Issue #185 All About Email

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Hi, friend. 👋

Welcome to Issue #185 of All About Email!

Last week, we looked closely at Google Merchant Centre’s new email marketing scraping feature in my longest and biggest email of the year.

This week, as the dust begins to settle (it’s still very early days), we look at the topic again and answer some remaining questions.

There’s also an important announcement about Litmus at the end of the newsletter.

Let’s go! 👇

The “All About Email” - Private Community

🚨Before getting stuck into this week’s topic, I’m considering starting a private community for this newsletter.

I’ve been running a poll on LinkedIn and X (Twitter), and you can vote there or cast your vote below. 👇

Now, friend, on to this week’s topic, to answer more questions about Google’s new feature surfacing your email content on Google Search and Shopping listings. 😲

Questions Arising from Google’s Email Announcement

⚠️ If you missed Google’s announcement last week, you can read the original email or my deep dive in last week’s newsletter, Issue #184.

(Don’t read any further until you know what we are discussing, otherwise it will make no sense.)

In summary, last week, we looked at Google’s announcement in detail and tried to answer some initial questions:

• How does Google get my email content?

• What information does Google extract?

• How does it use this information?

• Image-only emails (is it time to avoid them altogether?)

• Annotations

• Any changes needed to email campaigns (build campaigns properly)

• How to opt out

• Any other considerations (tracking, statistics and PPC)

⚡️ Since last week, there have been many discussions about the surprise announcement from Google, and more questions have been answered and asked.

Let’s take a look at those now. 👇

“Should” You Opt Out?

We know you can opt out, but Gil David suggests you should opt out for now.

Gil makes a case for opting out from a media buyer’s perspective (and he and his team are unbelievably good at what they do!) with these key points:

• New features from Meta or Google aren't always worth adopting right away.

• A new Google tool uses email content for ads — interesting, but risky.

• Better to wait and see if it proves effective before investing.

• Let other brands handle early testing (and potential bugs).

• Early adoption often comes with performance issues or hidden drawbacks.

• Sensitive email content (like VIP offers) could be exposed broadly, hurting brand perception and margins.

• With limited budgets, being strategic beats being first.

💡 Gil is potentially correct about “sensitive email content”. I think this can be avoided by using suppression/segmentation to exclude Google's email address from specific campaigns.

You could combine this with annotations, explicitly telling Google/Gmail about the particular offer.

⏰ Time will tell, and with Google involved, they will do what “they” want.

If You Use Double Opt-In, Can Google Still Sign Up?

Google’s documentation states that Google will try to automatically subscribe to your email list (or you can manually add it).

🤔 I wondered (as did many of you) how Google does this with double opt-in?

💡My initial thought was an automated bot that clicks, and Jay Oram from Action Rocket thought the same.

While I can’t confirm for sure, after speaking to Mark Robbins from the Email Markup Consortium (EMC) team, I'm confident that Google won't have an issue with double opt-in.

In Issue #177 of All About Email, I discuss the EMC’s work around accessibility and how to add them to your email campaigns so they can further that work.

I assume that Google can do the same or similar to what the EMC does below. 👇

✅ That covers most English language double opt-in emails.

However, as a backup, they also put a link to each of those first emails into a dedicated Slack channel to manually check them.

😎 Clicking that link will open the email in Parcel, and they can manually have a look.

Can All Industries Use This New Feature?

🚨 In last week’s newsletter, we discussed what content Google can pull from your marketing emails and show in search. But a lot of you asked for even more information.

Again, this is the early days, so it's hard to say until we start seeing data and results in the wild, but Google gives more information about their terms and conditions (you know, those things we never read 🤣).

Restricted Industries and Abuse

⚡️ Having read through various policies and content guidelines, it looks like some industries won’t be able to show their email content in search results.

The “Unsupported shopping content” and “Abuse of network” guidelines provide more information about this (there are also additional policy links in the sidebar for you to refer to).

A Final Question Around A.I.

🚨 After digging into this over the last week (and a bit), another question comes to mind.

Maybe I’m overthinking it, but Google Merchant Centre has clear guidelines for disclosing the use of A.I. created content it shows in Google Shopping (both the free and paid listings).

 🤔 Will we have to markup our emails if we use A.I. to generate images and content?

Litmus Got Acquired 😬

So, friend, you might have heard that Validity acquired Litmus.

You might not have heard that many good people were let go immediately (this number is rumoured to be 50% of staff, but that’s unconfirmed).

This impacts many good people, and my heart goes out to them, especially Jaina and Carin. ❤️

A website has been set up for affected employees and hiring managers so these awesome people can find new opportunities.

😔 The acquisition has been described as a “community in mourning” rather than a celebration, and I would tend to agree.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc. I currently have “Classified” slots and a Main Sponsor slot available.

That’s It For This Week 👋

⏭️ At this stage, you might think Gmail clipping will never be discussed. I’ve been trying for three weeks, but next week it’s happening…no promises. 😉 🤣

See you next week!

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• Big News! 👀 - Introducing Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services. (Thunderbird)

• Introducing Email Shepherd - The email creation platform that allows marketing teams to build quickly and efficiently at scale. (Email Shepherd)

• What the Yahoo!? 😬 - Yahoo Just Nuked Your Deliverability. Here’s What to Do. (Audience Bridge)

• Membership Platforms - Top Picks for Building & Monetizing a Community. (Email Tooltester)

• DMARC Academy - Become a DMARC professional and protect your organization against phishing and domain abuse. (DMARCIAN)

• Forget Growth Hacks - THIS Is Why Newsletters Succeed. (Growth in Reverse)

• SaaS Marketing - How to Name Segments, Campaigns, and Broadcasts for SaaS Email Marketing. (Userlist)

• Hiding From You - 7 Controversial Truths about Email Marketing. (Magnet Monster)

• Wow! ❤️ - Free Access 50+ Top Performing Email Templates Right Now (I got these and they are amazing, more details on LinkedIn). (Peyton Fox)

• Would You Rather? - Fight 100 duck-sized horses, or 100 horse-sized ducks? (Alison Gootee)

• Back in the Game? - Klaviyo is way out there, but is Mailchimp a contender (more in the comments)? (Jeremy Horowitz')

• Mailbox Provider AI - Automatic Extraction and Email Previews. (SendGrid)

• Referral Income - How To Scale Your Passive Income Through Email Marketing Partners. (Beehiiv)

• Email Detective - Find out which email service companies use. (Email Tooltester)

• I Loved This! 🧠 - Campaign Composer is a Notion-based idea bank that lets you capture your best ideas, organize proven email types, and plan content like a pro. (Peyton Fox)

If you have a question about this email or email marketing, reply, and I will answer you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋