sunsetting
Google first warned earlier this year that they’re going to retire accounts that haven’t been accessed at all in the past two years. This affects Gmail accounts — if nobody’s home, no emails have been read, nothing’s going on, Google is now likely to shut down that account. They warned us that the soonest they would start shutting down accounts is December 2023. Well, December is now here. What should we do about it? If you’re a Google user and don’t want to lose that Gmail account, or lose any other data that may be associated with your Google account (files, photos, etc.), Google explained in a recent notification what you can do to make sure that Google continues to denote your account as active. In short? Log in, poke at something. Reply to an email. Edit a file. Show a sign of life. If you’re an email newsletter or email
As mentioned before, Google is now going to retire accounts gone inactive for at least two years. Indeed, Google just today sent me an email notice explaining this in some detail, which I thought would be handy to share here. For Google, of course, the focus of this messaging is their individual users. For you, reading about this on a deliverability blog, the focus is what senders should know and do about this — how should it guide you with regard to sending mail to Gmail subscribers.That guidance ultimately is nothing new: As I’ve said before, don’t treat subscriber addresses as though they last forever. Even before this change, there were good reasons to do this — to periodically sunset (inactivate) addresses that don’t respond. This new change just reinforces that guidance. Addresses will eventually bounce — and then who knows, maybe at some point in the future Google could
Today’s guest post comes from Steven Lunniss, Deliverability Lead for Cordial. Steven is a seasoned email marketing expert with over 15 years of experience – including six years working with top email service providers as well as nine years client-side.The goal of sunsetting is to focus your resources on engaged subscribers and maintain a healthy email list. As part of a “subscriber lifecycle strategy” methodology, it helps to boost deliverability success (and inbox placement) by boosting your engagement metrics. You’re boosting those engagement metrics by suppressing subscribers who aren’t engaging.It’s important to strike a balance between re-engagement efforts and the need to remove those unresponsive subscribers – you want to maximize engagement but not at the cost of throwing away live subscribers.How to properly sunset your inactive subscribers:Define Inactivity Criteria: Determine what qualifies as “inactivity” for your specific business. It could be a certain period of time (e.g., six months)