3 new email marketing rules from Google and Yahoo, Google’s new AI algorithm update, and more

All right, today we're going to be discussing how your email marketing won't work anymore unless you follow these 3 new rules from Google and Yahoo. Did you see what they ended up putting out?

No.

So Google and Yahoo are making—

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This I have, go ahead.

Yeah, so if you're sending out 5,000 or more emails per day, they're changing up the rules on you. The first is your spam limit needs to be less than 0.1% ideally. It can't go above 0.3%. So that really means you can go up to 0.3%, but they don't want you over. And if it goes over 0.3%, there's a good chance your emails don't even get placed in people's inbox. The second is, and this one's been going on for a long time, it just sounds like a lot of people still don't do it, at least smaller businesses. They want you to use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to let them know that you're actually the one really sending out the email versus someone spamming or pretending to be you. Yeah. Which makes sense. I would've guessed that most companies already do this, but I guess there's some that don't if they're listing that out. And here's a funny one. You have to have a one-click unsubscribe, which pretty much all email platforms do, but they added a caveat. If someone messages you to remove them within their list, you have to do so within 2 days. If you don't do it within 2 days, you're going to have issues from them.

Yeah, look, I think this comes down to you have to adapt as a marketer. This also comes down to marketers tend to abuse things until they get bad. And so then you have companies like Google and Yahoo that need to do something about it. So I think this is a better thing for users at the end of the day. It's a better user experience and you just have to comply. And I think even now that we're talking about this, we're actually a little late to it. We did talk about a couple months before, but I think it's helpful for us to remind you that you should comply to this. Otherwise, you're going to lose out on one of the most important channels that you have way more control over than any of the other channels out there. So the idea here is like, we're not saying go start a newsletter business. We're saying, hey, a newsletter is a nice way to keep people engaged and potentially get them to convert.

Yeah, and I think they're making these changes because you're seeing more and more emails being sent to people who don't want them and more people creating newsletter businesses, which is increasing email volume, right? Newsletters have been on fire. A lot of people like the Cody Sanchez's have been talking about newsletters. You're also getting people using softwares like retention.com and emailing people who may not want to be emailed. But over time, I actually think this isn't that crazy of requirements for them. I do think they're going to tighten this up. I think this is just the first step of them saying, hey, we're actually going to put in our own requirements, forget just laws, because people are using Yahoo Mail and Gmail and they're really popular as well as Outlook. they're going to start creating their own rules to help protecting their users, which then causes more people to be like, you know what? I'm going to end up using Gmail over Hotmail because Gmail makes it so I get way less crap in my inbox. And that's a huge problem. Like if I look at my Gmail inbox on a daily basis, dude, no joke, I at least get 100 to 200 emails a day from people I don't want, never heard of, And I click unsubscribe, and for some reason I keep getting added back to lists. And on top of that, there's some of them don't even have unsubscribe. There's people just randomly emailing me, and I can't block them out anymore because I've used my limit. Google has this filter—not filtering thing—you can end up just blocking people, and I would just block, block, block, and my inbox would start becoming. much cleaner, nicer. But Google has a limit on how many people you can actually block within your Gmail. And I've went over that limit a few years ago.

Dude, so Neil's super OCD where he gets to inbox zero. I've given up at this point. So one of my inbox is like 51,000 and then the other one's—

Oh, 51,000? How do you sleep at night?

I give up though. So I'm pretty good at filtering for the things that are important. I generally don't miss things that way. I just, I'm too lazy to go delete and like do all these things, right? But there's actually an app that's good for you. So, you know Thomas, he works at SaneBox, right? SaneBox does a good job. Even to this day, they still have a lot of customers that will help you filter out and move things away that seem like they're spammy. So that might save you time too. And I use it for that to help me boomerang things back to my inbox later, weeks later, months later, if I need to follow up with an email. So that's what I do. We all have our different ways. But I think the key takeaway here, or one of the key takeaways should be that if you want to have a low spam score, that probably means you have to send valuable emails. Otherwise, if all you're sending is sales emails, you're going to get a high spam score. And then what's going to happen is you're going to get filtered out. And that's going to affect a lot of people that are relying on outbound. So like, even if you do outbound, having a good— having good content that you're putting out maybe once, twice, or 3 times a week, that's going to balance things out. Otherwise, I don't see it working out for you in the long term. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

Dude, you know, it's so funny because with their new algorithm update, I ended up releasing some data about what I think the future is going to hold because we've been running experiments with AI content and non-AI content. And check this out. Funny enough, I actually can share my screen. Ah, this makes it easy. Yeah. All right. And can you see the chart on my screen?

Yep. So check this out.

We took 68 websites, created 744 articles, half AI and half non-AI, right? So each website would publish half their content with AI, half with non-AI. In month 1, the AI content on average per article got 28 visits. from SEO, like organic traffic. 71 for the human-written. The month 2, 49 versus 155. Month 3, 36, 139. Month 4, AI content had 64 visits on average per article and 207 visits on average per article for human-written. Month 5, and that's where we stopped the experiment, 52 for AI. That's an average visitor count on a monthly basis per article. Versus 283. The difference is staggering. Even though search engines are saying, hey, we just care about content quality, we don't care if your content is written by human or AI, at the end of the day, they're pretty much saying indirectly, if the content is by AI, because we don't think the quality is as high, you're just not going to get as much traffic. And the people that we're seeing generating a lot of traffic from programmatic SEO are still modifying their content heavily with humans.

So basically, if we're to simplify this, I'm looking at the 5-month mark over here. At the 5-month mark, the human content performs 5.44 times better than the purely AI-generated content. And actually, I've seen this. On our site, we've actually segmented it ourselves. So on the programmatic SEO piece, like that's not going up nearly as quickly as the AI-assisted content we're doing with marketing school. And that actually got a boost after the recent update. It's actually shooting up even faster. And so I still think the key for the next 5 years or so is going to be AI-assisted content because it's pretty easy to detect the templated pages you're creating. I'm not saying don't do programmatic SEO. I still think it's a very viable thing. And programmatic— guys, by the way, programmatic SEO is nothing new. TripAdvisor, Expedia, Zillow, all these companies have been doing it for years and years and they're really leveraging their authority. So it's a combination of both if it makes sense for your business. So that's it. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. So have you seen this stupid Pepsi ad? Here, let me tell you what I'm talking about.

No, but I want to see it. Share your screen.

Okay, here, here, here, here, here. See, if we record at my place next time, we can share screen live in person. All right. You see this ad? Here, let me explain what's on the ad. So there's a picture of nachos and then there's a Diet Coke can, but then it says taste okay. So they turn the Coke can to only show the okay. Tastes okay, right? And then at the very bottom it says, tastes better with Pepsi Max. And I'm just like, which idiot allowed— first, which idiot made this ad? And then also which idiot allowed this ad to go forward? Because you're really just advertising Coke.

Yeah, I know. I'm looking at this, I'm like, why would you put a Coke can within your ad? The only Pepsi ad that I've seen That does really— that I thought was really creative.

The Halloween one?

Yes. Did you see that one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the— yeah, yeah. Do you want— let's see who can pull it up faster. If you get it, go for it.

Pepsi.

I got it.

Awesome.

Here, I'm pulling it up. So share screen. Okay, you see this?

Yes, there you go. I thought that one was creative. That was clever.

Yeah. So we wish you a scary Halloween. So Coke, and then you can see that the Pepsi actually is the main focal point over here. But for the other one, the focal point, you can't put this Pepsi at the bottom when this, that's the main thing. Like this is no longer the focal point. So whoever did this, I don't think did this one. They tried to bite off this one, but it didn't work.

No, but this one was clever. You're saying it's spooky to show that you're Coke. What's funny is I get both these companies are really big. Both their products are just so bad for people.

Yeah. Well, the good thing about Coke is they've diversified their portfolio and they have like healthy drinks and things like that too. And so good thing for Coke. I'm sure Pepsi's done something similar.

They both do, dude. They're they're no longer a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi. There's hundreds if not thousands of different products, and some of them are really healthy and good, and some of them are really terrible for your health. But you know, people still love their Coke and Pepsi. I don't get why. Yeah, you know what?

I I did go to a family reunion. So for Chinese people, with the type of food we eat, like I saw everyone drinking Coke, and they're like, Coke is good for digesting this type of food because it burns it up, right? The acid. And I'm like, and I. I haven't had Coke for years. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, in that case, I'm going to try some Coke. And I was like, tasted pretty good. But that's why I guess we Asian people like eating Asian food and drinking Coke. So, I'm going to end it. I think there's a nice one over here from a SmartBear. So, Jason Cohen, who founded WP Engine, I think he's founded 2 multibillion-dollar companies, or maybe SmartBear was like a centimillion outcome or something like that. But I wanted to share this piece over here. And here's what it says. Everyone go check out this blog post later. Just type in A Smart Bear AI Startups. So type in A Smart Bear AI Startups. And here's the post. It says, AI startups require new strategies. This time it's actually different. So it says, the typical dynamics between startups and incumbents do not apply in AI as they did in previous technology revolutions like mobile and the internet. Ignore this at your peril, right? I'm not going to read the entire thing here. But basically, here's what he's saying at a high level. So incumbents aren't failing to innovate. So when you think about if you're going to start like an AI company, how are you going to compete with like a Microsoft or a Google or an OpenAI? They're the incumbents, so to speak. And before, it was more about a startup getting distribution ahead of the incumbents, right? But in this case, the incumbents already have distribution and they're innovating on their datasets, right? So that kind of goes out the window. And incumbents also have the data too. So you can't really build an AI strategy if there's no data strategy, right? And when you think about all the models that, or the data that Google's building on or OpenAI or Microsoft, whatever it is exactly, they have the data advantage. And also great talent. When you think about before, it's like, okay, why would someone work at a startup? A startup might raise money, they might work on something amazing. Well, here's the thing. If you work at an incumbent like a Microsoft or like a Google, you might get paid millions of dollars a year if you're a really good AI engineer, or at least a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, right? So you have a much more stable job if you're going to build like an AI company, right? And so there's just a lot to think about here. And I do think like back in the day with mobile and the web and everything like that, all these things like risk aversion, disruption theory, the incumbents versus the startup, type of thing. Like, that's all changed, and he does a really good job of explaining how this all works.

Dude, and if you look at a lot of the incumbents and the larger players in the space, like, let's take Adobe. Adobe with Firefly has done an amazing job innovating and adapting, right? There's a lot of these bigger players like Adobe, Microsoft, even Google. I know a lot of people don't like Gemini, but Google is trying to innovate and adapt really fast. And you look at some of these big incumbents, they're spending an arm and a leg and adapting probably faster than a lot of the new startups that I see. The main reason being is a lot of this AI stuff takes tons of cash, and that's what the incumbents have more than anyone else. For startups to really leverage AI, some of them have to end up raising hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions. It's hard to do what OpenAI did and others. It just takes too much cash.

Yeah. Look, I think, so the main thing that Jason's saying here too is that this is what it's going to take to build an AI company. And the vast majority of people should not try to build an AI company. You can innovate on AI in your space. That's a different type of setup. I'm going to end it with this. This is a really good piece here. So on disruption theory. So the innovator's dilemma is not a dilemma this time around. Disruption theory explains how little upstarts leverage new technology to topple incumbents. Even though the incumbents see it coming and act in their rational self-interest. The theory goes, new technology is often A, better in some ways, B, worse in some ways, and C, cheaper than existing technology. The combination of A and C can overcome B. The classic example given in the book is the original transistor radio, whose the sound quality was far worse than the incumbent, beautiful to look at, rich sounding, furniture-sized and weight RCA Videos, radios. However, the advantage of the transistor radio is that it's portable, a feature made possible because transistors use so little energy. A radio at the beach that's staticky and tiny, I think, and a tinny, is a lot better than not having a radio at all. So upstarts were able to sell radios that were worse in a very important way, but also cheaper with the advantage of mobility. So last paragraph here. So of course, over time, the transistor radio improved its sound quality, And this is the other factor in disruption theory, that the technology that starts out worse becomes better over time, and yet is still cheaper and retains its positive qualities. Then the new technology fully disrupts the incumbents who had been looking on thinking, we're the ones who are so— who have great sound, so we're safe. We're not even really competing with those toy radios. So he's saying this no longer applies in the world of AI. So I just, I think we can end it on this.

Yeah.

Just go check out the post. There's a lot more to explore here. We just wanted to give you a little taste of it. And think about how you can apply this to your business so you don't get left in the dust. So that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. And then if you want to grow your agency, if you're an agency owner, you can hang out in our community. You can learn more about our community, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you tomorrow.