Google and Yahoo Email Deliverability Changes: What You Need to Know

Email continues to be a pillar of digital marketing strategy, in a bid to reach the 4 billion daily email users worldwide. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025. (Statista, 2021)

As technology gets more sophisticated, so do hackers and fraudsters–prompting the need for industry improvements in email delivery services and privacy practices.

By February 2024, Google and Yahoo will introduce new email delivery standards that you need to know about. These standards emphasize sender authentication and recipient preferences to keep spoofed and unwanted mail out of our inboxes.

Bulk email senders will be required to:

1. Authenticate their sender domain
   Email domain authentication is enabled by a DKIM record added to the DNS settings for your domain and linked in Kartra (coming to your account in Jan 2024).
   
2. Prioritize recipient preferences with easy unsubscription
   Recipients should be able to easily opt out of content they don’t want. Kartra natively provides the tools needed to make this happen–no special configuration is required.
   
3. Ensure their messages are relevant and wanted
   Google is enforcing a spam rate threshold requirement to keep recipients from being spammed with messages they don’t want. Kartra, a leading email provider, already enforces a spam rate threshold of 0.03%, keeping you well within the new requirements.

Bonus tip: Google is cleaning house and deleting old personal mail accounts that have been dormant for more than 2 years. If you send email to a significant segment of Gmail accounts, this could cause a sudden spike in bounce rates and put your sender reputation at risk.

What actions do you need to take?

Get ready for February in a few steps:

1. Use a custom domain email address as the sender for all outgoing emails.
   
2. Add DKIM records to your Kartra and WebinarJam accounts for sender verification.
   DKIM tools will be released for Kartra and WebinarJam in January 2024. More information about when they will be available and how to use them will be provided soon.
   
3. Add DMARC records to the DNS settings for your email sender domains.

Bonus tip: If it’s been a while, we recommend that you take some time to clean your subscriber list and make sure your audience is still engaged.

Why is this important?

Google recipients are at the top of our delivery list, representing over 60% of all mail delivered by KartraMail. Yahoo ranks as number two.

Senders who do not observe these requirements will experience a significant drop in their deliverability to Google and Yahoo email addresses and a hit to their sender reputation. This can be very difficult to recover from.

As global leaders in email, Google and Yahoo represent a huge segment of email users and are setting a precedent for spam management that other providers will likely follow. Taking steps to improve your sending practices now will help you be prepared as the rest of the industry follows suit.

“No matter who their email provider is, all users deserve the safest, most secure experience possible,” says Marcel Becker, Sr. Dir. Product at Yahoo.

“In the interconnected world of email, that takes all of us working together. Yahoo looks forward to working with Google and the rest of the email community to make these common sense, high-impact changes the new industry standard.”

The Kartra Commitment

Email is a core component of the Kartra all-in-one business solution. As the requirements of the digital marketplace continue to evolve, Kartra is committed to giving you the tools you need to maintain best practices, thoughtfully engage with your customers, and build a strong brand.

If you’re looking to earn more online and take your business to the next level, Kartra offers every tool you need to succeed. You can create landing pages and sales funnels that attract customers, connect with your audience using email marketing, build online courses that share your knowledge, automate your business, and so much more.