At the end of last year (2023), I heard about new rules that several major email providers would begin implementing in February 2024 to help email account owners declutter their accounts.
The system the email providers are putting in place essentially will block emails from various senders from reaching subscriber’s inboxes if they have not opened emails from that sender for some time. This is essentially the same result as someone unsubscribing since they will not see any more emails from that sender.
From what I heard, the reason behind this change is that email providers notice that people with many unopened emails spend less time in their inboxes. They spend less time reading emails, which decreases the opportunities for email providers such as Google Gmail to post advertisements in their inboxes.
If you have a Google Gmail account, have you ever noticed the box at the top of your inbox with a little blue envelope with the words, ‘Unsubscribe from (sender’s name)? You haven’t opened any emails from this sender in the last month’.
Gmail is actively helping people unsubscribe from sender’s emails because they are not actively engaged with them.
For me, this is a little scary because I am in the beginning stage of building a new passive income business with no leads and no customers. I plan to rely on email marketing as the primary way to engage leads and create product offers.
If these new rules make it harder to reach people via email, what impact will this have on my email marketing efforts? Could it make it not worth spending the time and energy to create emails if the results are poor?
Or, does it create a new challenge to figure out how to keep subscribers engaged so they periodically open emails?
What place in marketing will email marketing have in the future if more rules are implemented in the years ahead?
These are some of the questions I think about now.
I will continue incorporating email marketing in my online business because there is still a lot of value in it.
However, I will keep an eye on this as new rules begin to be implemented by email providers.
New challenges for email marketers could be coming very soon.