Is the latest Gmail update (December 2023) going to kill your email marketing for good? Everyone's reacting to this update like it's the big apocalypse of email marketing. But is that true? Let's talk about whether this update does or doesn't affect you, and how you can go about it. 

Ready to find out the honest truth about this? 

Let's go!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:15) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.

(4:09) The latest Google update - what is it all about?

(7:50) Let's talk about your email deliverability.

(8:49) Hard bounces and your sender's reputation.

(11:01) What can we do about the latest Google update?

(12:35) Don't make any decisions based on your open rates.

(14:27) Google isn't trying to kill your email marketing!

(15:59) It's all about those clicks!

(17:53) Subject line of the week.

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The latest Google update - what is it all about? 

Gmail is making a technical change, which, on the surface, is going to be the death of email marketing. Again! There’s going to be a lot of email marketing chaos at the back of this Gmail policy that's to be enforced from the 1st of December 2023. Google rolled it out into their new terms in July 2023, when they announced that any Gmail account that hasn’t been logged into for two years will be deleted.

So what does this mean? First thing first, the impact of this change might not be as big as you think because “logged in” could also mean that people are using their Google Calendar or Google Drive, for example. And as long as they are, even if they're not accessing their Gmail, their accounts will stay. Only truly dormant accounts will be deleted.

And that’s fair enough because these could be email addresses that people created for a particular project or business venture and then either never used them, or they stopped checking them at some point. Why are they being deleted? Because all these accounts take up a lot of space on Google servers, so a clean-up exercise is now in order. You can imagine that renting space out for free to people on the Internet is expensive, so Google is cutting some costs and trying to become more efficient. And that's not a bad thing!

Let's talk about your email deliverability

So let's talk about why this could be an issue for some people. If you've been in our world for a while, you'll know that one of the things we always talk about is that the technical side of email deliverability is not all that important. It's not weighted that heavily when it comes to most of us day-to-day – not for marketers who have email lists of the size we or our clients have.

What truly matters when it comes to email deliverability is engagement management, which has to do with making sure you’re not emailing people who aren’t real accounts or who haven’t opened or engaged with your emails in some time.

Hard bounces and your sender's reputation

When the Google update kicks in in December, if you're still sending emails to accounts that Google has now deleted, your emails will hard bounce. Your email platform is going to send emails out to these deleted addresses, and your emails are going to hit a stone wall and bounce back again. And that's bad for your sender's reputation, yes.

But it's only bad if you've been emailing these accounts all along regardless of the fact these people weren't engaging with your emails! If these people were on your list and hadn't used their Gmail in two years, surely they hadn't been clicking on the links in your email for a long time (if ever).

So when it comes to your sender's reputation, this was already a bad scenario for you. But from now on, with these addresses completely deleted, you're going to see a much stronger message coming back to your domain reputation. Once the update kicks in in December, if you keep emailing these accounts, you'll hit a brick wall.

But the truth is that this isn't affecting the number of people you're actually reaching with your email marketing - your reach is no different! All that’s happening is that you’re going to see the people who don’t exist anymore in a much firmer and more solid way. But even before the Google update, these people weren’t listening. So if you think about the goal of getting your message through to people, you simply weren’t!

What can we do about the latest Google update?

So how can we all prepare for these changes? If you’ve been in any of our programmes or followed our work, you’ll know about our engagement monitoring method. We talk about it more in the episode called How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).

If someone’s not clicked on a link in the last 60 days, we’re going to put them through a 14-day re-engagement campaign called the LOL Revival sequence. And if people don't re-engage with our emails during that period by clicking on one of our links, we stop sending them emails altogether. We remove the tag they’re under and take them out of the segment they’re in. We take them out of our list.

Before we even do that, we tend to watch new subscribers closely, especially in the first 14 days of joining our list. Because if they don't engage or click any of the links in your emails, we don't even put them into a revival sequence. We don't even give them a second chance! 

Don't make any decisions based on your open rates

It's worth pointing out here that the decision to stop emailing someone and remove them from our list entirely is based on clicks - not on open rates. Why? Because as we keep saying, open rate data is incorrect and inconsistent. It's dependent on the device, the browser, the email client and service, what spam protection and firewalls people have on their system, etc. There are many variables that can show that emails are being opened when they're not and vice versa. So we make decisions based on whether people click on the links in our emails. And if someone hasn't clicked on a link for over 60 days, we put them through our LOL Revival re-engagement sequence.

This means we’re already taking care of the hygiene of our email list, and when Google deletes accounts that have had no activity for two years, we’ll have already identified them on the basis of 60 days of not clicking on the links in our emails. We’re ahead of the curve because we make sure we have the best engagement and the best deliverability to our audience.

This means the latest Google update isn't going to affect us. And it's not going to affect any of our students either - because they're following the same process. We don't need to worry about this at all - we're making zero changes to our business because we already have a strong engagement monitoring protocol in place. And so do the members of The League. 

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Google isn't trying to kill your email marketing! 

It’s easy to look at the latest Google update out of context and start panicking. On the surface, it may seem like Google is trying to make email marketing difficult for people. But they’re not! They're trying to make it better for the people sending emails and for those receiving them. And so are we! We're all on the same page here.

They’re trying to create a better customer experience for their users. Ultimately what they want (and what other email platforms want) is to make sure people continue to use them. So they're not trying to make it hard for marketers to send emails - they just want it done in the right way. They want you to email the right email addresses, and you should want that too! That’s definitely what we want. So we're all going in the same direction here.

And the people who are moaning and whining about these updates are those who do email marketing the lazy way. They’re building a list of people and bashing them over the head regardless of who these people are and what they’re doing. They’re using dirty tactics to grow their lists, and that's exactly what we’re trying to eliminate.

It's all about those clicks! 

So the big thing you have to do in light of the latest Gmail update is to monitor the clicks on the links in your emails. Of course, you can only do that if you include enough links in your emails in the first place. If you're not, start now. Because if you don't include enough links, you're not giving people the opportunity to click and engage. So increase the frequency of your emails and make sure there’s something people can click on because that's critical for engagement monitoring.

Also, find different ways to dress up the links in your emails. If you always use the traditional “click here”, people will soon develop what we call link blindness. They'll stop seeing and reading certain things in your emails because they always look the same. So always try interesting, quirky, novel, and attention-grabbing ways of dressing up your links and call-to-actions.

That’s the exact reason why we put together our resource Click Tricks, which is about interesting ways of dressing up the links in your emails to make sure more people are clicking and engaging. In turn, that will keep your deliverability monitoring really high. So go and grab Click Tricks for free!

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “[First Name] and Goliath.” So if your name was Karen, your subject line would be “Karen and Goliath.” We think this is a really interesting subject line. You can take any traditional story, or a film name here (something that’s well-known) and change it over to something that’s relevant to the person you're sending the email to, such as their first name. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Increase Your Open Rates (They’re Wrong But…)

Get Your Emails Opened Using NLP – With Jon Benson.

Stop Landing In The Spam Folder & Immediately Skyrocket Your Email Deliverability – With Brian Minick.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the latest Gmail update of December 2023) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:25

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy.

Unknown 0:26

Unknown 0:37

you darling. Anyway, before it all comes to an end, we might as well make as much money with email as we possibly can. So we've put together something for you that is totally free for you to download and use to start getting better results because if you want more sales from your emails, you need to get more people clicking on the links if you're in your emails, so that's why we've put together 12 creative ways that you can get more clicks from every email that you send in a new download that we are calling click tricks. It's yours totally free. As a listener of this podcast, all you have to do is go to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks, follow the little instructions. You'll be able to download it in just a few minutes from now.

Unknown 1:06

He is still waiting for a receipt from the fast food restaurants.

Unknown 1:11

It's comedy ever disrupt the devil and his check luggage is bright red it's psychological mind reader Kennedy

Unknown 1:20

okay, what's happening with your with your receipts?

Unknown 1:21

So you know, when you go into the fast food restaurants now they're trying to remove customer service. They give you those machines, giant iPads that you can order. Oh, yes, yes, those are just really annoyed. They never seen it makes like a good internet burnings. And then when it's supposed to spit out the receipt with your order and then I'm still trying to figure it out

Unknown 1:52

I will tell you a little bit this morning so Simon Cola, but we'll go with red.

Unknown 1:55

Unknown 3:03

If you remember a few weeks ago when we went to a hotel concierge to pick up our luggage and we gave the guy the little luggage tags and he went off to go and find it and it was about three inches from our feet. And he was walking all the way

Unknown 3:14

through 101 and we're gonna read one there and

Unknown 3:18

how long do we give him before we go actually we're looking at it's next month it's

Unknown 3:20

negative. I've taken the system sucks just point you don't look at hello. Every week on this show. We show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We talk about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make you more sales online. Making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every Wednesday. Make sure you hit subscribe button on the podcast player.

Unknown 3:45

Unknown 4:19

Unknown 6:26

Yeah, who'd have thought that giving people gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of free storage on the internet but that's, you know, you can sign up for it within minutes with no idea or anything like that was gonna come back and bite them on the last one.

Unknown 6:36

I mean, it would have thought that'll be on the first meeting. What What if not, don't worry about that, John.

Unknown 6:42

Unknown 8:12

But I want to talk about the good side of this, by the way, well, that's not necessarily good, but the the indifferent side of this, which is the people who were already not checking their email inboxes that Gmail accounts for two years weren't opening and clicking your emails anyway. So all that's going to happen is rather than it's just like, kind of bad for you reputation, it's pretty bad reputation anyway, as a sender because these people weren't clicking and engaging. What's gonna happen is it's gonna be a much stronger identifier, a much stronger message coming back to your to your domain reputation, saying hey, that not only that, not only is that person not clicking and engaging, but that doesn't exist anymore. You've sent it against a brick wall, which doesn't exist. So remember, this is not affecting the number of people you're actually truly reaching. Your true reach is no different. All that's happening is you're gonna see the people who actually don't even exist anymore in a much more firm and solid way. Those people already weren't engaging, right? That's what you got to remember. Like before, it was like they just weren't listening. Now, it's like they're not there anymore. That's the difference and in terms of getting your message through, there is no difference there. So what are we actually do to actually work against this and fix it so that we're prepared? Well, the good news is, if you've been in any of our programmes, if you've listened the show for a while, you'll know about our engagement monitoring method, and we're going to briefly to talk over it again now but we will also link you over to to the episodes where we've talked about in much more detail but basically, if someone has not clicked a link, clicked a link not opened or clicked a link in the last 60 days, right? Then we're going to put them through a reengagement or a subscriber revival campaign, right. And then that takes a 14 days, LOL sequence that we give our students takes 14 days, if after that they haven't reengaged. If they haven't clicked a link, we're then going to stop sending them emails, we're going to remove the tag that puts old take them out that segment, whatever it is you want to do, we're going to stop sending that person emails. The other thing that we're going to do is we're in the first 14 days of someone subscribing to our email list. We're really going to be looking at them closely, right? Because again, if the person signing up with a really old Gmail account, they actually never even check in. They haven't checked for two years. If they don't engage and click a link enter your emails. The first 14 days we're not even going to put them into a revival sequence. We're not even gonna give them a second chance. They're just gone for day 15 If they haven't had to link gone, and two really important things. One, this is not based on open rate. This is not based on people opening your emails because that data is incorrect and inconsistent as we keep saying depending on the device, the browser, the email client, the email service, what what spam protection and and firewalls and stuff like that they've gotten their system like so many variables can show that emails are being opened when they're not on not being opened when they have been so we're not basing any of this stuff on opens, but we aren't doing it based on clicks. Okay, so if they don't click within 60 days at any point, we're going to put them into that lol our revival reengagement sequence. That's what we're going to do and that means we can't fall foul of this two year thing like 600 Something days, we're not gonna, we're not gonna we're not gonna get anywhere close to that 60 days, it's going to be taken care of so that natural list hygiene that we want you to have so that you're having the best engagement, you're having the best deliverability to your audience. That's going to naturally take care of it. Like every other flip and change that's come around. This is not working anymore. Guess what? It doesn't matter if you use our protocol for engaging management, that next change that came around that also did not affect you, our students. This current change is going around, guess what? Anybody who's already got this set up, doesn't even need to worry about it. It's already taken care of. We're making zero changes in our business in the light of what Gmail is announcement is we don't have to our students don't have to you listeners who haven't been at this already don't have to. It's already you're already way ahead of the curve because of this really good engagement monitoring protocol

and the reason why this is happening is that it's easy to look at it without without the context of this. And without the rationale of what we've talked through on this episode. It's easy to look at this as oh my god, Gmail are trying to make this email marketing thing difficult. They're trying to make this hard for us to do they're not they're just trying to make it better. And so are we. And so this is really where things are different. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make email marketing better for the people who are sending emails, us and you, I'm trying to make it better for the people who are receiving emails and Gmail only want the same thing. It's a little bit like, you know, when Facebook changed the ads policies, and people say, Oh, my God ads is getting difficult now. Well, it's what they're trying to do is they're trying to make a better experience for their users. Why would they do that? Because they want their users to stay on the platform. Why would they do that? Well, because when they do that, more and better people will advertise and so what all they're trying to do is create a really good customer experience or user experience. And the same thing applies for Gmail and the email platforms. All they're trying to do is make sure that people like using that email platform more. That doesn't mean they don't want anyone sending emails into it. That would be redundant. They're happy for people to send emails into it. They just want it to be done in the right way and sent to the right people and that's what you should want as well. It's definitely what we want. So these people

are going the same direction. We're doing exactly the same thing, don't we?

Yeah, exactly. People who are moaning and whining about these these updates saying and they're making it more difficult. That's because they're doing email marketing, the lazy way. They're not doing you know, they're just building a list of people and bashing them over the heads regardless of who those people are and what they're doing, or they're doing these are dirty tactics, which is what we are trying to stamp out.

Totally, totally. So that's the latest update from Gmail. That's how it does or doesn't affect you, and what you should be going and doing about it. But do try and keep you massively up to date on the cusp of what's going on here on the Email Marketing Show. And of course, like we said, the big thing here is to be monitoring those clicks. The big thing we need to really drive home here, the rubber thing is not enough people are putting links in their emails. They go well, no one's clicked for a week and they go, Okay, how many links how many of those emails you send? How many emails have you sent? One? Okay, did it have anything to click on it? Well, no, not really. Guess what you haven't given people the opportunity to click so increase frequency and making sure there is something you want to have people click is critical for this engagement monitoring. The problem with all of this, of course, is if you show up with an email that says hi and come and check this out, and just like the link that says click here with blue in blue underlined, people very quickly, get ad blindness to that they become they stopped seeing that they just stopped reading at the points before it because they're not always gonna just say click here because that's what it's always said. So one of the things we always try and do is think of interesting, quirky novel attention grabbing ways of dressing up the links that are in those emails to make sure people can't get that link blindness to maybe it'll go oh, I'm gonna try and click that I am gonna go and click that. And you should definitely do that as well. And that's the exact reason we put together that resource that you mentioned at the top of the episode, Rob, if you want to go grab it. It's called click tricks. And it's about interesting ways of dressing up the links in your emails to make sure more people are clicking, more people are engaging and you keeping that deliverability monitoring really, really high. You can go get it's free for you as a listener of the show. By going to email marketing heroes.com/tricks Email Marketing heroes.com/tricks And now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. What have you got?

This one is first name so you merge in the First Name, First Name and Goliath. So if you were receiving this email and your name is David that was a good example. That was really the first example is Karen this one would be Karen and Goliath. So first name and Goliath I think it's always really interesting. You can take any sort of traditional story or something that's well known a film name maybe but the more traditional the story, the better. You know, so like, it could be like, you know, Karen's Ark, that old biblical catalogue, you find yourself any story that people have first off and, and swap out something for something that's relevant to them like their first name or something like that. Roberts, Cooper. Well,

your Roberts Creek,

Roberts Creek Yeah, yeah, yeah, not Robert shit. That's the difference. I've got that

shit. Anyway, I think that's quite enough of this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week you so much for listen to the whole show this week. We're gonna be back next week in another episode, so make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player was