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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
How to Improve Email Deliverability: Expert Tips to Avoid Spam Filters
Want to improve your email deliverability and stay out of spam before Black Friday?
In this episode, Matt Brown, email deliverability expert and author of the Deliverability Now newsletter, shares actionable tips to improve inbox placement for your sales emails.
Learn why emails end up in spam, how frequency impacts deliverability, and the steps to monitor and reduce spam complaints. If you're ready to improve email performance and reach more of your audience, tune in for insights that can make a difference in your results.
2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Monica Abadio, I'm the in-house copy chief at Data During Marketing, and today I'm talking to Matt Brown. Matt is a copywriter, full-stack marketer and email deliverability expert. He's the author of the Deliverability Now newsletter, where he sends out weekly tips and strategies designed to help you win big with email, and over the past five years he's managed lists from 1,000 to 200,000 plus active subscribers in a variety of markets. Now he partners with entrepreneurs and business owners to fix deep-seated deliverability issues, boost email performance and grow revenue. And today we're going to talk about a very hot topic how to not get into the spam filter and increase the chances of your sales emails actually reaching the inbox.
Speaker 1:Before we jump into today's episode, I have something exciting to share with you. So if you want to grow your email list quickly, you need to check out our Double your Email List guide. Having a bigger email list makes everything else in your business easier. It means that every time you do a promotion, you'll make more sales, make more revenue and help more people, and with this guide, you'll get the step-by-step process to everything you need to do to grow your email list. If you follow it, you'll very quickly experience a boost in your lead magnet conversion rates and see more people joining your email list. We typically see an increase in new subscribers each month of between 2 to 10x between 2 to 10x. So grab your copy of the Double your Email List guide right now at datadrivenmarketingco. Slash double and watch your email list transform. All right, let's get into today's episode. Matt, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey Monica, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for the opportunity to be here and grateful to share whatever I can with your audience.
Speaker 1:I am so grateful because there's never enough information on deliverability and even though it's kind of been the word of the year for email marketers, there's still so much confusion about what deliverability is. So, before we get into the nitty gritty, I'm really curious to hear how you found your way into deliverability is. So, before we get into like the nitty gritty, I'm really curious to hear how you found your way into deliverability, because it's not like the sexiest topic.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, that's a great question and it really all stems from my background in marketing, you know. So when I came to marketing, I started in content marketing, you know. I was writing articles, I was learning all about SEO, learning all about how to rank content in Google, capture that first spot, build domain authority, like do all the things you need to do. And then from there, I discovered copywriting and I was like, oh, I really really much prefer copywriting and so I started learning a lot about copywriting. From there, I started learning about email copywriting and that's when I started working one-on-one with, basically, course creators, entrepreneurs, coaches on email copy. So I started writing a lot of launch emails. So, if you're familiar with, like the Jeff Walker style of launches, product launch formula, I was doing a lot of launches in that format between like 2016, 2017, 2018. And one of the launches that I worked on I think this was in I don't remember the exact date, but it was 2018 or 2019. The person I was working with they had a really solid offer. It was the biggest email list that I had been working with up to that point and leading up to this point, too, in my career, I was basically just writing emails in a Google document and then handing them off to whoever it was I was working with and then their team would implement them in their email platform ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit. And then their team would implement them in their email platform, activecampaign or ConvertKit, and they would just check in with me kind of throughout the launch and let me know if they needed anything else. And at the end they say, great, we got this many sales, awesome job, see you next time, matt. Basically. But this first launch in 2019 with the biggest list and ActiveCampaign and everything my 19 with the biggest list and active campaign and everything my client was like hey, matt, our active campaign guy just quit. Is there any way you can just like load the emails into active campaign? And I didn't at this point, I didn't know that this is like a specific skill set or its own job. I was just like, yeah, sure, I was always up for learning something new. And I was just like, yeah, I'll do this. So I got access to the email platform for like the first time throughout an entire launch. So I designed the automation. I put all it was like $2,000 or $2,500. And he added like 104 new people into the annual membership build annually and it was like a quarter of a million dollars of new annual recurring revenue. He had a really low churn rate at like 5% and he's like stoked. He's like this is awesome now. Your emails were fantastic, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:But to me, like I had been kind of going along with the emails and I'm looking at them all in active campaign, I'm like this email got a six percent open rate, this one got a nine percent open rate. Like we've got 30 000 people on this list. I, in my mind, I'm like we should have done a million dollars easily, you know, um, and that was the first point where I was like what is going on here? Like I didn't spend all this time writing these amazing emails just to get an average 8.6% open rate. And so I started like chatting with ActiveCampaign after the launch and I was like, hey, like what's going on here?
Speaker 2:I didn't understand anything at this point about deliverability or list management or anything like that. I didn't even know about. Like, about deliverability or list management or anything like that. I didn't even know about. Like, I knew about the promo folder, but I didn't know that like you could get out of it or that emails could be going to spam. I was just like we're legit senders, it's opt-in marketing, we should be able to just get to the inbox.
Speaker 2:And so I started chatting with ActiveCampaign.
Speaker 2:I was like there's something wrong with your platform. I didn't know anything and they escalated the ticket. And then a tier two support person was like hey, you might have a deliverability problem. And I was like what is a deliverability problem? I didn't even know that that was a thing back then, and so once that support person told me that it was like the rabbit hole just opened up and I was like what is deliverability? How do we work with this and optimize it to maximize our email performance? So basically, from that point I just became obsessed with deliverability because it impacted my success as a copywriter, and now I love working with people almost exclusively as just a deliverability consultant and expert to fix these issues, because a lot of people are looking for things to optimize, levers to pull. Let's change the headline, let's change the approach. With emails it's possible you could double your results without changing anything about your copy or messaging. You may just not be reaching all of the people that you've paid to acquire. So that's, that's basically how it all started.
Speaker 1:I love that inception story and it's very similar to what happened to me the first time I discovered deliverability, and I couldn't pronounce the word for like one year, and yeah, kind of like three, four years ago. When you search for deliverability resources, most of the stuff available was very techie and it was very difficult to comprehend what the hell is going on. And it was very difficult to comprehend what the hell is going on. So I remember I actually looked for people, experts who would explain it to me, so I could explain it to my clients and then solve it in our own campaigns, and it took three different people to finally get to one that could explain the techie element in a way that made sense to my mind as well. And everything changed.
Speaker 1:And for me it's very fascinating because not many copywriters can see behind the scenes of a promotion to see those numbers right, and if you can't see the numbers, you don't know how well it worked or how bad it flopped. And the client, if they don't have the knowledge and the education, they can't tell either what is the actual potential or damage that has been done. So I find deliverability fascinating and I think a lot more people should learn from this and at DDM've had like several scenarios where we were like new client, awesome big list, like one million people, and we were excited again, let's do a re-engagement, let's work with it, yeah we're gonna make so much money for them yes, exactly, and I wrote an awesome campaign.
Speaker 1:I was so proud of myself and then the open rates were like super down, buyers were almost non-existent and I'm like what's going on? So, with this intro, which is basically this is why deliverability matters, can you give us like a explain deliverability to a five-year-old?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely, and this kind of goes to the core problem with deliverability and this is why I'm so passionate about it is that, like you said a lot, most of the deliverability experts out there are extremely technical, like. These are people who are basically email developers. They're working with server level issues, implementing large scale super technical solutions, and this is stuff that even I am like I need an expert for. When you're talking about the, you know the actual makeup of the code and all of this stuff that's managing the relay of the email. Or the deliverability experts work for the email platforms like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit and they might say that they have your client's best interests at heart, but they really have their own best interests at heart because they have to protect their platform and the deliverability of all of their clients, which makes sense there's no harm in that whatsoever, um, but it's hard to just find like normal people who can give you the five-year-old explanation of deliverability. So, basically, what deliverability is is it is how, how well can you deliver your emails? And there are a bazillion factors that impact that, impact that, and a deliverability problem is when you have issues delivering your email.
Speaker 2:So the most severe type of a deliverability problem is that your emails are undelivered, and there's a variety of reasons that can cause this.
Speaker 2:You know it's literally you hit send an active campaign or convert kit or Kajabi and the emails don't even make it to the spam folder of your intended recipients. So this could be due to a technical issue that you have on your end, or it could be that you have such a low domain reputation or sender reputation with the inboxes that they're like we think this person's a spammer, we think this person is a completely illegitimate sender. We're not even going to deliver their messages. So that's like the most severe type of deliverability problem and it's very rare to see that. The second tier is like you get mixed placements. So 60% of your emails go to the spam folder, 20% go to the promotions tab and then another 20% go to the primary tab, and so deliverability is really kind of like the art and science of getting as many of your emails to get the best placement as possible. It's not really 100% possible to guarantee 100% inbox placement for people, but you can get very close.
Speaker 1:I'm laughing because this is like the most nightmarish situation for a conversion copywriter. Like most of the emails I write are sales emails and if they don't even reach the inbox, whatever that one is, that's terrifying. I mean promotions like I'm fine with getting into the promotion folder every now and again, right, but not even making it there. Wow, that's a really bad one.
Speaker 2:That is rare, but that is what deliverability is. You know it's. Can you deliver your message to at least one inbox? Even a message that goes to the spam folder is considered delivered. So a true deliverability problem is the message does not get delivered. That's a really, really big problem and I rarely ever see that, and when I do, it's typically because of a technical issue that the client didn't realize that their setup was done completely wrong and they've enforced you know, enforced a specific type of DMARC policy, that's rejecting their own email. So it's really like they're shooting themselves in their foot, and if somebody is having that severe of a deliverability problem, I would be cautious about working with them because they may very well be an actual spammer. So it's unlikely that you'd ever experience that. But then, when you move to the second tier, it's about placement and it's about understanding where your messages are landing in your subscribers' inboxes.
Speaker 1:I like that explanation of placement, so let's talk about it and we can make it specific. So I write sales emails. Now most people think that if you send a sales email it's probably going to go straight into the spam folder. There's a chance it might hit the promotion folder, but the majority of people think it's straightforward to the spam folder. So I'm curious because in my experience it's not just about the copy that might get it flagged and sent it into one of these places, but I want to know, like why do emails land in the spam or promo folder in the first place?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a great question. There's a lot of different reasons for this, but I will start by saying that email placement you know spam folder, promotions tab, inbox, you know primary tab those are the three main places in a Gmail inbox or Google Workspace you know inbox that an email can go. My experience of this may be slightly unconventional Email placement almost has nothing to do with the content of your email. So people obsess over subject lines, preview, text copy. Is the language too promotional? Are we using spam trigger words? Are we saying buy now, click here, like in my experience? None of that matters. It all comes down to your sender reputation and how the inboxes view you as an emailer, and so there are a lot of factors Most of them are unknown in how Google specifically calculates your sender reputation, but a number of the known ones which you can find in Google Postmaster Tools are your actual domain reputation.
Speaker 2:So this is kind of where my SEO background really helped me here is that Google in large part you know SEO has changed so much since I was doing it but they use your domain reputation. You know each tool kind of calculates that differently to determine where to rank your articles. So this is why Forbes, which has like a 90 plus domain reputation, can outrank your brand new WordPress site that has a domain reputation of three. It's like Forbes is a lot more trustworthy as a domain than your dinky little website that's registered with GoDaddy or whatever. And so in Postmaster, google will tell you how it views your domain. You can actually see your domain reputation. It can be high, medium, low or bad. And so if you have a bad domain reputation or a medium domain reputation, google is going to treat you and your content with a lot more suspicion than somebody that has a high domain reputation. And this is also connected to your IP reputation, which is also available in the Google Postmaster Tools.
Speaker 2:If you have your email tools set up in a certain way to track your IPs that the platforms use to send your emails so ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or Kajabi they're going to assign you a mail server and the IPs that are used to send your emails. They also have reputations, just like your domain. Well, is ActiveCampaign putting you on a good IP pool or a bad IP pool? Are you with a bunch of other spammers or are you with you know world-class marketers? Are you with a bunch of other spammers or are you with. You know world class marketers, and so that's another factor that impacts if your email is going to go to the spam folder or the promotions tab.
Speaker 2:And then your actual spam complaint percentage. You know now that we're living in like a post February 1st world with Google and Yahoo's new sender guidelines for this year, spam complaint percentage is really important. So if you ever go above a 0.3% spam complaint threshold that's Google's guideline, which means three spam complaints for every 1,000 emails that you send that's going to put you into a more cautious, suspicious category. So as long as you maintain a good domain reputation, you keep your spam complaints low.
Speaker 2:You're on a good mail server from your ESP and you have an engaged list. You're sending to engaged contacts. You can send as many sales emails as you want, and the proof is in your inbox. I can name you a dozen senders who send me a sales email every single day, and every one of their messages goes to my primary tab, whereas I get an email once a month from some random e-commerce company I signed up for two months ago and it's not even a sales email. It's like hey, we're going to be at this festival this weekend. It goes to my spam folder. So the content, in my experience it's secondary to your reputation.
Speaker 1:Oh, this explains so many things and I finally have a really good explanation for when people ask me, should I or should I not say hey, on sale, discount or whatever in my subject line. I feel vindicated.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I'll prove it to you too, like I had when I work with people on deliverability optimization projects. I have an email that contains it's just like a document that contains every spam phrase, spam word, promotional word that all the email tools say do not say these things. So I just copied every single one of these spam phrases from the email platforms and I put them into a single document. It's like a thousand words, and I have there's ways you can test your deliverability and test placement. At the end of a project.
Speaker 2:I send that email as a test from my client's account and if it goes to the inbox, I know my work is done, because the inboxes are saying your reputation is so high. Even though the first line of this email is become a crypto millionaire overnight, we're still going to deliver it to the inbox because you've proven to us that you're sending emails to people who want to receive them. So I wouldn't recommend just doing that. I'm doing it in a very strategic way and you can get yourself into trouble with that type of stuff, but it's just proof that reputation outweighs content that is very cool and it explains something that I've been seeing with two of our clients is getting 50% plus open rates on sales emails Amazing yeah Right, and it's been consistent, like it's 50% plus over 12 months, and we promote something each month.
Speaker 1:And I thought this is weird. I mean let's ask other copywriters and most of them were like that's impossible, I mean you can't have that. And then I looked at another client we have and in this case we have almost 20-ish plus promotions in one year, with an email list that's over 100k and the open rate for the sales emails averaged 49 point something percent. And I looked at what we were doing, what's different to you know what everybody else is doing. So we have this big, big focus on making sure the emails are valuable to the audience.
Speaker 1:So it's not about the product, it's about the audience, because we want them to get value and to engage, because, like, engagement, in my head, is one of the ways you can improve your deliverability right over time. So as long as the reader opens the email, reads it, clicks, replies, all those things, then those are signals we're doing a really good job. And, what's interesting, that for the first client, he's not really sending a lot of emails in between the promotions. Like you know, you have like a newsletter or like, hey, new video out, so we're basically relying only on the sales emails to go in and do the job for us, and what's interesting is that we do, I think, a re-engagement for his list, I think every six months or something like that. Like twice a year, we do a re-engagement and the last time we did it, which was last month, I was shocked to discover that out of 50,000 plus contacts, only 7,000 were disengaged.
Speaker 2:Disengaged. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yes, and now that you talk to me about like reputation, he has a really good reputation. He's a personal brand and very expertise based, like his whole focus is delivering the best of quality possible in terms of interacting with his audience. So we kind of get away with you know the subject lines that has people freak out like on sale a discount subject lines that has people freak out like on sale a discount. They're not all like that, but it's not impacting his engagement rates. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's a factor too that's outside of the email world is like how do people view this person and their reputation just in general? So this is like the cheat code, basically, where it's like you kind of have a personal brand that you're working with and they have a fantastic reputation outside of email, their YouTube channel or their social following, and they're just genuinely held in high esteem. Or if they're just famous and popular, like you can get away with a lot. You can do a lot more than someone who is unknown and is trying to establish their brand because they're just not going to have those signals. And if you think about it, google owns YouTube and email. You never know if there are algorithmic factors happening in the background that says, oh, there are algorithmic factors happening in the background that says, oh, there are 200 000 subscribers on the youtube channel, there's a 40 match on the email that they're sending out to like. No one will be able to know if that's true or not, but there's. That's definitely something to consider that's an interesting connection.
Speaker 1:So, based on this, that it's not necessarily the copy, but like your reputation overall, does frequency impact deliverability, get better at it like improve it, and my strategy is going to be I'm going to send more emails but make them more valuable. Is that a good tactic or should we do something else instead of that, like rebuilding trust?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this really depends on the specific scenario and the specific list and the person who's sending the emails. You know the face of the company and basically the issues that they're facing, like if you have a deliverability problem, if you have a placement problem, and you're like, well, frequency solve this issue or will something else solve this issue? I think of email frequency as basically just like an accelerant. So if you're doing something right and if you have a sound strategy that's going to work, increasing the frequency of your sends is going to shorten the amount of time it takes to fix your deliverability problems. But if you're doing something wrong and you don't know that you're implementing an unsound strategy, increasing frequency is just going to dig you deeper into the hole much quicker.
Speaker 2:So I am working with a client. They send out daily sales emails and they encountered a really big deliverability problem earlier this year and they were like Matt, we send out daily emails, we need to do this for our business. Like, is this going to help us or hurt us? And I said, well, we're going to design a strategy and by doing it correctly, the daily emails will actually help us. You know a process that may take three months to sort of heal your Sunday reputation. It condensed to like a one month period because we got a big uptick in positive signals very quickly, versus if we were only sending out one email a week. That's just going to lengthen the amount of time it takes for those positive signals to be established. But if they kept going without solving these issues with their daily emails they would just be digging themselves deeper and deeper and deeper into the hole that they had to crawl out of. So I hope that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It kind of does. I'm getting a lot of like ideas in my head right now, like a lot of things are starting to make a lot more sense. It's kind of like exercise.
Speaker 2:You know it's like. It's like exercise. If you're injured, if you have a knee injury and like you're six months away from a meniscus tear and you don't realize it and you're like my knee hurts, I'm going to solve it by exercising even more. Like you're just going to accelerate the amount of time it requires for your knee to tear. But if, like, your thing is like I have low energy and I want to feel better and I wasn't exercising before, exercising a little bit every day is just going to help you feel better faster.
Speaker 1:You know so you mentioned google postmaster as one of the tools we can use, but I don't know. Is there any other way? I mean, what are the signals that my emails are going into the spam folder? Are there some KPIs we can look at in our email platforms that could be an indicator of that?
Speaker 2:Definitely so. When you have a really large list, like if you have over 50,000 people, if you have 100,000 or 500,000 people on your email list, it's just going to be guaranteed that you're going to get some percentage of mixed placement. Like anybody that says I can guarantee you 100% primary tab placement for 100% of emails for 100% of your contacts, primary tab placement for 100% of emails for 100% of your contacts, they're just lying. They don't know what they're talking about because Gmail is a their. Their algorithm for email placement is based on individual user engagement. So, like someone who opts into your list and never opens a single one of your emails and never opens any email, you know their account because it's just a junk account that gets filled up your emails are eventually going to go to their promo folder or their spam folder, versus someone who engages with every single one of your emails clicks, replies, no matter what you say, it's going to go to their primary tab and so it's not like it's this completely chaotic algorithm. There do seem to be these sort of silos of how Google determines where to send emails, but it is a bit random. That said, for spam placement it becomes really problematic when the majority of your emails are going to spam, and so one of the indications of this is in your email platform. If you go from getting 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% open rate consistently, whatever that is down to like a sub 10% open rate or a sub 5% open rate, that's typically a sign that you're getting a majority spam placement, because most of the email tools out there don't have the ability to filter out.
Speaker 2:Apple privacy opens and mail privacy opens All the prefetching that happens with the open pixel in the email you know ActiveCampaign does, klaviyo, I believe, can do that. There are some tools that can do it, but Kajabi, convertkit, entreport all these other popular platforms for creators. They just bundle all their opens together and then they have a little asterisk next to the open reporting that says open rates are not reliable, use click rates, blah, blah, blah. Don't pay attention to this. We probably shouldn't even be telling you about this.
Speaker 2:Anyways, the reason that this matters is that if InconvertKit or Kajabi are one of these platforms that can't filter out the false opens, if you go to a 5% open rate, that's typically a sign that your emails are going to spam, because when an email goes to the spam folder, google deactivates all the images in that email, including the tracking pixel, and so if a bunch of your emails are going to the spam folders of like 50 percent, 60 percent, 80 percent of your recipients, the pre fetching and the app the privacy opens that happen. Those aren't even going to happen. So it's like that's a sign in your own data that the emails are probably going to spam and definitely something to look out for.
Speaker 1:That's something very cool. I didn't know about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean go to your spam folder and open an email and it's like the thing that will pop up says Google, we've turned off images Report, not spam. Yeah, I didn't know about deactivating the tracking code. Google, we've turned off images report not spam you know, I didn't know about deactivating the tracking code.
Speaker 1:That's what?
Speaker 2:Well it's not a code, it's an image.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very cool. So if our spam reads are going up, what can we do about it? Should we just stop emailing? Should we just I don't know segment isolate audiences? What can we do about it? Should we just stop emailing? Should we just, I know, segment isolate audiences? What can we do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it really depends on where you're getting your information about spam rates as well. So, like every email inbox you know Google, yahoo, aol, hotmail they all report spam complaints differently. And so if you're just relying on the data that you see in ConvertKit, for example, let's say you go and look at the analytics for one of your emails and you sent the email out to 100,000 people and you got four spam complaints you think great, I'm totally in the clear. Well, that's not actually true, because Google does not report spam complaints back to the email platforms through something called a feedback loop. So some of the inboxes have a feedback loop with the email tools where if an Outlook user or a Yahoo user hits spam, yahoo is going to send that data back to ConvertKit and that's what's going to show up in that spam complaint area. Google does not send that data back to the ESPs. They keep all that data in Google Postmaster tools.
Speaker 2:So any spam complaint you see in ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign did not come from Google, and most of the people I work with 70 or 80% of their list is using a Gmail or Google product for their email, and the only place you can get that information is in Postmaster Tools. So you really have to be carefully and closely monitoring Postmaster Tools, because even though ConvertKit says you have four spam complaints out of 100,000 emails, you can go into Postmaster and be like, oh, we got a 5% spam complaint and you could be having trouble that you don't even know about. So it's really important to make sure you have accurate data about what your spam complaint rates actually are and then, in terms of lowering the spam complaint rates, that's typically a list building problem or like an engagement problem. So if there's a mismatch between what people have opted in for, or how they came onto your email list or how frequently you're communicating with them, that that can lead to high spam complaints. That you know has to do with content. People are just going to hit spam, you know you.
Speaker 2:Just you got to keep an eye on it and, um, do your best to align your the emails that you'll be sending out and the content and the approach with how you're bringing people into your ecosystem, setting expectations from the beginning, being very clear about you know how to what to expect in terms of content and frequency, and then regularly checking in to make sure they want to stay on your list, not just continually just pummeling them with email after email after email and making it easy to unsubscribe to. You know, obviously with Google now they've implemented one click unsubscribe. So as long as you're compliant with that, it should be relatively easy. But you don't want to be doing things like burying the unsubscribe link or using the lightest gray font possible and unsubscribe now and hiding it or trying to be creative with it, just like if people want to go, like make sure they know where the door is and they can unsubscribe very quickly and very easily.
Speaker 1:I think your explanation for why postmaster is important it's probably the best one I've heard so far, and I've talked with quite a few people about deliverability and none none of them told me it's not optional, like it's not like you need or you don't need postmaster like just for your curiosity to go check something in it. No, you need it.
Speaker 2:basically, from what I'm hearing, yeah, you need it and some email tools they try. So google has a feedback loop set but they're not reporting that data back. If your email tool has a feedback loop set up with Google Postmaster Tools, you can see like a graph in there. But I've talked with Entreport, activecampaign, convertkit about this and they're all basically like it's not really accurate.
Speaker 2:Like you know, because you want to, you want to know volume, like the spam complaint rate. You know, if it tells you you got a 0.4% rate, you kind of have to cross reference like okay, how many emails did we send out on the day we got these spam complaints? But someone someone could have just gone through their inbox and hit spam on 30 of your emails that were sent over the past month. It's unlikely that someone would do that, but there are vengeful people out there. So you know it's. It's not a perfect science to be like OK, we sent out 100,000 emails, we got a 0.4% spike on this day. So that's where I like the feedback loop is supposed to be helpful to tell you how many of total volume of complaints versus the percentage. But it doesn't really work.
Speaker 1:So, since we talked about platforms, what's your take? Is it better to just use Kajabi's email marketing built-in tool or is it better to just use like a specific email marketing tool, like just active campaign for email? Kajabi for hosting your courses I know, click funnels for selling your courses, wordpress for your blog what's your take on that?
Speaker 2:yeah. So this is my not most controversial advice, but this is the advice that none of my clients ever want to hear, because they're also busy and you know managing this stuff is not their favorite thing to do. But my recommendation is, if you're on a course platform like Kajabi or Kartra or one of these tools that's kind of an all in one platform it has a decent email tool. My recommendation would be to use both, so to have your emails you know, an email strategy occurring inside of the job but also to use a dedicated tool like Active Campaign or ConvertKit or whatever works best with your tech stack. And the reason for this is it's kind of like an insurance policy and you know most people don't realize that a lot of the email platforms are all built on top of the same tools.
Speaker 2:So, for example, convertkit is built on top of SendGrid and I believe Drip is built on top of SendGrid. Kajabi is built on top of Mailgun, so they're all based. And ActiveC, active Campaign, is built on Amazon's infrastructure, and so if there's a problem with SendGrid, it could be impacting all these different tools. And if SendGrid gets into trouble with Gmail which they very rarely do, if there's just an issue, it's nice to be able to fall back on a tool to get your messages out, that's not necessarily encountering that same problem.
Speaker 2:Or if you encounter deliverabilities with ActiveCampaign like, let's say, that they downgrade you to an inferior IP pool and you have some issues you may be getting better performance with the emails that you send out from Kajabi. So it's nice to have both options. I wouldn't recommend just like having two email tools for the heck of it, but if you're paying for Kajabi, you may as well take advantage of all of the features that they have to offer. But their email tool is also not quite as powerful enough as it needs to be to be your primary platform. So that's where it's good to have convertkit or an active campaign for more of the automations and integrations and things like that yeah, I was kind of thinking the same thing right now yeah, this was very, very insightful to me.
Speaker 1:so I'm curious um, what's your process? I mean, if someone comes to you and says, hey, matt, I think I have a deliverability issue, what's your process? What's the first thing that happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my process is if someone comes to me and says, hey, matt, we're having email problems, I think we have a deliverability issue. A lot of people don't even use that terminology. They don't know about deliverability. They're like our emails suck now or, you know, like our open rates, our engagement sucks. The process is I perform a free deliverability audit.
Speaker 2:So I have a process and I have tools that I use. Where I'll get on a call with that client, we'll open up, you know, activecampaign or ConvertKit. We'll look at their kind of setup. I'll go, we'll look through like their past month or two months of sending and I'll kind of get a sense of the trend. And then I have a variety of tools that I use to test placement.
Speaker 2:You know these are seed lists where you send emails to actual email addresses that then the suite of tools use to tell you okay, a percentage went to spam, a percentage went to promo, a percentage went to the inbox. They are helpful but not 100% reliable. And so I have other things that we do on the call to determine if you have a deliverability problem or if you may just have a list segmentation problem or an engagement problem or you're just not sending out content that people want. You know that can be a tough pill to swallow for some people, but not all email problems are deliverability problems. So if somebody then does have a delivery deliverability problem, where we're getting a really strong signal that we're getting high spam placement, then I have a whole process that I go through. You know, it's like a five-phase project where we fix all of those issues and we work to get as to get their email performance back up to where it was before, or better. It's almost always better, um, but uh, yeah, that's kind of how I work with people that's that sounds like hiring a private detective it is like hiring a detective that's okay, and
Speaker 2:I love mysteries. I love, I love those types of stories as well, and in my newsletter I have a regularly recurring content type which is deliverability mystery. So I send out an email where I investigate a strange email performance out there that I see and I diagnose what I think the problem is and make my suggested recommendation for how to fix it. So if you like mysteries too, definitely subscribe to my newsletter and you'll get the next deliverability mystery. I like mysteries too, mysteries 2, definitely subscribe to my newsletter and you'll get the next deliverability mystery.
Speaker 1:I like Mysteries 2. I mean, my four-year-old daughter has been listening to detective stories for kids.
Speaker 2:Ooh which, oh, for kids okay. For kids, yeah, Like Harriet the Spy, or where's she at?
Speaker 1:Maya and Alex successful detectives and they have like um small adventures and mysteries in a little town called who stole the ice cream, that type of stuff yeah, yeah, but more advanced. Like who stole the gold from the bank, who, um stole art from the museum. It's very interesting.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:So, on this note, if people heard this episode like they loved it, they want to learn more about deliverability from you. Where should they go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they should go to deliverabilitynowcom. That's the opt-in page for my newsletter. You can sign up to get my emails from there, and one of the things that really excited me about starting this newsletter was that my goal was to make deliverability fun and engaging. It's using my background as a copywriter and a content marketer. So much of the deliverability advice out there is incredibly boring, but I strive to make all of my emails super fun and interesting. Um, so, yeah, sign up there and keep an eye out for the next email that I'll be sending out, which will be friday this week. So this email won't be won't be going out, you know, in time for that, but some friday you'll be getting my next email.
Speaker 1:That was awesome, very insightful. Thank you, matt, for your breakdown of deliverability. I think this is a very fresh look on deliverability, which is a topic that I've been studying a lot in the last year, and I think it's very cool and practical the way you explained it.
Speaker 2:So thank you very much. Thank you, yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, monica. I really appreciate it.
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