There's some good email marketing news for you if you're:
- A politician, or
- Work for a politician
According to a recent filing that Axios is reporting on, the tech giant is trying to make U.S. political campaign emails exempt from spam filters.
Google's proposal to the Federal Election Commission would make emails from “authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC” exempt from spam detection, as long as they “abide by Gmail's policies on phishing, malware or illegal content.”
Republicans claim Google unfairly targets conservative content across its services. Recently, Republican leadership proposed a bill that would force platforms to disclose how they filter campaign emails and make it illegal to put their emails into spam without user consent.
Ironically, though, Google says the whole reason their emails are going into spam is directly from user consent — in other words, regular users are seeing their emails in their inbox, and reporting it as spam.
If it goes through, Google's pilot program would work by giving users the option to opt-out of receiving future emails when they receive campaign messages for the first time. Basically, automatically opting them in first.
This could be the first step in a new direction for spam filters. But, if consumers are bombarded with content they didn't sign up for in the first place, will your brand’s campaigns get lost in an inbox of 8000 unread emails?
