Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What if more than half your new leads never see a single email you send? And not because of bad copywriting and not because of poor targeting, but because of something happening silently before your email ever reaches an inbox? And this horror story is true for lots of businesses, and they have no idea. In this episode of Databeats Opinion, we're talking with Adrian Savage, co founder of Email Smart and one of the sharpest minds in email deliverability, or really, as he prefers to call it, inbox visibility.
Going deep on why the email metrics you're watching are probably lying to you. Also, the number one thing you should be measuring but probably aren't, and why emailing your entire list could actually be destroying that single asset that you're trying to build. If email is critical to your marketing, and it should be, this episode will change how you think about it. Let's start the show.
Adrian, super happy to have you.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Like, this is exciting. We.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: We've known each other forever, like way back in the day. I don't even want to think about how long it's been.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: More than. More than 10 years.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, definitely.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah. A long time.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't. It's. You're one of those friends that I don't even remember where we first met. It's been so long. And those are the best friends. So I'm. I'm super happy to have you on this. And, man, email is changing. So I think this is very apropos and I'm really excited to talk to you about this.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Awesome. Let's go for it.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So for people who don't know you, give us a little bit of your backstory.
Email is. And especially email deliverability is such a thing.
How'd you get into this?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah, you don't kind of wake up one morning and think, hey, I want to be an email deliverability specialist.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Unless you're a masochist.
I'm not.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Definitely not.
So, I mean, I got into tech when I was still in short pants. I was about seven, I think, when my dad brought an Apple II computer home, if anyone remembers those.
And I read the manual and taught him how to use it. So that's. I've been a geek for the last 45, 46 years, something like that. I'm showing my age a bit. Did the usual corporate stuff. Escaped from that. Maybe 15 years ago, my ex wife very kindly moved to the other end of the country with my kids, and the only way I could keep seeing them was by quitting my job and going into the big Bad world, being an entrepreneur. So that was how I got into the world of email marketing because I joined mastermind groups and I was the only techy guy in the group. So everyone was like, hey Adrian, how do I do my email marketing? And then a couple of years later it was, it was like, hey Adrian, some people aren't seeing my emails.
So that's how it all started is I just kind of stumbled across people that were having what turned out to be deliverability problems and I just started learning about how to get the emails to land in the inbox and, and back then 10, 12, 13 years ago, it was a very different landscape to what it is today. Back then, as long as you didn't have certain spammy words in the subject and as long as the survey you were sending from was well trusted, then your emails would get through pretty much.
Fast forward to now and there's a million different rules that you ought to follow if you want your emails to be seen. So it's changed a lot in that time. I started off writing software to help people get their emails seen and I think that's how you and I first met when I launched WeDeliver back in 2015 or something like that.
And then from there as Google started to change their rules and you know, back in the late kind of 2018, 2019, even Google were using AI to decide whether to deliver emails or not. Things changed so that rather than where you were sending it from, they started looking at what you as a sender were doing.
And it's all evolved further from there and it gets more complex. So one of my jobs is to stay ahead of the game there. I'm very lucky that Evan, who's my co founder of Email Smart, he's even more of a nerd than me when it comes to emails land in the inbox.
So that then gives me the time to focus on getting the best possible software to help people get their emails seen as well.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: I think one of the hardest things about email deliverability for an end user, right, someone who's not in this, is that it's completely opaque, right. We have no idea if our emails are getting through or not. And there's, there are tools that help, but even they are like, they're either super expensive or they're. We don't know how to read them. Right. And so when we're talking about email deliverability, like what does that kind of mean? Because I think there's, and I think you'd agree there's different layers of deliverability now. That we have, like you were saying 15 years ago, there was no promotions box, there was no notifications box, there was just this fire hose of. Of content in your inbox. Right?
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And this is why, if I had access to the folks that maintain dictionaries and things like that, I would have them go and find the entry that says deliverability and scratch it out, never to be seen again.
Nobody understands what the word actually means.
Some people think it means delivery, other people means has it landed in the inbox. Other people mean think it's, oh, it's something that my email provider is going to take care of anyway. So I don't care. And this is why I hate that term because it confuses people. It sounds incredibly techy, it's very easy to just say it's someone else's problem and so on. So this is why I'm trying to focus a lot more on what really matters here, which is what I call inbox visibility. And is your mail landing in the inbox and is it being seen? Because if your email isn't being seen, it doesn't matter how good your offer is, it doesn't matter how amazing your audience is, it doesn't matter how good your copy is. If someone doesn't see your email, you can't make a sale. It's as simple as that. So we don't care if it's been delivered or not. We care has it been seen. That's what matters here.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: What is the measurement of being seen? Because it can't be open rate, because an open rate, now that they auto open emails and stuff, is a difficult number at that point. So like, what does being seen mean?
[00:05:58] Speaker B: This is the challenge. You cannot measure it because the only people that know if your email has been seen or not are the mailbox providers themselves. The only person that knows if I send something to your Gmail address, the only person apart from you that knows if you've read it or not is Google. And they sure as hell ain't telling anyone.
You can put as many tracking pixels and whatever else as you want in there, but as you just said, you know, Apple and even Google these days, they sometimes preload those things. So. So it looks like someone has opened something even if they haven't. So we can't track opens like that, we can't track clicks, because let's face it, if you send an email out and you get a 3% click rate, you have a party. But that doesn't mean the other 97% didn't open the Email, we just don't know.
So I've spent a lot of time in the last five or six years trying to work out, well, what metrics can we come up with to infer whether people are seeing your email sufficiently or not? Because we can't measure it directly. So we have to come up with different metrics that help us get an understanding of what our audience audience is doing based on what we can see. We have to kind of fill in the gaps because it's a bit like SEO. Nobody knows what Google's rules are and email is just the same.
And anyone who says they've got this software that will tell you whether it lands in the inbox or the promotions tab, that's great. But they're just, they're mainly, with the greatest of respect, they're selling snake oil. Because the only way you can tell if an email lands in the inbox or not is to look inside an email inside a mailbox. And the problem is these people doing that, they're either buying the data from real users that may not be representative of your audience or they might be operating their own inbox. And all that can do is either open things or not open things. And Google changes the behavior of whether the email lands in the inbox or not based on the behavior of each individual subscriber.
So if someone's saying I can tell you if this lands in the inbox or not, they're only telling you that for that one specific mailbox they're monitoring or the collection of mailboxes they're monitoring and they're not going to be real people normally and they're either going to open everything or ignore everything. And you know, you can't read anything into what someone else is telling you they are seeing.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: It's so personalized at this point up to a point where we, and we don't control that personalization at all. Right. And but there are things I believe that you can do from the user perspective of the person getting the email that then would make those emails always come in, like responding to an email and stuff like that, like that type of engagement. Is that still valid?
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. Because I'll focus on Google because they are the biggest mailbox provider by at least a factor of two. Typically Google will control more than 50% of all the addresses on your email list. If you're a standard business to consumer or even business business is a small business. Google are going to be in there. So I'll focus on them. But actually Microsoft and Yahoo that typically make up you know, between the three of them, they make up 75, 80, 85% of an email list. They all have similar rules. So when I talk about Google, I'm including everyone else in there as well. But what Google are looking at here is, well, what signs can I see that show that Keith is responding to Adrian's emails?
And opening it is obviously one of them. Keeping the email open and scrolling through it is another one. Clicking a link is another one. Replying to an email is a really big signal. And then there's other things. If you don't do it, then that's a negative signal. So if you ignore my email and leave it in the inbox unread, that's a bad signal. The worst possible signal is if my email lands in the spam folder for some reason and you leave it there. That's the. That's the word.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Because obviously Google will treat people with suspicion sometimes. And you know, the biggest challenge is when someone opts into your email list for the first time, there's a greater than 50% chance that that first email is going to go into spam. No matter how good your reputation is. And if your recipient doesn't rescue that from spam and mark it as safe, then they are unlikely to ever see another email from you again.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: I mean, considering how much spam. Like, I have probably 10,000 spam emails in my spam folder and it's like, I don't go in and clean that up, right? Like Google's cleaning that up every 30 days when it deletes them. But, like, if something gets in my spam, there's a zero chance that I'm seeing it.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Exactly. So if someone signs up to my email list, the first thing I have to do, this is my most important job. And this is why I never have an upsell on my thank you page. The only thing I care about when someone opts into my email list is, please go and find my email and get it out of spam.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Way back in the day, when we were doing work with I Will Teach, we had a script that would check the MX records of the person's email address and see, are they on Hotmail or like you said, Gmail? Because everyone's. Even if it's their own domain, there's a high chance they're still using Gmail as the provider. Right. And we would give them a link to search for that because we knew what the subject line was and we'd be like, looks like you're on Google. Click here and it will open the email and search for it and go find it. Is that still a tactic you see that works? Is that like there's so much that has changed in the years, right?
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's something I've never heard before. But as long as they're using the web interface into Gmail then that is, that's, that's absolute gold dust. So that's exactly it. Particularly if it's making it to check the spam folder as well. Because that's the biggest issue is it just not just finding it, but finding it inside the spam folder and marking it as safe. Because Google is probably the most flexible with this.
Because with Google you can create a rule that says if an email comes in from Keith that segmetrics say never put it in spam, always put it in the inbox.
So if you want to be that kind of hard hitting with your audience, you can actually say don't just rescue out the spam box and mark it as safe, but create a rule to say never send it to spam.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: And that's the, that's the ultimate way. But unfortunately I would say 99 people out of 100.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Yeah, now I'm gonna do it.
First of all they probably don't know how to do it and second of all they probably wouldn't set that up right.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: But you know, we can do the basic version of that, which you know, Evan, my co founder, he calls it modifying human behav. It's training people to go into the spam folder, grab it, rescue it, mark it as safe, put it back into the inbox and then if you tell them to reply to it as well, that gives that extra legitimacy signal to Google saying hey, this person hasn't only rescued it from spam, they've actually replied. So they must be interested in this. And the more things you can get people to do to engage with you at the time of opt in, the more likely you are to get your emails delivered forevermore for that person.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: So this is interesting because this is something that, you know, we're all about data, we're about understanding how much of this gets that engagement. How are you tracking if people responded or not? So let's say that you have that people signed up for the list. You're like go into your inbox, respond to this thing, I'm going to give you a PDF or whatever, like just something to tease them into engaging and responding to that. How are you then measuring that on the back end of this person responded, this person didn't all we can do
[00:13:06] Speaker B: is just see if the open indicator is there or not and see if they clicked. That's all we can do. And the time that my heart sinks is when someone asks me to troubleshoot an individual email visibility issue where they say, this one person hasn't got my emails. And that's the toughest thing to do in the world because we don't really know what's happening. The only thing we can do with this is look at things at scale and look at the trends because, you know, okay, I mean, I've analyzed thousands of different email senders. So I've got an idea of what good looks like and what not so good looks like to some extent, as long as the metrics are within a tolerance range somewhere in the middle. So it's like if the, if a typical open rate is somewhere between 45% and 60%, then it means people are doing okay. If the click rate is, you know, 1, 2%, ideally higher, then that's okay. And then you have to look at the trends because obviously we know that Apple are kind of, you know, they're, they are distorting the figures because they're making it look like a lot more emails were opened than really were. But as, and this is why I expect to see an open rate of 50 to 60% these days, because that includes all of the fake opens and things like that. So as long as it's that range, it's okay. But the thing that matters is the trend because as long as you are fairly consistent with your opens and your clicks, you know, you're doing okay. If they start to go down, you know, you've got a problem and that's when you need to investigate. And that's looking at kind of the simple stuff. But then one of the metrics that I look at that I don't think anybody else does, I've yet to find software that does. It is looking at how the overall audience engages on a rolling 30 days.
And what I'm looking at there is, well, how many people have opened at least one email in the last 30 days? How many people have clicked at least one email in the last thirty days? We can control that level because obviously if they're not clicking or not opening, we can stop sending to them.
And that will artificially inflate the percentage of people opening or clicking because, you know, I've always joked to clients that I can double their open rate overnight
[00:15:09] Speaker A: the way I do it, just by sending less emails.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: I just delete half their contacts off their list that haven't opened for a while and certainly the number of openers hasn't changed, but the open rates doubled. And here's the thing. Google love you if you've got a high open rate, because what Google want to do is they want to make money from the ads that they display when someone opens an email. If you've got a low open rate, you're not making Google much money. So it's very much in your interest to only send emails to the folks that have recently opened something because they're the ones that are most likely to open the next one.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Right?
[00:15:42] Speaker B: And that's what matters here. Because the other side of that as well is, and this is, you know, this is probably the least talked about metric ever. The reason I'm really excited to be sharing this on this particular podcast is because I would expect that the majority of people listening to this will be fairly clued up about numbers and ROI and how well things are performing.
Because a lot of my clients spend a lot of money on ads.
Maybe 10, 20, $30,000 a month is not uncommon. Now if you are doing this right, you're going to be doing legion on the front end, capturing the email address and then following up. Because we know that not everybody buys straight away.
So if the follow up emails aren't getting through, then you are losing the ability to sell to those people. And for a typical new client or new prospect that I look at, the metric that I look at is what percentage of new leads have opened something in the first 30 days. Now it is possible to achieve 90% of people opening something in the first 30 first 30 days. The challenge is that most businesses, it's less than 50%. And one guy I spoke to last week who's coming on board as a client now, it was under 10% of his new leads. Anything in the first 30 days. He was spending 30 grand a month on ads and he was wondering why his launch had gone from 100k last year down to 25k this year. And that was why nobody was seeing his email.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: That's painful.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: And he wasn't measuring that metric, but most people don't.
So if there's nothing else that you take away from this podcast, the one thing I'd encourage you to do is look at all the people that have joined your list in the last 30 days and work out the percentage of them that have opened something. If it's not 80 or 90%, then you've got some work to do. And similarly, you need to look at the Percentage of new leads that are clicking. If you're not getting 50% of your new leads clicking, then again you're leaving money on the table, you're wasting ad spend. And you know Evan, my co founder, he's got a very well known client in the coaching personal development space. She is achieving 75% of new leads clicking, which is insane. That puts her in the top 1% of all of our people we've ever measured.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: It's possible to get 75% of.
I would say that 50% is a reasonable target and if you're nowhere near that, then please get some help.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Now I kind of want to see what our numbers are. So this is, it's interesting because you know we have that partnership with Kit.
Kit Insights is running on segmetrics on our data platform and everything and using our analytics. One of the first things that Nathan and the team came to me with was the most important thing for our customers is to understand the engagement of that list and especially not only just in the 30 days, but continuing. And we were like, yeah, that's an easy thing to do but we had never thought of it in those terms before of oh, this is something that just needs to be out of the box. This isn't a report that you go build. This is like a core fundamental piece of how your marketing is doing is that engagement, especially on 30 days. And he was like, here's what it needs to look like. And he has this really cool graph that he sent me. I'm like this is brilliant. And so we built that out and now it's kind of in Kit Insights right now and mainstay metrics of like of the people on my list, how long from the day they are created to whenever they stop, are they engaging with those emails? Right. What's, what's that engagement life cycle over time. And it's interesting to watch that drop and drop and drop over time. But you're exactly right. In that first 30 days you really just have to have people completely engaged because it drops off so quickly.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: And that's, that's the challenge. I mean if someone has signed up to your email list, in theory they are, are, that is the most likely they are ever to engage with you. The only other time they're going to be as likely to engage is when they just bought something.
So that means you've got a golden opportunity to actually get that engagement there and then. And if you don't manage that in that moment, then you've lost them.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: When you're talking about that first 30 days and you're talking about that 75%, that 90%. Is that at the end of that 30 days or is that at some point because everyone's opening probably the first email or the second email, but from the beginning to the end, how high do you want to keep that engagement there?
[00:19:57] Speaker B: I'm not actually measuring that, believe it or not, because all we're looking at is just that average 30 days because.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Got it. Okay.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: What I have looked at is the 30 day average isn't all that different from the 7 days because as you said, if they haven't opened something in the first few days, they're probably never going to open anything in most cases.
So we're measuring it 30 days because that's how far back we're looking as well. So that way then, if there was a contact that was added 30 days ago, then that's still catching those ones as well. But on the whole, I would agree that it's getting them to open that first email is what matters. And then the hardest thing after that is to get them to keep opening. Because normally in a typical, I know I've seen someone in the past, they had a 12 email welcome sequence and by the time they got to email number 12, then the engagement rate had dropped off from like 70% open to the first one, down to about 15% for the last one because it became irrelevant. So the thing that is definitely different to years ago is that attention has dropped massively. So you need to get, get to the point quicker, get your message out quicker, make the emails shorter and make sure there's always something to keep them engaged. Because the other challenge is that three or four years ago people would keep opening your emails and then they might stop for a while. They might have a couple of weeks before they see your emails. They might have a month and then they come back and open another one.
These days, what I call the point of no return has dropped to about 13 or 14 days.
So if someone hasn't opened your emails for two weeks, the chances are they will never ever open email ever again.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: I actually see that with my own emails as well. Like the emails that I get. Like, I'll sign up for someone's newsletter, it's like, oh, I'm really excited about this and I'll read a few of them and then life gets in the way and then I stop reading and after two weeks of not reading, it's just like it's sitting there in my inbox and I'll get to that later is like the killer of that. It never happens. It never happens.
So this is something Laura Roeder at Meet Edgar was talking about her, her, her nurture sequence for people when they join the list and she's like, we give out whatever they opted in for that magnet and then it's hard sell for 10 days.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: And it is every single day, every, every email is a hard sell. And then it goes into a soft sell after that. But she knows that if they do not make that sale in the first 14 days, that the chance of them continuing to engage and to do anything just drops like a rock.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: I want to go back to one thing that you had mentioned before, which, and I'm just maybe tugging at a thread that doesn't exist, but that reply to I feel is such a valuable metric and you said there's nothing that tracks it.
Why is can it be tracked? If we could track it, would that be something good to track?
[00:22:38] Speaker B: It's useful to track. But here's the thing. If you tamper with the reply address so that it goes into some kind of system that's going to track it for you, then you're immediately watering down the effectiveness of it because Google's looking for a reply to the same address that sent it. And beyond that, if you're replying to some kind of software that's tracking it, that likely won't even be on your domain. So I know the active campaign used to do a reply tracking thing and the reply to address became something cpv.com it's horrible.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: No, so that doesn't work.
I know that some CRM will take control of the outbound and the inbound email and they can report at that level. So as long as you are using that as your primary customer communication tool, then that's one way of doing it and measuring it. But that will only work if you're using a CRM or some kind of email platform that does actually handle all the incoming email as well. And it's got some kind of way of marrying up the subject line or some kind of ID in there or something.
Because you know the only other way you can do it is just if you're using some kind of support system for the replies, then you can probably train it to look for particular subject lines and things like that and do metrics based on that. But it's not, it's certainly not an exact science, but getting a gut feel for what your replies are is probably useful. But let's face it, the reply Rate is likely to be even lower than a click rate.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Right? Which is already minuscule. 3%, 2%. Yeah. And so, interestingly enough, you know, you touched on something which is that the email that you are sending from the email, the actual address is generally different than your standard email address. Right? You're not going to be sending from Adrian at most likely.
Same domain, but different email address. We do the same thing. Because otherwise I get so many, so many emails when, when the wrong email goes out, does that email address then are there things you can do for that email address or does it not even matter? Because I've seen outbound email addresses where they're warming the domain and they're having bots talk to each other, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But if an email address is only for your marketing, is that a limiter? Right? You get what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm asking a smart or a dumb question.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: It's not that much of a limiter because as far as Google are concerned, the domain is the domain.
Now, if you start splitting things out into subdomains, so you might have a subdomain for your marketing emails, then that does start to have a little bit more of a bearing on it. But there's what I call reputation bleed, which is whatever the main domain has as a reputation and subdomain, there's going to be an overlap. If you're, if you've got a subdomain that you're sending all your marketing from and you get loads of complaints and the reputation drops for that, it will still bleed back into your main domain. So you can't completely protect things. And interestingly, I've seen cases where people have spun up a whole new domain, almost a burner domain, if you like to try and just, you know, send junk mail and things like that.
When they've done that, you know, or they've done it because they'd already trashed their main domain and thought, oh, I'll spin up a new domain and that's going to solve my problems. Unfortunately, it isn't, because Google is too clever for them. Google's very good at joining the dots and working out, hey, so this person who's created segmetrics.com and they've trashed their domain reputation, they've now got this new domain called welovemetrics.com but look, they're talking about Segmetrics. It must be the same thing. So within a matter of days we will link the domains together because the AI is all Seeing. And it doesn't matter how you try and gain the system and pull the wool over Google's eyes, they're going to spot that. And you will see that the reputation of the new domain you just spun up will very quickly crash down the same way that the original one did. So you can't game the system. I think that's, you know, I mean, I'm going to go off on a quick rant there about gaming the system as well, because you see people selling software or solutions and say, put this magic code into your email and I'm going to get your email out of the promotions tab into the inbox or whatever. The crazy thing is, it works, but it only works for a few days until Google work out what you're up to. Because as soon as you start stuffing code or changing what's hidden inside the emails, then that's a technique that's normally known as hash busting. And that's something that spammers have been doing for years to try and make emails look like something that they're not. You know, kind of a walk in sheep's clothing, if you will. And Google and Yahoo, I think Yahoo in particular, their, their main email guy, he posted on, there's a, there's a Slack group called Email Geeks, which is awesome. And there's this guy, Marcel Becker, he posted in that publicly, saying if he sees this person, anytime that Yahoo see this person's software attached to someone's sending, they will block that particular sender as soon as they find it because they don't agree with it. It's game.
So. So be very wary if you ever see these too good to be true solutions that add magic code in to save your emails. Because actually, yes, it will work because they sell the solution to you. And it works for a little while, but then sooner rather than later, then you get caught up, you get caught out. There's, you know, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch in the, you know, there's no silver bullets in this game.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: I mean, getting into like, even SEO stuff, it's the same thing. Like if you suddenly make a thousand pages with almost the same content, but it's slightly spun, you're going to have a huge SEO boost for about a month.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: And then it's going to tank because Google's going to say, wait a minute, all these pages are exactly the same. They were created at exactly the same time. And like, oh, look at this. And you're. And your entire site may go down right in Ranking, because Google's been, well, these guys are scammers.
It's very frustrating. So I want to touch on something that you said, because I don't know if this is true or not. And I'd love to get your opinion because I don't know if people know this or not. So a lot of people. We also did cold outreach. We did the, okay, we're going to create seven new domains, we're going to warm them up, and then we're going to do cold outreach through them. What you're saying, though, is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, creating those domains, and if we burn that domain, it might affect our main domain because Google says, oh, look, both of these domains have the word psychometrics in them. They both have. They're both talking about psychometrics. And this one's obviously spam.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Absolutely. There's always that risk. Now, the way that people get away with cold outreach is by staying under Google's radar. Because let's face it, if a domain is only sending 50 emails a day out, Google aren't going to care.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Google doesn't care.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's why people get away with cold outreach, because as long as you keep the volumes low enough, you are less likely to get into trouble. I'm not saying you won't get into trouble because any kind of cold email, unsolicited email, is still considered spam by Google. It's just that as long as you keep it low enough and as long as you can craft it in such a way that you're less likely to get spam complaints and you're more likely to get. Get good results.
Okay, so a lot of that is be very careful how you build your list of prospects you want to reach out to. Be very careful how you word the emails. Make sure there's something really compelling in there. So it's, you know, so it's the usual marketing principles.
On top of that, then it's just be very cautious and don't send many of them.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: It almost sounds antithetical to what a lot of the outbound people say, which is like, this is a numbers game, so you want to be sending 5,000 emails a day or whatever. And I'm like, man, that just feels like a burning the domain, burning the list, burning your reputation. And at some point it's just like, okay, this is just spam, right? We're not having a conversation. We're not creating good content and good outreach. We're just spamming.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: It's a numbers game. Until you get caught. But I guess the way the world is evolving is becoming easier to make it more personalized. So I think, you know, there's this.
At some point my prediction is that traditional email marketing is going to disappear because it will be possible to personalize every single email that goes out. At which point the game's going to change again but the engagement trend is still going to matter. It's just we are going to be able to make it more possible to engage at an individual level rather than these email broadcasts. And you know, even the automations we've got today, they're not exactly personalized, are they? There's a couple of, maybe a couple of custom fields in there and a few bits like that. But the more you can truly personalize each email you send, the more like you have of a successful engagement. And that applies to cold email as well.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Man, there's so much, so much to unpack here. And it's interesting because you, you know, we're getting into this, the zero click marketing world right now where Amanda from SparkToro was talking about the percentage of Google searches that turn into a click is now less.
Sorry, 84% of Google searches do not end in a click is the number right now. And she was talking specifically about owning your platforms. All the social platforms are locking down, they are changing algorithms at any point, they are changing what you can do with their data. And at the end of the day the only thing you can control is your email list. And you talk to people who have large email lists. You talk to Brendan Dunn, you talked to Ramit Sadie, you talked to Eben Paying, you talked to any of these people and like would you rather lose all your money or lose your email list? And everyone's like lose the money, right? Like because with the list you can build that back because the list is the only in this day and age, it's the only thing you own, no one can take that away from you and show your stuff in a different way. And it's probably the most valuable asset we have.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Absolutely with and I can't see that changing because even, you know, my prediction is that a year from now AI is going to be controlling what people see in their inbox because you won't get a traditional list of here's all the emails you've received today. Instead there'll be some kind of AI curated list saying here's the things you need to know today. But the, the transport mechanism underneath that is still going to be email, there's still going to be An SMTP connection from the mail platform to Gmail or something, something like that. It's just what sits on top of it is going to be different. And our role as marketers is going to be to change the way that we communicate and engage with that audience and measure the engagement. Because again, deliverability is gone. It's purely going to be visibility. And it's not just did your email get seen by the person, but can it get recognized as important by the AI? So there's a whole, you know, the same way that SEO has already transformed, now we've got AEO and email is going to go the same way, there's no doubt about that. So, and again, this is where I'm very fortunate to have Evan as my co founder because he's all over the, like, you know, he's all over that like a rash already working out how, how we can advise people what they're going to need to do when Gmail launches their first AI inbox that's in beta at the moment, and so on. There's, you know, we've got to be ready for the changes because the world is going to change and we have to keep up with it. The people that don't, the people that, I mean, right now we've got people who are emailing like it's 2012 still. You know, they'll build the biggest list they can and they'll just mail the hell out of it until people buy it, they die or they unsubscribe and they wonder why they're getting filtered all the time. Now those, those folks, when AI comes in, they're going to be even more dead than they are. But the people that are still being, they're being pretty good by today's standards. They're going to need to evolve as well. You know, on the one hand, Google is going to make life more difficult because again, it enforced things like quarantining and things like that come at some point. And if people aren't reporting on the technical side of their emails at that point, then they're going to, they'll have no idea what emails are getting through and what emails aren't. And then beyond that, it's like, okay, so we will do all the things to keep Google happy at the technical and the kind of the compliance level. But then from a content perspective, how do we craft our emails so that the AI will recognize the relevance to the audience enough that they will show it to them?
And then we've still got to get our audience to want to Read it, open it, and act on it. AI is making it so easy to create the content now that when someone used to get 100 emails a day, they're now getting a thousand emails a day.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: So I was at a conference last week and I came back to 520 emails. So, yeah, and not even the promotions. One like that was in the inbox. 520 emails, and most of them are crap. But like, it's just, it's so much. I actually use an AI assistant to scan my emails, see what I need, like categorize them. Is this urgent? Is this like an update? Blah, blah, blah. You know, we talk about that email like 2012, right? And it's interesting because I've worked with people with giant lists, I've worked with people with small lists, and the value per person is so different. So if you have a million, 2 million people on your list, they're probably worth a penny a piece, right? On average, your lead value for anyone on your list is probably a penny. And I've talked to people who have. Have 20,000, 30,000 people on this and their value per person is like 79. Yeah, right.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Like, I've got a distinction for you there as well, Keith. Okay.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: Oh, yes, please.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Obviously, a lot of people look at their list size and you know that term. There's. Was it. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.
Now, in the world of email, list size is vanity, engagement is sanity. So they might talk about a 30,000 list, but what percentage of those are engaged? Now, if your entire list is engaged, the value per lead or the value per contact on that list is between 5 times and 10 times more than if you have an unengaged list. So it really is in your interest to make sure you are managing that engagement really tightly and only mailing those folks that have opened recently because the value of your list grows by an order of magnitude. It's not just like a 2x increase, it is 5 to 10 times.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: Do you think that it's FOMO? Like, it's almost like a hoarding, isn't it? Because people are like, well, it doesn't hurt to send it to someone who hasn't opened in six months. And maybe if they open it and buy, that's an extra 50, 100, $300. Right.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: It's a mindset people have. And I have to remind them of two things. Firstly, there's Einstein's rule of insanity, which I'm sure you know what that one is.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Is it the one to do the same thing and expect different results?
[00:36:54] Speaker B: You've nailed it. So if someone hasn't emailed the last 25 emails you sent them, then what in the name of all things sacred means they're going to open the next one? It is not going to happen. It's as simple as that. So that's the first thing. And then the other side of that as well is if you're mainly the people that haven't engaged for weeks or months or whatever, then we're already saying that Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting different results. They are not going to open that next email. But this is where we go back to what I said about the point of no return. We have got the data now that for a typical list, if someone hasn't opened an email in the last 14 days, 16 days, something like that, they're gone forever. So there's just, there's no point.
One of the tools that I released this year is called my reputation checker. And one of the things it's got in there, kind of a byproduct of what I built, is what I call the sending behavior and the results of that. So on a day by day basis, I can plot a graph showing how recently did they engage from green through to red. So green is the last seven days, yellow is the last 30 days, then it goes to different shades of red. And there's a separate graph that shows how many people opened those emails. And the headline news is this. You can barely ever see any of the red folks opening anything, hardly ever. There's specific cases where you might. But on the whole, you've got to accept that if someone hasn't opened in the last 30 days, there's more chance of there being a second moon up there going around the earth than that email getting opened.
Why bother doing it?
[00:38:23] Speaker A: So for someone who is not in this every day, what should they be doing to see, oh, I have a problem, I need to go talk to Adrian, or I have no idea or I'm doing great, or like, what's kind of the cadence on that?
[00:38:38] Speaker B: You need to be checking monthly as a minimum, and preferably weekly. I mean, it's crazy.
One of the software tools we've got, we call it smart alerts and it emails people when something falls off a cliff. But guess what? 97% of our users haven't set that up.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: So how many people are off the cliff at the beginning, though? That's, that's the other question.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: It's not as many as it used to be. I think there's a Lot more email savvy senders out there now. But yeah, I think, you know, this is why I'm, I'm very keen to make it easier for people to spot the problems and spot where they're at. I've got a lot of, of new ideas that I'm working through at the moment. They're going to make it easier for people to just get a better idea of how well their visibility is shaping up. So that way, then, as the world does start to shift, you know, I think it's going to shift very quickly over the next year. I want to make sure people have got the right tools to make it easy for them to check it without having to be a deliverability nerd. They can just literally say, right, tell me if there's a problem with my visibility and then we'll just send them an email when something goes wrong.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: I think this, this is interesting because, you know, we were talking a little bit about before we started about AI and how it's affecting software and how it's affecting the world in general, like content and email and everything.
And I think a lot of the benefits that you and I both have in this new kind of AI focused world is that these are hard things to do and they're not things that AI A can do now and probably won't be able to do later on because they have to have this structure behind them.
And as I have found out with my AI just tossing data into AI, they are lazy bastards who will not, will not follow directions and just make up stuff constantly. And so it's interesting to me because this is something that is so key and fundamental to all of our businesses. Email is the fundamental way to build and market our types of businesses. Creators, coaches, SaaS even.
And it's not something that you can stick an AI at and go like, how's it going?
Right. Because there is so much behind the scenes that needs to be understood and calculated and it's always changing and interesting
[00:40:49] Speaker B: you say that because I've had a lot of people now saying, oh, I've asked Claude what to do to help my deliverability and I hate to say this, but what it comes up with is third rate at best, even. Yeah, well, I, I have tried training different AI models with some of my own frameworks and tools and it still gets it wrong.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: So someone without that detailed training and context to start with is going to struggle even more. So, you know, it gets a few bits right, but in some cases it, you know, I've seen one case where The AI was telling people to do things that was actually going to tank their deliverability and not improve.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: You know, you should, you should stuff your email with all of the, all this extra metadata.
Crazy.
We had the same thing. So we were doing, I was testing out some AI analytics because everyone does, and I tossed in about 800 records of trials that had come in and I was like, analyze these records, let me know where they're failing on these onboarding, or like, what's the biggest trouble that they're having? Blah, blah. Just looking at the raw data, right? So I uploaded CSVs and it had this weird number in it. And I was like, that's a, that's a really weird number. Why, what's with that number?
And it said, oh, you uploaded 800 records. I just looked at the first 10 and I'm like, you did what
[00:42:06] Speaker B: you say, lazy.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: It is, it is. And that's, it's not smart, it's just taking in, it's just regurgitating everything. And sometimes that's great. But if you're looking for something that is constantly changing, like email deliverability, if you're looking at something that is so different, nuanced, like email deliverability, like it just, it can't keep up and it's going to lead you astray.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: Like, I want to finish this off with one final question, and this is supposed to be lightning round, but I have a feeling this might go a little bit long.
What's the biggest email mistake that you see businesses make? Like, what's, what's the one thing that you see people time and time again and you're just like, oh my God, why are you doing that?
[00:42:51] Speaker B: It's very simple, actually. People don't realize that every single email you're going to send send is either going to help your reputation or harm it. And people don't realize that they see their entire email list as an asset, whereas if you're mailing the wrong people on your email list, it becomes a liability. So it's as simple as that. You know, mailing the wrong people is the biggest mistake, and the wrong people are the ones that haven't opened for a while.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: It ties in a lot with what I've been seeing and thinking, especially in the realm of AI content, where people have removed that personalization, everyone's just a number. I have a list of 50,000, 100,000, whatever. And I'm just looking at those percentages. I'm not looking at the people behind them, I'm not making sure, am I Sending to people who are engaged or am I sending this message to the right customer demographic within my list? And the more specific you can be and the more targeted you can be, the better opt in rates you're going to have, the better open rates you're going to have, the better everything you're going to have.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: It's always about send the right things, the right people at the right time. You can't go wrong.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: Yes, it's it, it is 200, 300 year old advice and it's still the main piece of business marketing and we just keep forgetting it and everyone like comes back to it and they're like, you know, we should really segment down and send our emails to only the people that are, that are really interested. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you think? Yeah, you think like Adrian, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I always love talking to you. Where can people find you and got anything interesting for them?
[00:44:25] Speaker B: So Emailsmart.com is the place to go. And in the next few days, so probably by the time this, this podcast is visible, there's gonna be something new called the visibility center and that'll be front and center on the emailsmart website. At that point, I'm not gonna say any more than that, but it is gonna be something big and something very important and it's going to be free.
So that will be the thing to look out for and I'm sure we'll have to make sure that we share the URL of that and a little more details when the podcast gets published.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: It will be in the notes below and we'll include that and then we'll send that out in email and hope that it gets delivered.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Awesome. We will make sure it does.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: Adrian, thank you so much for your time and as always, great. Have a great one.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: Cheers.
