So What? Email Marketing Deliverability

Well, we need to fade out that music a little bit better. So welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show from Trust Insights. I am Katie Robert. I am joined by Chris Penn and John Wall, as always. And today we are talking about email deliverability.

So I'm as we jumped into this, I wanted to make sure we called out that Chris has actually worked in this field forever. Um when we first started doing marketing over coffee, I think about within a year, you were at Blue Sky Factory, which is an email service provider that ended up getting acquired by what counts. And I think even they were even acquired maybe around 2011. I mean, so this has been a long time. But um email deliverability is a question that I've always seen this as a dark art.

You know, like there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but very few people know how it works. And I've even I've had many email service providers talk to me about how it works, and they can't answer basic questions about it. You know, there's maybe one guy at the company that knows how that works. And so yeah, we're here to let you kind of light things up for us so we can torture the next vendor that we talk to when we're talking about other stories. So deliverability is one of those things that in the email marketing world, you have some control over and some control you don't.

And and I guess the best way to explain it is kind of like a supply chain, right? Where you have your originating server, which is where the email comes from, and they have people, and then they have this big mysterious you know, interconnected series of tubes that uh your mail passes through that may or may not get there. So one of the challenges that a lot of marketers have is that it's not clear when there is a deliverability problem, it's not clear how I know if there's a problem, and then it's really not clear what the problem is, because the problem can occur in a few different places. So I figured we we talked today about establishing that, and we'll get into some of the technical stuff, I guess, depending on on uh how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. It's a very deep rabbit hole, including things like DNS configuration, you know, parsing XML reports from from vendors and stuff like that.

But there is some the there is a a logic to it all. Well, and I guess that's where you know I would as a so you know, we make no bones about the fact that I am not the technologist or the data scientist on the team. And so I'm always good for asking the basic general questions. And, you know, so when you're saying, like, is there even a problem? How often do you think, Chris, that people just say, well, you know, my open rates aren't that good, or you know, the email, you know, didn't even reach that many people, or they don't even look at those metrics.

They just send the email and go. Like, do you think that that's like the precursor to the problem? It depends. It depends on how your organization is set up. So, like at a small company that where there's one person doing everything, you get kind of a holistic view.

Um, in fact, let's look at an example of this. Um, one of the things that people don't do is they don't look in there, you have something as simple as Google Analytics to say, like, hey, are we getting traffic from email? So this is my website, and this is the uh year to date. And what should be immediately apparent is some weird stuff has been happening in the period between uh really until the beginning of September. Uh prior to that, it was kind of flat, you know, about two or three hundred visitors a week from email, and then suddenly, you know, we're it's going up, up, up, up, up.

And you know, the question is why? We don't know. Is there a problem with my email deliverability? Apparently not, at least in terms of getting email to my website. Um, but this is odd, this is unusual.

And so one of the first places that anybody should go to figure out if email's working for them at all is Google Analytics and say, like, are you getting email traffic? Assuming that your Google Analytics is set up properly and you're tracking. That was going to be my next question is how much of that issue is related to the channel groupings not being set up correctly. In this case, it's not as big a deal, depending on the segments you have set up. So, like in this case, I have an email segment which is clearly defined for what I think email is.

So that includes you know a source or a medium with email in it, but also includes things like you know, mail.yahoo.com, which uh out of the box, Google Analytics thinks is referral traffic. And bizarrely, it even thinks that about Gmail, which I don't understand because it's their product. Um, so that's one of the first places to go check is assuming that you've got Google Analytics set up properly, you go and check there. The second place you go check is in your software, right? So if I pull up my email software rates, I can see here my read rates for my newsletter, how many people got sent to, uh, and then how many people have read it.

And what I'm starting to notice is that you know, as of really the last few weeks, um, the read rates have been up considerably from where they were, you know, in the beginning of the year, where it was you know 13, 14 percent. So this makes more sense if I'm getting more people to actually read the email. But this is still small numbers though. So, Chris, one of the questions that someone's asking is is Google Analytics even the right tool for a small company. I know that we could go off on you know a whole uh topic about that, but so in this instance, you're probably using the free version of Google Analytics, which is appropriate for any size company.

Yeah, I mean, uh, Google Analytics is inappropriate once you hit the sampling limits, right? Once you're getting a million visitors to your site a day, then it's time to upgrade to the uh the pro version. Um but uh if you're under a million visitors a day, you're you're probably good at this with the uh the free version. If you're if you're at a million visitors a day, um you should be monetizing that and be able to afford the paid version. So I do see that my read numbers, even though the audience size is increasing, the read numbers are holding relatively steady.

So I might have a deliverability problem because I may not be getting through to more people. If your list is growing, but your opens aren't growing, you might have a problem where hey, you're throwing stuff out, but still not landing in new spots, right? So that tells me there's there may be something up here. Um open rates are important to look at, click rates are important to look at too, because there are a lot of email companies like Gmail, Outlook, especially, where they won't load images by default. And if the image doesn't load, the open doesn't fire, and you don't see that in the open rate, but you can see it in click-through rates.

The third place to look for email deliverability problems is frankly in the inbox. One of the things that I still baffles me that marketers don't do is you go out and you get yourself a free Hotmail account, a free Yahoo account, a free Gmail account, you know, and you add those to your list, and then you have them in a piece of email like Thunderbird or Spark or something like that, and you look like, hey, did we get our newsletter this week to all of our test accounts? And if the answer is no, you've got a deliverability problem. Um again, it's one of those things people just don't think about it. So let's say that we think there's a deliverability problem.

There's three different kinds of deliverability problems. There's technical, there's list, and there's content. Um, a technical problem is one where the emails aren't getting through. Something is causing your emails to just simply not arrive. Um, there are list problems where you have lots of bounces, uh, low open rates, uh, open rates that are out of sync with your list uh sizes, and then there's the content.

We have uh low click-through rates. So which do you want to tackle first? Um, you know, I'm trying to think of sort of the you know common denominator. And so let's start with content and then move on to list and then technical. And it's not that technical is not important, but it is a bit of a rabbit hole, and it is a more advanced thing.

So, what are some of the things that a marketer has control over and they can do themselves, you know, in the immediate? So there's stuff in each of these, um, that for for the content, content is actually one of the easiest to address. Um, and one of the things that um I love love love doing is making it an unsubscribe that you literally cannot miss. Like, if you cannot find my unsubscribe button, you need medical attention, right? You you need to see an ophthalmologist um because it literally takes up the entire screen.

Um having an easy unsubscribe, having an obvious unsubscribe, processing them in a timely fashion gets rid of people on your list who don't want to be there. And the more you do that, the better your list performs because you will have higher open rates, um, you'll have fewer spam reports, things like that. So, from a content perspective, a making it easy for people to leave, like really easy, and then B, and I know this is so trite, have content worth reading. I mean, that's the that that it's like one-on-one. But here's the thing like the the easy this is the easy test.

If you were um reading your email and pretend you didn't work at your company, would you still want to get this email? Like, would I still want to receive the trust insights newsletter if I didn't work here? In my case, it's like there is unique data every single week. Um, like and I I know how the data is produced because I produce it, but even if I wasn't producing it, I would still want this information. I would still want to like what what is happening with Instagram, right?

What is happening with Instagram reels? Like, how is it impacting stuff? So that's from a just a stupid content perspective, and they you know, hit you with the obvious bat. Make stuff that's worth having. If you look at a ton of the emails that you get every day, a lot of them are like, okay, would I miss this?

So here's a quick question. And either one of you answer this. Or if you were on the field, like David or Tristan, um, feel free to comment as well. Without looking in your inbox, name as many other newsletters as you subscribe to as possible. Um I'm probably not the good person to answer this because I tend to I I don't read newsletters.

I personally I I just I sort of find them to be just a bunch of noise. And I've even commented on our newsletter that it's it's very dense. There's a lot of information, which means I'm the wrong audience for it, but that's okay. John, what about you? Yeah, well, it's funny.

It's you kind of hit the point in that I am either a fanatic about it or I don't subscribe at all. So it's like I've got almost timely in air insights, marketing over coffee, Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, um, and the stoic guy, uh Ryan Holiday, trust me, I'm lying. So like those six, it's just like bang. I I know every day. You well, they're not all daily, so you know they're daily, weekly, monthly, but like, yeah, I those come in and I look for them.

And probably DC Comics is another one too, which I've just stopped getting randomly. Like, that's a good example of this too, is that I don't know, I used to read it every week and but it doesn't come to me anymore. And now this is the first time in like months I've I've noticed, like, oh, it's actually gone. But yeah, it's um you you're not kind of doing a boring company newsletter, like it's gotta be really interesting, exciting content for your tribe, and those are the people that you want to get because yeah, there's no medium in email newsletters. Exactly.

I guess so. Chris, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is do you think that um do you think that marketers are nervous to make the unsubscribe button very obvious because they're afraid of losing people they're afraid that if you make it easy for them to unsubscribe then they're just going to go ahead and do that and then their numbers will go down. Yep because they're measuring the wrong things they're measuring you know raw list growth and not measuring in say Google Analytics to look at okay how much is your what is your newsletter actually doing for you instead of because every subscriber you add to a newsletter is an extra cost. It may be you know a tenth or a hundredth of a penny but it's still an extra cost. But because companies tend to measure on vanity metrics like how big is your list um you have people have a tendency to focus on the wrong thing and so they think that you know if I just have you know a thousand subscribers or 10,000 subscribers I'll win.

So the the way to um take that newsletter data by the way the idea of which ones you subscribe to if you then look in your inbox and you see a whole bunch that you didn't remember it's probably safe to unsubscribe to them because you they weren't enough to be top of mind. So that's content. The second thing that again people don't do enough and they rely too much on software to do for them is clean your lists. I can't begin to tell you how important cleaning your list is frequently when you look at unemployment numbers coming in through the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's like a million people a week losing their job. Structural employment's like a 14.2% in the United States, which means that your email list is decaying rapidly every single week.

More and more stuff doesn't work. And a lot of people use software, and you know, there's there's varying degrees of good and bad software at there, like MailChimp and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, um, Marketo, Mautic, et cetera, that like to say, yep, we handle all that for you. But they don't do a great job of it. Um into the weeds, like sometimes you have to dig in and actually check to make sure that your software is doing what it's supposed to be doing. So let me give you an example real quick here.

I use AWS for the back end of my email delivery, which means that Mautic is, you know, AWS is nothing more than a big pipe. And you just you know, connect your software just pours email to the pipe. Um one of the things you get out of it is you get these lovely reports. Um, and this lovely report, which comes in JSON format, tells you what's happening. Like this is an undetermined bounce type.

It bounced, but we're not sure why. There are other ones here. This one is a complaint. Hey, this person complained. Um, which is probably something that means you should remove this person from your list.

Um, there are other ones that are like soft bounce, hard bounce, things like that. When it comes to your list, you have to clean your list, and you have to sometimes process the data yourself and then feed it to you know uh a verification service, like once a quarter to say, okay, what about all the stuff that I missed? What about all the stuff that our our service providers missed? How about that? Um that we have been using a ton is uh one called million verifier.

Um, and you just pour your newsletter list in here, and it comes back and it says, Hey, you know, here's the number of lists, the ones that have just gone bad. So every week before we send the Trust Insights newsletter, all of the new subscribers that have you know they've been on that list get put through here. We validate them if they've they've gone bad or not. And once a quarter, actually now once a month since the pandemic started, we put our list through here, you know, regardless of when we add the person, regardless where they subscribed, put it through here and knock out the bad stuff. Now, Katie, I know that sometimes causes a little consternation because you every week we also put the here's how many subscribers the newsletter has, you know, every week, you know, sometimes the number goes Yeah.

You know, and it is, it's a little concerning, but it's also helpful to have the context of you know unemployment and you know bad subscribes and those types of things because if you're just looking at the raw numbers, you could assume that that many people just flat out unsubscribed from your content, and then you could start overhauling everything when really you had very good content, but people switched email addresses, which Chris, to your point, is happening a lot lately. And so um, because I'm a bit OCD, I track all of these numbers uh fairly frequently. And by that I mean literally every week on a Wednesday, I want the numbers and I want to put them in my spreadsheet, and I want to back calculate the growth or the decline or this or that. Um, but that's me, that's my approach. And so having the additional information outside of just the raw numbers is really helpful in trying to understand what happened.

And so, for example, you posted the uh newsletter subscribers yesterday, when you sent out our company newsletter, and there was a difference of one person from the prior week. And so that to me says that yes, I'm seeing new subscribes come through, but there are enough either unsubscribes or bad email addresses to split the difference. So there was almost no growth week over week because we do, you know, we do have like organic social posts going out of like, hey, do you want to subscribe to our newsletter? We try to make it very easy on our website. And so if neither of those things are working and the list isn't growing, that's a different problem that we need to address.

Yep. Um, you also have to uh deal with user error. So one of the things that we do, this is an example of one of the control files we use. When we load our list each week, um, there's there's an art piece of our programming software, our code, that loads this table and looks for common misspellings. So, you know, you forgot the A in Yahoo.com, right?

And so we go through and we clean up the list. Now, for a list our size, I mean, we're in the in the you know, tens of thousands of subscribers. Uh, we we're doing some work for one of our clients, which has eight million subscribers on their list, and it just running through this cleanup alone brought back 35,000 emails that had just were bad because somebody fat-fingered their the domain on their email. So having those cleaners in place, even before you go to like a service like million verify or whatever, is a great way to help your list recover it. And as long as you're doing it with stuff that people did with form fills, it's still they still intended to subscribe to you.

So it's not like you're sending them email out of the blue. It's like, no, they intend to do this, they just you know, we're typing with their face. And you're also saving, especially if you're uh paying per user or paying percent, you're saving, you know, 35,000 emails is not small dollars if you're using a system like Salesforce. Um, because the cost when you get to that volume can be really large, and so there's also a financial reason to be doing this kind of cleaning, even if it means your overall numbers that you put on paper will look smaller. You'll actually have a tighter list and better deliverability, better open rates, better you know, audience overall that you're reaching.

Yep. Now, the the technical rat hole is the last uh the last area. There's a few different things here. Before we get into uh the protocols, you've got to know where your email lives, right? One of the things that will kill your email marketing is if you are on a shared IP with uh you know Bob's pills point a casino uh you know emporium, right?

And he's sending out you know a billion emails a day, which is all just spam. If you're essentially living in the same bad neighborhood as as Bob's uh uh emporium, your email is not going to get through. A lot of folks who talk about email deliverability are still very much stuck in like an early 2000s mindset. Like it's all about the content. Like, don't use the word free in the subject line.

That hasn't been the case for about five years. Um what really matters is your reputation, your your server reputation and your domain reputation. Um, so A, don't live in bad neighborhoods. And B, there's five technical protocols you need to have set up. And you may set this up as a marketer, your vendor may set this up with your help.

Your IT department may set this up. So you may need to buy some beer and pizza for IT on a Friday afternoon to get their help because otherwise your ticket will stay in in the ITQ forever. But the five protocols are SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TLS, and BIMI are the five protocols. And what these are essentially methods of authenticating to servers like Gmail and Yahoo and say, hey, I am who I say I am. When you see email coming from this server, it really is from me.

It's not pretending to be me. I'm willing to certify that the email is mine. I'm willing to acknowledge that I'm sending good email and not spamming. And I'm willing to encrypt my email. So each of these things has to be set up in a way that tells the receiving servers or the servers that are relaying along that path from beginning to end of the mysterious pipes tangle in the middle that you are who you say you are.

And where this is done is in uh your DNS, your domain name records. So question for you, Chris. You know, uh, do you think that people will just sign up for an email marketing uh piece of software and not realize that these things didn't need to be set up? Or you know, are a lot of these things set up out of the box already? So And I know it depends.

It depends. Um and it's it's it's two parts. So the service provider can do their part and get the the pieces on their end set up, but you, the client of that vendor still have to do your part. Um, they cannot do it for you. Um, when the when you go to like your DNS records, you have to be the one to insert the records in here properly um and make sure they're configured.

And a lot of the providers, you know, particularly the more expensive ones will tell you like here's exactly what to type or here's exactly what to give your IT team to do it but you still got to do it and if you don't do it um your deliverability rates go down really fast so a good software system would tell you this is a step that you need to take to set this up correctly that's correct um and and in fact there's some providers um that will actually not let you finish setup and start using the software until it's set up um I I've had arguments with them because I've said like look I know what I'm doing just let me configure the software the way I want to like no no no you have to have it sit on a 45 minute onboarding call with our technical specialist to walk you through how to set up a you know this thing like is it DNS records? Yes I don't need a 45 minute call just give me the bloody codes I'll do it myself like we can't do that I said okay you're fired um and we got rid of that member because they it's like I I know what I'm doing. So how do you do this? The first place the first thing to do is know where your DNS lives right so in our case um for us and for all of our clients where we manage it we actually use a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare essentially intercepts a lot of the the DNS stuff and manages it for you and provides among other things the ability for uh you to make changes in an easy easier environment uh and also provide some protection if you someone tries to hack you but to do that you got to know essentially what to type one of my favorite uh uh pieces of software is a service called mx toolbox.

It's free. Um and what they do is they will have all these little wizards uh tools and stuff like that you can use to build uh these records. So if we go to the all tools system here, um you have a lot to choose from. And what you would do is based on each of the protocols, you would go through and say, okay, is this something is this one that I need to go set up? Uh they have one called the super tool, which I think is is fairly helpful.

Let's do SPF. So let's do type in uh that one. And this is gonna tell me, am I set up correctly? Right. So there's my SPF statement, which says, hey, this is the IP that I usually send from, but also make sure that Amazon, which is where I send from, is included, make sure that my uh modx system is included, make sure my Gmail stuff is included because I have Google Suite, and uh and make sure all these other domains are included.

And it breaks it down and tells you how this is done. Now there are it'll also tell you like, hey, it looks like some things might not be working right. You should probably go fix those, right? And if you don't fix those, uh that could be problematic. To build your SPF stuff, uh, just go and Google SPF Wizard.

So okay, let me take a step back for a second because yes, you're getting very technical, and I think that it's important, but you know, so let's say I'm trying to DIY this because I'm a small business and I have very little budget. And let's say I, you know, stand up a free or inexpensive email uh system, and none of my emails are going through. If I you know research or Google, you know, why isn't my email being sent? Will I start to come up with some of these resources like MX toolbox or SPF or DKIM or DMARC? Like those are terms that until I talked with you about this, Chris, I didn't commonly hear in reference to email marketing.

And so I guess my question is if someone's trying to do this themselves without a lot of assistance, how do they get to this point to know to even know to look at something like an MX toolbox? Chances are they don't, and so their email continues to suck. Um, you know, but what if they continue to Google like why isn't my email getting sent? Like it will it lead you eventually down the trail of getting to something like this. Eventually, there are enough um email companies out there that provide enough content that eventually once you learn the lingo and know, you know, for example, you're talking about deliverability, then you start getting into the technical stuff.

But out of the box, most your average marketer is probably not going to know a lot of the stuff. And honestly, sometimes in some circumstances, that's not a bad thing because if you do this wrong, you stop your website from working too. Um, which is generally regarded as not helpful. Um so for each of these protocols, there's a way to check it. Again, MX Toolbox provides that, and then there's also a way to create it if it does not exist.

So here, uh, for example, do you send email from your web server? No or yes. If you do, then you're gonna want to include your web server. Did you send email from the same server in your MX records? Uh no or yes.

Uh, the answer is for you is yes. Any enter any other host name. So let's do Amazon SES.com because I know I have email coming from Amazon. I know I send from my website. I know I send from Google Mail Gmail dot com.

Let's see, do I send from anyone else? Um it's for fun just put in trust insights.ai even though it doesn't come off the server. And then you find your domains uh IP ranges, uh which I don't know mine off the top of my head, but you can see what it's doing is assembling that record for me. And that is what would then go uh into your DNS. So I would want this to be a strict policy.

Etc. John, did you do any of this when you set up uh the marketing over coffee email list. Uh we went back into it but like I've done this on the corporate side before and yeah it's you once you find the list of five you then just basically spend you know at least an hour googling through each of the five and figuring out like what you're supposed to do. And some of them have testing options you know you can set some things up and then ping a server and it'll come back and tell you if you've got it set up right or wrong. But the really scary ones are the MX records you know when you're messing around with your company's domain name because just as Chris said you're trying to you know make sure your email goes through and next thing you know you get a call from the CEO because the homepage has stopped working and that never goes over well.

Um so yeah it's like a really ugly and painful thing. And now and I've heard that when you go top shelf you know if you have an email service provider that you're gonna pay you know $50,000 a year like just as Chris said the you know your account rep will walk through all this and make sure everything's okay before they even turn you on. But for every other service provider, you know, the all of the you do the grocery lists of email service providers that small businesses use, like they don't even touch upon this stuff. So you know you you kind of have no idea if it's working or not. Yep.

Um there's an additional gotcha that I'm sure you've run into if you accidentally shut down the homepage, and that is that there are what are called TTLs, time to live records. When you make a change in the DNS, it has to propagate through the domain network system, domain networking system around the planet. Uh that can take minutes, sometimes it can take hours. In rare circumstances, it can take days. So if you screw something up, uh, even if you issue a fix, the fix may get delayed behind the screw up.

So make sure you know what you're doing before you hit submit on your DNS. And do not piss off your IT team. No. Well, and this is one of those things too. When you this is when you think you've saved all this money by registering your domain name for like three bucks through some sketchy dude in some other part of the world.

Suddenly the propagation time is like days as opposed to if you had just gone with some huge US company. Uh-huh. Exactly. Um, the other thing that you want to do check out on a regular and frequent basis is you want to go and look up things like domain health uh in MX Toolbox and ask, like, hey, how is my what is my reputation? So let's do check my domain health here.

So this is noted there are uh I've got some look uh some null lookups in my DNS. I need to fix that. I need to change my DMARC record, right? Uh I don't have it set to quarantine, I need to set to quarantine. Uh I got a few other things here, and that's normal for Google's uh Google Suite.

But when you look at what's what results it gives you, it tells you very clearly these are the things that you need to go fix. If you don't fix these things, they can have an impact on deliverability. So it's now up to you to go and do those things and fix them up and make sure that that you've done the right things. Um other one that is uh interesting, uh, it's not relied upon as heavily as it used to be, is uh sorbs lookup. So Sorbs is the spam open relay blocking system.

Um, and what this does is uh it is essentially when when there are enough complaints to your domain, um you end up showing up in a blacklist that is blocked by you know all these different providers. The big one that is uh causes a lot of people pain, particularly in B2B is Barracuda because Barracuda firewalls sit in corporate networks and they are sit in front of the mail server and they will just eat your mail, and you won't know that your email never got through. You're just like, hey, our our trade show list from uh from our last conference, nobody's opened our emails. Yeah, it's because the Barracuda uh system just ate it all because you had enough complaints in there. So what you do have to check up um on a regular basis, go look up your domain.

Uh let's do this here. I think this is a really good pro tip. So even if you don't have the technical resources to fix up all of those other pieces, even just knowing if you're getting blacklisted is a step in the right direction. Um when I work I'm not a spammer, right? Yeah, big win this week.

When I worked a couple of companies ago, we would run into this issue all the time, but we didn't have the technical know-how to go look for all of the other protocols and things that were getting fixed. All that we knew was that uh Barracuda was actually the biggest issue, and we would constantly be on the spam list. And we just had no understanding as to how to fix it. And it was a huge issue because the we then couldn't reach people. Yep.

Um other uh it's not a hack in the in a malicious sense, but um when you go through and you like a little hack and a shortcut and a pro tip. Yes, is when you have email addresses that go bad, yes, 100% opt them out, remove them, clean them from your email list and forget that they exist, right? Because you you never want to send to a bad email address. Um, when email addresses go bad, sometimes they get converted into honey pots, which means that uh email providers look for you continuing to send email to them and say, Hey, it looks like you're sending email to an address that doesn't exist anymore. We've told you it doesn't exist.

Now we think you're spamming. But what you can and should do is export the bad emails into a separate file, encrypted for safety, and then you can load it to Facebook and Twitter um as retargeting options because what some people don't do is they don't necessarily always update their email address tied to their social media profiles, and so you can recover at least some part of those people and show them answers saying, Hey, um, you know, you're you're not you used to be subscribed to the end of the headlights newsletter. We're pretty sure your email address has changed. You know, if you still want to say subscribe, go go click here to resubscribe with your current email address. And that would only be shown to people who you had bad email addresses for.

Now, again, for a small list like ours, that's like 50 or 100 people. It could probably manually just go find those individuals um and and you know, send them a direct message. For our one client um that had the uh a list of eight million, one million of those addresses went bad. So that's clearly the case where they want to have uh some of the automation to help them out instead. That's a really good point.

And I think that that is really, you know, especially when budgets are slim and teams are you know getting cut, really thinking about how you can do more than one thing with the information that you have is such a smart way to think about your planning moving forward, where you know, an email list of people who you know have gone bad, like a lot of people would just delete that information. But you're saying there's other things that you can do to either get those people back or continue to have them see your information just in a different format. That's so smart. Now, the last thing we're gonna cover on the technical stuff, and then we'll we'll leave it before every time you send an email, uh, you will get uh what is called a a DMARC report. Um, and this is from the individual vendors.

I'll bring up one here, and it's a zip file, uh, which contains an XML file, which contains something that is almost unreadable. Um, there are tools, MX Toolbox has one, we can load that file in and it will interpret it for you and then tell you what that provider sent. If for the big providers, um Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Yahoo, by the way, is surprisingly important. You would not believe the number of corporate email systems that actually use the Yahoo backend for their email servers. I'm constantly shocked, like you know, so-and-so's you know, uh coffeeshop.com or whatever is actually running on Yahoo!

mail on the back end, and it's just a leftover legacy. But you get that report, and then like once a month you load it into the the MX Toolbox analyzer and you say, hey, read through it. You know, this says you sent six emails yesterday to Google.com. All six from my domain failed, right? And so I need to go and fix uh something in my DMARC record is wrong because I'm failing.

SPF uh for alignment six passed for authentication, six failed. So I need to go fix my authentication. Um same for DKIM. I had some I had a passes on authentication and a fail on alignment there. So you don't need to do this with every single vendor, every single uh DMARC report because if you've got DMARC set up correctly, you're gonna get hundreds of these reports every time you send an email.

But once a month, get the big reports from the big providers and look at it and go, okay, if I've got zero percent compliance, something's gone wrong. If I got 100% compliance, great. You know, and it should give you a sense of like, yeah, I've got things set up, or no, something's wrong on the back end. So to wrap up, um, on the on the topic of deliverability, there's three things that go wrong. There's technical, there's list, there's content.

Content's easiest to fix, make good content and make it easy for people to leave. Clean your list like crazy. And on the technical, set it up, do it right the first time, and then monitor it, you know, monthly to make sure that you're continuing to you that everything you got to set up here is correct. By the way, when you do your DNS edits, you will almost certainly find other things wrong that are not related to email that you didn't know were wrong. And it's an opportunity to improve other parts of your digital marketing infrastructure.

So with that, do folks uh watching have any questions? Uh we had David asked a question early on asking about analytics, you know, email analysis software, stuff like litmus or email on acid. And I know back in the day it was return path, but now they're I forget they have a new name, they just got absorbed by somebody. But what's your your take on that kind of stuff? Um it depends.

Those are good. Uh something like litmus. So litmus, we used at uh the email marketing shop a fair amount. Um they are good-ish if you have like substantial content problems, um, or if you just have absolutely positively no technical skills whatsoever with anyone on staff at all. Um if you have someone who's who knows DNS reasonably well, who you know in IT, um, these services will be validation, but they will not necessarily be uh you know substantial improvements.

If you have none of that, it's they're not bad. I have never found them to be worth the the cost, but also I'm notoriously cheap and I'm like, I'll just do it myself. Yeah, there's a lot of um the problem is there's like 500 different things you could look for, and any one of these tools do maybe a hundred of them, you know, they're kind of all over the place. But one thing that I have found useful is if you can find any kind of tool where it gives you back a dashboard of what the email looks like in multiple platforms, like I one of the tools that we use comes back with a hundred screens, and it's like, okay, here's what it looks in Gmail on an iPhone, in Gmail on Android, in Hotmail on a PC. You know, it just has a hundred different things, and you can go down through and look, and you can just say, Oh, number 65 here looks horrible.

We're doing something wrong on the Apple Newton. So go dig the Newton out of the pack closet and figure out, you know, what the hell's wrong with that. Um, but something like that can save you time. But yeah, it does seem really crazy in that it's kind of just a a patchwork thing. Like there's no one solution that does everything.

So you really you're much better off understanding everything that goes on, because then you can effectively evaluate the tools. Otherwise, it's just kind of your um buying pieces of a raincoat and hoping you're gonna stay dry. And the with that, the easiest way to handle that is to actually go into Google Analytics and look at your device reports, right? For you know, look at at six months worth of traffic and see what the majority of your traffic comes in as. If uh if you got like four people on a Blackberry, like, okay, you probably don't need to render your email to Blackberry, right?

Uh but on the other hand, if you if you think you know you've got 80% on Android and it's actually 70% on iOS, yeah, you probably wanna to spend some time making sure that your emails are compatible for both, or you do what I do, which is the lazy uh way, and you make your emails as simple as possible as and it's only just text and a few graphics, and you say this will probably render okay on just about anything, including that Blackberry. That's a good point. And so, you know, Chris, you covered the technical, the list and the content, you know. So if you've already explored your tracking system, such as Google Analytics and you're and you're positive that your channel groupings are set up correctly, you know, that you've looked at your system rates, your opens, your clicks, your benchmarks, you've checked your inboxes, and everything is still kind of wonky. Start to look at these other things that Chris has just walked through.

And if you need, you know, any assistance with those things or have any questions about them, you can give us a shout. We're happy to sort of help you assess the situation because email is such a vital part of your uh digital marketing. It's um it's definitely not dead. I think that there's this, there was a rumor floating around that email was dead and it's definitely not dead. So you know you want to make sure that you're getting the most out of your email, especially now when people's email addresses are changing so rapidly, you want to make sure that you're reaching the right people at the right times.

Anybody who says something is dead has got something to sell you. You can just ignore them. All right folks that's going to do it for this week's So What? If you have not already subscribed on the relevant platforms like Facebook or YouTube or wherever it is you're watching this, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Stop by the Trust Insights website and say hi.

And we'll see you all next week. Take care