📈 What does Google's announcement mean for cold email?

A short synopsis.

Recently, Google announced these new requirements for anyone delivering more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail mailboxes.

And, to say everyone is panicking is an understatement.

Those immediately claiming personalization is the answer don’t understand the stats.

Google is talking about only being allowed 1 “spam mark” out of 300 emails sent…

This is a very, very low bar.

And even with every email being 100% personalized…I still think more than 1 out of 300 people will hit “spam” because this is easier than unsubscribing, or they just don’t like unsolicited outreach.

I quickly released this video on my thoughts.

Long story short: I personally don’t think cold email marketers have much to be worried about yet.

As long as you’re spreading volume across email domains (via GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc.) and individual addresses (via Office365 or a secondary provider), you won’t be delivering 5,000 emails from any individual domain.

At the moment, you can still safely set up “forwarding” so if someone searches “vethgroup.co” it goes back to “vethgroup.com”…but this may change in the future.

I do believe in light of these changes, we need to diversify our sending platforms.

99% of cold email marketers the past few years have sent from Google and Office365.

While this used to work great (and still does, broadly speaking)…it is working less well now that they are “looping” inbox analytics and shutting off senders who hit too high of a “spam” threshold (again, we are talking crazy low numbers).

So, it’s time to diversify.

One provider that we are testing is Mailreef. We’re also testing hosting our own email (think: 1990 IT-geek stuff).

Artificial intelligence can also help.

Using AI to scramble your messages, and create pseudo-personalization will be another angle to diversify copy and reduce spam marks. Early tests of ours on Clay.com are suggesting that this is a wortwhile path to pursue.

All this to say, the long-term future of cold email should absolutely be a concern…

We are talking about the largest tech companies in the world trying to stop cold email to both:

• Create what they believe is the best user experience

• (Perhaps more importantly) Force companies to spend more on ad revenue

So, make hay while the sun shines today. And continue experimenting on other channels like phone and LinkedIn, in the event that things change faster than we think they will.