Adrian Savage 03:38
So I got the other day. So thank you for that. Loving it. So yeah let’s let’s dive in. And I’m kind of jumping through things really quickly. So I’m the Co-founder of EmailSmart along with my really good friend and business partner Evan Samurin. I’m in Staffordshire in the UK, Evan’s in Las Vegas, so we don’t get to meet up face to face that often. Although I was over in the US a few weeks ago and we hung out together, which was really cool. I’m not a marketer. I’m a geek, and Evan is a geek and a sales expert. So between the two of us, then we do pretty well on this because we’ve both been working in email marketing for between us more than 20 years now, or something like that. Now, what I want to do in the short amount of time we’ve got is try and tailor this to you guys as much as possible. So can you quickly type into the chat for me if this is relevant to you guys? If you don’t use email then that’s cool, that’s no problem. Just listen anyway. But if you’re using email, can you let me know how big your list is, what email platform or platforms you’re using? And maybe if you want to, if you’re not feeling shy, just roughly the kind of revenues you make from email. Or if you’re a consultant or an agency and you work with clients, let me know how many. And then I’m going to try and tailor what I’m going to say to that. So I’ll give you a moment or two just to type something in and see what comes out, and then we will take it on from there. So just give you a second. There we go. So great. Thanks, Gabe. Mario. Nicole. Brilliant. We’re seeing active campaigning there a bit. MailChimp, ActiveCampaign. There we go. Yeah. Mark was with clients. That’s cool. Keith, we’ve got. Now, quick thing is what I’m talking about here, it doesn’t matter what email platform you use, as long as you’re using something that is a reputable, well-known email marketing platform. Everything that I talk about will typically work on most of these platforms. There’s some that are not as easy to do, what I talk about, but the principles really matter here. But I’m seeing some great results there. Thank you very much for that. What I’m going to focus on very, very quickly today, and Nicole yeah, HighLevel definitely counts, that’s a very grown up marketing platform these day, is just look at some changes that are coming, particularly from Google and Microsoft and Google and Yahoo and what the impact of that is, what you need to do. And I will quickly count a little bit of time on just how Email Smart can help if you guys are up for that. So first off, and I can’t see enough of you on the video, so just put yes or no in the chat for me. Are you already aware of the changes that Google and Yahoo are making on February 1st next year? So I’m getting lots of yeses in there, a few no’s as well. Okay, well, I think the no’s are outnumbering the yeses now. Okay. So very quickly imagine something okay. Imagine it is February 1st, 2024. Imagine that you’ve had a really cool holiday period. Your Christmas emails have gone well, maybe even in January, you’ve done some offers, you’ve made loads of sales, then February 1st comes around next year. Suddenly your email open rates drop to 1 or 2% from whatever you had. Your click rates go down to 0.1%. How would that make you guys feel? Would you be happy with that, or are you going to be in a pretty bad place? I think I know the answer now. This is why this conversation is so important right now. Because if you’re not aware of what’s happening and if you don’t make the changes, that’s exactly what could happen to you or the people that you know on February 1st, because Google and Yahoo are making some big, big changes. Now let’s jump ahead a little bit. First of all, because a lot of you are using the platforms that it’s quite easy to check things on. Then I want to share with you a sneak peek into the email health check that I’ve created. As I said, I am a geek. I spend a lot of time locked away in what I call the skunkworks. I actually developed software. That’s my creative zone. I love having fun creating software, and I’ve done that for years and years. Over the last 3 or 4 months, something like that. I’ve created a whole new raft of tools to make it easier for you guys and everyone else to actually stay on top of all of your email marketing and make sure you’re getting the best performance you can. Now let’s see, can I actually get the link into here as well? No I can’t. But you can see on the screen there. If you go to emailsmart.com/health and that will take you to a screen where you can check your performance of your email marketing and any of the platforms you can see on the screen here. Then that health check supports that. Thank you so much guys. Thank you, Gabe, for putting the link in there. Now the way that works is you connect your platform up and it will run some checks and it will tell you how well you’re doing and you’ll get lots of different data points. It will actually end up looking something like this. You will see some green check marks, some yellow exclamation marks and some red x’s. And obviously green is good, red is bad, and yellow is somewhere in between. If we don’t support any of the platforms on there. So if you’re using something like HighLevel or ConvertKit, something like that, we can still help. So let me just see if I can put the link for that into the chat as well. Yes. emailsmart.com/auth. I’ll come back to that in a second. But here’s what the health check looks like. And the thing that matters most on February the 1st is this bit up here. If I just go back again. So you’ll see that’s part of the results is authentication. And what is happening on February the 1st next year is Google and Yahoo are going to insist that authentication is set up properly for your email marketing. So if you don’t get a green check mark for authentication when you either run the health check or the authentication checker, you are going to have a problem. That’s where we’re at. So that’s kind of the main reason why this matters so much. Unless you take action by February 1st, your list is a ticking time bomb. So what I’m sharing today will help you defuse that bomb and make sure that your email remains the cash generating machine that you need it to be. It is really, really important. Because whether you decide to get help or not, whether it’s from us, from someone else or you do it yourself, whatever, it’s absolutely vital that you take action. The changes that I’m mentioning here will impact you, so you need to pay attention and make a note of the most important things with this. You know, as Jonathan is saying, this is going to have a great impact because hopefully we will start to see better quality emails. So, you know, Google and Yahoo are doing this because they want to improve the user experience. They want to make it more difficult for the spammers to do their stuff. They want to make it easier to actually track people’s genuine reputation. And that’s something that will possibly talk about in a follow up session. The thing is, it’s not just this thing that’s changing, you know? Yes, Google has announced this massive, massive update right now. But the thing to bear in mind is that the world of email changes on a weekly, if not monthly basis. There’s always changes and the best parallel that I often draw is this a bit like SEO. You’ve got to stay on top of things, and email is the same way. If you’re making a lot of revenue from your email, if you’ve got a particularly large email list, if you just want to keep in touch with your current clients, you’ve got to make sure you’re doing what you can to get the emails through. Really, really important. Because the problem is, if you don’t, then obviously you’re going to lose sales. No doubt about that. You’re going to be wasting ad spend, cost per lead is going to go up and your credibility could go through the floor. Imagine if someone’s buying your program and they don’t get your onboarding emails or whatever. You can’t reach out to your clients. All of that can be really, really difficult to deal with. So it’s absolutely vital that everything you’re doing is focused on getting the emails that you’re sending so that they land in your audience’s inboxes. Not the spam folder, not the promotions tab. We want to get them to land in the inbox. Just as a quick aside there, the promotions tab isn’t the end of the world because people do tend to look there. The real thing we don’t want to do is end up in the spam. So very quickly, I will cover why this is happening. And, you know, the starting point is that people are just sending more emails. Over the last few years, the email volume has just gone up and up and up. And at the same time, what we’re seeing is that people are abandoning email accounts at a record pace. So that means that if an email account gets abandoned, the bottom line is the mailbox providers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on, they can’t make any money from it. You have to remember that the majority of mailboxes belong to the free email platforms Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and so on. And the way those people make their money is through advertising. If Google, if someone isn’t opening the emails that you’re sending through Gmail, then Google can’t make money out of it because they will only display the ads if the emails are opened. So if you want to have a good email reputation, make sure you’re sending emails to the people that are actually going to read them, because that’s how you’ll help Google make their money and they will love you most for that. Now, the thing to bear in mind here is that there are no quick fixes. There’s no magic buttons, there’s no miracle code snippets, there’s no silver bullets. You know, the bottom line here is that Google and Yahoo are going to be taking some major, major anti-spam measures and they will actually block the senders who don’t comply. Microsoft has done this for a while, so it’s getting worse. And when I say there’s no miracle code snippets, no silver bullets, please, please protect yourself. And don’t be sucked into any of these promises that you can put this magic code into your email and it’s suddenly going to land in the inbox. That’s something that’s called hash busting. It’s something that spammers have done for many years. And there’s a bit of a backlash about this. If you look on Facebook at the moment, then people are, you know, really starting to attack this because you can’t put magic code into your email and suddenly see it perform better. It might work okay for a week or two, but Yahoo has stated publicly that if they catch people doing that, they’re going to block the sender as soon as they find out. So you’ve got to remember that everything you do when you send an email is leaving a digital fingerprint. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on, they will just keep tabs on that. So also, it’s interesting that it’s both Google and Yahoo making this change at the same time, because guess what? The mailbox providers now talk to one another. So worse than that, they’re also very clever at joining up the dots. So if you try and stay one step ahead of the game by switching from one domain to another or using different email platforms or anything like that, you’re going to find that actually Google will work out what you’ve done and quicker than you can say, spam filter, they’re going to work out what you’ve been doing on your old domain or your old platform, link it together, and if you were blocked in the old place, they’re going to block you in the new place. So the only real way through this is to stay as squeaky clean as possible. And, you know, Tom was saying that direct mail is looking better and better then I totally agree. I’m an email guy. I always will be, but I will never, ever say that email is the only game in town. You’ve got to make sure that you’re using different ways of keeping in contact with your audience, whether that’s text message, phone call, direct mail, social media, you name it. Email is a great tool because you have got a lot of control, but you’ve got to make sure you’ve got other ways as well of keeping in touch with people just in case. So again, rushing through this, any questions and please pop them in as we go through and I’ll catch up with them probably at the end unless they’re relevant right now. So Google first of all, are deactivating most of their old unused email accounts. Furthermore, as I’ve said already, so email authentication. So we’ve got SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These are all technical buzzwords that I’ll talk about at the end if there’s time, if you’ve got questions, but this will be required. The good news is that’s a one off setup. Once you’ve done that. And also Google will be setting up their DMARC policy. So you can’t send marketing emails from gmail.com. So what that means is if you’re sending email marketing and you don’t have your own domain already and you’re sending from Fred@gmail.com or Brian@hotmail.com or whatever, that is not going to work from February 1st. So it’s absolutely vital that if you don’t already have your own domain to send emails, you need to go out and get that right now, bearing in mind it will take up to about a month to warm up a new domain. So that’s only if you’re not already using your own domain. Don’t use a free email domain to send marketing emails from now on. Pretty much. Then the other thing that Google are doing, which is really going to rock the boat a bit, is they’re changing their spam complaint thresholds. Now, the thing you have to bear in mind, first of all, is that when someone hits that spam button inside Gmail, the complaint does not get sent back to your email marketing provider. So if you’re using MailChimp or Activecampaign or something like that, if someone reports you for spam inside of Google, you’ll never know about it. All that happens is Google just very quietly block the emails going through. But Google will still be keeping an eye on what you’re doing. And if you go above their complaint threshold, then they’re going to start blocking you completely. Now, 0.1% has always been the official published limit. So for every 1000 emails you send, you could get one spam complaint. Now, what Google are now saying is if you go over 0.3%, so that’s three complaints per 1000, they are actually going to block you from the network. They will not accept the emails that are coming from you, so they won’t even land in spam at that point. And to make matters worse, they will only be measuring that against the contacts that have engaged with you recently. So let that sink in for a minute. If you’re sending a thousand emails and only 100 of those people open something in the last month, then they’re going to be working out how many complaints you’ve got from those 100 people, not the thousand. So you’ve got to be really on top of this and make sure that you’re using Google Postmaster tools and check what your spam complaint rate is to make sure you’re within those thresholds. Otherwise, it’s going to get really ugly really quick. And if you want to see what Yahoo has got to say about it, then there’s a link to their site where they say, you know, remove invalid recipients, you know, get rid of the emails to users that are not reading them and remove invalid recipients. So Google has had that for a long time. Yahoo has said that that’s one of the things that you need to do. And again, I can go into that in a bit more detail. But the thing that you need to remember more than anything else now is that legitimate marketers will be impacted. And that means pretty much every one of you that responded saying you’re using an email platform. And if you don’t use email yourself, if you provide content and copy for other clients, they need to know this as well. Really, really important. Because what we’ve learned as well, as well as the new rules that Google are bringing in, is that you probably know this already. Prospects are losing interest more and more quickly. You know, you’ve got a few seconds now before they’re going to flick on to the next email. And what I will share here, because it is really important, is the data that I’ve managed to gather that illustrates this with what I call the point of no return. And this is how long does it take for someone to re-engage with you after they stopped reading your emails and three years ago, you’re looking at this graph on the left. We could say that maybe after 30, 50, 60 days, people would start reading your emails again when they had a break. Fast forward to the same data, this is my email list three years ago and now, and as you can see, if someone stops reading your emails after about 15 days, the chances of them coming back and re-engaging in the future are next to zero. So again, really, really important here. You’ve got to start making sure that you’re keeping on top of the engagement of your contacts much more strongly than you ever have. And this is a report that I’ve developed that I can actually run for every individual marketer out there and tell them what their unique point of no return is. We do one for opens like this. We can do another one for clicks. Really really important. I already mentioned about authentication. Mentioned that engagement management needs to change. I’m going to very quickly talk about three new metrics that the health check that I shared with you covers, because one of the greatest dangers for spam complaints now is actually people that have never clicked on anything. The reason for that, reason we’ve learned that, is that Evan and I receive a lot of rehabilitation referrals from other email marketing platforms. And we’ve seen that the email spam complaints went up through the roof. And when we did the research, we realized that probably 99% of all spam complaints are coming from people that have never, ever clicked on an email. So one of the new metrics that we’re sharing there is exactly that. You’ll see that we’ve got three new metrics NCI, NLCR, and CCR. And this was the bit that Brian actually sent back to me in the email a few weeks ago. These are the three things that nobody else is talking about yet. And this is based on the research that Evan and I have been doing. So NCI, as I mentioned, is the Never Clicked Index that needs to be zero. You should be mailing zero people that have never clicked on your emails. If they sign up for your lead magnet and after two weeks they haven’t clicked on anything, you need to toss them in the trash because they’re worthless at that point. You want to do everything that you can to get them to click, but if they’re not clicking your emails, then because we can’t trust open reporting anymore, then the clicks really matter. Next figure that matters is the New Lead Click Rate. And this is fairly obvious whether it’s organic or paid for lead gen, you’re getting new prospects onto your email list. What percentage of those are clicking the links in your email? If they’re not clicking, you can’t sell to them. You can’t engage with them. Simple as that. We need that to be as high as possible. And then finally we’ve got the Click Churn Rate, and that tells us how many contacts are we losing on a monthly basis. How many are churning away because they’re no longer clicking on our emails? All of those things really, really matter. Kevin, if you’re saying if your links to Instagram and LinkedIn only, this doesn’t really affect that. You know, this is just about if you’re sending out marketing emails to your email list. If it’s just social media in general doesn’t particularly matter. And just to show you where those metrics live on the health check, you can see there we’ve got NCI, which is this one down here, NLCR, CCR. What we’re saying here is we want to focus on opens at one level, clicks at another, and we could go. I’ve got a 60 minute presentation just on interpreting your email stats. So if you’re a real email nerd then we could just do this forever. As it stands, I’ve got what, eight minutes. So I better speed up a bit. So there we go. And David. Yeah, absolutely. You know, sometimes you can be very shocked at how low the click rate is. And yeah, E.J. is saying is it just clicks or the replies count? So a reply is a good sign of engagement. Your email platform can’t track that. And if it says it will, it’s not tracking it in a way that’s helping you. So what you have to do is you have to still encourage those people to click as well. But a reply is a really good form of engagement, and I’d say that you should definitely recommend your audience to reply to you where possible. But the click matters because you need that statistic. Because we’re looking a lot at trends here, even the open rate. The open rate isn’t that accurate, but the trend behind it is. So this is Evan’s favorite slide that he got me to put in. Because, you know, you cannot be an ostrich burying your head in the sand with this. You’ve got to take action at some point.
Outro 23:07
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.