How Marketing Ops Can Navigate the Bulk Email Apocalypse

2023-12-04 UPDATE: Edited to include new guideline clarifications from Google.

By now, we’ve all heard about the changes some email service providers will implement for handling bulk email, starting in February 2024. Hot takes sprang up instantly, and ran the gamut from “this is fine” to “we’re all going to die!!!”

One thing we know for sure, whatever happens, is that it probably means more work for marketing operations. Why? Three reasons. Because marketing operations, more than any other group at your organization, has a deep understanding of consent-based email practices, they possess a technical grasp of how to send compliant email at scale, and they have the tools and processes necessary to help unify the organization’s email programs.

Raising the bar for bulk email senders

Google has outlined three principles for bulk senders:

1. Authenticate their email
2. Enable easy unsubscription
3. Ensure they’re sending wanted email

In addition, Google has published requirements for everyone, as well as requirements for bulk senders (5,000 or more messages per day).

At Stack Moxie, we’re already hard at work helping our customers prepare for February 1st. We’ve broken down those principles into nine steps. And we’d like to share our checklist with you.

1. Document your email ecosystem
2. Validate and monitor your authentication
3. Pull together a tiger team
4. Estimate your bulk status (5k a day?) and your abuse rate (.3%)
5. Monitor your bulk email status
6. Send fewer low-value emails
7. QA test and monitor your Preference Center
   • Make it easy to unsubscribe (ideally one click)
   • Make sure your opt-out list is actually opted out
8. Put quality controls in place for your sales cadences
9. Consider migrating some email sends to your marketing automation platform

Document your email ecosystem

Do you know how many email platforms your company uses? All of them? Do you know who owns them? It’s time to start documenting, or collecting documentation from various teams. You might have dozens of systems that autogenerate emails. Think about recruiting, customer success, support, product growth, and of course sales, demand, and brand/communications. Don’t forget your IT team, or whoever owns corporate email. 

You’ll also likely want to connect with whoever owns DNS for the company’s domains.

Validate and monitor your authentication

Email authentication primarily comes down to proper DNS configuration. You’ll need to get a handle on your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC status.

Google Postmaster Tools is a great way to stay on top of your status as an email domain. You can validate your technical settings, and get a timeline of when you’ve been reported by users for email abuse.

Stack Moxie has a free checklist for Marketo and HubSpot users to monitor their DKIM, SPF, and DMARC status, as well as to monitor availability and health of marketing automation tools .

Pull together a tiger team

There’s going to be some work involved if you’re going to get your org ready by February 1st. Find yourself some allies to share the load. This might be other systems owners or senders of bulk email. A fair bit of the work will be change management and communication of your findings. So you’ll want to build a project timeline and a comms strategy.

Estimate your bulk status

Now that you know who owns the systems it’s time to find out how many emails you’re sending, and what your status is. Again, tools like Google Postmaster can help. But you’re going to want to do your own analysis, especially if you’re at an organization using multiple domains or subdomains. 

Here are the guidelines from Google, broken down for all organizations, and additional requirements for those with bulk status:

Google has said that penalties will apply to “organizations,” but there may be ways to spread out the risk by sending certain types of emails from different subdomains or even different root domains. This is already a tactic deployed by companies that do a lot of bulk email. And it can also be naturally the state of things at companies with acquisitions or diverse product portfolios. 

Separate domains, and even separate subdomains, can have different DKIM and SPF records. So you may want to calculate abuse rates and bulk status separately by subdomain.

That being said, subdomains may share a common fate, due to the way that many spam exclusion lists and implementation techniques focus on root domains. And Google has yet to specify whether they will treat all domains and subdomains together or separately. Be prepared for both.

Monitor your bulk status

Tools like Google Postmaster and Stack Moxie can help you monitor your email status so that you can catch regression, predict incidents, and quickly act when they occur. Set up a few tests, and alerts, and periodically you may also want to check your bulk email status, abuse rate, and technical compliance with email best practices.

Send fewer low-value emails

Now that we’re done auditing status and configuration, we get into the implementation phase. You almost certainly have emails being sent somewhere in your org that are incorrect, duplicative, or simply unnecessary. See what you can kill, combine, or improve.

QA test and monitor your Preference Center

It is so easy to mark an email as spam. Your goal should be to make it just as easy to unsubscribe or change preferences. Aim for:

• One-click unsubscribe. Don’t make them enter their email address.  And never send a confirmation email that they’ve unsubscribed, unless you are Ryan Reynolds and can be amazingly ironic about it.
• Unified preference center. Everything should be included, including product emails, sales emails, and anything they might subscribe to, like quarterly reports, or newsletters.
• Integration with GDPR, California Privacy and other privacy regulations.  It is all related, so if you are Testing and Monitoring, you might as well be logging to protect your company.

And once you have something in the preference center, be sure to set up regression testing so that you can guarantee that users’ preferences get honored.

Put quality controls in place for your sales cadences

Who monitors the quality and compliance of your automated sales emails? If it’s not your marketing ops team, it’s time to take a look. You’ll want to test for broken links, include an opt-out link in every email, and generally monitor for anything that could be harming your brand. That might include typos, grammatical errors, factually incorrect content, clashes with the brand voice, etc. 

Ideally an opt-out from the sales cadence will show up in your preference center as opting out from sales emails. You likely don’t want to trigger a global unsubscribe. Some prospects or users may want your newsletter, or your product onboarding emails, but they don’t want to hear from sales. An opt-out link (that gets honored) is a great way to protect your sales team from getting sent to spam or getting reported to regulators.

Consider migrating some email sends to your marketing automation platform

You may be sending product, support, or other emails from separate systems unnecessarily. Consider consolidating these into your marketing automation platform. Why? There are a few reasons.

• It can unify your unsubscribe and preference center options
• It can give you a handle on how many emails individual users are getting
• You can unify brand voice, look, and feel with templates and a unified editing process
• You can improve deliverability by sending from your most robust platform
• You can likely save a good chunk of money if you can remove a platform.

From surviving to thriving

Whew, that’s a lot. In the face of all these bulk email changes, Stack Moxie is here for you to work through this checklist and come out the other side with confidence. If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, we can also recommend a trusted consultant or agency that can run point. However you decide to tackle this moment as an organization, you can weather the email apocalypse and emerge with a protected domain and a stronger brand.