Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Adrian Savage from Email Smart.
Adrian has collaborated with prominent figures in the digital marketing sphere, including Neil Patel, Eben Pagan, and Ryan Levesque. He established Deliverability Dashboard, a platform designed to swiftly address deliverability challenges by assessing your email delivery and engagement metrics.
Company Website: https://deliverabilitydashboard.com/
Email Health Check: https://emailhealthcheck.net/
Authentication checker: https://uir93022.isrefer.com/go/auth24/wd852/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Adrian Savage from Email Smart.
Adrian has collaborated with prominent figures in the digital marketing sphere, including Neil Patel, Eben Pagan, and Ryan Levesque. He established Deliverability Dashboard, a platform designed to swiftly address deliverability challenges by assessing your email delivery and engagement metrics.
Company Website: https://deliverabilitydashboard.com/
Email Health Check: https://emailhealthcheck.net/
Authentication checker: https://uir93022.isrefer.com/go/auth24/wd852/
What percentage of the people you're emailing are opening your emails. If you're not monitoring that, then you're more likely than ever to be seeing the emails filter in the future.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Adrian Savage Adrian email Savvy. Savage is a dad, a geek, an entrepreneur and co-founder of email smart. He is the best person that I know of about email deliverability. Recently I was in a WhatsApp group and everybody was asking around who's the person to go to around email deliverability and I said you need to talk to Adrian and someone said no, no, no, no. The person to talk to, the people to talk to is email smart and I was like okay, that's exactly the same people that we're talking about there. He's like the absolute, the go-to guy here. He's helped thousands of businesses get their emails seen so they make more sales. He's helped hundreds of people like Frank Kearns, stu McClaren, neil Patel, ryan Navec, shark Group, glaser Kennedy all to improve their email performance. He's also the creator of the unique email smart software, which we'll come back to later. It quickly and simply shows how well your emails are performing and how you can get even more people to see and open your emails. So today we're going to be talking about how to make sure your emails get through to your subscribers, inboxes, email deliverability, what you can do, what's new in 2024, especially around authentication, which is a new thing if it's not a new thing, it's a thing that it absolutely must do. Now there's some new stuff that's come in around it and we're going to make sure that you know exactly what you need to be doing so that your emails are getting delivered.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We're here to make sure that your podcast experiences as good as possible, and you can help us with just a quick favor by taking a moment to rate and review our podcast. You're going to give us precious feedback that's going to help shape future episodes and you're going to help us to rank better as well. Make sure more people see the podcast. So if this show has helped you to make money, then please leave us a review and tell us about that. I've had that feedback from a bunch of different people. Has it helped you grow your business or improve your courses? If it has, please share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom slash online courses that's ratethispodcastcom slash online courses and leave us a review. So, adrian, welcome to the show man. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, john. It's great to be here, so let's start out kind of broad. Why do people's emails sometimes end up in their client spam folder?
Speaker 1:It's a really tough question to answer and it is probably one of the ones that I get asked the most frequently. And I'll be completely honest Even as an alleged email deliverability expert, I have to confess that sometimes the marketing emails that I send out still go to the spam folder, and the reason for that, unfortunately, is that the, the, the major mailbox providers. So we've got Google, they they normally have a stranglehold of more than 50% of a typical email list. So there's Google, there's Yahoo, there's Microsoft, between the three of them, 75, 80, even 90% of your list. They set some very specific rules and also, I don't think it's necessary fair to say that they hate marketers, but they do want to make it very difficult for people to get their marketing emails through, because they're very keen to give their, their subscribers, their users who aren't their customers, by the way, because people don't typically pay for Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail but they want to give those people the best possible experience, because if they don't, those people are going to move on and if they don't give a good experience to their users, they can't make money out of displaying adverts, because that is how Google, yahoo and Microsoft make their money. If you're using Gmail, then you're not paying for it, so that means that you're the product. So every time you open an email, google can display an advert to you, and they can only display adverts for the emails that get opened. So what that means is it's a constant, almost a pitch battle between the marketers and the Googles and Microsoft and Yahoo's of this world, because we need to get our emails seen so we can get our message across, and Yahoo and Google don't want to upset the people that are reading the emails and they try and hide all the stuff they don't want to see and show them all the stuff they do want to see. And this means that Google and Co have invested millions, if not billions, in AI Long before AI was a thing.
Speaker 1:In the last few years, google came along with something called TensorFlow and the idea is it's meant to try and work out is this a legitimate email or is it not? And it will look at all kinds of things, and I often relate this to something like search engine optimization, where we're trying to have to second guess what those rules are. There's nothing published. I mean, these days, google and Yahoo have actually broken their silence a little bit and they've published some bulk sender guidelines, which is maybe about a page long. So that gives us a starting point, but there's so many nuances beneath that and what we're seeing really is that if someone hasn't opened your emails before and you send them a new email, you are probably going to get rooted to spam and there's very little that you can do about that, which is why we have to train our audience to look for the emails when they sign up for our email list, as an example, or when they sign when they buy one of our courses, because, as a course creator, there's nothing worse than someone paying you some money for a course. You send them the email saying here's what you've paid for. It doesn't land in their inbox and suddenly you've got a refund on your hands because they're complaining and saying you've let them down.
Speaker 1:So, even further than the ability to sell, getting that first email through when someone buys from you is vital, and we can't guarantee it, unfortunately. So we have to make sure that when you sell something or when someone signs up to your email list, you have to put a very clear message on this confirmation page that says right, I have just sent you an email. Go into your email and search for this email that's from this name, with this email address, with this subject, and go and find it. And if it is not in your inbox, you need to actually rescue it from the spam or promotions or whether it's gone and mark it as safe. And if you don't do that and your first email gets ignored, it's likely the subsequent ones you send will also end up in spam. Then there's other reasons, like it could be a particular set of words in the email, it could be the way the email is formatted.
Speaker 1:There's no one reason why things go to spam, unfortunately, and it's really vital that you play your part as a good email citizen. You've got to send emails in the right way to the right people at the right time, and doing all of those things will help reduce the chance of things going to spam. But it's and it's not an exact science. All we can do is share. Here is what best practice is.
Speaker 1:Here are the things that you should do and, being fair, as long as you don't do anything too crazy, too stupid, then you will probably get most of your emails through most of the time, and one of the hardest things that I ever have to do is to troubleshoot an individual person who's not received an email, because it's almost impossible to do that.
Speaker 1:The good news is that if one person tells you their email has gone to spam, the chances are that isn't happening to everyone else. So that's the thing you got to bear in mind is that Google, yahoo and microsoft will give every single person a unique, personalized inbox experience. So if one person ignores you, your emails are going to go to their spam folder. If someone else opens every single email you send, they won't go to spam. So there's lots of different reasons here, and it is very much behavior driven, both on the behavior of your audience who are receiving your emails, but also, even more so, on the behavior of you, the way you're actually sending them. So there's so many moving parts here over the last year.
Speaker 2:Things have changed quite a lot, haven't they? So what they have indeed how does that affect people who are sending out email promotions?
Speaker 1:okay, so, first and foremost I'll gloss on this one the mailbox providers have become a lot more, a lot higher expectations around the way they expect marketers to manage their engagement. They're getting a lot less tolerant of you sending emails to your entire list whether or not they've opened something or not, because too many people are still marketing like it's 2012 and you remember the good old days. You'd build the biggest list you could and you just mail the hell out of it until they either buy, they die or they unsubscribe, and you can't do that anymore. If you keep mailing people that aren't opening your emails, you're going to get slapped and you're going to get put into google jail. So we have to avoid that. So that's kind of one change that is ever evolving, and the way that we measure that is more difficult, because obviously, a couple of years ago, apple blessed them, brought in their mail privacy protection, which means it's now the norm to not to, to not be able to effectively and accurately monitor whether someone is open your emails or not. So there's a lot of difficulty around that and there's lots of more advanced tactics you can use, but monitoring the trend of opens is still important, but the main thing that matters more than anything else right now is authentication, and six months ago so not enough people had heard of this. And the thing that really scares me where? It's the 12th of february today as we record this, and the deadline was the first of february to set up authentication as per the new rules that google and yahoo published back in october last year. And even on the first of february, the thing that really shocked me is more than 50 percent of all the different businesses and marketers we've checked had still not set this up, and that is really scary because, although the enforcement of these news rules has started quite subtly to start with then, by April this year, so we've got less than two months now.
Speaker 1:If someone sending bulk emails does not have authentication set up in the way that I'll describe in a minute, those emails are going to get blocked. They just will not get through, end of story. And this is probably the one time ever we've seen where the mailbox providers are actually saying we are not going to deliver emails Up until then. They might say, well, we might filter some, we might just not necessarily put them into inbox, they might go to promotions, but this is the first time that Google and Yahoo have stood shoulder to shoulder and, it's interesting, they've actually coordinated this between themselves. So the mailbox providers do definitely talk to each other and they've said here are the rules you must follow. If you don't do this, then by the summer of this year your emails aren't going to get through. Lots of people still aren't taking that into account and this is why I'm doing my best to share the message with as many people as possible, because otherwise, you know, some people have used the term email Armageddon, which is a little bit drastic, I think.
Speaker 1:But you can't trust marketers.
Speaker 2:Adrian, you can't know. No, totally, not Absolutely. We can hype everything up, aren't we?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. But I think you know we have seen some cases already where people are being affected by what Google and Yahoo started to do, and I know that there's a new warning. If you go into your spam folder in Google, in Gmail, now you'll see there's a new one that says this might not be from John Ainsworth because for some reason it's not been authenticated correctly. So they're all. They're already starting to warn people that if an email hasn't been signed correctly, they're questioning the validity of it even before they've started filtering them out and they might be putting them, putting them, into spam already. So we've gotten to April, the first which is a really funny day, april Fool's Day to get this working properly, but a lot of people still haven't. So if, if what I'm talking about here you're listening to this and you're thinking, hang on, I don't know anything about this, then it's absolutely vital that you take action now.
Speaker 1:And even if this is something that you think you have done, then the slightly scary thing is that maybe 15 to 20% of the people who've come to me saying I've done all this and then we've subsequently checked it, we found that something wasn't actually quite right, even though they thought it was.
Speaker 1:Well, the nightmare scenario is oh, I paid a guy on Fiverr to do it for me, and then we've subsequently checked it and they said, well, he did this bit, but this bit he's got wrong, and actually you're more likely to see your emails going to spam now. So it's one of these cases where it's a one off thing. That's the good news. Once you set this up, you can forget about it, unless you go make a major change to your email domain or something like that. And then, once it's done, then you can just relax knowing that all the emails you send from the platforms you're using right now will be signed and authenticated correctly as you go forward. But it is really vital because it's you know, the reason that Yahoo and Google have chosen to do this is because they want to make it hard of the spammers and the fakes and the spoofers to get all their garbage through. Unfortunately, that means that us, as legitimate marketers, we have a price to pay for that, because we've got to go through and jump through all the hoops they've given us.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. So what's any misconceptions people have about email, email authentication and what's causing any of these issues?
Speaker 1:I guess, to start with, it just scares most people because, particularly if you're a, if you're a marketer who's you know, creating your courses and marketing it yourself, you don't want to have to worry about all this techy stuff. You just want to create your content and sell it and you don't want to have to get into all these techno babble, acronyms and deacons and D marks and things like that, and a lot of people just get scared of it. So part of it is just not knowing what it is and how it works. And then actually making it work properly can be a challenge unless you know exactly what you're doing. Because effectively what we're doing you know.
Speaker 1:Let's take MailChimp as everyone's favorite. You know simple email marketing platform. You know there's plenty of more capable platforms out there, but MailChimp is kind of ubiquitous. If you're sending your newsletter out from MailChimp, then you have to go into MailChimp and you have to say I want to authenticate my domain and MailChimp will say, okay, you need to take these particular strings of gobbledygook and then you need to go and publish that information in your DNS records. And some people look at me blankly and say, well, what's my DNS record? So, very simply put, when you sign up and you buy your email domain, you might go to GoDaddy or Namecheap or somewhere like that. Then when, as part of buying your domain, then you have to publish various bits of information about that domain and that's called the DNS records, which is the domain name system, and in there you can publish any kind of text that you want. And the way that domain authentication works is you publish some specific bits of information that MailChimp or whatever the platform you're using will tell you, you copy those, you paste them into the control panel for inside GoDaddy or Namecheap or some people use Cloudflare, things like that and then you click the Save button there, go back into MailChimp and you say, right, make sure that's correct for me, and MailChimp will either say, yes, it's okay, you're good to go, or they'll say no, you've made a mistake, go back and do it again.
Speaker 1:And then, once that has been done, then you've done two things. Firstly, you set up what's known as de-kim, which is domain keys, identified mail, which means nothing, and what that's doing is it's signing, it's adding a digital signature to every single mail that you send out, which then gets compared with the public information that you've put in your DNS records, and as long as all that adds up and matches, then the email will get through. And then the second part of it is what's known as DMARC, and I forget what that even stands for. But what DMARC is is it's telling the world what should happen if an email gets received that hasn't been signed by you. So imagine if someone's trying to spoof you or a spammer's sending stuff on your behalf or something like that, and with DMARC you can either say do nothing or you can say put the email into quarantine, which means stick it in a spam, or you can say reject it. So, as an example, google, as of the 1st of February, and Yahoo have said that if an email ever gets received that claims to be from gmailcom or yahoomailcom or whatever it is, and it hasn't come from a Google or a Yahoo server, then throw it in the trash, not even put it in spam, reject it. Which means that if you're using MailChimp to send an email from fred at gmailcom, it will not get through anymore because of this DMARC rule that Google have published.
Speaker 1:Now most people would choose not to do that because it's, you know, dmarc. If you get it wrong, then you can risk losing all the emails, because if you set DMARC to reject and all the emails that you send go out and suddenly something goes wrong with the digital signing, those emails won't land anywhere. So I always recommend firstly set up your digital signing correctly using Deakin and then set up the DMARC policy to say none, which means that nothing will happen if there's a problem, and then you can optionally look at reports that tell you what's working and what isn't. If everything is working, you can maybe start enforcing quarantine or reject. But unless you're seeing some kind of sign in the report that someone's trying to spoof you, I wouldn't recommend it. I would rather keep things as simple as possible, because the fewer moving parts and the fewer complexities you've got in there, the less there is to go wrong.
Speaker 2:Okay, so there's a lot that you just went through there, so I'm going to try and summarize, but there's a bunch that I think I'm going to miss. I'm going to do my best to so what you want to do in order, you need to set up Deakin and DMARC, and I looked up DMARC just for thoroughness. It stands for Domain Based Message, authentication, reporting, inconformance, so that helps, so I'm glad we've all got that sorted out.
Speaker 2:Everything's clear now, right? Okay, so we're going to want to set up Deakin first and then DMARC Now, could you say again why it was that you need to do it that way around?
Speaker 1:So DMARC tells the world what to do if you don't have Deakin set up correctly. So if you set up DMARC first and you haven't got your Deakin working, then it's going to go wrong. But the good news is you can actually do both at the same time, because if you you know the way that MailChimp and the other platforms have evolved now, they will tell you what to do for both Deakin and DMARC at the same time, and then they actually MailChimp, as an example won't even send the email now unless you've authenticated your emails. So they're kind of forcing you to do it, even though Google and Yahoo aren't insisting that you do just yet. But it's as simple as that. They will help you make sure it's correct.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Okay. So you go into MailChimp, you go to the email authentication section, probably look up in help or whatever and find where that is. Absolutely. Then they're going to tell you what to do and they're going to give you some, like you said, gobbledygook as far as most people are concerned to put into your DNS you take that.
Speaker 2:Deakin first and you go over to your wherever your domain is hosted go, daddy or whatever it is and you paste that into the place where it says to paste it into in your DNS. It's very straightforward doing that. I've done this many times before. It's not complicated to do, it's just a little bit terrifying.
Speaker 2:It's just copying You're not sure if you're right, you know. So it's going to tell you here's the pain thing to paste it into whatever it is I don't know a name for server or an, a record or whatever it is but it'll tell you what to do. Paste it in there and then you save that, you do it for Deakin, and then you do the same thing for DMark and then you should be done. Is this correct? Yeah, or was that other step Pretty much?
Speaker 1:So that is it as far as MailChimp is concerned. However, this is where it gets a bit more interesting, because you don't only send emails from MailChimp, right, because every day you're going to send emails on a one to one basis as well From. You might use Google Workspace, you might use Microsoft 365, you might use you know, you might use GoDaddy's email for your domain, but whatever it is, the medium to long term requirement will be that every single email gets signed, not just your marketing ones. So people have been overlooking this and just sorting out their marketing emails, which means they're going to have to come back a few months from now and work on the next part. So we're recommending it's worth actually catching everything, because you've got your email marketing platform.
Speaker 1:You've got your everyday email platform that you send one to one emails from. You might have a help desk, such as I don't know Zendesk or Teamwork or something like that. That has to be set up as well. If you're selling courses, then you might have a membership website that sends emails out direct from the website. So all of those things need to be looked at as well. So you know and we'll mention the authentication checker that I've created later on but the thing to bear in mind is that every single source you've got of emails that are coming from your domain name, they need to be checked to make sure you've done this correctly. So you start with your MailChimp or your Keep or your Active Campaign or whatever you're using for marketing. Then you've got your one-on-one email, but there's bound to be something else as well in the mix more often than not, so it's making sure that you don't miss anything. Got you?
Speaker 2:Okay, cool, so we're looking for. We've talked through how you do this for MailChimp at the kind of top level or MailChimp being. You know we're substituting that for Active Campaign, convertkit, whatever other you know.
Speaker 1:You know you must be free using.
Speaker 2:And secondly, you're going to want to do it for your personal email, whether you're sending it from just Apple Mail, you know, whatever the thing is that's installed on your iPhone or your Mac and you're going to want to do it for your help desk, and you're going to want to do it for Teachable or Kajabi or whatever else where your course is hosted. And then you're going to want to think where else has this done? Now, once you've identified this list of places, how do you go about doing that? Are you searching for whatever, let's say, outlook? Do you search for, like Outlook, dmark Setup or something? What's the order to go through?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it'll be something like that. So Barrett said that the clarification is DeKym has to be set up for every single individual platform you use, whereas DMark is one and one. Only Having two DMark records in your domain is an error, so make sure that you don't fall into a trap that some people do, where you actually have two DMark records. So DeKym, so that's the and that's what is typically called domain authentication. That's the bit you need to search for and, just to clarify, it's unlikely to be the software that you're using, so it probably wouldn't be Outlook or Apple Mail or something like that. Okay, it'll be the system that you're connecting to on the back end, which might be. It could be Google Workspace, it could be Microsoft 365, it could be GoDaddy email from your ISP, and that's where you need to find those settings.
Speaker 1:So it's a bit more Googling and searching because, unfortunately, as we've learned the hard way, because we've set this up for hundreds of people now, every single darned platform has different settings and different, you know, and finding that can be a slight challenge, but normally if you just search for your platform name like Google Workspace, dekym or Microsoft 365, dekym or whatever, and that should link you to their help page or even their control panel page where you set it up and again it's the same thing You'll say I want to set this up, they will tell you what to publish and then that goes into your DNS, the same way you did for MailChimp or whatever else.
Speaker 2:Perfect, okay, and so Google Workspace is, I'm guessing, the new name for Google Apps or whatever it was called before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Google Apps became G Suite and then yeah, then it became Google Workspace. So that's exactly it. So yeah, so, basically, if you're using Gmail and it's a business domain, that's Google Workspace.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, got it. Okay, cool, okay. So forget what I said earlier, the bit about the Apple Mail or the Outlook. That's not the place. It's the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 that you're going into to find and change the settings in there and it's only to. Kim, not DMark, got it.
Speaker 1:Yes, as long as you don't do DMark. Yes, got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, this is very thorough. I like this a lot, okay. So is there anything else that people need to be setting up with their authentication? There's a tool that you've got right that can check whether they've set this up right. Where does that come in the order of things?
Speaker 1:Okay. So if you know it's not set up, there's no point checking. I would at least wait until you've had a go at setting things up before you check it. But then the way the authentication checker works is very simple, and we'll be sharing a link that'll be somewhere underneath this recording somewhere and you go to that. It'll ask you to register, you'll receive a login link and you sign in and then there's a manual check option. You click the manual check button and it will say send an email to this string of letters and numbers. That becomes an email address. So you go back to whether it's your MailChimp or your Google Workspace or whatever, and you just send any random email to that address, and the only thing you have to make sure is don't send it as a test email, because sometimes that goes in a weird and wonderful way. It needs to look like a real email that you're sending from MailChimp as a broadcast or a campaign or whatever they call it. Send it to that address, wait a maybe 10, 20 seconds, worst case and then you'll see a result on the authentication checker screen and there'll be three different results. It'll be like traffic lights they can either be green, they can be yellow or they can be red, and ideally you want three green things and if you've got any non green things, then yellow is OK. You've met the minimum requirements for this time round, but you could maybe tighten things up. But if there's any red in there, then you need to get that fixed.
Speaker 1:There's a third authentication method that I haven't mentioned and I'll just very briefly gloss over it now, and that's called SPF, and it's nothing to do with sunscreen. That stands for Send Out Policy Framework and that's another form of authenticating your email platform, and SPF is a bit like DMARC. You only have one SPF record and it says here are all the mail platforms that I trust in one place to send emails on my behalf. So if you haven't got the email platform that you're using mentioned in that SPF, then it will tell you that you need to fix that as well. But just to be very clear, that is not a requirement for the Febby, the First rules that Google and Yahoo have brought in. So everyone wants three green checkmarks, ideally, of course, but we're not really pushing SPF too hard at the moment because that's something that can be fixed later and it's an extra piece of work. So that's just there for completeness.
Speaker 1:But as long as you're getting the green checkmark for DKIM and for DMARC on the authentication checker, then that's fine and the thing you do. Once you've done it for MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or whatever you're using, you need to click the Send Manual test email again inside the authentication checker and then go back and do the same thing from your Google Workspace or your Microsoft 365. And what you'll see is the more different platforms you send your emails from inside the authentication checker, then there'll be more than one result it will show for each platform. It'll tell you whether you're good to go or not. So you might find that DKIM is set up correctly for MailChimp but not for Google Workspace, as an example. So again, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make sure that every platform that you're sending from is being authenticated correctly.
Speaker 2:Perfect, all right, cool. So the link for that tool is going to be in the show notes for this episode. So, wherever you're listening to this, click in the link for the show notes. So, if you're watching this on YouTube, go into the comments or the video description. If you're listening on Overcast, rappel Podcasts or Spotify whatever, go into the podcast description and there's going to be a link in there that's going to take you through to that email authentication tool. You can access that for free and then you can run these tests after you've done everything that Adrian's just told you to do from the episode.
Speaker 2:Go back, listen again, set it all up, use the tool, and then you can know for sure if this is actually set up right. Make sure you do this, because this is a really big deal. Email we talk about that a lot on this show is the most powerful tool for actually making sales for your courses, and so you've got to have this stuff set up. I mean you absolutely must. It's February now. I don't know when you're hearing this episode, exactly when this is going out, but it must, must be set up by the first of April. We've just heard that from Adrian. So make absolutely sure you do this. Don't put this one off, are there? I want to just change angle a little bit. What key metrics are there that course creators should be looking at to maintain a good sending reputation?
Speaker 1:So I mentioned earlier on, the real, vital sign that you look at as your email list these days is all about engagement what percentage of the people you're emailing are opening your emails, and if you're not monitoring that, then you're more likely than ever to be seeing the emails filtered in the future, because reputation, which is probably the key thing in email deliverability, depends very much on the behavior of you and your audience, as I mentioned earlier on. So what we're saying here is to maintain the best possible reputation that you've got. You need to be sending your emails in a way that's going to get Google and Microsoft and Yahoo to actually like you, and they will like you if you send emails that get opened by people and don't send emails that won't get opened. So obviously, content plays a part in that. If you're sending a load of junk out, people will ignore you. But, going beyond that, we want to try and stack the odds in our favor and, statistically speaking, who is most likely to open the emails you send them? It's going to be the ones that recently opened something from you. If I've been mailing someone for the last six months and they've ignored every single mail I've sent, then I'm going to remind everyone of what Einstein's definition of insanity is, which is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If people aren't opening your emails, then I will unapologetically throw in a reference to the frozen movie in here and say you want to listen to the song and let it go. There is no point mailing what I call the liabilities on your email list. The people that are not opening your emails will be hurting your reputation every time you mail them, every time they don't open something.
Speaker 1:So what we're looking at here ideally is we want to send as many emails as possible to the people that have opened something from you in the last, let's say, 30 days. Sometimes it's even less than that. The open rate itself doesn't matter that much, because we know that Apple have made all these changes and as part of that, you can't necessarily trust whether or not one individual person has opened your emails anymore. But what we do know is that a fake open report that Apple will trigger only happens if the email hasn't gone into the spam folder. So even though we don't know that email has been opened for sure, we know it's been delivered and there's a chance it will still get seen. So what we're saying is as soon as we realize that we're getting the sign that someone hasn't opened emails for a while, we must stop sending emails at that point.
Speaker 1:So that's the most important metric is just what proportion of people are opening your emails. And the other thing that I'll go into just briefly to kind of follow up on that, because we all know that people aren't going to buy your products by opening your emails. They'll buy them if they click on the buy now link or if they click on whatever you're offering them in the call to action on your email. So monitoring clicks is really important, and the metric I use to get people into good habits there, rather than looking at the people who have clicked, let's look at the people that haven't, because statistically, the people that are most likely to hit the spam button on your emails, which will result in damaging your reputation, are actually the people that have never clicked a single link in your email. So let's imagine they sign up for your freebie, they receive the email. If you can't get someone to even click that first link in that email with your freebie, the chances of them ever buying something from you are pretty much zero.
Speaker 1:So my recommendation is to always very quickly eliminate those people from your email list that have never clicked anything because unfortunately, they're virtually worthless.
Speaker 1:So that never clicked index, as I call it, the NCI that needs to be as low as possible to zero percent. And I've got some very well known marketers where I went in and I analyzed this for them and the never clicked index was north of 80 percent and I had to give them the very bad news that I'm afraid that your email list is probably only worth about 20% of what you thought it was, which is why this whole list size and engagement and open rates they're all vanity metrics. The only thing that matters is how many people are clicking the links in your emails and how much money you making from it. It doesn't matter if you've got a list of 500,000 people and an open rate of 60%. If they're not clicking, it's pointless. So you know that never clicked index is vital because you know, being completely honest, until recently Even my own email list had too many people on it that hadn't clicked stuff, so that's something we've had to do something about Makes a huge difference.
Speaker 2:On another topic why do you think it is that people believe that email is dead? Why does that always get said like, again and again, like I kind of forget about it sometimes, right, somebody said this to me the other day. I hadn't heard it in a while. And Then someone said oh, so what do you say to people who say that you must? That is like. Oh, people still saying that I was like. So I made me think, I wonder. I guess maybe they still, some people still are, I don't know, I'm not sure. Do you think people are still saying that and, if so, like why?
Speaker 1:It's a while since I've heard it. I think the last time I heard it was when Facebook Messenger bots were the big thing and there were lots of people selling bot courses and of course they'd say the email was dead. The same way that people doing social media marketing training or text message marketing Training is in other people's interest to say that email is dead and I think also a lot of people who do maybe. You know, as my friend and business partner, evan, who runs email smart with me, he's got a phrase he talks about people taking a dive headfirst into Lake stupid. And if someone has done a dumb thing recently and got banned by Google because they managed to get you know Lots of spam complaints or something, of course They'll think that emails dead because it's not working for them. But as long as you are sensible and you follow common sense and you send your emails that have good quality content to the people that want to hear from you and that are opening your emails, then email is not dead Because, let's face it, if you've got a massive following on Facebook or Instagram or something like that, the number of people I have I know personally who in the last six or 12 months have been thrown off the platform for reasons they didn't even know about, because they have got no control over the algorithms. You know, effectively you are renting an audience on social media.
Speaker 1:Well, with email you are owning the audience. It's your email list, it's your email addresses for you to do as you wish, as long as you are doing it within the terms of consent that they gave you. And and sure, we have to do things Google's way, otherwise they are going to get upset with us. But as long as you follow some very simple, very common sense rules, then email is absolutely not dead. And you know, I'm working with clients that are making eight figures by selling through email and they have not necessarily a massive email list. Obviously it's going to be significant, but you don't need a massive email list and you don't need massive open rates to be able to do well with email. As long as you're following the basic rules and you're creating good content that people want to receive and you're mailing to them at the right time, it doesn't even matter how often you do it.
Speaker 1:I've got some clients that mail twice a day, every single day of the week, and those emails get through. They have a high open rate, they make great sales. So as long as you're sending stuff out that people want to receive, then email is far from dead. It's very much alive and kicking and it's keeping Evan and me and the rest of our team Very gainfully occupied. And, of course, social media and everything else is okay and you know that I'm not going to ever you know kind of play down any other channel of marketing because, at the end of the day, multi-channel is best. You want to. You know, don't have all your eggs in one basket. You want to use social media, email, maybe text message, when Direct mail people still don't do it enough, because we have to accept that sometimes email can't get through. It's not perfect, because nothing is perfect. So it's worth trying different strategies, but I'd say 99 times out of 100, email is still the most cost-effective and profitable marketing channel you can use if you're doing it right.
Speaker 2:Okay, so a reminder, the email authentication tool is going to be in the link.
Speaker 2:The link to that story is going to be in the description or the Show notes or the YouTube description, whatever it is, wherever you're watching this.
Speaker 2:To back up everything you just said about the Using email like we, the way that we approach it very much is we've got a lot of clients, you've got very big YouTube audiences or Instagram audiences, this kind of thing, and it's like that's where you build the audience and then you get them onto your email list and then, when they're on your email list, that's where they're more likely to buy by far, like so much more likely to buy from a promotion direct via email than direct via, you know, doing a YouTube live or announcement video or something like that. It's. It's unreal and people just it boggles my mind how little people realize this because it's like all these like you know, clients who start working with us, you might have a million subscribers on YouTube and they don't send email promotions and I'm like they're not getting people onto their email list. They're not doing, never mind any of the clever stuff you're talking about with email deliverability. They're not even sending emails, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like oh my god, you're just missing 80% of the revenue.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's terrible, oh yeah sets me squired in this podcast. Let everybody know about it, okay. So, um, go check out the email authentication tool completely for free. Link will be below this Uh, wherever you're listening to this, where else can people find you if they want to learn some more of your wisdom?
Speaker 1:um. So by doing the authentication checker, you'll end up on the email smart email list anyway, where we send out lots of, you know, hints and tips, things like that. Um, there's the email smartcom website, which is effectively, you know, there are some information articles on their blog posts articles and so on and, again, you can sign up to our email list. Um, I can be contact directly through facebook as well. Just facebookcom slash adrian dot savage, always welcome to accept friend requests, and I can be DM'd through that platform. Um, and we can be emailed through our website as well. So lots of different ways to get in touch, but I'd say that, for the time being at least, then starting with the authentication checker is the best thing to do, if you haven't done that already, because you need to do it perfect.
Speaker 2:If you've enjoyed this and you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you have been listening, and if you want to hear more from adrian, we actually had an episode with adrian a while ago it was back in June 2022 where he covered more about staying out of the spam folder, so you can go and listen to that one as well, if you'd like. Thanks so much for coming on. Adrian, really appreciate your time today. Mr Pleasure John, thank you so much for the invitation.