By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on The PMA Blog on 11/08/23
Email marketing has been around for over 40 years and a part of affiliate marketing since its inception. With all that, we don’t talk about the email channel all that often. It’s largely because, having been around for so long, a lot of the issues with compliance and best practices that more recently launched marketing channels (social, influencer, etc.) have been largely settled in the email arena. Since 2003, email marketers have known the rules of the road they need to follow in order to comply with The CAN-SPAM Act. While the law has been updated over the years (with increasing fines mainly) the core elements have remained essentially the same.
What has changed over time is the challenge of getting emails delivered to the inbox. Over the years, rules and best practices around email deliverability have constantly evolved. Often those changes were happening behind the scenes at individual inbox providers, sometimes leaving marketers to adjust to them after the fact.
Recently, two of the largest inbox providers (Gmail and Yahoo!) teamed up and announced several changes to how their systems will process incoming email messages, to go into effect by February 2024. In particular, these will changes impact email marketers who are sending more than 5,000 messages to Gmail or Yahoo! Inboxes each day. The stated goal of the changes is to make consumer inboxes safer and more spam-free.
All of the new requirements are achievable for email marketers, however, they may force larger email marketers to adjust various processes in order to comply. The upcoming changes impose three new requirements on bulk senders.
Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.