Thanks to Gmail’s new spam guidelines, email and CRM marketers are in a pickle. The list management practices keeping them under spam thresholds means subscriber volume will likely decrease over time.
As if that isn’t enough, iOS 15 continues to throw a wrench into the works: Any marketers using open rates to measure engagement are trying to make sense of a murky picture.
So, what do we suggest clients do about subscriber acquisition and management?
Let’s get into it.
Post-acquisition list management
Generally speaking, our main suggestions for brands to use for new subscribers are: 1) set (or tighten) standards for when to remove people from ongoing sends, and 2) set up stronger automations based on user engagement.
For standards, note that new subscribers who haven’t yet established a record of engagement are your riskiest segment, recency-wise. For this reason, brands must identify both early engagers and non-engagers.
The non-engagers should be approached with a slow warm-up campaign. That needs to start sooner than happened before the new guidelines came out. (For instance, if you used to wait a year for users to engage, consider segmenting them into non-engagement lists in six months. In other words, if you’re going to fail, fail fast to mitigate your spam risk.)
Dig deeper: Email deliverability: What you need to know
As you build systems to identify engaged and non-engaged users, remember iOS 15 makes open rates an unreliable metric. Gmail users checking their mail on iPhones won’t register accurate open rates. Use click metrics instead — yes, there are fewer of those, but you can rely on the data with much more confidence.
The other piece — automations — is key for moving new subscribers definitively into an engaged segment. Setting up automations based on types of engagement (e.g. site visits, products viewed, recipes viewed for CPG brands) increases the value of messages sent to new users. This creates a nice, positive cycle: the larger your list of engaged users gets, the more often you can send them messages — and the more latitude you have to drive new customer acquisition.
Using acquisition to balance subscriber erosion
The bad news about setting up your system to fail fast is opening yourself to subscriber decreases. The good news is that being more sure about your standards and giving yourself firm guardrails means you can be more aggressive about new subscriber acquisition.
Once the tighter standards are in place, set a revised acquisition target. For instance, try to grow your list by 10% in the next month, and monitor how things shake out. Without a system to segment unengaged users and balance the loss with acquisitions, you’ll set yourself up to dump a bunch of users all at once when you get red-flagged for spam.
Dig deeper: New rules for bulk email senders from Google, Yahoo: What you need to know
List acquisition and strict segmentation is an evergreen, regenerative approach that will smooth out any peaks and valleys — and keep you out of tough conversations with your leadership team. It also means you can take a responsible approach to acquisition instead of relying on shortcuts like list-sharing and list-buying, which leads to irrelevant users and higher spam risks.
The role of personalization in adherence to spam guidelines
Your single biggest ally in keeping new users in your engaged segment is personalization — in terms of both message content and scheduling. Use a welcome series to capture signals that help you build a profile and personalize emails accordingly. For instance, if a user interacts with family-oriented or kid-oriented content, capture that information for future sends.
You can put preference centers into play to ask users to give you their interests proactively, but few people will. It doesn’t move the needle as much as systems in place that are picking up their cues.
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If none of the above advice is particularly earth-shattering, good — it’s gleaned from best email marketing practices. Even though it’s logical advice, we rarely see brands coming to us with those fundamentals firmly in place. Use this as a cue to take a hard look at your list segmentation systems, your automations and personalizations, and your reliance on open rates. If you do, you’ll find plenty of ways to improve your odds of staying on the right side of Gmail’s guidelines.
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