The End of an Era: Cold Email Blasts

The new policies that Yahoo and Google are implementing in February 2024 will have a massive impact on how B2B companies approach cold outreach. These two emailing giants own more than 48% of B2B email accounts.

Historically, sales organizations have relied on email at scale for their outbounding efforts. With the rise of AI generated messaging making it easier than ever for companies to blast thousands of emails at a time, inboxes have become overloaded.

These new policies are Google and Yahoo’s attempt to try to alleviate the floods of emails that prospects are receiving on a daily basis. In February 2024, we will see these changes implemented.

Yahoo and Google will require users that send over 5,000 emails daily to:

• authenticate their email using security protocols
• offer subscribers a one-click unsubscribe option in every message sent
• process unsubscribe requests within two days
• and abide by a spam rate threshold of 0.3%

If users do not meet these requirements, their domain will be blocked by Yahoo and Google. Yes- the entire company’s email domain.

‍So, what do B2B companies do now?

This is definitely the end of the cold email blasting era. Sales organizations need to ensure that the emails they are sending are both relevant to the prospect’s role and how their solution can help them with their job but also personalized to the human on the receiving end.

Companies are also going to begin to launch products to make it easier for B2B sellers to customize their outreach. A new tool launching from LinkedIn Sales Navigator called Account IQ will provide detailed company information to sellers when they search for a specific company. The tool will surface how that company makes money, key people in the account, the account’s strategic priorities, business challenges, and the competitive landscape of said company.

These new rules from Yahoo and Google are going to result in a shift from a more transactional selling process to a more human-to-human approach- which is arguably a good thing.‍

Gartner reported that 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well informed about their personalized information during an interaction. Buyers don’t just want personalization, they’re demanding it- and now, sellers will have to lean into that to provide a more targeted experience.