Why Businesses Need to Crack Down on Email Spam
One spammy email can paralyze your entire sales outreach. We’re seeing anecdotal evidence of entire sales teams being locked out of their email accounts/domains as a result of someone sending spam. It’s important that companies take a closer look at how they’re using customer data for cold outreach in order to protect themselves.
Warning Signs
The warning signs are increasing: major technology companies that can make or break effective business development outreach are cracking down on spam emails. As discussed on LinkedIn, business development teams are reporting that they are being locked out of their Google administration accounts for cold emailing from their private domain. And, to be clear, an entire company’s workforce that relies on the same admin account can be locked out. I know of a few other companies that had their entire domains blocked for this reason, which can paralyze a company’s communications. That’s pretty alarming!
So, what’s going on? Are business development teams going rogue and spamming more? No. Rather, email providers are getting more aggressive about enforcing privacy rules. For instance, HubSpot has not changed its rules about using the platform for cold outreach. HubSpot considers all cold outreach to be spam, and using HubSpot for that reason has always been a risky thing to do. What’s changed is that email platforms are raising the stakes for spam by cracking down.
Essentially businesses need to be extremely thoughtful in this day and age of privacy and consent in how they are reaching out to people. Businesses shouldn't be enrolling 100% purely cold contacts who have never engaged with them in any sort of ongoing messaging -- whether automated or manual.
And the solution is not to find another platform whose rules might seem more permissive. Those days are over in a privacy-first era. The solution is to crack down on spam.
What Businesses Should Do
It’s time for businesses to redouble their efforts to police email spam. How? Rely on the tried and true. For instance:
- Diversify your outreach. Don’t rely solely on cold outreach via email. Adopt techniques such as ad retargeting and LinkedIn.
- Use a consent-based model. An opt-in consent model requires a user to perform an affirmative action before they can be sent any marketing emails. An opt-out consent model requires users to sign up to receive marketing emails by default and requires an action from the user to opt out of receiving such emails.
- Segment your list and send targeted emails. This means sending different emails to different groups of people based on their interests. This will help to ensure that people are only receiving emails that they are likely to be interested in.
- Honor all anti-spam laws and regulations. This includes laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States.
- Use best practices when writing emails. For example, the subject line should not be misleading, and your content should deliver what your audience signed up for. Use images and hyperlinks sparingly (too many of either will increase the likelihood that your email gets flagged as spam).
- Always ask, “Is this email providing value?”
Here are some additional resources for more tips:
- “29 Email Deliverability Tips You Must Know in 2022,” HubSpot.
- “10 Tips to Avoid Email Spam Filters,” Content Marketing Institute.
- “42 Email Marketing Tips to Avoid Spam Filters,” EBQ.
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