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 donβt understand the stats.
Google is talking about only being allowed 1 βspam markβ out of 300 emails sentβ¦
This is a very, very low bar.
And even with every email being 100% personalizedβ¦I still think more than 1 out of 300 people will hit βspamβ because this is easier than unsubscribing, or they just donβt like unsolicited outreach.
I quickly released this video on my thoughts.
Long story short: I personally donβt think cold email marketers have much to be worried about yet.
As long as youβre spreading volume across email domains (via GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc.) and individual addresses (via Office365 or a secondary provider), you wonβt be delivering 5,000 emails from any individual domain.
At the moment, you can still safely set up βforwardingβ so if someone searches βvethgroup.coβ it goes back to βvethgroup.comββ¦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)β¦it is working less well now that they are βloopingβ inbox analytics and shutting off senders who hit too high of a βspamβ threshold (again, we are talking crazy low numbers).
So, itβs time to diversify.
One provider that we are testing is Mailreef. Weβre 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 concernβ¦
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.