We have a robust email management program for leading consumer brands. In recent months, Google and Yahoo have laid out some rather ominous updated guidelines warning brands to stay on the right side of the spam divide. Our clients have a whole lot of revenue at stake if their email campaigns get flagged (and consequently shackled by sending restrictions).

So what’s our panic level? In a word: low.

These updates have frequently been cited as challenging for email marketers to accommodate, but in reality, brands that execute thoughtful, strategic email marketing campaigns will benefit in the long run.

These updates should clean consumers’ inboxes so that they have less tonnage from bulk senders who are just trying to send blanket messages to as many recipients as possible. As a result, individual brands that deliver personalized email experiences to consumers will be able to deliver messages to a less cluttered inbox, which should improve their performance over time. If email users can be slowly trained not to mass-delete, brands delivering relevant messages will face less risk of getting swept out with the tide.

Most brands we work with send emails on a strategic cadence that includes both personalized content and send times based on when consumers want to be receiving messages, as opposed to bulk senders who are just blasting one message to their entire database and playing a numbers game. These updates from Google and Yahoo will cut down on volume from the latter group, which will ultimately allow the volume from the former group to get more visibility.

Both Google and Yahoo go into much more detail about send guidelines than I will here, but if you follow the basic tenets of giving users an easy way to unsubscribe, setting up basic authentication factors, and making a genuine effort to provide your users with relevant messages, you should be fine. On the other hand, if you think you’re spamming your users, you are, so pause your campaigns until you can get things in order rather than face the wrath of your email providers.