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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Hey. It's Dave. Just letting you know that this episode was recorded on August 2, 2023. Now in it, you'll hear one of our guests predict that mailbox providers will say, if you're not authenticating your mail, we won't take it. Well, both Yahoo and Google have made that announcement.
Dave:Although Yahoo and Google won't implement the requirements until sometime next year, you should pay particular attention to the conversation around authentication. You'll find out more about what that means in this episode, and you'll find a link in the show notes with details on how to get your Constant Contact account ready. Enjoy the episode. Today on episode 37 of the be a marketer podcast, you'll hear from the people passionate about making sure the mail gets to where it's supposed to go. And I'm sharing why that's actually not as simple as you might think.
Dave:This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave:My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact. And I've been helping small business owners like you make sense of online marketing for over 16 years. You can be a marketer, and I'm here to help. Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Remember the last time you sent a marketing email through your Constant Contact account?
Dave:You hit send, and the people on your list get the email. It's like magic. But truth be told, there are actually a lot of technical things going on. And in the industry, it's called email deliverability. So what's email deliverability?
Dave:Well, simply, it's how much mail gets to the inbox. And as a constant contact customer, you benefit from our industry leading 97% deliverability rate. Now as I mentioned, that's not exactly magic. There are essentially 2 things that play here, the technical stuff. Now Constant Contact does everything it can here to ensure everything is correct.
Dave:And 2, the stuff you control, content in your emails, making sure you have consent, and your sending frequency to name a few. Now at the end of the day, your expectation is that the emails you send get to the inbox. And today, I'm talking to members of the Constant Contact team that work to facilitate that expectation. Well, friend, today's guests are Constant Contact's own, John Marburger and Tara Natanson. John is the director of email deliverability, and Tara is the manager of deliverability and ISP relations.
Dave:Together, they have over 31 years of experience in the email industry. And if you are wondering things like, is the Gmail promotions tab really all that bad? Is there a technical way you may get higher opening click rates? Or what can you do to keep more messages out of the spam folder? Well, you'll wanna listen in on this conversation, and you'll also find out why you should absolutely not use single image emails.
Dave:Now you may hear some words in this conversation that are a little technical. Well, don't worry. We're gonna talk through them and I'm gonna provide provide some resources in the show notes for you in case you wanna learn more. So what's going on behind the scenes to make sure your marketing emails get to the inbox? Well, let's pick up the conversation there.
Jon:So there's the 2 facets. Right? There's the delivery facet, which is it is actually getting it is it getting to a recipient? Is it is it actually being received by the mailbox provider? Right?
Jon:And that is, are we sending messages that the mailbox provider based off of our reputation as an entity, are accepted by the mailbox provider because we're sending from IPs that they know they can trust. We're sending as an as a as an organization that they know they can trust. Right? So that's the first step, and have making sure that your systems team has, you know, your outbound mail server set up appropriately so that we're doing we're because this really is a one robot talking to another robot. Are they speaking the same language?
Jon:Are we saying things to that recipient robot that they expect to hear so that they know they can trust our email and that we're formatting the conversation appropriately? And then the second aspect is right now, now that it's actually received the recipient server, now where is it placed by the recipient? Right? The recipient mailbox provider. And that's where the deliverability.
Jon:I don't wanna say finesse comes in because it's not finesse. It's really just listening and responding to what the mailbox providers are asking you to do to facilitate their relationships with their customers. Right? Because an email list is made up of a mailbox provider's customers. Right?
Jon:And so if the mailbox provider is saying, in order to get email to our customers, this is what we expect of you. That's one component of deliverability, but there are I mean, there's a wide breadth of different components. So when we look at it, we look at first, is the email actually getting delivered? If it's not, what is causing that? And there are occasions that where mail is being bounced back, meaning it's undelivered, whether it's temporarily or permanently, is that a recipient issue?
Jon:Is it a recipient mailbox provider issue? Is it an architectural issue? So, you know, being able to quickly look into metrics and address those issues before they become systemic problems. And then the second is, okay. Are we getting using, like as Tara referred to earlier, using our third party tooling, are we able to just assert that we are getting to the inbox?
Jon:In the rare cases that we're not, in that 3% that we're not, why are we not? What can we do to improve? Do we need to have conversations? Is there something that they're asking us to do that maybe we're not that would increase our chances of delivering mail? Because it's not only consent versus non consent, which obviously consent is the key here.
Jon:It is also consent with the way the frequency that their recipients are expecting it to be seen, the type of content their recipients are expect to receive when they signed up to get mail from you in the 1st place, that kind of stuff. There's a lot of nuance that goes into it.
Tara:There's another way that I like to break it down too as well, which is that there's parts of it that we, Constant Contact, control, and then there's parts of it that our customers control. Okay.
Dave:So, yeah, I was gonna ask you
Tara:about that. So all of the technical back end stuff, the way the mail servers talk to each other, those are some of the important things that we get from, attending these 3rd party working groups because, you know, we will talk to AOL and say they want the mail technically delivered a certain way. They want maximum number of messages which things are changing. A lot of that has to do these days with authentication, and which things are changing. A lot of that has to do these days with authentication, which we can talk a little bit more about later.
Tara:And so those are all the things that we do on the back end to make sure that as the mail leaves the door, we've done everything we possibly can to make sure that from a technical standpoint, that mail is correct. And then the next part of it is on the customer, and that's kind of what John was referring to where it's the content. It's the frequency. It's consent. So at this point, when we see messages not getting delivered, you know, we look at bounces, and we say, is this a technical issue, or is this a specific customer issue?
Tara:Is this affecting all customers or just this one send? So those are the types of things that that we look at when we break it down.
Jon:Lots of analytics, lots of data, which I really enjoy and which is why I gravitate towards the medium. Right? It's and and Tara's really, really good at asserting cause to the data. Right? Looking into the data and saying, this is happening, and I know I think I can figure out why.
Jon:Right? And that's really key in what we do is anyone can look at a plot and say we're seeing a spike in bounce rate. It's okay. Are you looking at the individual bounces? What are those bounces telling you?
Jon:What is the recipient server's description of that balance actually telling you? So you can actually go in and find the root of the problem as quickly as possible and solve it.
Dave:Yeah. And we're gonna get into some, like, best practices and things like that and and and things for people to consider a little later, but I do wanna bring up one of the things that I think is important that obviously we're always harping on too is that idea of that you mentioned as consent. Right? Which means you're not just adding people to your list. Right?
Dave:Our customers aren't just doing that because if you do that, that's where you run into that situation where we can argue the technicalities of whether or not that's spam. I guess, technically, it's not. Right? Because they you as long as they have a way to unsubscribe. Right?
Dave:But the reality is you wanna be getting that consent on the front end. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Right? I'm just trying to work through it. Is that, like, you're continuing to send good signals versus negative ones.
Jon:Right. Right. Because that's what the recipient mailbox providers are looking for. They're looking for those good signals so they can attribute your mail as either junk slash spam or something that needs to go to the inbox that the recipient actually wants. Right?
Jon:To be clear, like, list growth is a great thing. That's what sustains businesses like ours, but it's through organic list growth that's based off customer interest or, you know, or, you you know, attendee interest or something that actually they're demonstrating. They're telling you explicitly that I, you know, I wanna receive your mail. Right? Because if they're not saying that, once you start saying sending mail to them, they're not they're gonna ignore it or they're gonna put it in the spam folder, and then everyone else that had those positive signals is going to get punished as well because you are no longer perceived as an entity that is basing the conversation on consent.
Jon:Right? Because it really is a conversation.
Dave:Well, and I think this actually brings up an interesting point is that it's easy for, I guess, you know, as an individual sending email, you think it's you're the individual sending the email, but because you're sending it through Constant Contact servers in this instance. Right? Like, this is really it it is impacting the whole, which is why we have to be very diligent on our side to make sure the people that are using our platform are doing things in the right ways so that everyone benefits from that. Right? And so, I guess, what are some of the things that we do from that level to just make sure that we are maintaining that deliverability rate, I guess?
Tara:One of the most important things that we have is an incredible compliance and account review team. They are working every day. They we've got metrics and numbers. Accounts will pop up that go over thresholds, and they reach out to them, and and they make sure, look, like, hey. What's going on?
Tara:They they figured out that maybe this customer didn't realize that they shouldn't have purchased a list, and they'll talk them through it and and work through it. But it's really because of what we do and what they do combined together. They're out there looking for the customers who might be hurting the reputation of of the rest of the customers. Because of the way we send mail, all of our customers kind of share a back end reputation. There's a lot of different levels of reputation.
Tara:There's There's individual domain reputation. There's IP server reputation, and all of our customers share that IP server reputation. So if we get a few bad apples that go through, they could hurt the reputation
Dave:of everybody. That's why we work very hard to
Tara:make sure that doesn't happen, you know, and our compliance team is very, very good at that.
Jon:Yeah. And also, I mean, even the more dangerous aspects of sending email. Right? Our compliance team and and working and tooling to make sure that we're identifying things like account takeovers, where someone gets access through whatever means to the platform and abuses an existing account to try and send out phishing emails, things like that. So putting in place, we know AI is really important to us, looking at content from an AI perspective to identify sends that that have signals that indicate that it's a phishing or a spam based email.
Jon:Right? So to make sure that we are not only encouraging and educating our customers to what best practices are, but protecting ourselves from the truly, truly bad actors that are trying to propagate or perpetuate, negative, you know, aspects of email, like phishing and malware propagation, things like that. Okay.
Dave:Russ and I were talking a little bit about that just in terms of, like, spaminator and how we're how we're using AI to really help us identify those types of things before those messages go out, of course. Again, do so in ways that allow us to catch things that maybe we can't manage at, like, a large scale with just the human looking at it. Right? Which I think is really cool, and it's great that we've been doing those types of things. So I wanna talk a little bit maybe about some, I guess, maybe some misconceptions.
Dave:Right? Just when it comes to, like, email deliverability. And then then maybe we'll get into some of those factors that actually influence that stuff. But, I mean so I think maybe a big one and we can start here is just, like, what are the things that actually causes, like, something to trigger a spam? Right?
Dave:Like because I feel like there's different things. Like, I think you could maybe early on, you go to, like, don't use an s 3 exclamation mark. Right? Right? Like, oh my god.
Dave:Don't do that. Don't capitalize
Jon:it. Some of those things still to be clear, those historical aspects of deliverability. You know? Some of them are still true, but to a far less extent because the recipient mailbox providers like Gmail and Microsoft have gotten much much smarter at looking at recipient behavior. It's not it used to be focused primarily on infrastructure and content, and now it's really focused around recipient behavior.
Tara:Yeah. There's and when you say triggered as spam, that can mean a lot of different things. Yeah. So in most major web based mail platforms these days, there's a report spam or report junk button Yeah. Where you can go the individual recipient can go, this is spam.
Tara:Yep. Now why do they think it's spam? Maybe they signed up for it, and they're just bored of it, and they just don't like it anymore. Maybe they really didn't they don't believe they signed up for it, and, you know but the key is that they think it's spam, and let's say they're an AOL user. Let's say they're a Yahoo user.
Dave:Like, woah. Hey there. AOL user. Alright. I have a really good one.
Tara:Let's say they're a Yahoo user. So they've now reported this message as spam. Now, Yahoo knows that they believe that this message is spam, and that goes into a big box at Yahoo saying this our users think this message is spam, and if they get enough reports of the same same message that is believed to be spam, they might take action on future mail that looks like that or is from the same sender or maybe is from the same platform. So that's something that we're constantly looking for. And then the other aspect of that is the stuff that they identify and just put directly into the spam folder instead of the inbox, and those are messages that they might be doing that based on previous spam complaints.
Tara:The interesting thing is that we do receive data back from many of the ISPs when people click that spam button, and so we're able to then use that feedback ourself to figure out which customers are having problems and why. Like, when we see a huge spike, okay, that's probably a phishing or an account takeover. We see a small bump, maybe this customer just maybe not been sending the best stuff recently.
Jon:To Tara's point real quick, just to kinda speaking on the the notate or the actively marking something as spam by a recipient. Right? That's why it's really important and not to jump into best practices, but that's why it's really important to not obfuscate the unsubscribe. Right? If you take away that opportunity for someone to say, I don't want this anymore, the next best option for them is to just mark it as spam.
Jon:Right? And that ends up hurting all of your mail. Right? Because if you're giving someone the opportunity or even better, a preference center that says, I don't want these every day. Maybe I want these every week or I want these every other every other month, something like that.
Jon:Giving the recipients the option to tell you to set expectations with the messaging cadence that they're willing to accept and engage with allows you to then, you know, work within those confines and to make sure that they are not gonna go click spam because that is one of the worst signals you can get as a sender is to say, oh, my recipients are now clicking spam, and worst of the worst is they're clicking spam because they have no other options because you've made it hard to see where the unsubscribe link is or you haven't given them the opportunity to say, I'll only wanna get emails about soccer balls instead of soccer balls and basketballs. Right?
Dave:Again, I've been putting myself in a customer's shoes. I'm sending emails. Is there a place, like because I think one of the things that we wanna do is obviously take a look at our reporting, see what's going on, making sure things are getting to where they're going and, you know, what are opens clicks, all of that type of stuff. But obviously, one of the things that you can see is unsubscribed. If I'm the customer and I'm sending those things, is there a threshold where I should start to be concerned?
Dave:Like, as to like, oh, wait. I feel like I'm getting a lot of like, a lot of people unsubscribe from that. Like, when is the point where I have to say, maybe it's me, not you. Right? Like, I guess that's my point.
Tara:Well, the great thing that we do actually is we have unsubscribe comments turned on by default now. That's great. And so what I tell people when they're worried about their unsubscribe is go look at why they And
Dave:you can
Tara:get a really good idea. You know? Maybe it's a list it's a music class for toddlers, and you're still emailing those people when their kids are 10, 12 years old. And and then you look at the unsubscribe comments, and they say no longer interested. Yeah.
Tara:And so, you know, they're not unsubscribing because they don't like you. They just they're not gonna be purchasing your classes anymore.
Dave:Well, so that's an interesting point. Right? Like but I'm curious. Does the machine who's paying attention to what happened How does the machine decipher between somebody having a valid purpose for unsubscribing? Well, I guess it's not spam at that point.
Dave:Yeah.
Jon:No. I mean, again, mailbox providers love for you to make, you know, Gmail. They introduced the idea of sort of the one click unsubscribe. Right? The un what's called an unsubscribe header.
Jon:So it's it's a bit of code that you put in the email header that most recipients don't ever know exists. Right? But it allows them to quickly click unsubscribe in some instances. But, yeah, allowing listening to what your customers are telling you, even if it's a negative data point, why are they unsubscribed? Give them the opportunity to indicate why they chose to That's really
Dave:important now.
Jon:Again, talking about specific thresholds and metrics. Yeah. From an unsubscribe perspective, if you're doing things and it's based off consent, you shouldn't really have a really high unsubscribe rate unless you provided content that really dissatisfied a large audience. And then it's a pretty clear signal as you were saying that you just sent something out that most of your recipients didn't wanna see, and maybe you should rethink your marketing strategy or your messaging strategy. Right?
Dave:To your point, I mean, it's interesting too, particularly from I find this from a lot of small business owners too is that because you are so ingrained within your community and the people that are signing up for your list are typically people that you know. Alright? And then there's there's this very, you take it very personally when somebody unsubscribes Yeah. Oftentimes. Right?
Dave:And you can get very upset about the fact that somebody unsubscribed. Right? But the reality is that, like, look, if those people unsubscribe, well, they're probably not gonna be somebody that was gonna purchase something from you in that method anyway. Right? But just to your point earlier that I mean, I had somebody recently just unsubscribe from my list and the comments came through.
Dave:And the person it was an unsubscribe because the person who you they used their work email to sign up for it, they don't work there anymore. Right? And so I could be thinking it's me when reality is no. It's actually just because, like, look, things change. Right?
Dave:And so you should expect your list to kind of cycle itself a little bit in some instances. Right?
Tara:You know, and and while it can be hard to see people leave or or to watch your list get smaller, having a smaller, more engaged list is way better for your deliverability than having a huge list that has a very low number of opens and clicks. Yeah. Because especially, Gmail, Yahoo, and Verizon, they're looking closely at that. Yeah. They're like big brother.
Tara:They're looking at what people are doing with the emails. Did they actually read it? Did they they have more insight into what their users are doing with those messages than we do or what our customers can see, and they they use that data. So if there's a bunch of mail that never gets read over and over and over again, that message has higher likelihood that it'll go to junk folder in the future. So that's you know, if if you have a smaller list and you have high engagement, then that's actually that's really good.
Tara:That's way better than a huge list with low engagement.
Dave:Yeah. Right. I think so a couple of things. Right? So because you're gonna have some atrophy.
Dave:Right? Just in the normal course of business, like, you should always be looking to grow your list. But to your point about just sending up to a large list and not making any distinctions, one of the reasons, obviously, we recommend segmentation and starting to think through Right.
Jon:And that's Yeah.
Dave:How do you send the right messages to people right here?
Jon:You don't want it to get to the point to where you've got low engagement. Right? When you start to see the low I mean, change your messaging. Right? Try and reengage these folks.
Jon:It's really, really important because if you're not paying attention to the signals you're seeing from a reporting perspective, from a metrics perspective, you don't wanna get to the point where people are unsubscribing out of message fatigue. Right? That means you're not providing value, and you've got at that point in time, you it means you haven't been focusing your efforts in the way that you need to be focusing on those folks that may not be engaging. Yeah. Right?
Jon:So segment out those folks that are the least engaged and try and engage them or maybe change up the content, the way you're messaging them, what you're offering them if it's a business and you're looking for sales, things like that, to make sure that you don't lose their attention. Because that is, you know, losing their attention is is is the last thing you wanna do. Right?
Dave:Well, so to that point, you'll often hear, particularly from our customers when I think about it and just and really, I guess, small businesses in general, but you'll often hear, oh, I don't wanna bother people. And so they they on the side of sending less than maybe sending a little bit more frequently. And I feel as though I've seen some discussions and I would argue that you probably wanna send more than you think. Right? Particularly if you're sending things of value.
Dave:So there are more positive signals, or am I am I wrong?
Jon:It depends on your seasonality too. Right? You know, if you're a sender that's a seasonal sender sending and if your season is revolves around the wintertime Yeah. Sending daily in July probably doesn't make much sense, and it may induce some level of fatigue.
Tara:Yeah.
Jon:But again, that's why things like preference centers are really important. Letting your customers tell them at what point they would get fatigued. Right? Instead of only giving the option done since Well,
Dave:you know, that's why I love that idea too. I I think timing and relevancy are really, like, important factors here. Right? And so I'm always a big fan of, like, when we think of, like, our click segmentation tool, for example. Right?
Dave:Is, to your point, putting the subscriber in control so that their expectations are met. Right? Meaning, like, if you're sending your let's say you have a regular newsletter that you send every other week or something like that, And maybe you wanna send out more information about a sale you have coming up about something or it's like of particular interest. Like, you can let people gauge people's interest by clicking on something to say, like, yes, I'm interested in that. And then, you know, because they have that interest and it's based on the timing, you can send them more information about that maybe with a little higher frequency because you know they're interested.
Dave:Right? And so it's like I think it's it's great to really start to take advantage of the tools that we do give to people so they can start to do those things. I wanna shift this here a little bit to talk about the, I guess depending on who you talk to, but this is always a question that comes up is how do I stay out of that Gmail promotions tab? So let's talk about this. What are we talking about and what does that mean and what does that look like?
Tara:Well, Gmail, made a decision a few years ago to try and make you remember, you gotta remember, everything they do is for their users. Not for us. It's not for the marketers. It's for their users because their users are their customers. So they they have what is it?
Tara:The inbox, the primary, the promotions, forums, and and, yeah, promotions is where a lot of the marketing mail goes these days. And to be honest, I was really worried about it at first. Mhmm. But I, as a user of Gmail, love it because I I like being able to look at my inbox for messages from my mom. And then when I'm ready to shop, I go to my promotions tab.
Tara:And then when I'm looking for that, you know, one time activation code, I go to the updates folder because that's where it's gonna be. And I find it very valuable as a user, which makes me think that I would hope that the marketers would see it that way as well. Yeah.
Jon:I mean, thinking about it more of of a tabbed inbox. Right? It's I believe it's called the the what you could call them is the is the primary. Right? There's the primary tab.
Dave:Yeah.
Jon:And not to be flippant, but, hey. It's not in the spam folder. Right? You are actually in the inbox. Yeah.
Dave:It is
Jon:a just a tab. It's segmenting out the inbox just like you wanna segment it out. Organize. It's organized inbox more effectively. So someone could say, I wanna go I'm gonna read I need to read my transactional correspondence right now, but later, I'm gonna go and see what sales are happening at the store that I follow, things like that.
Jon:So it's not a bad thing. The initial negativity associated with it, unfortunately, has still in some circles, you know, is still maintained, but I don't think there's any negativity about it whatsoever. Right? So now but if you are sending, like, literal one to one transactional mail, not as a marketer, but as an individual and it's going to the promotions tab, that's a whole different story. Right?
Jon:Sure. But if, you know, if you're sending, you know, marketing email, bulk marketing mail, and it's getting the promotion tab, that's where Gmail's asserted that their customers want it to go.
Tara:I mean, if if you think of the old days before we had that, you know, you you go in there and you're you're trying to look for your 1 to 1 messages, and your home mailbox is just full of all this marketing mail. And that was frustrating for users, and it made them dislike the marketing mail. Mhmm. But when you separate out the marketing mail and you put it in its own place, and people can go to it when they're ready for it, you're giving them the choice, and then they're not frustrated by the marketing mail that made them not see the message from their mom.
Dave:Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. And I think you go into that with a different frame of mind too. Right?
Dave:Like, if you're going to the promotion tabs, you're almost, in some level, turning on your, oh, I might wanna buy something mode. Right? Right? Which I think is interesting. But I think this also builds a case for if now that I'm in this moment thinking about it, as, you know, we talk about, like, SMS as a channel.
Dave:Right? And how that has like, the really where that shines is in is in its timeliness and its immediacy and its relevancy from that factor where maybe where you have you're trying to send an email that may have some time sensitivity, maybe SMS is a better channel for that because of that reason. Right? That's very interesting. You know, you mentioned, like, transactional messages a minute ago.
Dave:Any, I guess, misconceptions here around just like transactional versus marketing messages? Any things that we need to think about there?
Jon:I mean, the misconception that if I've only sending to the one person, then by nature it's transactional, which is not necessarily true. Right? Transactional is defined as something that is initiated by the recipient. Right? It's it's something like a receipt, something like an invoice, things like that whereas or one to one communication between known entities.
Jon:Right? A response to someone reaching out to you is considered transactional. But if some if it includes marketing and sales content, it generally does not fit under the umbrella of transactional mail. It fits under the umbrella of promotional or marketing mail.
Tara:And the reason why the distinction is important is because, you know, according to canned spam laws and and whatnot, there's you know, we're required to have an unsubscribe in marketing mail. You're not technically required to have an unsubscribe in transactional messages. And they're you know, at first, there was a lot of blurring of the lines there. Well, in this receipt that there's no unsubscribe from, I'm gonna put an ad in the bottom of it, and that's not allowed. Right.
Tara:And that that's why it's important to differentiate between when your mail is strictly transactional because those are messages that people don't have the ability to opt out of. And if you're throwing marketing at it, then you're you're kinda breaking the rules. And, you know, if you're if I have opted out of your marketing communications, but I go to your store and I and I buy something online, you're still allowed to send me a receipt because that's not marketing.
Dave:Mhmm.
Tara:But if you then put marketing in that, that's where it gets
Dave:Gotcha. Gets
Tara:people into trouble.
Dave:Well, I mean, does this get into a category of, like, maybe other misconception or thinking through, like, people trying to kind of trick people in some instances. Right? Like trying to make their emails look like let's put it this way. There are some people out there that will say, oh, what you should do is, you know, try to do this get more of this or get more of that. In reality
Tara:I mean, there are truth in advertising laws. Probably not gonna get sued over it, but when you do that thing where you put r e and make it look like it's a response to something when it's really a marketing communication, that's tricking people. That would, once upon a time, have gotten you in trouble, but it's kind of from the low hanging the low thing on the the totem pole now, nobody's really looking
Jon:at that. Clear, I mean, there are legitimate reasons that as a marketer, you may wanna send a text only email that looks very similar to a, you know, a one to one communication because of the message you're trying to present to the recipient. Yeah. There are legitimate reasons to send a text based email that doesn't have lots of images in a year old and all kinds of fun body formatting and things like that. It is when you get to, like Tara said, to try and make it look like it is a message that was initiated by the recipient Yeah.
Jon:Or something that's, hey. It's just you and me talking. Right? Again, that can be very effective from a marketing perspective, but it's gonna have the unsubscribe footer. It's footer.
Jon:It's going to be obvious. It's when you try and hide that. Right? Or make it look like it is not in fact a marketing mail. It's a one to one communication when it's not.
Jon:That's when it becomes problematic.
Dave:Yeah. So do not do that.
Jon:You know, again, recipient servers, mailbox providers, they're looking for things like that. They're they're looking at those signals. You're gonna have a higher spam complaint rate on those things and stuff like that, and it's not gonna end well.
Dave:Gotcha. So I wanna get into some just, like, best practices that people can kinda think about here. And so, obviously, you know, we started talking about just, you know, the importance of just the quality of that list. Right? And making sure you're doing things like that.
Dave:And we talked a little bit about just make sure you're getting permission. I think it's probably the number one thing. But, like, is is there anything else that businesses can be doing to ensure that they're building kinda high quality lists. Right?
Tara:In terms of brand recognition and brand reputation, the biggest thing that I would say that people should be doing right now is authenticating their mail. Constant Contact has had the ability to set your messages up, to be signed, a DKIM signed with your own domain for many, many years now, but we've recently made improvements to make it a lot easier for people, and that's the type of thing that's gonna get you a a lot further into the inbox. Nowadays, all the mailbox providers really want authentication, and they want authentication on the domain that's in that from line. And so that's something that's out of our control. You know, I was talking earlier about how we do all this technical stuff on the back end.
Tara:This is one technical thing that's actually in our customers' hands. In the product, it's called self authentication. And, you know, if you own your own domain name, you should be DKIM signing your mail with us. It's a small process. There's work you need to do with your DNS provider.
Tara:If none of those words make sense to you I
Dave:was just gonna say, you're saying
Tara:lots of things. If none of those words make sense to you, go to the person who helps you set up your website and ask them how to do it, and they'll be the ones that can help you. It really is, these days, that's what the mailbox providers want to see. Mhmm. And it's really you're making a statement when you authenticate the mail saying, I authorize this mail to be sent.
Tara:Even though it's being sent out of constant contact servers, I'm authorizing them to send on behalf of my domain. Okay. And that's really what authentication does for them, and the mailbox providers view that as favorable. Once they do authenticate their mail. Do we know why?
Tara:Once they do authenticate their mail.
Dave:Do we know why they're preferring that? Is there reasoning behind it? I know sometimes you're using something
Jon:asserting some level of identity as well. Right? You know, you're you're sending from a domain that you have ownership of. So it makes it easier. And, well, you know, it's an additional data point that the mailbox providers have to attribute, as we talked about, either reputation to a specific entity.
Jon:Right? So they start with our IPs. Right? The IPs that we use to send, and then they then but then also they have this data point that this is the domain that is sending this mail, and it is signed by the same domain. So it's coming from john@johnscompany.com, and it's d kim signed by johnscompany.com.
Jon:Right? Yeah. And, you know, again, it's that brand reinforcement for the mailbox provider to say this mail is coming from this entity that's not just hotmail.comorgmail.com. There is
Dave:So there's a couple of things here. So, I mean, obviously, I think we're technically getting to some places that are maybe a little I know over my head on many levels. Right? And so I'll say this. I think one, it's good to have your own domain.
Dave:Right? So if you, you know, joescoffee.com. Right? Have an email address that is dave@joescoffee.com. And if you can set up this self authentication, I'll include some links in the show notes for people that we have KB articles that show you how to do that And to Tara's point, if you have somebody that helps for the technical side of things, do this.
Dave:End of the day, it's better for you and will help, like, with deliverability and things like that. Are there any other, I guess, best practices that businesses can follow to improve their deliverability rates?
Jon:I mean, we we talked about paying attention. Right? That's the biggest thing. What are you sending to who and what are the signals that you're getting back? Are you getting emails bouncing back because, you know, a number of your recipients, either their mailboxes are full or they're no longer deliverable, things like that, really paying attention to what the recipient mailbox providers are telling you, the signals that they're sending back to you.
Jon:When we brought up earlier, obviously, unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, really paying attention and keying in on is my messaging being effective and how measuring effectiveness is really using the data points that you're provided by the mailbox providers. Right?
Tara:And from the users.
Jon:And from the users themselves. Absolutely. Yeah.
Tara:I'm gonna harp on it, but I really believe that the most underutilized part of our product is the opt out comments. People unsubscribe and they leave you a message about why, you should really be looking at those. They they are super enlightening. We allow for them to write something in, but we also have, like, 5 or 6 checkboxes they could click. I think it's a really underutilized part of the product that people are should paying attention to.
Dave:So obviously, there are laws and regulations. We've got things like GDPD and GDPR. We've got, you know, can spam, of course. Any of these regulations, do those impact deliverability at all? Like, how does that come into play?
Dave:Or does it?
Jon:They're regulations, so adherence is mandatory. Right? So, if you're not adhering, it's not only a deliverability problem. It's a regulatory slash legal issue you're having. So right?
Jon:So, but you'll see a lot of the things that they're prescribing in CAN SPAM and CCPA and CASL and GDPR are best practices. Get consent.
Tara:Yeah.
Dave:Mhmm.
Jon:They'll allow your recipient to revoke consent. Right? Make sure you're sending messaging that not that can is not misleading, things like that. Make sure your subject line is not misleading. So it really is that it's just it's just a formalization of best practices and but to the extent of this is allowed versus not allowed.
Jon:And, you know, obviously, they're all different based off the locale.
Tara:But, like, you know, if if the question is, will Gmail penalize you because you did something that was against GDPR? Not directly. They're not going to do it because you broke GDPR. They're going to do it because you're not adhering to best practices in general.
Dave:Got it. So
Tara:yeah. They're not gonna penalize you specifically for breaking a law.
Dave:Yeah. Gotcha. And our tools, I mean, to be fair, our tools are those things things that are set up in place to make sure that we are following those regulatory things so our customers don't get into trouble on that side of things. So what about kid, like, content? You know, we've talked about some of this stuff with, like, spam and words to use, but, like, content within the body of an email or even design, like, can those types of things impact deliverability at all?
Tara:Definitely. That's one of those things if you're having trouble with, it's, the troubleshooting can be long and and complicated where you're if you're going to the junk folder and you're looking at your message and going, well, which part of my message is causing that?
Dave:Mhmm.
Tara:And, you know, we've had some customers who have we were talking about this this morning. They've they've had to go through and they send a message, and then they take something out, and they take something else out, and they take something else out to see how that changes things if if they're having problems. There are some technical things, like if he's got broken HTML and things like that, sometimes that can affect your deliverability. I know that our our awesome templates team was always testing against that and looking for things like that. They're not gonna put out templates that have broken HTML for that specific reason.
Tara:So that's something that that we do help take care of for the customers.
Jon:Occasionally, link shorteners, public link shorteners specifically Yeah. Can be problematic. Single image emails, that's all you have is just one image and note, and all the text is flattened into a single image. That can be problematic from a deliverability perspective.
Tara:That those definitely have the lowest inboxing rates usually is a single image mail.
Dave:That's interesting. You know, that's one of those things that I think people like to do for the ease of use, but also one of the things that, you know, we are often educating, like, you know, don't do that. Simply even it's not even a deliverability issue, but now that's another kind of cap to put on that. Right? Is that, like, it's because you open the email, you may like, some people don't have images turned on.
Dave:Like, there are people that have, assess accessibility issues and things like that that, like, you get nothing from just that image. There's no text in the email. Right?
Tara:There's that, but then there's also, you know, Gmail is doing content scanning. And if it's all a single image, they can't scan the text to see what your message is about. Yeah. So if they don't trust anything else about that message, they're just going to assume it's spam because that was in the early days, that was the first way the spammers tried to get around content scanning was, well, just put an image out. Yeah.
Tara:And so the the mailbox providers picked up on that. It's just a cat and mouse constantly.
Jon:I mean, you're also blurring the call to action. Right? If you're sending mail that you want your your recipients to actually engage with and click through Yeah. If it's just one big hyperlink on an image
Dave:Yeah.
Jon:But there's still a click here, it looks very odd. It looks very suspicious. Right? You know? And sometimes it is beneficial to have multiple opportunities for click through in an email, in a single email, not just one call to action, you know, just click button at the bottom of an email.
Jon:So when you're having a single image email, you condense everything is just this one action that can be taken on this one massive image. It looks suspicious. You know, people are likely reticent to click on that. It's also you know, if you're going to copy that campaign and rebuild that campaign, you can't edit the email. You have to create a whole new image now and bring that into and replace the previous image.
Jon:Right?
Dave:Is there anything one thing maybe from each of you or one thing together, if it's the same thing. Let's find out. But what's one thing you want our customers to know about deliverability?
Jon:It's not a hard sell, but it's the hardest part to message about it is it's not static. Right? Deliverability is dynamic. It is changing. The the world is changing.
Jon:Opens and clicks, you know, Apple MPP, Apple Mail Privacy, things like that are changing the way we can interpret opens because Apple is opening. If you're setting up, you know, the mail app, they are opening most of those mails and proxying that image. Right? So, really, we, as a company, I think, do a great job letting our customers know things that are changing and how the times are changing from an email perspective and a deliverability perspective, paying attention to that. You know?
Jon:Taking the opportunity to listen when we're we're talking about these things and how things are changing. Reading the KB articles because they are updated regularly. Right? Making sure as things change in the industry, we're updating
Dave:those KB art. We have a great team that does that. So really understanding
Jon:that if it works today, it doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna work tomorrow. Making sure that you're constantly listening. Right? And because we're constantly trying to talk to you and tell you what to pay attention to.
Tara:My one big takeaway, and I'm just gonna get up on my soapbox again. I know I already talked about it, but it's authentication. That is the big turning point right now. And not to be doom and gloom, but I I worry that there eventually, there are gonna be mailbox providers that say, if you're not authenticating your mail, we don't want it. Nobody's doing that yet, but it has been talked about.
Tara:And all the mailbox providers are afraid to be the first to say it and do it, but they have talked about it. So I really want all of our customers to be able to authenticate their mail if they can. If you own your own domain, this is my big selling point today. If you own your own domain, but your email address is your business name@gmail.com, figure out how to set up email at your domain and send the message from your own domain instead of from Gmail. We already know that there's problems if you're sending as a company name atyahoodot com.
Tara:We have to do special stuff to make that mail get delivered at this time because Yahoo changed their authentication policies. Gmail may do that too someday. So my biggest thing is if you have the ability, if you own your own domain, find a way to get an email address set up at it as well and send it from your your own domain. You're gonna be building your own domain reputation instead of random Gmail reputation. And I really feel it's the best thing for small businesses.
Dave:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, follow list growth best practices. The number one reason email marketing works so well is that people give you explicit permission to email them about your business. Now there's power in the act of someone opting into your list. These people are gonna be more engaged and looking forward to what you send them.
Dave:Make sure you're not just adding people to your list without their permission. Let them join. You'll get better results all around. Number 2, look at your email reports. Now by doing so, you'll have a better understanding of what's going on with your emails.
Dave:You'll know who's reading and engaging with them. You can figure out the best time to send emails for the majority of your subscribers. You can even see who's unsubscribed or if someone marked a message as spam. All this and more allows you to make better decisions in the future based on what you're seeing. And number 3, read your unsubscribed comments.
Dave:Look. No one likes to lose a subscriber. But many times, there are valid reasons why people unsubscribe like moving to a new location or changing jobs. By looking at the comments people leave, you can put your mind at ease and know when you might need to take a closer look at your strategy. Here's your action item for today.
Dave:Set up self authentication in Constant Contact. Now self authentication is the process of verifying the identity of an email sender. It tells the Internet service providers or ISPs that the email comes from a trusted source. So that means even better deliverability for you. So if you have your own domain name like your business name .com, for example, you can get this set up in your constant contact account.
Dave:I'll provide resources for this and the other items mentioned in this recap in the show notes. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the be a marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me directly at dave.charest@constantcontact.com If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review.
Dave:Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.