Impact Gmail Protection policy on bulk sending sales emails

From February 2024 onwards Gmail will require bulk senders (e.g. people bulk sending sales emails or marketing content) to adhere to three policies:

Authenticate their email: protecting their email address from spoofing & phishing, which can be easily done via DKIM and DMARC on your server side.

Enable easy unsubscription: this is already a requirement in many countries but will now be enforced in order to prevent getting complaints.

Ensure they’re sending wanted emails: enforcing a clear spam rate of 0.3% and a limitation that organizations can only send 5,000 sales emails daily to the Google or Yahoo network.

If you now think ‘this doesn’t apply to me, I use another tool to bulk send sales emails’, you are in for a surprise. The new policy of Google will also impact users of SEPs (Sales Engagement Platforms) such as Outreach, Salesloft, Hubspot Sales Hub, Groove, Apollo.io and many others.

The new policy will start rolling out at the beginning of 2024 (after its announcement in October 2023) and will be in full effect from the start of February 2024.

Under the motto ‘A warned man counts as two’ you should start taking precautions today in order to prevent your sellers becoming unable to reach out to their clients – or worse: your whole organization becoming unable to reach out to anyone.

The first two things you can already do today, is making sure you adhere to the first two new rules.

Your IT service or Workplace administrator, should be able to install the necessary records (DKIM and DMARC) to prevent spoofing, phishing and spam from your domain. 

By installing these DNS records, organizations with bad intent will not be able to forge emails coming from your email address. This should already be a basic setting in your setup given it’s important for the credibility of your organization and your search engine optimization.

That said, if you have never heard of DKIM and DMARC – this help article from Google can help you set it up.

The second quick win is installing unsubscribe options in all your email communications. Most Sales Engagement Platforms already offer default options to install this.

If you are not using a SEP, you could opt to include an unsubscribe link in the footer of every email that’s being sent by your orgainzation. You can either do this centrally or ask every individual in your organization to add this link in their signature. There are also plenty of tools that can help you achieve this result at scale.

What remains a blocker is the limitation of 5,000 emails from your organization to the Google or Yahoo network. If you are keen to keep on using email, you can think about the following best practices.

In the next chapter, we also cover alternatives, which will allow you to have similar or even better conversion rates than just sending plain emails.

To keep on sending sales emails, you need to prioritize gathering business or company domains from your leads or clients. You should make this a hard requirement in your sign-up form.

While you might lose some of your leads doing so, especially when engaging with small or medium sized businesses, the long term benefits outweigh this:

• You will collect emails that are reachable
• You can send emails outside the Google network (no limit)
• You get more qualified leads (more serious companies)

It’s important to set restrictions when people sign up or fill in a lead form on your website. On the other hand, you should identify all existing clients to which you are bulk sending sales emails that are using a Gmail email address.

Reach out proactively to these clients before 2024 and ask them to update their email address with a corporate one in order to prevent them from not receiving emails in the future.

This is also a good opportunity to clean up your CRM and remove email addresses from (potential) clients that no longer have intent to do business with you.

Double opt-in requires people signing up for your service to give their email address, press a button and subsequently press a link in their email inbox. Double opt-in allows you to check the real intent of potential leads.

They also have a positive effect on your overall email delivery stats:

• 114% increase in click rates compared to single opt-ins
• 48.3% lower bounce rate compared to single opt-ins
• 7% lower unsubscribe rate compared to single opt-ins

The only disadvantage of using double opt-in is that it will take longer to grow your email list, but the email list you will build will be more robust, qualitative and sustainable over time.

You shouldn’t stop using your SEP such as Outreach, but you should be more considerate when it comes to bulk mailing.

You can drive consideration by adopting best practices:

Segmenting your audience: identify common parameters between your audience in order to categorize them. When you want to send out bulk sales emails, limit them to certain categories.

Capping email frequency: set a maximum amount of emails a certain individual can expect to receive from you in a given time frame (for example: 5 bulk sales emails per quarter)

Understanding potential email value: give a value to every email communication in terms of potential outcomes and impact. Prioritize emails with higher value.

Monitoring bounce rates and no-replies: have rigid planning to remove email addresses that frequently result in bounces and delete contacts that haven’t replied in a certain timeframe.

Improving your email content quality: improve the content and quality of your emails to decrease the likelihood of them getting flagged as spam. Focus on the contact’s needs instead of pushing your product or service.

Batching different bulk emails: when you still decide to send out bulk sales email, make sure to batch them. Instead of sending 10,000 emails in one go, send 2,000 emails per day in a work week.

How cliché it may sound, picking up the phone is never a bad idea. Spam blockers on phone lines are less advanced compared to emails. If you really want to prevent getting flagged as spam and sending too many emails while providing a better experience to your clients the solution is simple: pick up the phone.

One of the key reasons Sales Engagement Platforms are so popular is their ability to customize at scale. You can send hundreds of emails while still giving more or less the impression they were written by a human – while in reality all the content is coming from a template.

When you are unable to send bulk emails, you also lose your ability to customize at scale.

A solution here is to create personalized and customized sales material at scale based on unique attributes of your clients or leads. This personalized is important given it will lead to 35% more conversions and 40% more revenue.

You can either choose to do this personalization manually, or use a free tool like SlideFill to create thousands of decks in just 3 clicks.

By doing so you will still get the positive effects while not being fully reliant on emails as we will see in the last section.

3. Example of Creating Sales Pitch Decks and Material at scale
© SlideFill 2023

The benefit of creating personalized content, similar to custom emails, is that you can share it directly with leads or existing clients without the need to send an email. 

When you share a document, your clients will receive an email but this email is not coming from your domain. It’s coming from Google directly – leading to lower bounce rates, higher open rates and no additional spam complaints. 

It’s an easy trick to keep engaging with your clients ‘over email’ while not sending emails directly from your website. You can either use it to provide clients with personalized insights, tips, recommendations, invitations or to inform them about new products – e.g. all communication for which you normally use an email. 

SlideFill allows you to directly share with multiple users from the tool itself.

Before you head to the conclusion of this article, you can find answers on frequently asked questions related to the new Gmail Protection Policy and Revenue Operations.

If you are worried about the new Gmail Protection Policy and your ability to bulk send sales emails, you should start working today to lay the foundation allowing you to keep engagement up with your clients.

You will want to focus on these three key areas:

Make sure your domain is authorized via DKIM and DMARC and add these as DNS records on your server. Ask IT to help if necessary. Allow clients to unsubscribe from your email communications in every single email.

When you want to keep on using email as your main engagement source, try to gather company emails instead of personal emails. Focus on double opt-in to get the highest engagement rate and retain from bulk sending emails through segmentation, frequency capping, batching and monitoring.

Start using alternatives to email. Go back to old school by picking up the phone and calling your clients. Create personalized content at scale and share documents directly with clients in order to drive marketing, sales, attendance and client actions driving profit for your business.

Download our free eBook:

Revenue Operations Explained: 7 Proven RevOps Strategies to Decrease Cost and Increase Revenue

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