You may have seen emails from your email marketing platform saying that you need to make some changes before February.
The message will then say not to worry, it’s not that difficult, followed by a lot of information that sounds anything but simple! So I’ll explain the changes in plain English here.
From February, Google and Yahoo (ie this applies to the emails that you send to @yahoo.co.uk, @yahoo.com, @gmail.com etc email addresses) require all bulk email senders to follow these rules:
– Stay below a spam rate threshold (0.3% for Google). My guess is this won’t be a big challenge for most small businesses, but now would be a good time to check the reports in your email marketing platform just to be sure.
– Allow one click unsubscribes. Again, any decent email marketing platform should already have this in place, but check your emails to be sure.
– Authenticate your sending domain. This is where it gets a bit technical. In plain English, this means linking up your domain (e.g. mine is helenlindop.com) with your email marketing platform so that the services receiving your emails (e.g. Google and Yahoo in this case) know it really is from you.
If you need help with authenticating your domain, talk to your web designer, whoever has access to log into the account to access your domain name or I’m happy to help.
If you’d like to do it yourself, each platform will have guides on what to do, for example:
Mailerlite: https://www.mailerlite.com/
Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.
These 3 rules have been good practice for some time now, so in some respects are nothing new. But many small business owners may not have been aware of them. So I recommend you check your own email marketing platform to make sure these are set up correctly.
Just a quick warning, I’ve seen some articles out there that are a bit over-the-top about this issue, so please don’t panic about it.
Hope that is helpful, please get in touch if you need help or advice with this.
If you need some help with your email marketing please get in touch. I can do everything from helping you plan out your strategy to setting up and managing your email marketing for you.