Google & Yahoo email acceptance policy changes: What does it mean for me?

Editor's note: We recommend you review the Google and Yahoo requirements directly to ensure you completely understand how they apply to your specific situation. To learn more about our best practices, watch our recent webinar.

Recently, Google and Yahoo announced changes to their requirements for email acceptance. To say it’s created some apprehension in our industry is an understatement. We take the concerns seriously, and we’re here to help our customers through these changes. With careful configuration, we believe this will create a healthier environment for businesses and customers. When used in accordance with our best practices, Outreach helps customers continue to scale their outbound communications while still staying in compliance with these new regulations.

One of the most important ways our customers use Outreach is to enable sellers to strategically engage with potential buyers and current customers through unique, customized communication. In fact, the coming policy changes will go a long way to ensure high-quality, personalized, and targeted outbound sales motions that will positively impact your conversion and engagement rates, and we think they will be a net positive change for our industry. It will also empower sellers to pick up the phone or meet with buyers in person to get to the bottom of their business needs and work together to solve their toughest challenges. 

To stay ahead of these upcoming changes, customers may need to adjust their email processes to be viewed as a legitimate sender by Google and Yahoo. We encourage every GTM team to take a look at their policies and work with their IT and Operations teams to prepare for these updates. We’re working closely with our customers and partners to support them every step of the way. 

Here are a few things we recommend GTM organizations do today to be viewed as a legitimate sender by Google and Yahoo:

• Strongly authenticate their emails, ensuring that the sender's identity is verified, thereby closing security loopholes exploited by attackers. All email must be authenticated using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. For many organizations, these changes will need to be made or verified by their IT or Engineering department. 
  
  
• Offer Gmail and Yahoo recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial emails with a single click and must process unsubscription requests within two days. This simplifies the process of opting out of unwanted emails.  
  
  
• Enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to prevent users from receiving excessive unwanted messages, setting an industry-first standard for spam control.

Outreach has a plan in place to ensure that our platform and our customers are set up for success  when these new policies come into effect so there will be no interruptions in service. We’ll continue to send communications out as we get closer to the requirements launching in February.

If you’re an Outreach customer and concerned about how these changes might affect your business, reach out to  Outreach Support or one of our many partners. We’re always here to help!