Comply with New Google Email Sending Requirements: What You Need to Know

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Did you know Google and Yahoo are trying to make email safer? If you or your company have not read about the email security changes Google and Yahoo are implementing, now is a good time to learn about it. The changes will affect the deliverability of the emails your company sends, and any other service that sends from your company domain, like LoyaltyLoop, your CRM, your marketing automation tool, and others.

For reference, here are 3 great links from Google to pass along to your email administrators and teams who manage your company email: Original Google support post, Google Sender Guidelines, and Google Sender Guidelines FAQs.

Google and Yahoo will be enacting email authentication requirements for all senders to Gmail, Google Workspace, and Yahoo inboxes. Google Gmail inboxes are easily identifiable since they end @gmail.com, but Google Workspace are branded email addresses and not so easily identifiable. For example, our email service (@loyaltyloop.com) is Google Workspace. Since pretty much every company sends email at one time or another to a person with a Google or Yahoo inbox, you’ll want to pay attention to these changes to ensure your company is in compliance.

To be compliant, your company will need to implement well-known, existing email security practices. In the past, these email security practices were recommended by Google, but now they will require and enforce them, starting gradually in February 2024 and increase during the year. Everyone except bad actors will benefit from these changes, as they’re designed to make the entire email ecosystem safer, with less spam. Senders will now be required to have both SPF and DKIM records on your sending domain, and possibly a DMARC policy.

Relative to your LoyaltyLoop service, most customers have their service configured to send survey invitation emails and related service emails from an email address of a person at your company domain (e.g. mycompany.com). This makes your LoyaltyLoop emails more personal, relevant, and appear to the recipient like any other transactional email they might receive from your company. To ensure your sending domain used in LoyaltyLoop is in compliance, please instruct the person who manages your domain to confirm or update the following domain records as follows:

SPF Records

1. Add the following to your SPF record: “include:sendgrid.net”, or add our sending IP address 168.245.62.234 if using an SPF flattening service.

2. Remove our legacy SPF entry from your SPF Record (unless used by a service other than LoyaltyLoop): "include:worldapp.com".

DKIM Records

3. Please email our Support Team (888-552-5667 option 3 or support@loyaltyloop.com) to request your domain's unique DKIM keys to add to your DKIM record.

DMARC Policy

Optional.Consult your email or IT professional. Consider adding a DMARC policy as follows: Host = “_dmarc.{yourdomain}, Value = “v=DMARC1; p=none;”

If you or your IT team have questions relative to this matter, please contact our Support Team (888-552-5667 option 3 or support@loyaltyloop.com). Don't delay. Take the steps required to ensure your emails continue to be delivered to Google and Yahoo inboxes.

What is Customer Experience?

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We’ve all heard of “Customer Experience” – but what does that mean, really? We will discuss this more in section 1 of our latest White Paper in this month's posts, but according to Forbes Advisor, “Customer Experience describes the overall interactions a customer has had with a brand right from the point of awareness to purchase to loyalty or churn. It addresses the user’s entire buyer journey and how well they were able to ‘connect’ with a business or brand.” At the end of the day, Customer Experience (CX) is what determines whether a customer will remain loyal to your business or move on to a competitor.

Components of a Good Customer Experience (CX)

Empathy

Customers today are not just looking for a transaction, they are looking for an emotional connection with the business and brands from which they buy. Make sure to not treat your customers as just data points – they are people and deserve to be treated as such. Build an emotional bond with your customers and you will be rewarded with increased loyalty.

Personalization

Similar to empathy, customers want to feel special. This is where personalization comes in. Help them to feel seen with personalized touches, such as remembering their past purchases, recommending products that complement past purchases, and anticipating their needs.

Centralized Technology Stack

Use technology to your advantage in CX – connect various data points about your customer to create that personalized touch. Creating seamless digital (and physical) experiences for your customer will help them feel seen and boost their sentiment of your business and brand.

Value

Customers want to feel they are receiving good value for their money. This does not mean lowering your prices or making your offering appear cheaper than your competitors. It means make sure you are communicating what your customers are getting, and that what they are paying is fair for your quality product or service.

Click here to discover more about CX from Forbes Advisor, including how to measure CX, online versus in-person CX, and more!

Leveraging Net Promoter Score in Your Business

Section 1: The Customer Experience, An Introduction

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We all want our customers to be happy. ‘Happy customers are repeat customers.’ ‘Repeat business is the best business.’ What does it actually mean for a customer to be ‘happy?’ Defining happiness and the pursuit of it might be a little heavy for this paper, so instead we will focus on something that is more concrete and slightly easier to measure – the customer experience.

Customer experience is the compilation of all experiences and impressions that your customer gathers while working with your business, products, or services. It includes interacting with your staff, visiting your website, and everything else in their journey as your customer. Customer experience, not surprisingly, is closely tied to your brand. If you deliver outstanding customer experiences, the chances are your brand equity is equally strong.

Why does customer experience matter? Because it is a top indicator of future repeat business. To put it simply, your fans and happy customers who have positive customer experiences are likely to keep doing business with you, while your disappointed customers may go elsewhere next time they need your product or service.

We know that customer experience is important, but understanding how to actually measure it is a little more difficult. We also know that a decision made without data is just a guess, so we will use data to improve our decisions around customer experience. There are many customer loyalty metrics that have been developed over the years, most notably Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Effort Score (CES), Revenue per Visitor (RPV), and Customer Churn Rate.

While these are all good metrics and data to know, there is one metric that stands above the rest due to its ability to predict future customer behavior – Net Promoter Score SM (NPS®). In this paper, we will do a deep dive into NPS and learn how it can be applied to help you understand your customers’ experience, improve processes, and ultimately – grow your business.

Tune in next month for the next section from our latest whitepaper “Leveraging Net Promoter Score in Your Business”.

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