The end of cold email?

November 17, 2023

😟 The end of cold email?

Welcome back to The Outbounder 👋 your weekly guide on the latest outbound news, strategies and insights from industry professionals.

This week we are going to be looking at the emerging news from Google and other ESPs about the cold email crackdown…

Let’s dive in 👇

If you haven't caught the news this week, Google and Yahoo have announced measures to curb spam and mass email by placing limits on senders and harshly penalising those who violate the new rules.

You can see an announcement from Outreach here. 

The rules affect every organisation sending cold emails, especially the newly classified ‘Bulk Senders’.

Bulk senders are defined as any organisation sending over 5,000 emails daily.

The new rules enforce a strict 0.3% spam threshold. This means that if you send 1,000 emails daily, and 3 of those are marked as spam, your organisation risks being banned from sending emails.

To lots of businesses, this is a massive shock especially when you factor in that large organisations will be sending:

  • Internal Emails

  • Cold emails

  • Newsletter emails

  • Client emails

All from one organisation…

This high risk of exceeding a 0.3% spam rate could have disastrous consequences for any business.

Imagine one day you wake up and your entire organisation is unable to send emails…

IT departments are going to freak out.

While the news is quite fresh solutions are already being thrown around.

So here is what I’ve collected so far on how to combat this new set of rules.

  1. Separate domains for separate functions.

I’ve been preaching this for years and it’s really not new. If you are a business sending lots of emails, especially cold emails, you should have multiple secondary domains and throttle volume on each domain.

As an organisation, you could have a domain for just your newsletter, a domain for internal & client emails and multiple domains for your cold outreach.

  1. Bring internal comms onto a messaging platform.

It’s 2023 you shouldn’t be managing a team via email…

Switch to a platform like Slack to circumvent the risk of hitting the spam threshold.

  1. Monitor your domains using Postmaster.

Keep an eye on spam reports, bounces, and other stats to ensure you remain compliant.

  1. Segment your newsletter audience…

Newsletter managers will need to become more strategic about their target audiences.

Take the time to break your audience down into segments and only email relevant people, this alone will take your spam rate down to negligible levels. If your spam rate is above 0.3% for opted-in emails, you’re sending bad content.

  1. Bring your cold email volume 👇

The spray-and-pray methods of the past few years are about to become defunct. Sales teams should be focussing on contacting only those who show actual buying intent for their products. From here heavily personalised emails and multiple channel touch points will reduce your dependence on cold email, and keep spam rates low.

Your cold emails are likely being marked as spam because they're sent to irrelevant recipients.

Tools like Instantly.ai will become even more important for sales teams with unlimited inboxes, inbox rotation and warming to keep your reputation high.

I see the future as follows:

Company buying intent/signal —> Find a relevant person in a company —> Create highly personalised email —> Leads are fed into Instantly.ai —> Volume is spread out across multiple domains and email accounts to keep spam volume below 0.3%.

Remember this news was just announced this week and won’t come into effect until February 2024.

With solutions already being presented I’m confident that we’ll all be ready for the changes when they come.

In my opinion, these changes are positive.

Prospects are being spammed daily from hundreds of different sources as the barrier to entry for cold email is too low.

With less competition and better cold emails, my client’s results should only get better.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these new rules. Reply and share your opinion.

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See you next week 🫡