The Coming Email Storm
No one ever expects to be the cautionary tale…until they are.
Here’s a story: Two entrepreneurs, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ditch their day jobs for the entrepreneurial dream.
They start a staffing company, and boom—it’s a gold rush. In under a year, they’re pulling in over a million dollars. Office space leased, staff hired, the whole nine yards.
But then, the plot twist. Like many before them, they leaned hard into cold email outreach. It was a gold mine, until suddenly, it wasn’t.
A slight drop in replies—nothing alarming, right? So they doubled down, sent out more emails. Classic mistake. That’s when a hiccup turned into a full-blown code red.
Fast forward a few weeks, and it’s a digital ghost town. Emails? Blocked. Spam folder? New residence. Revenue stream? Bone dry. Staff? Gone. Office lease? Still draining their pockets.
They reached out for help, scrambling to fix it, but hit a wall.
Turns out, understanding email service providers (ESP) is like reading ancient hieroglyphs without a Rosetta Stone. The rules are murky, enforcement’s a wild card, and the consequences? Brutally unfair.
This is the norm now, a tale as old as time, but with a digital twist. Business owners, knee-deep in desperation, throwing cash at a problem they don’t understand. By the time they find us, they’re running on fumes.
Cue the doomsday clock: Google and Yahoo dropped a bombshell—new email sender requirements.
The internet lost its mind, then shrugged it off. Classic denial.
“This will only affect spammers, not me.”
“These new requirements will be impossible to meet, there is no way they will go through with it.”
“This is totally unfair, Google just sprung this on us. They aren’t giving us enough time to prepare.”
“This will absolutely devastate email marketers.”
This person got it. They understood the magnitude of what’s coming.
But here’s the kicker: these requirements aren’t new. The majority of them have been stated email best standards and practices for over a decade.
More than a sufficient amount of time to adhere to them.
To say they have been sprung on us is ridiculous.
Well, during Black Friday week, the tone changed.
In early November, we started monitoring online conversations about the new sender requirements. As you can see, as we are getting closer to the February deadline, the chatter is picking up.
The above graph shows an 11,741% increase (and rising) number of conversations online about the impact of the new requirements before and during Black Friday (the busiest email period of the year).
It correlates with the spike in the number of people reaching out to us last week about emails not getting delivered. The biggest increase in inquiries we’ve experienced in 5 years of being in business.
The overarching theme we see in this online chatter can be summed up in one word…
FEAR
Remember, email is the OG of online communication. It’s the undying zombie of digital communication. Sure, it’s got competition. Social media, WhatsApp, SMS. But it’s the king of the hill, and it’s under siege.
Here’s the grim reality: The email ecosystem is a battleground. Spam is the ever-present enemy. Email accounts are being abandoned at record rates.
Spam accounts for approximately 50% of all emails sent, and it is rising every year.
Big Tech’s not playing around. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo—they’re the gatekeepers of email, and they’re clamping down. Hard.
They know this will be very painful for a lot of businesses, but taking these actions is well overdue.
It’s about the bottom line—billions on the table.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo control approximately 85% of all the mailboxes in the industry.
Their approximate annual revenue from providing mailboxes is $21.4 Billion in the areas of Advertising, Premium features, and Partnerships.
The business email market has an estimated value of around $29.85 billion.
The email industry is projected to grow at a rate of 6.2% annually, potentially reaching around USD 54.65 billion by 2033.
This is a perfect storm, and a problem for the email industry they can’t ignore.
I hope I have your attention.
You’ve got a ticking clock. Eight weeks to dodge the bullet. This isn’t just about your marketing emails. It’s every single email you send.
Me? I’ve been there, done that. My inbox was a war zone. Now? It’s a Zen garden. And I plan to keep it that way.
I’ve been in the email trenches for over 20 years (the last 5 years specializing in email deliverability). I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. And for a limited time, I’m your guide through this hellscape.
Welcome to “Email Shield: Protecting You Through the Storm of Email Compliance Reforms.” This isn’t just advice—it’s survival.
It’s consulting plus a newsletter. You have unlimited email access to me to get quick answers to your questions, and you will have a lot of them. Plus, a monthly newsletter with breaking news updates, a survival guide, a beacon in the chaos.
The first issue is FREE, with no further obligation.
It’s your playbook. Your map through the minefield. An expanded, 30-page issue with foolproof, step-by-step instructions on implementing the new sender requirements.
The first issue of the newsletter is designed to ensure your email reaches your recipient’s primary inbox, with no interruptions, when the new sender requirements are enforced in February.
Important Note: The number of spots for unlimited email consulting and the monthly newsletter are limited, and by invitation only. The first issue is yours to keep, as my gift to you. For those who receive the invite, you will see why I’m doing it this way.
You’ve got a choice. Be the lone email that finds its mark, or be lost in the digital void.
This is your moment. Grab it. Because in this new world of email, it’s adapt or perish.
Don’t be the one wishing you’d known better. Be the one who did.
Take action. The clock’s ticking.
Type “I’m In” in the comments and I’ll DM you the link to the first issue.
P.S. Please share this newsletter with business owners you know. They will thank you for it.
Every company that has engaged us that has been in email crisis has said virtually the same thing:
“I wish we would have known this before.”
It’s a hard thing to live with, to know you could have prevented someone from disaster, and didn’t have the opportunity to help.
To get access to the first issue, leave a comment saying, “I’m In.”
Google Has Officially Declared War On Spam
Here is how it will affect everyone using email for sales and marketing.
Since 1999, I’ve used email as my primary method for client acquisition in the B2B space. What’s coming may have the biggest impact on how we use email that I have ever seen.
We have an email spam problem, and everyone knows it.
Email remains, far and away, the most used—and depended on—communication platform online.
The average person spends between 321 to 352 minutes a day on email.
Over 5 hours per day!
That’s 10X longer than on Facebook and 600X longer than on LinkedIn.
Nothing else comes close to the time spent on email.
Feel free to fact-check me.
No decision maker on Earth checks their LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or messaging platforms as often as email. Slack might be the exception, as some people are obsessed with it.
So the news of Google announcing its war on spam should get your attention…because it will affect you.
We Saw This Coming Over 2 Years Ago
The only question we had was, “Why did it take so long?”
For two years, we felt like Chicken Little (the sky is falling).
We’ve been telling clients sending email blasts that it would die suddenly (because that’s what spammers do, and AI can’t tell the difference), so they needed to build workflows and behavior-based segmentation.
Drip emails are more friendly to the mailbox providers. They require less server resources, and thus inbox better…
while email blasts mimic what spammers do.
Everyone Has An Email Account
More people are likely to have an email account than a bank account, television set, or even a car.
Email is a major profit center for mailbox providers. And they have no plans of giving that up.
Yet, unwanted emails—mostly marketing emails—are the primary source of negative sentiment about email.
And that is bad for business for mailbox providers, because:
- Unwanted emails take up server resources (which costs money)
- They create a negative user experience (bad for the brand)
- They reduce ad revenue as users spend less time lingering on email
Spam is an existential threat to the cash cow which is email, so active measures will be put in place to save it.
And don’t think Google will be the only mailbox provider doing this. They all will.
Some people are making this out to be a cold email issue. It’s not.
It’s an email issue.
Here is where you are vulnerable:
- If your spam complaint rate is above 0.1% (1 in 1000), you’re going to run into a problem.
- If your unsubscribe rate is above 0.5%, you’re going to run into a problem.
- If your bounce rate is above 2%, you’re going to run into a problem.
- If your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (setting the protection policy to quarantine or reject) are not properly authenticated, you’re going to run into a problem.
And most people are not in compliance with the above requirements with their emails (optin and cold email).
With optin email, you are going to need to build workflows based on behavior segmentation.
That means you’re going to have to plan email campaigns and be much more strategic.
If you come up with an idea, or topic, and send an email blast, your list will soon be worthless (because your emails will not be delivered to their inbox).
Cold email will have another set of problems, too numerous to go through here…but I will cover them.
If this makes you nervous, it should. It is a big deal.
If you’re not nervous, that’s on me. I failed to articulate the seriousness of the situation.
This is a developing story, and for that reason, I’m launching a private podcast this month, so you will be prepared.
I will be covering topics privately that I will not discuss publicly. Topics you will want to know.
I haven’t decided on a name for the podcast yet, but if you use email in your sales and marketing process, you would be well advised to subscribe.
If you’re interested, leave a comment or DM me. When the first episode goes live, I’ll let you know.
