
B) have a >0.3% spam rate

A couple of things to note on the spam rate

1. Spam rate applies to all email traffic of the domain, not just sales/marketing 👀

0.3% is 3 emails marked as spam for every 1,000 emails sent

This means you'll need to drive down spam rate for your email domain across every email motion whether you're sending newsletters, cold emails etc.

2. 0.3% spam rate requirement is for all the senders, not just those sending over 5K emails to Gmail users.

What you should consider doing?

1. Monitor Postmaster Tools
2. Increase quality and reduce quantity (Easier said than done).
3. Warm-up EVERY mailbox you use to send emails to people you don't know
4. Introduce dedicated domains for email motions and do domain rotation
5. Reduce # of emails you have in a sequence. More emails sent to a recipient within a short timeframe = higher likelihood of spam report

There's more, but ultimately think from a user's standpoint and reduce the likelihood of them reporting your email as spam.

There are things that aren't in your control due to email fatigue.

Some users

# Don't open emails from unknown senders. They can't/won't manage it.
# Automatically filter emails from unknown senders or use tools to block them.
# Mark automatically as spam, even newsletters they signed up to, which is cruel :)

The good news there's plenty of time for you to adjust. Link for further guidance can be found here.