#187: Avoid Spam - Email Marketing Strategies In 2021

Episode: 187

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Adrian Savage – Founder and creator of Deliverability Dashboard

Subtitle: “Avoiding the Spam Folder – Email Marketing Strategies in 2021”

Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOpdKUwhYXU

Back on Lunch with Norm…Adrian Savage joins today’s Lunch with Norm to talk about changes on the email world this past years, the most important factor for email deliverability and the importance of engagement. Adrian is a former marketing automation consultant and developer specialized in email deliverability that helps others avoid the spam folder, double their open rates and ultimately be heard more.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• 0:00 Intro/Housekeeping
• 3:05 Welcome Adrian Savage                
• 8:03 Email Marketing Viability
• 10:52 How Email Marketing Has Changed? 
• 13:41 Identifying Illegal and Legal Opt-In
• 16:01 Gather Emails Quickly for Marketing
• 20:33 How Email Blast Marketing Work?
• 22:29 Email Authentication Guide
• 31:41 How will iOS 15 affect email marketing? 
• 40:19 Tips for Handling Bulk Emails 
• 43:10 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability 
• 45:12 Email Marketing Promotion or Spam?
• 51:25 Email Marketing Format That Gets Responses

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• Mailchimp
• Email Health Check https://emailhealthcheck.net/
• Free email Checklist https://get.deliverabilitydashboard.com/checklist
• Profit Factory – Tim Francis – https://profitfactory.com/

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normanfarrar.com

Norman Ferrar   0:02  

Hey everyone it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy you hear running a little late like usual. But welcome to the lunch with Norm podcast, Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast.

Norman Ferrar   0:26  

Alright, sorry about that, guys. We’re running about six minutes late. I couldn’t get my bloody camera to work. But anyway, it’s on now and we can get going. Today’s show is going to be awesome. We’re going to be talking about email marketing strategies, and avoiding the spam filter and a couple other goodies in there as well. We’ve got a first time guest. He left the corporate world about nine years ago and became the first,he became a marketing automation consultant working with Infusionsoft and Active Campaign. He’s worked with leaders in the field like Neil Patel, Ryan Lovak, and I’m really glad to have him on the show today, for the first time. It’s Adrian Savage. So before I get to that, I just wanted to give our sponsor a great big shout out to Global wired Advisors, a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please visit Chris and his team over at global wired advisors.com Where’s the Boy Wonder?

Kelsey   1:24  

Hello, yes, we’re running a little late.

Norman Ferrar   1:26  

A little late,six minutes late.

Kelsey  1:29  

I think our beard nations are used to it by now. But I welcome everyone. Welcome to the show. Welcome. Faye,Roslyn, Andrew. Let us know where you’re watching from anyone over in the comment sections, and we’d love to hear how everyone’s weekend? Oh, oh, maybe YouTube, maybe we’re just late. I’ll check into that. But I think that YouTube should be working now. But anyways, if you have any questions throughout the show, please feel free to post them over in the comment sections. As well as if you’re interested in the full episodes or highlights of the show. Um, you can always go to our YouTube channel or just look at lunch with Norm, and you’ll be able to find the episodes there. We also have a really great price today. Super excited about this one. So stick around. I know you guys all know how to end and enter. But we’ll release the price soon enough. And of course smash those like buttons. Get those thumbs up going. And yeah, if you have any suggestions for topics in the future, put them on over the come. The comment, the comments. It’s been a long.Okay. We’re good to go,

Norman Ferrar   2:46  

Go. Go get out of here. And if any of the links aren’t working, it’s hashtag blame Kelsey. Okay, so, questions or comments, just shoot them over into the comment section. And now we can sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee, and enjoy the episode. Welcome, sir.

Adrian Savage  3:06  

Hey, no, thank you very much,

Norman Ferrar  3:09  

man. Oh, man. So, you know what a great introduction. You know, running six minutes late, not bad. I wasn’t stranding you, by the way.

Adrian Savage    3:22  

I’m not the most punctual person myself. Anyway. I’ve run time is for a podcast. I’ll get there a few minutes early. But normally, you know, I mean, things happen things go wrong, or things happen. Problems are always the problem.

Norman Ferrar   3:35  

That’s right. Blendtec are Kelsey. So So anyways, for those of us who don’t know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Adrian Savage   3:44  

Yeah, sure thing. So I’m I describe myself as a dad and a geek and an entrepreneur. I think it was the geek that came first I was about seven years old. My dad bought one of those old antiquated Apple two computers home that that was meant to be helping him with his work, but it was kind of he was having a few problems with it and the computer was about to go out the window. Seven year old Adrian grabs the manual reads it and teaches dad how to use the computer. So that means I’ve been pretty much a geek for the last 40 years since then. Anything to do with computing it programming, then that was my thing. And then I escaped from the corporate world. About 10 years ago, I discovered some software called Infusionsoft learned all about marketing. And I discovered this really interesting thing is that if you’re doing online marketing, you need to get your emails delivered. And lots of people were having problems with that they were finding that all the emails they were sending, were either going to spam or just not even getting through or anything like that. So as time went on, then I kind of evolved and I niche down. So all what I do nowadays is helping people get their emails out older into the inbox and just get them to be heard by us. Many audiences possible. And if you’re doing any kind of online marketing or E commerce, anything like that, then obviously the more emails you can get to your customers and your prospects, the more sales you’re going to make. So this is a really, really important thing that I just love helping people with. So they can just get as many people open their emails as possible, because that’s going to lead to more sales and more success. That’s pretty much what I do.

Norman Ferrar   5:23  

This is such a great topic. And I right off the bat, before I get into it, guys, if if you do have people who are Amazon sellers, ecommerce sellers, if you think email is not the thing for you, right now, listen to this podcast, we’re going to change your mind on that, we hope we’re going to change your mind on that. So go out, get some people, tag them, get them to listen to this podcast, it’s going to be awesome. One of the things I want to get into I usually forget till the last section of the podcast is the giveaway. What is the giveaway?

Adrian Savage    5:59  

So I do very few consultations. And if I do, they’ve got quite a high ticket price. But today, I’m offering a free 30 minute consultation to one lucky person where whatever you want to ask about email deliverability how you can get more emails than 30 minutes, I’ll go through whatever you need to help you become more successful with your emails that that’s the giveaway.

Norman Ferrar  6:22  

Fantastic. That’s, that’s great. It’s unique. We have not had that on the podcast yet. And again, if you’re if you’re an online seller, not just amazon online seller, it’s so important to build your list. Amazon owns your customers. How do you get around that? You know, and we’re not saying do any Blackhat techniques, but you have to build your list. And that list, you know, what do you do with it? And a lot of sellers just don’t know, they I know a guy Adrian, I know a guy in a that had a beauty business. He had 280,000 original emails like that from clients, and he never did one email campaign.

Adrian Savage    7:04  

Oh, that’s it so badly, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Norman Ferrar   7:07  

And the other thing, you know, I, and we’re gonna, I guess this is gonna be the first question is going to be about, you know, the viability of of emails right now. But Kelsey has created an email for private label Legion. That’s our mentoring program. And he’s got a crazy open rate. I think the last rate Kells was at 24% 24% on an open on an email

Kelsey    7:34  

was, yeah, that was one of our low ones, we usually get around like 28%. Isn’t that? So?

Norman Ferrar   7:40  

Yeah, you know, what if I can get and I don’t think on an email blast for E commerce, it might not be that high. But still, if I can do that, and I’m hearing Oh, chat bots have this and I love chatbots. But email is, is it’s still that old school marketing that that still works. So that’s my first question. viability of like, you know, people say email marketing no longer works, it’s not effective anymore. What are your thoughts?

Adrian Savage    8:10  

Well, I will be bound to say that I disagree that it’s dead, because obviously, that’s all that I do. I’ll be very respectful of the other channels out there, you know, chat, bots, messenger, SMS, direct mail, there are so many different ways of reaching your audience. But I love email, because it is one of the few platforms where you are still in total control, you’re not dependent on Zuckerberg, you’re not dependent on Amazon, you’re not dependent on anyone. As long as you have got the email addresses, then there’s so many different platforms you can use to send those emails out. And if you can send the emails out, you can see who’s engaging with you, you’ve got complete control over what you’re sending when you send it. And if you if you don’t behave like a crazy person, then you will do very well with it. The reason a lot of people think that email doesn’t work is because they’re still stuck in the dark ages, where they know the good old days, we’ve just built the biggest email list you could, and you just keep mailing that everybody until they buy they die or they unsubscribe. If you do that these days, you’re going to get hurt. But if you do it the right way. And this is what I’m going to share about today. If you do it the right way, then, you know, 20% open rate is good. I can share how you can get to maybe a 40% open rate or higher, just by doing a few simple extra things. There is so much kidding. No, I’m no. The last email that I sent that was kind of important one I got a 62% open rate to my list. It’s only a small list. But even the clients I’ve worked with with hundreds of 1000s of contacts on their list, they can still routinely get 40 45% opens if they’re sending to the right people in the right way. But at the same time 28% is a lot better than many people. I’ve worked with some clients where they when they came and met me with me for the first time they say well, I’ve only got a 5% open rate and things like that. And what they hadn’t realized was the reason it was such a low open rate was because they just didn’t know how to manage everything for success. That’s all it’s about, yes, you’ve got to, there’s a lot of things that you can get wrong. But if you get them right, you’re going to get massive success. You know, the, there’s just there’s a few basic things. And, you know, we’ve got plenty of time today to share the most important things that will make that difference.

Norman Ferrar   10:27  

Great. Now, I would like to ask anybody who’s listening, if you have questions, please just throw them into the comment section. I know that there’s a lot of, it could be a basic question. There are no stupid questions, just throw it in there, and we will get to them I, I’m gonna learn a lot. My ability to do email marketing isn’t where I want it to be. So let’s let’s start off with things have changed over the years. And like going into 2021 22/4 Quarter. How has it changed?

Adrian Savage   11:00  

Yeah, it’s about to change massively, very, very soon. We’ll come to that. But yeah, I’ve already kind of mentioned this a little bit, if we go back to the good old days, then when I first got involved with email marketing, it was just a case of building the biggest list you could and then you just mail the hell out of it. And that worked really well until about 2015. But then Google started getting clever. Because if you go right back to when the internet started, you typically get an email account with your local internet provider. But then along came AOL, along came all these others. But now we’ve reached the point where there’s only three big giants that dominate the email, email world, we’ve got Google, and more than half of a typical email list will be Gmail and Google workspace. Another maybe 10 15%. Agree, Microsoft is going to be Hotmail, it’s going to be Microsoft 365, and things like that. And then maybe another 10%, of Yahoo, which includes AOL, because Yahoo bought AOL. So more than three quarters of a typical email is just those three big mailbox providers. And Google has invested millions, if not billions, in all kinds of software and artificial intelligence and things like that to try and improve the email experience. Because the thing got to bear in mind is that these mailbox providers give away free email, they want to make money out of advertising. The only way they can display their adverts is if someone opens an email. So it kind of makes sense, they’re going to reward the senders who get good open rates. So that’s what this is all about. And then over and above that, Google has just spent so much time and money just developing artificial intelligence to stay one step ahead of the spammers because nobody wants to see spam in their inbox, and make sure that the right things go into the inbox at the right time. But the trouble is, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might be inadvertently behaving like a spammer. And if you send me stuff, the same way the spammers do, then guess what it’s going to end up in the spam. So what we can talk about is how the world has changed. And the biggest thing really, is around engagement. And we’re going to come to that a little bit later on. But I think that’s the main thing is, it’s just that, you know, the the the mailbox providers have become so much more intelligent, you know, back in, if we go back to 2010, then the spam filters were almost non existent. And just whatever came in came in, and that was that. But now we’ve reached the point where 85% of the world’s email that gets sent is considered spam. So if we’re one of the good guys sending legitimate email, we’re in the minority. So we’ve got a real fight on our hands to be heard and to get past those spam filters. And that’s what this is all about.

Norman Ferrar   13:33  

My, the next thing, this is a difficult question. But the opt in, what is a legal opt in and what’s not? When I’ve talked to other people, other entrepreneurs, a lot of people are afraid to send emails, because they think that they’re going to get sued, or there is an issue with opt in how do we have an How can we get an official opt in? So you know, we have that warm and fuzzy feeling?

Adrian Savage   14:00  

Yeah, and that’s a tough one. And I’m going to preface this with the usual I’m not a lawyer. Because it depends where your audience is, you know, that you know, Europe has GDPR, Canada has Canadian anti spam laws, California is launching something the US has got can spam. There’s so many different things. And sometimes, you know, the really the devils in the detail. But if we keep it nice and simple, I don’t tend to look at the legal side of it too much. I look at the common sense side, I’d like to think that most the time, if you follow common sense, you’re also going to stay on the right side of the law. But please, if there’s anything you’re not sure about, please check with someone who’s qualified to advise you legally, but in general is all about this, as long as you are clear on what someone is signing up for. And as long as you collect their data, and as long as you don’t use it unethically and as long as you’re sticking, basically stick to the commitments you make when you take someone’s email address from them, and as long as you do that, you’re unlikely to get complaints and you are unlikely to fall foul of the law. Some some jurisdictions might require things like email confirmation, double opt in, and things like that. And that’s, again, I won’t go into that detail. But in general, as long as you’re being honest about what you’re collecting the information for, then you should be okay. Now, what isn’t so good if you’re scraping email addresses off the internet, or buying lists or things like that, because email has evolved to be all about permission is like direct mail is easy. You can buy a mailing list and send stuff throughout in the in the good old snail mail. And that’s, that’s all cool. But there’s kind of there’s a barrier against that, because it’s cost, no one’s going to send a million pieces of direct mail, because it’s going to cost too much. The challenge you’ve got is you can send a million emails, and it doesn’t cost very much. So that’s why it’s so easy to send spam. But as long as you are legitimately collecting email addresses, and as long as they’re people that have specifically requested your content from you, then you should you should be okay.

Norman Ferrar   15:54  

Alright, so collecting those emails. And I know what we’re a little bit off topic, we’re going down a different rabbit hole. But how do you gather? How do you gather the emails quickly enough, so you can start doing the campaigns?

Adrian Savage   16:09  

Well, the thing is, it doesn’t need to be a massive list. I’ve worked with clients, they’ve only got a few 100 people on their email list. And they’re still making 1000s of dollars every single month, because they’re just sending the right message with the right offer to the right people at the right time. So you know, there’s still you know, there’s all kinds of things there’s, you know, you can have paid for ads, you can have Google ads, Facebook ads, things like that. And for many people have worked really well. Now the price is going up on that stuff. But you know, you can do things like being a guest on a podcast is a great way of doing things. I’ve been on a fair few. And it’s, I’m never going to get 1000s of leads from being on a podcast. But every time I go on a podcast, a few people Google me, they find my site, they sign up and things like that. So there’s all that kind of thing. There’s, you know, being being a good, helpful person in Facebook groups and online communities and things like that. There’s just so many ways of getting the message out there. And then there’s good old word of mouth as well, I will ask my clients, my audience, I’ll ask them to recommend me the same way early on, you said, Hey, share this with a few friends and get them to join the show. There’s just so many ways that you can do it. And also talk about Amazon for a second. Like you say, Amazon owns the customer, they own the email address. You can’t email people if you’re building a business on Amazon. But if you’re doing your own fulfillment, then you can put any kind of message you want in with the products that you’re shipping and say, Hey, go to this website and register for a promo code or discount, leave us a review. And we’ll give you 10% There’s so many ways that you can incentivize people to join your mailing list. So even if you are, you know, even even if you haven’t got direct access, because you’re an Amazon seller, you can still find ways of doing it. I think that’s the thing. But it doesn’t have to be, you know, we talk about people with lists of 10s and hundreds of 1000s of email addresses, it doesn’t have to be if you’ve got a few 100 people, that’s more than enough to get started. Even, you know, heck 50 people’s a good start, you know, people always compare themselves to the big successful guys. But as long as you want to small, but perfectly formed audience, that’s all you need to get started,

Norman Ferrar   18:04  

right. And on those inserts, you can do all sorts of things from warranty registration, you can’t ask for a review. So you’re probably talking about Facebook or Shopify. But anyways, there’s, there’s all sorts of different ways to drive traffic. And I think it’s so important that if you if you just do a small ad, and start building in your inserts, you know, just have a QR code that drives people over sign up for a newsletter. And one of the things that I like doing is building value, just value value value. And when we start with our newsletters, there’s no promotions in there at all. You know, it’s just hear its value, its content, its videos, and a bit later on, there might be something in there, you know, and it won’t be every single newsletter that’s going out there. But okay, let’s let’s go on from here, I’m really curious about how you’re going to get my or Kelsey is in emails up to 40% open rate.

Adrian Savage    19:08  

Very, very, very easily. is a good time to mention I will I will joke with any client, I can double anyone’s open rate in seconds, in seconds in seconds. And here’s how I’ll do it. Suppose you’ve got 10,000 people on your list, I’m going to throw away the 5000 that haven’t opened anything for a while. And the next time you send an email you’re going to get the number of people opening will be the same but your open rate will be twice as high.

Norman Ferrar   19:33  

Very good. There we go. So Kelsey are two people on our email list. We can’t we can just get rid of that one person that never opened,

Adrian Savage    19:40  

cut it in half. And I’ll explain later on why that isn’t quite as flippant as it might sound, but that’s new. But that is a joke that I make when people obsess about their open rates. You can’t compare your open rate with someone else’s because you don’t know the quality of the audience that you’re mailing to. So in isolation that number doesn’t mean Much as a trend, it’s really useful because if your open rate is going up, you’re doing something good. If the open rate is going down, then maybe you’re doing something not so good. But that number, whether it’s 10% 20%, or 50%, it doesn’t matter because you can’t compare it to someone else.

Norman Ferrar  20:15  

Missing the spam filter, let’s talk about that. How do we get? How do we get into the inbox? I know I’ve seen it a ton of times where I just don’t get the message. People don’t even get some of my normal emails, you know, they can’t find it, it goes to the spam filter. What about what about email blast.

Adrian Savage    20:33  

So you know, blast is even more difficult. But the principle is the same for everything, it comes down to this, there’s four key factors that impact email deliverability. And I often talk about winning the email race to the inbox and race actually stands for the four things that matter. We’ve got reputation, we’ve got authentication, we’ve got content, and we’ve got engagement. And it is that reputation that that everything else feeds into, because let’s face it, if you’ve got a good reputation, then let’s take Google as an example. Gmail will love you if you’ve got a good reputation. And the higher your reputation is, the better Google think you are, the more likely you are to go into the inbox. And it’s as simple as that. If you’ve got a bad reputation, then guess what you’ll end up in Google jail, and everything you send will go to the spam folder. So it’s all about all the different things you can do to make sure you maximize your reputation, and three are and the ways to do that are things like making sure that you’re not doing anything crazy, like scraping this off the internet, making sure that you’re not sending emails to spam traps and things like that. Making sure that you’re not in any blocklists and making sure that you are only getting options from in ethical ways, as we already discussed. So reputation is massive. I’ll quickly mention authentication at this point, because that’s a one shot thing that you need to do. It’s about making sure that you’re telling the world who is allowed to send emails on your behalf. So let’s say you’re using, let’s say you’re using MailChimp as a way of sending emails out, they need to go into MailChimp and set up your email authentication, you do it once and once it’s set up, then you’re good to go forever, pretty much. But that one thing, setting up the audit authentication can make a massive, massive difference. Content, we could talk about that all day, we’ll come back to that if we got time. But engagement is the big thing. That’s what I want to spend the most time talking about, because that’s what makes the biggest biggest difference.

Norman Ferrar   22:25  

Okay, let’s talk about it. Oh, the, the authentication, by the way, is that like just a an email that you set up hello@xyz.com. So there’s

Adrian Savage   22:37  

a little bit more to it than that. And this is the one bit where I have to just forget about my anti geek pills for a second and go into a bit of because when when you set up a domain, then there’s something called the DNS, the domain name server. And that’s where you publish all different bits of information about your domain. And when you set up authentication, you have to put some specific, very special data into the DNS records that say, here are the platforms that I trust, here’s my special signature that MailChimp can use assign my emails on my behalf and things like that. And you go into the authentication section in something like MailChimp, or Infusionsoft, or ActiveCampaign, or whatever you’re using. And they will tell you what you need to publish inside your DNS. If you’re not sure, then you can get your techy person to do it. But the good news is you don’t need to be an expert on it. Because it’s a one off thing. Once it’s done, it’s done. But it is a little bit techie. It’s not as it’s not as simple as some of the other things that I’m going to talk about. But once you’ve done it, it can make a huge difference. And the only, the only reason to not do that is if you might have a poor reputation already. So if you know that all the emails you’re sending, you’re going to spam, and then you suddenly start signing them and sending authentication, that isn’t going to help because you need to sort yourself out first, but 99 times out of 100, assuming people have already been sensible and not trash their lists and things like that, authentication will make a huge positive difference.

Norman Ferrar   23:54  

Okay, so reputation authentication, what was the third?

Adrian Savage    23:58  

So the third one is content. And we’ll see how much there’s probably some questions on that. So we’ll come back. One person’s already asked about things like the promotions tab and things like that, and that content makes a big difference. And then engagement is the last part. And that’s what it’s worth spending a bit of time on, I think because that’s that can make the biggest and the quickest difference. So let’s go back to that little flippant comment I made about doubling people’s open rates. And here’s the thing, it actually does really matter. Because the more people you’ve got opening your emails, the better your reputation is going to be. And you know, I’ve seen a couple of comments coming in. I’ll just address them quickly now and then we’ll come back to it later on as well. It’s absolutely right, the open rates and those statistics aren’t always all that accurate. They’re about to become a lot less accurate. But the thing we got to bear in mind is right now they are the best thing that we have got to be able to actually keep an eye on what’s happening. We’ve got you know is email to everybody. is a bit like search engine optimization, we’re trying to stay one step ahead of Google. And you know, they’re changing their algorithms all the time. But we don’t really know exactly what’s happening, the only way we can see what was really happening would be if we actually looked at everyone’s emails to say, well did this one London, the inbox did this one London inbox, we can’t see that the best we’re gonna get for the moment is the open rate and the click rate. If we go back to what I was saying about doubling the open rates, let’s supposing that you’ve got a 20% open rate. Now, what Google will look at that is they’ll say, Well, 20%, open rate is okay. But that means that norm is sending out emails that 80% of his audience don’t want to see. And that’s the way they actually look at it. So the fewer people you’ve got opening your emails, the more you’re gonna be hurting yourself. Because what Google are looking for is people are sending out high quality content that people want to open. So it’s in your interest to only send the emails to the people that are most likely to open them. And the only real way we can see that is statistically, if they just opted in, they’re probably quite keen, because they’ve just opted in. If they open something recently, the chances are, they’re going to open something as well, in the next few weeks, if not sooner, if they haven’t opened anything for a year or longer, guess what, they’re probably not going to open the next email you send them or the one after that, or the one after that. So what we want to do here is we want to start only emailing the people that have opened something recently. And if you want to really stay ahead of the game, and really follow best practice, 30 days is that window that you should be picking people from. So if you’ve got people that opened in the last 30 days, then if you only send emails to that group of people, you should get a 40 to 50% open rate. And that is the key here. And it kind of if you think about it, it makes sense that people have opened something maybe 30 to 90 days ago, if you just entered that segment, you might get a 10 to 15% open rate. If you go beyond beyond 90 days, if you get to 5%, open rate for that chunk of the audience, you’re going to be lucky. And I look at some people CRM, some people’s email databases, and we’ll see that as much as a quarter of their contacts have never ever ever opened a single email. And this is where it was it Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing and expecting different results. So why would we keep sending emails to those people that have never opened anything, you know, there’s some people and I’ve managed, I’ve managed to get my little Frozen movie reference in, you just gotta, you just gotta let it go. You’ve just got to realize that not every email address on your list was created equal, you want to really zero in on the guys and the girls that have been opening recently. And yes, that’s going to change soon, it’s gonna be harder for us to find who those are. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But this is what I call the virtuous circle. If you think about it, the higher your email, open rate becomes, let’s forget about open rate, just let’s just look at people from and the more people you’ve got open your emails, the better your reputation is going to be with Google and Microsoft and Yahoo, and so on, the better your reputation is with those guys, then the next email you send is going to be more likely to make it into the inbox rather than promotions or the spam folder. And obviously, if that’s more likely to go into the inbox, then guess what you get more people opening it. So to start with, we kind of we gain the system of it, we we stop mailing people to artificially boost our open, right? But then by doing that our reputation improves. And then the people that then opt in after that they’re more likely to see things. So that’s how the real number of people grows as well. So it’s, it’s an interesting one, because it’s a it’s a medium to long term thing where you see the results short term, you’ll see your open rate go up for sure. But the number of people opening your emails doesn’t change. But long term, that’s where it all really starts to work because your reputation precedes you. And that’s what makes a big difference. And I work with a lot of people that do do they’ll do Facebook ads, Google ads and things like that. And there’s one metrics that I measure will look at how many contacts are they added to their database in the last 30 days. And then we’ll look at the percentage of those contacts that opened at least one email. And in many cases, I’ll see it’s as low as 30 or 40%. of new leads. Now it’s possible if you’re doing really well, you can get 80% of your new leads to engage with you. And that’s just because you’ve managed your engagement, you’ve got a good reputation. If you haven’t managed your reputation, you’re getting 30% of new leads to engage, then guess what, you’re effectively burning half of the money that you’re investing in your Facebook ads. So if you’re spending say $2,000 a month on Facebook ads, and you haven’t sorted your engagement out yet, you’re burning $1,000 a month that you could be getting a much better response with. So this is why it’s so so important. And yeah, the world is going to change a bit more soon when when Apple do things.

Adrian Savage   29:50  

But the good news if people are listening to this live or if they’re watching it the next few days before Apple rollout iOS 15 We’ve still got a last chance to use The data that we’ve got in the in the best possible way. And we can go through our existing email list and say, right, we’re going to find the people that open in the last 30 days. And those are our most important people, we can find the people that opened between 30 and 90 days ago, and they’re the ones that might still open for us. And then if they’ve already gone beyond 90 days, that opening, now is the time to send a few emails saying, Hey, do you still want to be on my email list or not? Because now is the time when we’re going to see if they’ve opened or not. Yeah, it’s always there’s going to be a few inaccuracies out there. But that’s why we also put a link in those emails saying, click here to tell me that you’re still here. Because if they click the link, then we know they’ve opened it as well. So that kind of covers it from both sides. But now is the time to do that before Apple come along and make our life a lot more difficult and start hiding the data from us. Sweets, we kind of segue straight into Apple Now don’t ask any other Yeah,

Norman Ferrar  30:49  

well, I do have one thing. So sure that the listeners, I’ve got a question. Are you using email lists right now? And if you are, what are your experiences? If you’re not, why not? Now, the other thing I want to talk about too, just in case you’re joining us late, Adrian is providing a free 30 minute consultation. As a giveaway today, if you’re interested in getting this and a look, if you listen for the last half hour, this guy knows his stuff. I’m learning a lot here. And I wish you could stick around for a couple hours. But that’s hashtag we’ll have Kelsey. And if you’d like a second chance, second entry, just take two people, and we’ll get you a second entry. Okay, so I am curious about who is using email list right now. And if you’re not using it, why not? Okay, yeah, let’s get into this iOS 15. It sounds like it’s gonna be a nightmare,

Adrian Savage    31:52  

it’s definitely gonna be a game changer. I mean, the good thing about marketing and being an entrepreneur and all that kind of stuff, is that we’ve always got a chance to raise our game and make things better. And this is certainly a really good opportunity to do that. But it is going to be challenging, because we have come to rely possibly too much on open rates. And I’ve seen a few comments come in where people have quite rightly said that there is a lot of discussion out there at the moment saying that you can’t hang your hat on open rates. And here’s let’s first describe how we can measure open whether an email has been opened, the only way we can do it is let’s take MailChimp as an example, again, they will put a tiny, invisible one pixel image in every single email that gets sent out. When you open that email, the pixel gets loaded, a message goes back to MailChimp. And that’s how they know. But a lot of email clients give you the option of blocking those images. So if you’ve got images not working, then no one sees if you’ve opened the email. And typically I’ll find that about maybe 90 to 95% of emails that get sent out do get tracked at the moment, maybe even more than that. In the bad old days, you know, Google and I think outlook was a big was a big offender here, they would block a lot those images and less people explicitly enabled it, but the world has changed. So on the whole now, email open tracking is accurate. But this is where are about to whip the rug from under us. Because it’s gonna be what, six, eight weeks ago now I’ve lost track of when it was sometime in July, Apple announced I asked 15 big fanfare, lots of new features. But there was one that had email marketers slightly wobbly, shall we say? Because they’ve announced something called Email privacy. So when you upgrade your Apple device to iOS 15. Or if you upgrade your Mac to the latest version of Mac OS, when that comes out, there’s gonna be a new option. And you’ll get asked a question, when you upgrade, it’ll say, Do you want to subscribe to this email privacy. And if you subscribe to it, it means that they will start hiding the open tracking data. So the way they’re going to do it, they’re going to pre load all the images in an email. So it’s going to appear that it’s been opened, even if someone hasn’t opened it. So suddenly, the people using Apple Mail to track your to track your emails. So to read your emails, it’s going to look like 100% of your apple people open your emails. So suddenly, all this engagement management I’ve just talked about is going to become very difficult to do. Because if someone’s using an Apple device, it’s going to look like they’ve read your email, even though they haven’t. So that’s going to be a bit of a challenge because it’s easy to say we need to just focus on who’s clicks links in our emails. But let’s talk about those 40 to 50% open rates, you’re still only only going to see a one or 2% click rate. And that’s the challenge. Not everybody is going to click a link in your email even though they’ve read it. So we got to start working out how we can keep on top of that. And this is why I’m recommending that people do all this kind of purging of their unengaged contacts now before it’s too late before we lose all this data, because the world is going to change. And we have to find new ways of keeping tabs on who wants to hear from us. We can’t just assume that people are reading our emails and use that data anymore. Now, the good news is, it only affects Apple people right now. But it’s not an apple email address. And here’s the challenge, you can’t tell what email client someone is using. It’s like, if I send an email to you know, I don’t know, if you’re reading it on a laptop, or a phone or whatever. There are ways of tracking it, but most people don’t see it. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Hotmail address, or Gmail, you know, any of those addresses could be being read through Apple, my email, because you can add any email address you want onto your iPhone, and then you can read it using the Apple mail client. But in the test that I’ve done, then anywhere between 30 and 50%, of a typical email list appears to be using Apple Mail right now. So it means that in the worst case scenario, as much as half of your email list, you’re suddenly not going to see who’s opening from you anymore. So we’ve got a big challenge on our hands.

Adrian Savage   36:06  

So one of the things that I haven’t mentioned yet, I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years writing software, the first bit of software I wrote and released in 2015, was all about email deliverability, for Infusionsoft. And then about three or four years ago, I released something that’s become a deliverability dashboard, which is a whole set of tools that help you manage your email deliverability. And the latest software that I’ve written in the last month or so is a way of actually identify who is using Apple who isn’t using Apple, which doesn’t really help us if they are using Apple, because we still won’t know if they’ve read the emails or not. But if someone’s using, say, Gmail to read their emails, then we will know that we can still trust the open data for those people. So even if we’re losing half of our ability to manage our engagement, we can still stay on track with the other half hopefully. And then what it’s going to be about then is just being a lot more aggressive with our engagement management. What I normally suggest people is if someone gets a 90 days and they haven’t opened anything, you’re going to send them a couple of automated emails saying, Hey, are you still here, you want to read my emails, I’ve got some super content for you or whatever. If we don’t know whether they’re opening or not, we can have to change that. And maybe after 30 days, we’ll send people an email, instead of saying, hey, just want to make sure you want to stay on my list, click here to confirm you want to stay on my list. If not, I’m going to unsubscribe you. So I think it’s going to have to become a lot more kind of draconian we’re going because this is about quality. It’s not about quantity. And now one of the biggest challenges I have is suggesting that people do sacrifice all of these unengaged, unengaged people from email list, because a lot of FOMO here, people are thinking, Well, hang on, this guy might still come back and buy something at some point. So people don’t like getting rid of their unengaged contacts. But it is in very, very important to do that. Because, as I mentioned earlier on, if you’re sending emails to those folks that have opened 90 days ago or longer, you’re only going to get a three, four or 5%, open rates, something like that. And a really low open rate, like that hurts your email reputation like you couldn’t imagine. So that’s why it’s so important to let those folks go. And the annoying thing is just because we can’t see who’s opening our emails anymore in the future, Google still can Microsoft still can. So that’s the problem, we’ve still got to manage our engagement, even though we’re having our our eyes and ears taken away from us pretty much. So it just means we have to assume worst case that people aren’t reading and say prove to me that you still want it. And that means that our email lists are going to shrink, but the quality will stay high. And that’s what really matters. So keep that quality as much as possible. You know, there’s there’s so many ways of keeping your audience engaged and entertained. Because like you said, on when someone opts into your mailing list, it’s not about proposing marriage on the first day, we’re not selling stuff. We’re sharing stories, we’re educating, we’re informing, we’re entertaining. And the more we do that, the more people are going to want to hear from us, the more they want to receive our emails. And then when we say hey, do you still want to hear from me? They’re gonna say yes. And that and that’s the time when you can make the right offers to the right people, because you can see who’s engaging, you can see who’s clicking on your different links and information you’re sharing those the guys that you then send those offers to as well because you can really segment down by what people’s behavior is. And just because we’re losing the ability to see who’s opening things, everything else is still going to be okay.

Norman Ferrar  39:28  

I like the idea of almost reverse psychology. Yeah, I starting to get those type of emails right now. Yeah, it’s just like, what? Maybe I should click on it. Yeah. The guys the guys are playing with my head a little bit. But um, yeah, that’s a that’s a really great idea. One of the other things I was wondering about, especially like with the MailChimp, so the world or the Gmail or what is it Google Suite now Google workspace? Yeah. And you blast out 500 or 1000 or more emails, I think you’re limited on on some of these platforms. But anyways, that’s not a great thing to do. You shouldn’t be blasting it out from your Gmail account, you should be going into an active campaign or a MailChimp account or something like that, right?

Adrian Savage   40:18  

Yeah, very much. So wasn’t this, this is the thing. Your one to one email account is like the crown jewels, and you don’t want to risk getting that shut down or blacklisted or whatever. And the more answer this is, the more bulk emails you send from that, the more likely you are to get into trouble. And that’s why things like MailChimp Active Campaign keep HubSpot, you’ve got all these dozens of different email marketing platforms. And they’re designed to specifically send those bulk emails and marketing emails, because they can handle things like if you send an email to address it doesn’t exist anymore, they can handle the bounces, they can handle the unsubscribes because that’s the, you know, we’ve talked about sending emails to people that don’t want to anymore, there’s one thing worse than that is if someone if someone says I don’t want your emails, and you keep sending them after that, you’re gonna end up in a lot of trouble. That’s when you get labeled a spammer. And that’s when you will get shut down. And that’s why using something like MailChimp, or whatever is so important, because that protects you against that they have an unsubscribe link automatically at the bottom of every single email. And our job, if we’re sending marketing emails, we want to polarize our audience, we want them to either love us, which is really cool. We want to get them to really, really dislike us. We want them to dislike us enough, they can unsubscribe, because that way they save us the bother of having to go through and kill off all these unengaged people, I would much rather half of my list unsubscribes because let’s face it, they weren’t going to buy from me anyway. So we might as well just be a little bit controversial. And, you know, share, you know, be unapologetically you, that’s the way to do it. Be really clear who you are what you stand for. So that when if people don’t like what you’re saying, they’re going to unsubscribe, and you don’t have to spend lots of time going through finding all these people that don’t want your stuff. There’s nothing worse in the world of email than apathy, we want people to love us, or we want to really dislike us and unsubscribe, because anything else is just, you know, those people that aren’t engaging with us, they have no value.

Norman Ferrar  42:12  

You know, I, I had some real issues with my domain and emails being sent out. Because I was on a shared hosting server. Got it. Yeah. And it wasn’t us. But it was somebody on that server that was spamming people. And all of a sudden, we became a black on the blacklist. And so this is something that a lot of people don’t realize when they’re going over to Hostgator or to set and, you know, HostGator might be perfect. I’m not saying anything bad about Hostgator. disclaim, but, but anyways, if you’re on a shared server, and you’re paying like 10 bucks a month, or 20 bucks a month, you’re sharing it with somebody else. And if you’re finding out that your emails are having problems, you might want to call that hosting company to see if you are blacklisted somewhere. So that’s where you got to look for a different server or a different hosting company. And I just wanted to bring that up.

Adrian Savage    43:09  

That is really important, because this is again, this is why you know, companies like MailChimp, and Active Campaign and keep and all the rest, they are really good, because all of them have a team of people. And, and their job is to keep their reputation high and to keep them off the block lists. You know, that’s a job that you don’t have to do if you’re paying, you know, it might be, you know, 2040 50 bucks a month for a marketing platform. You don’t have to pay a huge amount of money for it unless you have a big list. And then those people will look after all that reputation stuff for you don’t have to worry about being on a blacklist, yes, they will still occasionally end up on a block list because they do their best to stop the spammers getting through. But occasionally it does that when that happens, they’ll they’ll ban the person who’s in the spam, and they’ll get unblocked as quickly as possible. So you know, this, the thing to remember, because another question I often get asked is which email platform is best for deliverability. And there is no such thing as a perfect platform. And to be honest, you know, I’ve talked a lot about engagement management. And if you try switching platforms to get better deliverability, that’s a little bit like changing gyms and not doing and not changing your exercises. Because the email platform is just a tool. If you go to a different gym and do the same workout, you’re gonna get the same results. And email is the same. If you don’t change your behavior and go to a different platform, then it’ll be no better. And there’s a little sting in the tail, because every time you do something different in the world of email, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo are very, very suspicious of change. If you move to a different platform, your open rates are going to go down a bit, even if everything else stays the same. So it’s much better to stay where you are, and just do all the good things and boost boost your reputation manager engagement and so on. And we probably still need to mention content a little bit as well. We haven’t got there. But there’s there’s some really cool questions coming in as well. So we’ll have to see

Norman Ferrar   44:54  

how we’ll get those questions. Okay, yeah, let’s touch on content then. get into the questions. But Neil Patel A, you worked with Neil Patel, and I love what he says about content. If you don’t produce the best content, don’t publish it.

Adrian Savage   45:11  

Yeah, absolutely. It’s got a it’s got to be. But then having said that, nothing is for everybody. As long as you’re being you, you’re gonna, you’ll put the time into, I think that’s the thing you got to make sure. And that doesn’t mean you gotta spend hours a day writing emails. But if you’re going to write an email, make it count, make sure you’ve got a message in there, make sure there’s something valuable you’re sharing. If someone doesn’t like it, that’s cool. There’s the door, but someone else will like it. But it’s a lot of the things with the content is it’s not just what you say, it’s the way you say it that matters. You know, we’ve got some questions about the Google promotions tab, as an example, in Google is really, really clever. Now, if you think going back to five years ago, there was a list of hundreds of different spam keywords that if you put the words on, if you put the word free into an email, it’s going to go into spam. That’s what people used to think. And maybe it was right, maybe it wasn’t, but that isn’t the case anymore. What Google do now is that they’re they’ve got this artificial intelligence, they got natural language interpretation, they will read the entire email and work out what the purpose of it is, does it sound like a promotion, does it sound like spam, and that’s what they’re doing it on, you can’t just, you know, if you, if you try and mass the word free in for F r dot dot e in an email, then they’re gonna say, hey, this guy’s gaming the system, we’re gonna put it into spam. So you just got to be really, really open and honest and authentic. And that’s how you’re going to get into the inbox best. But if it sounds like a promotion, unfortunately, you’re probably going to end up in the promotions tab, because it’s a promotion. So you’ve got to be very careful about getting that balance, right between educating and making offers. And you can do both in one email. But it’s the balance of things. And sometimes it can be as simple as changing a couple of words. And that can get you from promotions into the inbox as well. But a lot of it is around things like the number of images, you’ve got an email, the number of links, you’ve got an email, all of those things can affect whether you’re going to promotions as well, because let’s face it, if I’m sending a personal email from my phone to you, nor is it gonna have a great big image at the top of the email, is it going to have lots and lots of images through the email? Is it gonna have links all over the place? Or is it gonna be a nice simple email that says, hey, Norm, I’ve got something to share with you today, blah, blah, blah, speak soon, Adrian, if it’s a nice simple email that looks like it was written from one person to another, it’s going to go into the inbox, if it looks like it’s a promotional email with kind of lots of marketing gimmicks, and graphics and mass heads and all this, that and the other is going to go into promotions. So you’ve got to do a bit of experimenting with this and work out well, how can you tone your emails down to look like they’re more personal. And that’s the one thing that makes the biggest difference, you know, there’s 101 of the things as well, that really subtle things that can make that make the difference. But it is totally down to the content, the tone, the style of your email, that’s what makes the difference between promotions, and the inbox. And it is a constantly evolving thing you’ve got to be you’ve got to really stay on top of things and just test things. But the general thing is, you know, to one or two images, okay, three is starting to get a bit, you know, more than three images, you’re probably gonna end up in promotions. And the same with links than minimize the number of links, minimize the number of images. And please, please, if you’ve got an email signature, do not have all those links and icons for your social platforms. Some people will have five little images for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, five images, five links, guess what? It goes into promotions every single time. So take all that stuff out, keep it as plain and simple as possible. Because if you’re sending a marketing email, do you really want to distract people and send them off to your social when you’re trying to sell them something, you just got to get the balance, right. So that’s, that’s the biggest part of content. But the more just make it authentic. And just make it sound like you and make it look like it’s a personal email. That’s the simplest and quickest way for getting asked promotions into the inbox.

Norman Ferrar   49:04  

What about for a newsletter?

Adrian Savage    49:07  

Well, I’m not a fan of newsletters anymore. It’s interesting, because in the good old days, you might send a newsletter once a month, or every couple of weeks or something. And you might send four or five different articles and maybe a little teaser and saying, click here to read the full article and do that for each of them. What I would recommend these days is actually rather than send one newsletter with five different things in send five different emails out and send them more frequently, because the more frequently you send to your engaged people, the better you’re going to do. Because let’s assume you’re getting a 30% open rate for a second. If you’re sending one email a month, you got a 30% open rate, you’ve reached 30% of your list. If you send eight emails a month, and each one gets a 30% open rate, it won’t be the same 30% each time. And when I’ve done tests on that, if you send any two emails a week and you get a 30% open rate, you’ll probably find that 50% Or More of your audience will have opened at least one of those emails. So rather than send one newsletter infrequently send smaller articles more regularly, that’s gonna make a difference. If you do send a newsletter, or you know, another good example is E commerce because if you send an E commerce, you’re gonna send a whole load of different products at the same time. This is where all the stuff that content is guidelines rather than rules, because I’m willing to bet that you’re receiving emails from Amazon every now and then that still land in your inbox. Surely, you know, there’s more to it than just that if you’ve got people, if people open your emails anyway, they’re gonna keep opening them. So it’s all about getting the balance, right. And this is why no email deliverability is like a massive jigsaw, there’s so many different bits that can make an impact. And the more if you as long as you’re focusing on as many of the essential as you can like authentication, like managing engagement, sometimes you’ll get away with the occasional bit of content that isn’t quite as perfect as it could be. So it’s always about ticking as many boxes as you can without being obsessive about it. Because otherwise you could be here forever trying to, you might spend three months trying to get everything perfect, and you’ve not sent anything in that time. So it’s better to keep sending things out. Because consistency and cadence and regularity matters as well. Because the more frequently you’re sending to those super engaged people, the better your reputation is going to stay.

Norman Ferrar  51:21  

One last question before we get into questions, the the format of an email. Anytime I see an email that usually has the cell format that uses about a half or a quarter, I look at that as old school. I don’t know what your thoughts are. But it’s just like, delete, I don’t really even look at it.

Adrian Savage   51:43  

I don’t think it’s necessary anymore. Again, some people do it because it’s a way of being distinctive. But the whole point now is email clients, particularly on mobile devices, they’ve evolved and everything’s responsive, you got a small screen, it wraps it. So now just just write write it long form and just let the email clients handle it. You don’t need to squash it up and do it narrow or anything like that anymore. Because again, it suggests that maybe that’s a you know, maybe someone’s trying to gain the system or is selling or whatever. So again, just the more he can look like it came from your own personal email client, the better.

Norman Ferrar  52:19  

Very good. It’s time. Let’s get into some questions. And by the way, if you’d like to enter to get a 30 minute consult with Adrian, hashtag, Willa, Kelsey. Okay. Calce.

Kelsey  52:33  

Okay, so some of these questions we’ve answered through a show. So I’ll try and pick ones that we haven’t. So the first one is from Howard, would you recommend two different email accounts sent from one marketing to DTC customers and prospecting b2b segments?

Adrian Savage   52:52  

Okay, great question. Because the more different email accounts you’ve got, I guess it depends whether you’re talking about the an email address has got two parts as the bit before the sign as the bit after the sign. And it’s the bit after that sign that matters the most. And you could create a subdomain, so you could have deliverability dashboard.com. And you could have sales dot deliverability dashboard.com. And if you use two different domains like that, then the reputation is separated to a certain extent. Whereas if you just had one domain and had sales at or support ads, then that makes less of a difference. And the only time I really recommend separating domains out is if you’ve got a particular group of people like sales guys, or something like that, that are actually hurting your main reputation. Even if you separate it out, then there’s gonna be a bit of kind of cross fertilization anyway. But I’m not a fan of separating different different domains out. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have different accounts at the same domain most of the time, because that way, then, you know, you’ve got sales over here, you’ve got support over there. But that doesn’t, you know, they all contribute to your domains reputation, pretty much everything is managed at the domain level. So you’ve got to make sure even if there’s even if you’ve got a bunch of salespeople, ideally, you don’t want sending spam out and unsolicited emails, because that’s still going to hurt you, even if you do separate it out. So I’d say most of the time, I don’t separate things too much, but there’s always a reason to do it. I know that’s not a total black and white answer, I’m afraid but hopefully that’s that’s the best I can do.

Kelsey   54:23  

Okay, next one from Red. Is it okay to buy email listings from third party sellers.

Adrian Savage    54:30  

I do not recommend it. There is only one thing worse than that, and that is scraping email addresses off the internet. And both of them the main pitfall is you could be buying lists of spam trap addresses. A spam trap is one that’s either been created by a third party designed to catch people sending naughty emails, or there’s what’s known as a recycled spam trap, which is where an email address gets it falls out of use that they kept it for three months, and then they bring it back to life as a spam trap to catch people that don’t actually manage Email engaging properly. And if you buy a third party email list, firstly, those people haven’t given you personally consent to mail them. So you’re going to get a lot of spam country complaints, potentially, and that will hurt your reputation. But also there could be spam traps on there. So, you know, I wouldn’t say don’t ever buy third party lists, but be really, really, really careful before you do because you can find all kinds of Tiger traps you can fall into, if you’re not very, very careful with it.

Kelsey   55:30  

Hey, isn’t there a difference in open rate between ecom rates and service based providers?

Adrian Savage   55:37  

Yeah, I mean, this, this goes back to what we said earlier. You know, open rates is not a panacea anyway. And the only real thing you can do is just look at your own stats, and not compare them with someone else’s. So as long as what you’re doing improves, then that’s cool. But yeah, I mean, you know, every, every different audience will have a different open rate, every different type of email you send, every systems near different platforms might work slightly differently, they might measure them differently. So yes, there are lots of differences. And that’s why, you know, looking at your own trends are what really matters here. There’s no you can’t say, Hey, I’ve got a 60% open rate and suddenly think that you’re doing really well, because it could be there’s something else in there. That’s that’s that’s causing it. On the other hand, if you got a 3% open rate, that’s probably bad. So it’s kind of you know, you can still there’s there’s very broad ranges that you can look at. But I wouldn’t, you know, you can’t hang your hat on open rates is the only thing to look at. There’s so many other things out there as well.

Kelsey  56:33  

Okay, for Tony, I use Klaviyo. But I’ve been hearing that it’s not optimized and takes up a lot of space for Shopify. Are there any other options?

Adrian Savage    56:41  

Well, I mean, I would, I would stick with klavier, because it is an awesome platform. It’s got so much functionality that you can do so many clever things with it. And the clients, I’ve worked with it, use clay vo they get good results. So I’d say you don’t have you don’t have to dish it at all. But there are plenty of other platforms out there. I know a lot of people that use things like Active Campaign, the Shopify, and there’s plenty of other platforms. But again, don’t be too quick to jump ship from one platform to another unless you’ve got a real reason to do so. You know, Clay Vo is a really, really good platform. And, you know, I don’t know if has a direct impact on Shopify itself, but I can’t see anything else being that much better from that perspective as Clay vo was really specifically designed to work with EECOM platforms like Shopify. If you switch to something else, like Active Campaign, it’s still a good automation platform. But it hasn’t quite got that same level of data integration, things like that. So personally, I stick with klavier.

Kelsey   57:38  

Okay, and I think we’ve just done a couple more. Most of them. We’ve answered I think throughout the show. From Andrew, would you use your name on emails, ie, Andrew?

Adrian Savage   57:49  

Okay, easy peasy. Yes? And no. If you’re sending out personally emails, then yes, use your email on it. If you’ve got a support desk or something like that, then I would definitely use support app for something like that. Because even if you only got one person answering those support emails, right now, you might have a team in the future. And you need to just differentiate between when it’s a single person, or when it’s a particular role. And there’s there’s a there’s there’s a time and a place for both. And again, don’t suddenly switch from one to the other, if you suddenly thinking oh, he just said, do it this way. Because whatever you’ve got right now will be okay. And yeah, I would, I would say, myself, I even send my mail blast out from support at deliverability dashboard.com. Because that way, then when people reply, then it comes back into my help desk. And then my team can either directly email to me if it needs a personal reply, or they can handle it if it’s a general inquiry. But when I send those emails out, just because I’ve got the the email address is supported deliverability dashboard calm, it still has my name, Adrian savage as the actual name that the person will see. So you can kind of balance it that way as well. But if he’s individually email just from you that Andrew is absolutely fine as well.

Kelsey   59:01  

Okay, and last one, just clarifying from phase so you can’t get an actual promotional email into primary.

Adrian Savage   59:09  

I wouldn’t go that far, because I have seen emails that feel and sound promotional land in primary. But the majority of times, Google is very good at flagging it for what it is. And I’ll be honest, a lot of times people who are looking to buy stuff from you, they will expect it to go into promotions. Anyway. I remember when the promotional tab, first launch, and everyone goes, oh my gosh, this is going to be the end of email marketing. And actually open rates didn’t really drop that much because the people that were expecting to read the promotions still found it in promotions. So I’d say that it’s not the end of the world if it does go into promotions. And if it’s if it’s a if it’s a blatant offer, that’s where it will probably go. But a good examples where for a while I was sending an email every single day and every email I sent had a little mini offers a PS at the bottom of the email, and the majority of those didn’t go into promotions they landed in the inbox Because I was leading with content is a little PSA, by the way, if you want to check out this, then you know, you can find out more here. So it depends how blatant it is. There’s always a balance to be struck, but I’m a big fan of having those educational in, in, you know, entertaining emails that also have an offering them because that’s one way of getting around that. But you know, the good old product launch where it was a big cart closes in one hour email. That’s a promotion is probably in promotions box.

Norman Ferrar   1:00:27  

Yeah, the scarcity thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Adrian Savage   1:00:31  

Google’s AI is probably clever enough to kind of sniff that one out. Yeah.

Norman Ferrar   1:00:36  

Okay, that it goes.

Kelsey   1:00:40  

Yep, that’s it. Sorry, my Wi Fi is kind of, it’s all right now. But yeah, Kelsey. Okay.

Norman Ferrar   1:00:47  

Okay, so is that time, Adrian, you’ve never seen this? Ooh, yes. Wait, get ready for it. Oh, the wheel of Keller

Kelsey   1:00:57  

here it is. Okay, it’s everyone’s favorite time to we’ll have Kelsey. We got a ton of people enjoying today. So if you are the winner, please email me at K at lunch with Norm calm. And I’ll connect you with Adrian. Alright, so here we go. Give it a spin. 321 saying it kills. We’ll have Kelsey

Norman Ferrar   1:01:40  

we’ve got that Brian. Brian. All right, Brian, congrats. Oh, that is useful.

Kelsey   1:01:48  

Alright, so Brian, just email me Kay, at lunch with Norm calm. And I’ll connect you with Adrian. And yeah,

Norman Ferrar  1:01:55  

I did that. Alright, well, Adrian, thank you so much. You know, I think we we don’t know enough when we still don’t mark it enough. A lot of Amazon sellers don’t, at least with email marketing. And what you brought to the table today was fantastic. And I really appreciate you coming on.

Adrian Savage   1:02:16  

Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me know,

Norman Ferrar  1:02:18  

hey, no problem. I you know, I’m gonna reach out to you to see if you can come on our Clubhouse room one of these days

Adrian Savage   1:02:25  

as well. Absolutely. Oh, there’s one thing. I forgot to mention that I’ve actually got a checklist that will actually go it pretty much covers everything we’ve talked about is okay.

Norman Ferrar  1:02:35  

That should absolutely that was my next question. How do we contact you? So,

Adrian Savage  1:02:39  

okay, so. So Easiest way is if you go to get dot deliverability dashboard.com forward slash checklist. I’m sure to share this, I don’t think I can kind of cover it myself or so look for I send that to Kelsey there when you can hopefully share that in the comments. So that checklist is everything you need to know about reputation authentication, content and engagement. And then the other option as well, if you’re using the majority of email platforms, I’m adding support for more as we go along. I’ve got a free email health check that will tell you how well you’re managing your engagement. And that is just email health check dot.net. Kelsey, got that their email. So those those are two different links people use to find me. If you sign up for those, then you get a link to my Facebook group as well. And that’s where people always contact me ask questions, things like that. Always happy to help as much as possible.

Norman Ferrar   1:03:43  

Fantastic. Well, thank you again for coming on. You’re gonna be leaving the podcast, but stick around and we’ll chat for a bit afterwards.

Adrian Savage    1:03:51  

Absolutely. Thanks again.

Norman Ferrar   1:03:52  

All right. We’ll see you later agent. Alright, everybody, so that was awesome. Adrian’s Adrian’s Awesome, we got to get him back on. And if you want to learn more about this type of marketing, you know, let us know. Let us know some of your questions. And we’ll we’ll definitely answer them for you. Okay, so before we do anything, I just wanted to thank excuse me, thank our sponsor, H refs. And oh, by the way on Wednesday, this is going to be awesome H rifts is going to be on Patrick stocks is going to be on talking about e commerce and SEO. So E commerce SEO on Wednesday, which is going to be great. But before we get to that, you know, I always talk about this. I talk about, you know, building an e commerce website. You know, it’s crucial when we’re talking about building your brand and 2021 but a lot of Amazon sellers just don’t have the time to do it. You know, how do you get your website SEO health scores up? Where do you start? Well, H refs is here to help. So they monitor your SEO health, your backlinks, your keywords, and it’s for free. So all you do is go to their site, and that is hrs comm. Slash AWT. That’s H R E F s.com/awtandyoucangetafreereportonthehealthbacklinkseverythingthatyouneedtoknowtostartbuildingyourseohealthsoi. Can’t wait till H refs comes on and starts talking about this. We don’t talk enough about your E commerce, SEO health. So that’s going to be on Wednesday. Kelsey, anything else?

Kelsey   1:05:30  

Okay. Just want to give a big thanks to everyone tuning in today. Hope you guys enjoyed. And yeah, we look forward to having you on or to have people on Wednesday. And yeah, if you haven’t already, please smash those like buttons, you can join our Facebook group lunch with normal Amazon FBA and E commerce collective. It’s a great place to throw in questions about Amazon ECAM. And just get to know the community. A lot of people watch from the Facebook group stream so you can always interact with people there as well. And if you missed today’s episode, and just catching the tail end of it today, you can go over to our YouTube channel, Norman Farrar, and you’ll be able to see that all the episodes were coming up on 200 episodes at the end of September two. So we’re going to do a special fan episode that I’ll be posting about in the group soon. So definitely get in there. And yeah, I think that’s about it.

Norman Ferrar 1:06:29  

Okay, can you put that? That URL in for Marsha?

Kelsey   1:06:35  

Yeah, yeah, it was. Just alright.

Norman Ferrar  1:06:38  

So I think that’s it unless you’re going to interrupt me. No, no, good. I’m good. Can I say my thing? The only way to say this, I get to say no lines. I’m good now. Okay. Don’t interrupt. Okay. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. And this my second line if he doesn’t interrupt me, thank you for watching. We appreciate you as being part of our community. We couldn’t do it without you. And we will see you on Wednesday.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai