It’s that time of the week again! Let’s talk marketing. Here are today’s topics:

• Did Google just kill bulk email sending? Breaking down Outreach’s viral email and what you should do about it.

• Don’t make these 5 mistakes on your website. Skip these and watch your conversion rate skyrocket.

🫣 Did Google just kill bulk email sending?

If you’ve been on social media this week, you’ve probably seen the viral email Outreach.io sent to its customers. It’s making heads spin in the sales and marketing world.

In the email, Outreach warns customers about new changes to Google and Yahoo’s email rules. And outlines how these updates will impact companies sending mass emails.

In case you missed it, here’s their message:

Why this is a big deal.

This news impacts any organization that relies on mass email sending to win new customers. It’s a sign from two of the biggest email service providers in the world that they’re cracking down on spammers.

It’s probably time to say goodbye to sending the exact same message out to thousands of people per day. Or you’re at least going to have to get a lot more crafty about it.

What you should do next.

If your marketing or sales team sends out 100s or 1,000s of bulk emails daily, you’ll need to revamp your email strategy.

Here are a few ways to start:

• Send emails from multiple different domains.

• Rely more on personalized emails.

• Use email warmup tools to prep new addresses and sending domains.

• Send less than 60-70 emails per domain per day.

If you stick to these guidelines, then you should be safe from the new email requirements come February.

What organizations should do next.

If your company sends over 5,000 emails/day and uses Gmail as your service provider, you must authenticate your account with Google.

According to Google, “…we'll require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription, and stay under a reported spam threshold.”

Organizations need to maintain an abuse compliance rate of 0.3% or better or risk losing the ability to send out emails.

What does this mean for bulk email tools?

Many people are shooting the messenger, but Outreach.io did their customers a solid by sending this warning.

But in light of this news, the outlook for mass email tools like Outreach doesn’t look great. The purpose of these tools is to allow organizations to send emails in bulk without landing in the spam box. And these new policies will make that mission much more difficult.

Outreach and similar tools will also have to adapt and pivot around these new rules to keep servicing the tens of thousands of teams that rely on them. They probably won’t be in business much longer if they don't.

The silver lining.

Even though this news is hitting marketers and salespeople hard, there is some good news:

1. Lazy senders will be weeded out, leaving more room for creative teams to thrive.

2. You’ll see fewer annoying spam emails delivered to your own inbox.

📰 In the news this week.

🎄  2023’s Christmas ad trends so far.

🤖  How to build custom GPTs for SEO & marketing.

📢  The complete guide to LinkedIn ads.

💀 Bringing bankrupt brands back from the dead is big business.

🚀  How B2B is reaching new heights of creativity.

👩‍💻 Don’t make these 5 mistakes on your website.

1) Body copy that isn’t scannable.

If you want people to read your website, you need to make your website easy to read. Big, dense blocks of text aren’t easy to read.

Break up content with headers and images. Write short, simple sentence. Use a lot of line breaks.

People absorb information that is interesting and relevant to them. If your website copy is too long for someone to scan, you don’t allow them to decide what content is interesting or relevant — making it very likely that they’ll click the back button.

2) Ignoring objections.

As visitors move down your page, they keep a mental tally of objections and, “but what abouts…??”

Don’t pretend like objections don’t exist. Instead, face the objections head-on and address them at the top of the page. Overcome the objection immediately, and you’ll free up your visitor's mind to absorb the rest of the information you want them to.

3) Spotlighting the competition.

Use your website to tell people why your product or service is great. As soon as you mention a competitor, you’ve planted them in your customer's brain. Leading to comparison and distraction.

4) Leaning negative.

When someone visits your site, they don’t want pessimism. If they want doom and gloom, they’ll go read the news.

Instead, use your website to show them how they can solve their problems, teach them new things that will help them in their career, and inspire them to see what their life could be like instead if they partner with you.

5) Framing from your perspective.

You should eliminate two words from your site: “we” and “our.”

Replace them with “you” and “your.”

Customers don’t care about what “we do.” They care how “you can.”

6) Selling features, not benefits.

Customers don't care about what your product can do. They only care about what it can do for them.

Stop listing off functions of your product. Start listing the ways you can make your customers’ lives easier.

😂 Marketing meme of the week.

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