It seems like this tax season was delightfully BORING — compared to the past few years, am I right? The sharp decline in fire drills from Washington *almost* made things feel, dare I say… normal?
While you enjoy this moment to briefly rest from your labor, I want to brief you about a very important update from Google and Yahoo as it relates to their new email sending rules.
You might have missed this email deliverability game-changer during your busy time.
The short of it is that Gmail and Yahoo recently imposed new (read: stricter) standards for how businesses like yours are supposed to send bulk emails out to your clients and prospects.
There was a sort of grace period between February and April while the rules took effect, but as of April 1, bulk senders (over 5K emails/day) and regular senders are both at risk of getting their emails delivered to spam folders (or not delivered at all) instead of inboxes.
For the bulk senders, there are a few main requirements to be met:
Authenticate your domain (use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for this),
Add one-click unsubscribe links, and
Monitor your spam rate complaints (keep it under 0.3 percent).
For other senders in smaller quantities, many of these changes will likely impact deliverability for you too. The main thing to know is that you shouldn’t be sending emails to your list from a non-domain-based email (like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) through a third-party sending platform (like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.).
Set up a domain-based email, follow the domain authentication guidelines, and keep track of your spam complaints diligently.
The penalties for non-compliance are rejected emails and, worse: damage to your sending reputation (a significant long-term problem). I found this article to be pretty straightforward in helping you figure this out, if you need the help.
Of course, if you’re a TaxProMarketer client, we’ve got this covered for you. Our dedicated development team worked hard before the April 1st deadline to ensure those well-read strategy emails we write for you every week continue to generate business for your office.
If you’re not a client of ours for some reason, you can wash your hands of this problem too when you utilize our done-for-you email marketing services.
Set up a time to move forward on that here: https://taxpromarketer.com/flow
This could be the year you get to focus on doing what you do best.
Now enjoy that cold drink, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
