What Mailbox Providers' New Spam Rules Mean for Your Sales Organization

Is your outbound email strategy ready for 2024?

Starting February 1st, Google and Yahoo, two of the world's biggest email providers, announced new sending guidelines that drastically raise the consequences of ill-considered sales emails being marked as spam.

What does this mean for you as a B2B seller?

It means that now is the perfect time to review your email sending practices to ensure you're best positioned to land in the inbox.

Here are the details on Google and Yahoo's new email sending guidelines and how to build a responsive outbound playbook of quality messaging for highest-quality prospects.

This article was originally published on January 8th and has been updated for accuracy.

What is email deliverability?

Ever wonder why a perfectly crafted email gets zero replies? It might not be your copy. It might be your deliverability. Simply put, email deliverability is the art and science of getting your emails into your prospect's main inbox, not the spam folder or some promotional tab they'll never check.

It's different from email delivery, which just confirms an email was sent. Deliverability is about where it lands. For sales teams, great deliverability means your messages get seen, which is the first step to getting a reply and starting a conversation.

Why email deliverability matters for sales teams

Let's be clear: if your emails don't land in the inbox, you don't get replies. If you don't get replies, you don't book meetings. And if you don't book meetings, you don't hit your quota. Poor deliverability isn't just a tech issue; it's a revenue problem.

Ignoring it means you're wasting time on outreach that never gets seen and potentially damaging your company's domain reputation for the long haul. On the flip side, mastering deliverability gives you a competitive edge, ensuring every email you send has the best possible chance of starting a real sales cycle.

What are Google's new spam guidelines?

Google and Yahoo have announced that, starting in February 2024, they are rolling out strict new requirements for sending to personal Gmail accounts (any address ending in @gmail.com or @yahoo.com).

They require that all senders:

1. Authenticate their emails: Google and Yahoo are mandating senders to authenticate their emails following well-established best-practices protocols like SPF and DKIM.
2. Ensure they're sending wanted emails: Google and Yahoo will start enforcing a clear spam rate threshold of 0.3% that senders must stay under (Note: For healthy email deliverability, senders shouldn't exceed a 0.1% spam rate 👀).
3. Validate DNS records: This is to ensure that your IP addresses are correctly pointing to your domain.

Now, for senders sending more than 5k emails a day to personal email accounts there are some additional rules:

• In addition to SPF and DKIM, bulk senders have to authenticate with DMARC
• Large senders must include a one-click unsubscribe feature on any bulk sends

Organizations who fail to follow these new guidelines will have all of their messages automatically blocked and lose their domain entirely—with no possibility to retrieve it.

Read Google's full email sending guidelines here.

What does this mean for you?

Sending generic messages to massive lists of contacts gets you flagged by email service providers, and is also simply bad practice!

(Psst…Legendary sales trainer John Barrows talks a bit about this industry shift and the future of outbound in this World's Best Sellers feature.)

At the end of the day, no matter what types of emails you send, the future is fewer, smarter touches timed to buyer needs and intent triggers. This keeps you out of spam, but more importantly, gets you real buying conversations with high-value prospects.

Long time sales leader and former VP at Intercom, Twilio, and Jive Software, Leandra Fishman, believes this shift is positive for the industry—and a wakeup call for sales leaders who are still "spraying and praying" their outbound.

"If you're sitting there spinning out about these changes, I urge you to evaluate your messaging, positioning and overall GTM strategy," she says, "This update will not affect those who know their ideal customer profile, have nailed their messaging and have a refined GTM strategy in the same way it affects those who don't."

The 5-step playbook for perfecting email deliverability

How do you get started? Here's 5 ways to use Apollo's data and engagement tools to instantly change the way you email potential buyers.

1. Build clean target lists using Apollo's Living Data Network

• Use 65+ filters to narrow your search and precisely target the right decision makers & ICPs and personalize emails using up-to-date data
• Leverage 15k+ intent signals powered by Bombora & LeadSift to target active buyers and personalize emails by topics they're actively researching
• Start reaching out to your ICPs whose emails are verified and activity has been detected with the "likely to engage" email filter
• Enforced contact review step to avoid risky contacts being added to Sequences

2. Adopt a multi-channel outbound strategy with Apollo's Engagement Suite

If cold emails are your sole outreach channel, you're leaving money on the table.

Let's say you average a 2% reply rate on cold emails. If you layer in LinkedIn touches and get even a 1% reply rate and cold calls that get a 2% reply rate, sellers immediately 5x their opportunities.

Here's some ways to built out a multi-channel strategy:

• Keep engagement in one place with the built-in click-to-call Dialer (we also integrate with Orum, Nooks, and Salesfinity)
• Bring Apollo's data into LinkedIn and complete tasks with the Apollo Chrome Extension
• Use the Apollo Chrome Extension within your Google tools for easy outreach and scheduling

3. Use email tools with integrated deliverability features like Apollo Sequences

• Set up multiple inboxes and rotate them to balance out your sends
• Properly set up DKIM, DMARC, and SPF to authenticate your email
• Use Sequence diagnostics for automatic domain health checks that give you guided step-by-steps for improving your domain
• Include unsubscribe links in all of your emails no matter volume. If you're a bulk sender, you must enable one-click unsubscribe link in the header
• Follow Apollo's guided mailbox setup to configure it for maximum deliverability

Head to the Apollo Academy to watch our full tutorial on 7 ways to avoid the spam filter.

4. Send highly relevant personalized emails with Apollo AI

• Create an Apollo Power-up to run in the background and do your research for you
• Use the Power-up to auto-personalize your sales emails by inserting the output into a sales sequence

5. Track email engagement and deliverability metrics in Apollo Analytics

• Make sure to set up Google Postmaster Tools and regularly check the status of your sender reputation
• Monitor Apollo's deliverability score to understand how your deliverability is trending, easily understand where you can improve, and be alerted when things change
• Use our pre-built deliverability rates & scores analytics dashboard to understand email deliverability score by team member, email delivery rates by week and by sequence

"Even before Google announced the restrictions, it was critical to lead prospecting efforts with personalization and timing to see success at scale," says Henry Mitzel, SVP of Revenue Operations at Apollo, "You need extremely personalized messaging, anchored around value frameworks that are both timely and relevant to the buyer's persona and buying cycle—something Apollo provides customers out of the box."

We're also creating dozens of resources to help you navigate the year ahead.

Check out:

• Our guide for avoiding SPAM filters
• Our Apollo Academy course on perfecting your email deliverability — plus an email deliverability resource kit
• Chapter 7 of Outbound Sales, which lays out everything you need to know about email deliverability and setting up your inboxes, according to the experts
• Sam McKenna's masterclass on writing highly-relevant cold campaigns that convert just as much business on 25 email sends as others do with 2,000
• Email Deliverability Myths Debunked on YouTube

In this new era of better, smarter selling, we'll leave you with these final words from Leandra…

"It's not time to panic, it's time to level up."

Perfect your email deliverability with the right platform

The rules of email are changing, but that's a good thing. It's pushing sales teams to be smarter, more relevant, and more effective. Instead of fearing the spam folder, you can master the inbox by focusing on quality over quantity and using the right tools to guide you.

An end-to-end platform like Apollo gives you the data, engagement tools, and analytics you need to not just comply with the new rules, but to thrive in this new era of selling. Stop guessing and start landing more deals. Get Started

Frequently asked questions about email deliverability for sales

What's the difference between email deliverability and email delivery?

Delivery is just confirmation that an email was successfully sent to the recipient's server. Deliverability is whether that email actually landed in the main inbox, as opposed to the spam, promotions, or another folder.

How long does it take to improve email deliverability?

It depends on your starting point. If you're making technical fixes like setting up authentication, you can see improvements quickly. If you need to repair a damaged domain reputation, it can take several weeks of consistent, healthy sending practices to rebuild trust with email providers.

Do Google and Yahoo's new rules apply to all B2B sales emails?

The rules specifically target bulk sending to personal Gmail and Yahoo accounts. However, the underlying principles—authentication, low spam rates, and sending wanted mail—are best practices that all email providers value. Applying them to your B2B outreach will improve your deliverability across the board.

What's considered a good deliverability rate for cold outreach?

While a general benchmark is 95% or higher, the most important metric for sales is your spam complaint rate. You should always aim to keep this below 0.1%. A low spam rate is the clearest signal to providers that you're sending relevant, valuable content.

Can I recover if my domain gets flagged for spam?

Yes, but it takes work. You'll need to immediately stop the practices that got you flagged, fix any technical issues, and then begin a process of sending smaller volumes of highly-targeted, personalized emails to engaged recipients to slowly rebuild your sender reputation.