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...