Remaining at the forefront of policy changes and requirements, specifically for emails, is a top priority for our marketing team. As a HubSpot partner for 10 years, our agency must stay up to date on these changes for ourselves, our clients and our partners. HubSpot released this article discussing Google and Yahoo’s latest requirements for email marketing beginning in February 2024. 

Email marketing best practices that were previously considered recommendations will now be mandatory for senders to enhance their credibility and avoid spam filters. Yahoo and Google will require all senders to implement email authentication and other policy changes. Failing to meet the requirements will result in email delays, blocks or direct to spam inboxes. 

Here’s everything you need to know to stay ahead of these updates coming next month: 

Ensure Your Email Domain is Authenticated

There are three methodologies that Gmail and Yahoo will now require: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. To move forward with sending emails, all ‘from addresses’ email domains must be authenticated with DKIM or SPF. Any unauthenticated emails may be bounced or marked as spam. These instructions from HubSpot are a great resource to reference to ensure you don’t run into any issues: 

1. Set up DKIM by connecting an email sending domain 
2. Add HubSpot to your SPF record 
3. Use a DMARC policy with HubSpot 

NOTE: These settings are not directly managed in HubSpot, so contacting your Network Administrator or IT team for additional assistance may be necessary. 

Enable Easy Unsubscription Options 

Making unsubscribing from emails as easy as possible will now be a top priority for senders. Email recipients shouldn’t have to search long and hard for the unsubscribe option. HubSpot plans to update all marketing email headers to align with this new standard. Although this update has not been released yet, there may be a spike in unsubscribes once the switch is official. 

Confirm You’re Sending Wanted Emails 

Ensuring your marketing emails are reaching contacts that have opted-in for communications is crucial. To avoid risks of increased spam report rates, all senders should aim to maintain spam report levels at 0.1% or less to ensure emails are successfully delivered without issues. Senders with a spam report rate of 0.3% or higher will experience email performance issues like delays, spam filtering, or bounces if this is not addressed and monitored. 

While these new requirements may seem like a daunting way to start the new year, HubSpot is a great resource to ensure you are up to speed on any requirements. We’re all figuring out the new guidelines together and if you ever have questions, you can reach out to our team, comment on this HubSpot community post or check out the official guidelines from Google. Here’s to positively evolving our email strategies in 2024!