Best Practices for Getting New Subscribers After Gmail’s Spam Update

People who work in email and CRM are having a hard time with Gmail’s new spam rules. To stay below spam limits, responsible list management means that the number of subscribers will probably go down over time.

It’s already hard enough that iOS 15 keeps throwing wrenches into the works. Marketers who use open rates to figure out how engaged their customers are are trying to make sense of a cloudy picture.

To deal with these new situations, here are some good ways to handle your email lists, get new subscribers, and make your emails more personal.

List management after a sale

When it comes to getting new users, there are two main things we suggest brands do:

1. Decide when to remove people from current sends, or make the rules stricter.

When it comes to recent activity, your riskiest group is new users who haven’t yet shown they can be engaged with. Because of this, it’s very important to have good ways to find early engagers and non-engagers. Put the second group into a slow warm-up program faster than they did before the guidelines were released a year ago.

For instance, if you used to wait a year for users to engage, you might want to put them on a list of people who don’t interact every six months. To put it another way, fail quickly if you’re going to fail to lower your spam risk.

When you’re making tools to tell the difference between engaged and non-engaged users, keep in mind that iOS 15 messed up open rates. People who check their Gmail on iPhones won’t get true open rates. Instead, I strongly suggest that you use click analytics. There aren’t as many of those engagements, but you can trust the statistics more.

2. Make automations stronger based on how active users are.

Automations are important for turning new users into a group that is actively using the service. Set up automations based on types of engagement, like site visits, goods viewed, or recipe views for CPG brands. This will help you get more out of the messages you send to new users.

This sets up a nice, positive cycle: the more engaged people you have on your list, the more often you can send them messages, which gives you more freedom to get new customers.

Using purchase to stop subscribers from leaving

If you set up your system to fail quickly, you’re knowingly leaving yourself open to losing subscribers. The good news is that you can be more aggressive about getting new subscribers now that you are clearer on your standards and have set hard limits for yourself.

I think you should set a new buying goal once your stricter standards are in place. One idea is to try to get 10% more people on your list in the next month and see how things go. You’ll lose a lot of users all at once if you get flagged for spam if you don’t have a way to separate inactive users and balance the loss with new ones.

Getting lists and being very specific about who they are is an evergreen, regenerative method that will smooth out any ups and downs and keep you out of tough talks with your leadership team. Also, you can be smart about how you get new subscribers instead of depending on quick fixes like list-sharing and list-buying, which bring in users who aren’t interested and raise the risk of spam.

How personalization can help people follow spam rules

Personalization is your best friend when it comes to keeping new users in your engaged segment. This includes both what you say in your texts and when you send them.

Make sure you have a welcome series set up so that you can collect signs that help you build a profile so that you can send more personalized emails. For example, if a user interacts with content meant for kids or families, make sure you record that information so you can use it in future sends.

You can use preference centers to ask users to tell you about their hobbies, but not many people will do that. There are already tools in place that pick up on their cues, so it doesn’t really move the needle.

Focus more on getting new customers, keeping old ones, and personalizing experiences.

If none of the above tips really shock you, that’s okay—they come from the best email marketing practices. Still, even though it makes sense, brands rarely come to us with these basic ideas already set in stone.

This should make you think about how you divide your lists, how you automate and personalize things, and how much you depend on read rates. There are probably a lot of things you can do to make it more likely that you won’t break Gmail’s rules.