Is “Winning by Volume” In Its Death Throes?

At the end of last year, both Google and Yahoo announced new restrictions on any organization sending more than 5,000 emails a day through their networks. These rules go into effect February 1, 2024 and will have a major impact on how companies use email.

The announcement immediately sent the marketing and sales industry into a frenzy. Discussions about the impact these rules will have on cold emailing heated up on social media:

Starting Feb 1 for Google and “sometime in the first quarter of the year” for Yahoo, organizations sending mass emails can be blocked entirely by either platform if their abuse report rate exceeds 0.3%.

The rules aim to end some of the madness of mass spam, and I’m hoping it will be effective. I have been preaching against the “spray and pray” method of outreach for complex sales for close to ten years, and it seems that finally some big guns have joined their clout to the cause.

What Do the Rules Say?

The new rules from Google and Yahoo are straightforward:

• You must provide one-click unsubscribing
• You must honor unsubscribes within two days
• You must authenticate your emails using approved security protocols
• You must maintain a spam compliant rate below 0.3%

This latter is what will get the most companies in trouble. That is a VERY low spam complaint rate, and represents less than 3 complaints per 1,000 emails sent.

How Will the Rules Impact Complex B2B Sales?

Organizations that market to a broad audience will be the most impacted. Any company that hires a large number of SDRs and then sets them loose to send out massive numbers of cold emails is going to have to change the way they do business. Being blocked from sending emails to accounts that are serviced by Google, Yahoo, or both is a penalty no one can afford to pay.

I, personally, welcome this change. I’m hoping someday soon to log in to my email and NOT be bombarded by spam and spray-and-pray cold emails.

Companies operating in a complex B2B sales environment are less likely to be impacted due to the nature of how we market and prospect. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be impacted at all. A 0.3% abuse rate is a very low tolerance and will force everyone to evaluate when and how they send emails, especially automated emails.

It will be essential for sales departments to consider how they prequalify and approach prospects. It won’t matter whether you strictly adhere to the law in this case. What matters is whether your prospect perceives you as “spam.” If they do, and they report you, you become vulnerable.

Additionally, marketing departments are going to have to take note and change how they approach automated emails. Again, it won’t matter whether you are adhering strictly to the law, what matters is whether the recipient perceives you as spam.

Again, I welcome this change.

How to Ensure You Survive the “Purge”

When these rules go into effect next month, I predict a massive “purge” of any company that has failed to prepare. While Google and Yahoo don’t control the entire marketplace, they do represent an enormous share of it. And it won’t matter whether you use a Google or Yahoo platform yourself. What matters is whether the people you’re reaching out to do.

To ensure you don’t get banned from emailing anyone on these platforms, it’s important to take stock of your current emailing practices across your organization. The marketing and sales departments are the most likely to run afoul of the new rules, so take an extra hard look at them.

Implement practices to ensure that your emails are actually wanted by the recipients. It will no longer be enough to know that the recipients are in your “target market.” It won’t matter if YOU think they’re a good fit. It only matters whether THEY want to be receiving the emails.

Train your marketing and sales departments in the new rules. Implement prequalification processes on your sales team to ensure they’re only sending emails with a high likelihood of being well received by the recipient.

And spend some time improving your marketing and sales alignment. If your marketing department is spamming your customers, your sales department will get banned right along with them. This is a situation where one part of your company can really screw things up for another.

I also suspect that some of the many automation companies that have cropped up in the past few years will go under. They simply won’t be able to provide the kind of value they could when “spray and pray” was the go-to approach for marketing and sales.

What Will Happen Next?

I strongly suspect that other platforms will follow in Google & Yahoo’s steps. Nobody wants to be the email platform that allows spammy emails to come in. Look for Microsoft to follow suit, along with a bunch of smaller platforms.

I also strongly suspect that this will eventually, in the wake of the purge, lead to better email response rates. When customers can see what’s in their inbox without having to wade through a thousand automated garbage emails, they will be more willing to respond to high-value emails.

That means that the companies that master effective one-to-one sales approaches are going to have a massive advantage very quickly over those that have relied on the spray-and-pray.

We’re all going to have to get smarter, and we’re all going to have to think like a customer and see things through their eyes. This puts them in the seat of power, and that’s something I’m in favor of.

I believe Membrain is the right platform for companies who want their salespeople to not only survive this change, but thrive and grow with a more effective approach. We’d love to show you how.