So What? Google Postmaster Tools

Well, hey, happy Thursday again. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. This week we're talking about Google Postmaster Tools. And so this is a continuation of a conversation we had on the live stream last week about email marketing metrics.

And we started to dig into the more technical side around Google Postmaster Tools. So today we're gonna be talking about what it is, why it matters, why you should care, why these are things you should know about. Uh, we'll be talking about how to use the seven main features of Google Postmaster Tools, uh and what actions to take to improve your score. So if you do a lot of email marketing, this show is for you. So Chris, Google Postmaster Tools, what is it and why does it matter and why don't more people know about it?

I don't know why more people don't know about it. That's that's amazing. Um if you're familiar with what's now called Search Console, used to be called Webmaster Tools. It was a tool for SEO professionals to be able to sort of see what Google sees when it comes to your website. Well, in the email marketing world, Google also created Postmaster Tools, which is again for email marketers to sort of see what Google sees and provide some context for it.

Now, if you look at your email database and there are absolutely no Gmail addresses of any kind, and you know for sure that none of your uh your prospects uh are using uh G Suite, Google's uh uh hosted uh environment, then this may not be as relevant to you. But if you've got clients who use G Suite, Trust Insights, for example, we use G Suite for our corporate email, it's powered by Google Mail. Or if you've got Gmail addresses in your database, then you probably want to know if your emails are getting to those folks and if um it uh what your reputation is, because if you're kind of on Google's naughty list, you're probably on some other naughty lists too in terms of email behavior. What do you mean by you know the quote unquote naughty list by like sending spam emails or not conforming to Google's rules or all of the above? All of the above, and that's actually what the the seven major features of Postmaster tools do is they give you um Google's point of view about your email marketing infrastructure and your behavior, and then say whether you're doing good things or you're doing bad things.

If you're doing bad things, obviously try to do less of them and and do the things that are expected of you. So let's actually go ahead and uh show what this thing looks like. It's it's much less appealing looking than uh uh Search Console. Search Console's gotten a lot of love over the years. Postmaster tools are very much uh sort of vintage 2012 here.

How about before you dive into that too? Is this your first stop for deliverability questions? I mean, if somebody's concerned about what they've got going on with email, is this the easiest and first place to start? Uh no. Um I would check uh something like MX Toolbox first to see you know what your reputation is broadly.

Now, for for trust insights and especially for me from my own personal newsletter, Gmail and Google addresses comprise close to 70% of the database, right? So it's a big deal for us to make sure that uh we're working well with Gmail. If that's not the case, then I would say something more generic. Uh so let's go actually you can see uh MX Toolbox here. And this is uh a free set of tools.

And in MX Toolbox, one of the things you can do is just sort of say, like, tell me what's going on. What's the health of my email? Am I on any blacklists, things like that? Um, the that would be I would say my first uh stop just to see like, am I doing something wrong? So let's go put in trustinsights.ai here, and actually let's do it under email health here.

I get a whole bunch of ads. And it'll give you like war errors, warnings, and things that you passed on. So uh in this case, uh, I don't see anything major wrong here. There's no red uh there's no red indicator. So uh I'd say we're probably in reasonably good condition.

Then we go to Postmaster Tools. So there's uh again, there's seven major components to this application. The first one is spam rate. And the seven major items are listed helpfully under this little menu. This one's really simple.

Anytime you send an email to somebody, and in Gmail, they hit the report a spam button. This tells you how often that's happening for all the emails you send. The goal is well, there's three thresholds. You or you want under 1%, right? That's sort of the gold standard.

If you can stay under 1%, you're doing good. Because there's always going to be that one person who's just like too lazy to find the unsubscribe link, and just go hit mark a spam. Well, it's right next to the archive button, too. Totally ridiculous. Yeah, I know.

Well, um to be fair, I hit the report as spam when I'm getting emails from people I didn't subscribe to in the first place, which means that they probably bought my email from a list or scraped it from a website. So that to me, I mark those as spam. So I'm that person who loves the report as spam button. It's like it's it's it's second to my first favorite thing, which is saying no. I didn't say no, it's just saying no differently.

It's correct. So under 1% is this the safe zone, like the call it the green zone. Between one and five percent is the yellow zone. Like if you're if your reported spam rates are you know between one and five percent, there are gonna be some um, that means your list is probably not as clean as it should be, and uh you may want to you know do some cleaning of it, and then above five percent is the red zone. That's where you're gonna end up on blacklists.

Google may stop delivering your mail entirely. Um, and so uh you definitely don't want to see that. So we're looking at the last four months here for trusting insights. We send out a weekly newsletter, and so you can see uh for the most part, uh we are at or close to zero. The highest we ever got was 0.4%.

So we're we're in good shape. So this is stop number one in Postmaster Tools. I think it really goes back to what is your email marketing strategy where you're getting those lists of people. Are there people who you have you know given them the opportunity to opt in, or are they lists of people that you've bought from somewhere else? So they've never heard of your company and can't figure out why they're on your list.

So as a side note, I actually did try to unsubscribe from an email that I didn't sign up for over the weekend. And I clicked unsubscribe, and then it brought me to a screen and it said, Are you sure? And I had a yes button and a no button. Guess which button didn't work. The yes button didn't work, so I had to, I kept clicking no, and it would be like, Thank you for subscribing to our email.

And it's just this continued. So then I finally did report them as spam, and I emailed them back and said, You need to fix this because you're going to keep getting reported as spam because I never signed up for you. Yep. Yeah. So this one's easy to control, right?

Obviously, make sure that you don't put people on your lists that they didn't ask to be there. Um and again, those numbers, you know, the zero to one is good, one to five is not so good, above five is is in danger territory. So that's number one. Second thing is IP reputation. So every server that sends email has to has an IP address of some kind.

And what we're looking at here for Trust Insights is you know, we are operating on a um our email marketing software runs on a uh virtual machine hosted by a company called Linode. When other tenants uh are sending out mail from you know coming from the same IP address, you know, we kind of all it's like you know, good neighborhood, bad neighborhood kind of thing. You're driving through the you know the neighborhood, it's like suddenly I think I'm gonna lock my car doors. Um kind of the same idea with with servers, the IP address of the server. Are there people on there who are you know sending out all kinds of email they shouldn't be?

If it's just your server, like you bought a dedicated IP address, it's just your server, and this is a reflection of just your behavior. But for companies like us, where we have we rent space on a in a much larger installation, uh you can see here that in August, um our actually are the place we're renting from, I guess gentrified or something. Gentrification email. And now we can see here that uh our IP, the IP reputation where we're sending from has gotten better. This is one of the factors that goes into where Google places your email.

So in Gmail, uh, for a lot of folks who have it turned on, there's four different places your email can be. It can be in the primary inbox, which is where you want to be. It can be in like the promotions tab, uh, which is uh not as good because it's all ads. It can get you know, sort of third priorities falling into the sort of the updates tab, or the the second to worst place is the spam bucket, the spam bold where nobody ever sees it. Though most worst places, of course, it just never gets there in the first place.

Um, so your IP reputation is one of those factors that goes into it. Now we don't have as much control over this, um, other than if you're you're gonna be doing a lot of email marketing, you buy a dedicated IP address for wherever it is that you're sending your emails from. But it sounds like, especially smaller businesses, you're gonna go the route of renting versus buying, because it's just probably more cost-effective and easier to manage, quite frankly, especially if you're if that's not your jam, you're not into managing IP servers and whatnot, which most of us aren't except for you, Chris. Um, so you don't have control over who your neighbors are. Can you find out who they are, or does that depend on the service?

Uh you can sometimes find that. And actually, I believe there's a tool in uh MX Toolbox for uh some of those diagnostics to see like what it what else is on this IP address. Um yeah, so you can put it in your mail server and look, it can look to see like what's going on on that server in general. But one of the things that is tough to do is we have a marketing automation server, but that is not where the email comes from. Our email goes through Amazon's email service.

So it's actually coming from Amazon servers. So this is actually a reflection of whatever shard we're on at Amazon, not even the server that we that we our stuff is on. So from that perspective, you really don't know. All you know is that whatever instance we're on at Amazon is working better. How about this is one of those things where I've had situations where you get ranked very poorly, and if you just call support and say, hey, throw me on a different IP address, I've had them move me before.

But is that something that you want to do, or is that create other long-term problems? Um you can do that. Like if you're in the the sort of the the blood red, you know, uh everything's on fire, then yeah, it can't hurt. Like it's not going to get worse. Okay.

Um so that's IP reputation. The next is domain reputation. Domain reputation is essentially an assessment of you, of everything that you're sending your email out from. So in this case, Trust Insights, we are reputation has been high for you know as long as you can see your data on this chart. This is where you can have some real interesting conversations with um with your your IT team, uh, with your sales team, with your PR team, because every email that goes out from your domain gets looked at this way.

So a long time ago, uh Katie, I think this might have even been before you joined uh the team at the old company. A new person had joined one of the PR teams uh from a different agency. And I was I was in charge of the marketing automation doing all this stuff with Postmaster Tools. And so they still start getting you know notification after notification, like hey, you've been blacklisted, you'd be blacklisted, your your reputation's hanging like what's going on. I went to find out one of the this new person on the PR team pulled the entire media database from uh Gorkana, all 70,000 reporters, and mass blasted their clients' pitch to every one of them.

Uh the entire planet from you know, like the uh card magazine of Malaysia to the New York Times. And of course, nobody wanted that. Uh, and it impacted the entire company's domain name. So this is this is one that is under your control, but you gotta know who's doing what at your company because other people, like you know, there's a new sales guy that's like, yeah, I'm just gonna blast the database. Oh, don't do that.

So that so the consequence of that is the person, you know, sent out a mass email and then everybody reported it as spam. Yep, reported as spam, said you know, we don't want this, complained, whatever the you know, and and it harms everybody. That that was indeed before my time, but I feel like I've heard that story before. Yep. Um, and so this is measuring the behavior of your domain, your organization.

So there's there's a couple things that are best practices, especially if you're a larger organization. One of the best practices is that your email marketing goes out on a separate domain than your corporate email. So, for example, we would have trust insights.ai, we might have trust insightsmarketing.com. Um, and we would have all of our email marketing go through that that way. That way, important things like accounts payable notifications and stuff go out and and they get received, it's you you're not endangering um all of your operations.

We're not big enough to justify that yet. Um but certainly if you've got mission critical emails that have to get out, you may want to split off that domain. One of the old companies that I worked at had huge deliverability issues uh because of the name of the company, and so it's something to factor in. So the name of the company was completely you know innocent, but unfortunately they spelled it with two X's in a row. And so the domain coming through with two X's was then flagged as inappropriate content, spam content, adult content.

And that was one of the challenges that the company forever had with getting email through to places like the FDA and pharmaceutical companies because it kept getting caught in that filter. And so the domain reputation and the deliverability was actually really poor, but because it wasn't a IT heavy technical knowledge company at the time, they didn't know what the problem was, other than the emails kept getting flagged as inappropriate content. Yep. Oh well. Well, so be careful of the name of the company that you choose.

Right. Yep. We we won't have TrustInsights Pills Casino.com up and running anytime soon. Probably not. Um the fourth is the feedback loop.

So a feedback loop, some uh internet service providers and and things, uh, some pieces of software will actually will uh allow services like Google to talk directly to them so that if somebody hits unsubscribe in an email, it's automatically processed, and you don't have to do anything whatsoever. Um you'll even see this in Gmail. If you're in Gmail sometimes, there'll be an the the mark a spam button will move and there'll be a new one called unsubscribe. And for those uh companies that have that more advanced feature, this is the the feedback loop where um Google will say, Hey, here's how often the feedback loop is being engaged. It's another measure of people essentially saying, I don't want this, but because the company has gone through the effort of you know turning on this protocol and integrating it, um it's less likely that someone will report you a spam.

They'll hit the unsubscribe button instead that Gmail provides uh and get taken off the list that way. We don't have the setup. No, I know we don't, but I guess it's I mean, and it it seems logical. It sounds like you would rather have people unsubscribe than mark you as spam. Exactly.

That's that's the goal is if you're reaching a bunch of people who don't want to hear from you, you want to make sure that it's easy for them to unsubscribe versus what I do, which is okay, this unsubscribe is frustrating. Now you're spam. Exactly. So, like if you were to look, for example, um, in the Trust Insights newsletter, um, you would be able to see uh let's go ahead and switch over to this version here. There's we we put it pretty clearly hey, here's the email I just subscribed here.

Here's a big old link to do it. And of course, you know, because people do look at the bottom, we have another one at the bottom. So we try to make our best effort. In my own personal email newsletter, uh, we go for absolute hilarious, and we put this in and say, like, if you can't find the unsubscribe button, you need medical attention because something's not right with your ability to see. But the short version is making things as easy as possible to unsubscribe cuts down on this sort of thing.

It's an it's a topic for another day, but there's certainly some sort of an insecurity and psychology that goes into why companies make it so difficult for people to unsubscribe. I personally, you can unsubscribe from us all day long because it means that we're not wasting our time trying to convince you that we are the right company for you. I would rather have people who want to be here versus people that were just like, please stay, please stay, please stay. Like, I if you don't want to be here, then great. Let's make it super easy for you to unsubscribe so that that way you can just go along your merry way, and we can find more people who are actually interested in the stuff that we are talking about.

Exactly right. Okay, so that's feedback. The fifth is authentication. So authentication is using uh these different deliverability protocols, DKIM, DMARC, and SPF, uh, and whether they're set up correctly. And we actually had an issue.

I was looking at when as I was getting ready for this show today. We had an issue in one of our SPF records. So I actually had to go in and fix that earlier. Um it's not reflected here yet, but it will be reflected in in future um uh shows. These are three um protocols that essentially say when we send email, we are who we say we are.

When you get an email from Trust Insets, it really is from us, and it's not being sent uh on behalf by some other third party or some nefarious middle person. It really is uh us. And so you need to have these three protocols set up. Now, this is done in your domain name service records, your domain name records. So wherever it is your DNS is hosted, um, you and your IT team would need to implement these protocols.

The easiest way to check to see if they're set up correctly, uh, there's a number of different services. The uh you can see the MX Toolbox has some. Um, I really like uh the one from Demarcian. So I'm gonna put uh trust insights in here. And all this does is it goes through, it looks our uh our records and says, Hey, it looks like you've created you, congratulations, you set up everything correctly, right?

So there's when I did this earlier, there was actually some things that were not correct that I needed to go in and fix. So now uh it's showing that these things all look good. But uh, you know, MimeCast, for example, the folks over at MimeCast have uh a really good uh tool as well. And they all do pretty much the same thing. They say, Did you set up your records in a way that machines can correctly read them?

So no problems detected, and they're not too long, and then they've got the relevant things. Now, you can you can see sometimes what happens when you do it wrong. Let's see if I've if uh my domain is not so correct. I think I had some issues earlier. No, that's that's that's fine.

Uh let's try marketing over coffee. I was gonna say you can probably try mine because I'm sure that that's not set up at all. Yeah. Well, so in this one, in this case, yeah, it's saying there's there is no uh there's none of these records. So uh one of the takeaways for for John and I would be okay, we probably need to go and set that up so that when the marketing over coffee newsletter goes out, uh people actually get it.

Um so that's what this this authentication tab in Postmaster Tools does is it tells you um did you set these things up correctly? Yes or no. I love how these live streams always make John's to do list even longer. Like every single week. John, okay, here's the five things you need to go do now.

I'm like, oh yeah, oh that's broken. Yay. I have to give it a shirt or a scoreboard or something. Um this is totally under your control, but you'll have to work with IT if if you're not a marketing technologist. If you are a marketing technologist, then you probably already know what to do here.

Um I very strongly recommend that folks use some sort of uh proxying DNS service. Uh companies like Cloudflare, for example, are really, really good and they have a free plan so that it's easier to maintain these things. Because I've had happen in the past where um someone I managed um made a change to a uh uh client's DNS record and it broke the DNS record, the the the uh A record, which is the root record, and so the client's website and the whole IT infrastructure just came to a grinding halt. And because they had set the time to live to 72 hours, the customer's entire infrastructure was down for three days. I was like, uh don't don't do that.

Yeah, we when a million, a hundred million years ago when I worked at uh a different company, the engineers would give us codes to update DNS and root records in order to be able to see things on staging and you know different environments. And I always it always like made my gut clunch because I was like, you're asking the wrong people to monkey around with these records because they would give them over to like you know senior managers who could barely get the printer to work, you know, and that wasn't their fault, it's just they weren't the technical people. And so yeah, I think that the big takeaway is like don't monkey around with your DNS records, find someone who knows what they're doing. Exactly. To give you an idea of what that looks like.

So this is the Cloudflare interface. So for you can see there's our DMARC record, there's our BIME record. Um, this is the SPF record. So you would have to go in here and create uh this record. And there are tools, there are wizards that can help you sort of assemble this, but you still need to understand how DNS works so that you get it correct.

Because again, if you do it incorrectly, you delete the wrong thing, uh, you're gonna have a really, really long day. Okay. So after authentication, the next is encryption. So encryption in this case refers to when uh your mail servers are communicating with Google servers. Is that transmission encrypted?

Is it protected from attack? Um this is one of the cases where unless you own all of your IT infrastructure, there's a good chance that there's a vendor in place here that's doing this. And for us, uh, because again, we're using Amazon as our gateway. So Amazon service connector, Google service, there, it's everything's 100% encrypted. And so you can see here we have 100% uh inbound TLS rate.

So we are in good shape here if for example we decided we were going to build our own server our own mail server um we would now have to manage this part because um uh Amazon would no longer be doing that and so we'd have to get our certificates and you know do all the authentication stuff in the back end so this is this is very IT specific but is also specific to the vendor that you're using if you see anything other than 100% on this screen change vendors because this is sort of like table minimum uh stuff that if the your email service providers not sending out encrypted email traffic they're not a very good provider is it are there just a are there just a few players out there so like when I think of you know people who offer this obviously Amazon or you know are there do they have I this will come out a little jagged but do they have the market share of the offering that kind of a service or are there other players like do you be are you basically do you can you only sign up for Amazon or are there other players out there who do similar things oh there's dozens so Mailchip uh constant contact HubSpot uh Marketo all the the you know the the marketing technology companies that we all know all have back end mail infrastructure of some kind and they all have um you know some of them do for example uh mailchimps um transactional email service mandual does go through Amazon on the back end but for their uh marketing stuff, they have their own server farms for so there's dozens of email providers out there. Gotcha. It's as you know, I'm sort of thinking it of it through the lens of let's say I were just me running just KD Robert.com and I wanted to set up, you know, an email newsletter. Obviously, I know the basics of like I should probably get people to subscribe to it. I should probably find a place to run it, like a Substack or you know, whatever.

But then from there, my understanding of how it all works is kind of limited. So I'm relying on these vendors to know all of these other things and make sure that my email is protected, provided I'm not doing anything stupid like sending out a bunch of spammy emails. That's right. And it gets complicated when you move try and start sending from your own domains. Like if you use Substack, like I use Substack for my daily pandemic newsletter.

Um, and it's you know, lunchtime pandemic.substack.com. So it's a substack.com domain. So all of this is their problem, right? Okay. I have uh it's it's a substack.com email, they get to deal with it.

The moment I upgrade and you know pay for that service, and now it's coming from you know, you know, pandemic newsletter.christophers pen.com. Now it's my problem to make sure that you know the it the all this this stuff is set up. So that line really depends on on the provider. For most marketing automation packages like a HubSpot or whatever, when you do the setup and the onboarding, there is a section where they say, hey, we need you to, you know, get with the IT team and do DNS stuff and configure it to to make it all send correctly. But it doesn't always happen.

Um, it doesn't always happen correctly. So, one of the things that this is one of the reasons why this tool is so important because it gives you us uh the ability to see from Google's perspective, hey, did we set our stuff up correctly or not? So even if I set up my newsletter through Substack and I'm not picking on them, it's just the one that comes top of mind. I can still use a tool like this to run diagnostics to see, okay, why isn't my email going through, and then bring that back to my provider and say, Hey, this is what I saw. Can you help me understand this?

Or can you fix it? Exactly. Okay. Exactly. Like for only 1999.

But that's super helpful because I know a lot of you know newsletters that are just starting are small businesses and you know, solopreneurs, and it's it can be overwhelming the amount of things that you feel like you need to understand in order to get your business off the ground. And so knowing that these other vendors are supposed to be taking care of it is helpful, but also knowing that you can do your own set of diagnostics to bring back to them is also super helpful. Exactly. Now the last uh piece in here is delivery errors. Delivery errors uh is really simple, really easy.

It basically says, Hey, uh, these are emails that you're sending us that are bad. Like you sent us email, you know, sent email to people who don't exist, uh, or things like that. And again, you what you want to see is what uh is here is uh errors, very, very, very low errors. Same rules apply as basically spam. Under one percent, you're in good condition, one to five percent, yeah, not so much, and above five percent, you're probably not going to get allowed to deliver to email the Gmail at all because Google servers going to say, Wow, you're sending us a lot of crap.

Uh, you're probably just a spam bot. So this is this is not the people who come back to you and say, Hey, I've unsubscribed five times, remove me from your database. These this is on you because you haven't cleaned up your list of people who've moved jobs, and that email address doesn't exist anymore. So it really drives home the point of, you know, at least once a quarter, more frequently if possible, clean up your, you know, uh email list to remove all of those emails that are just bouncing. Don't keep trying to send to them.

Exactly right. You know, you'll look at in there and say, you know, you have Katie Robert at gmail.com, but it's with four B's, you know, and a silent Q somewhere. Like, okay, so that's gonna bounce. Google's gonna say you're sending to somebody who doesn't exist. Um, and that's what's going to show up here.

And yeah, bad emails are the bane of every marketer. Um, they're the bane of every marketing technology platform, every marketing automation platform. And you've got to keep it clean. Uh, and there's there's a few different ways to do this, depending on your uh email service provider. Some of them will process bounces automatically.

Uh they'll say, Okay, anything that bounces, we're gonna we're gonna take it out. They're cleaning services. Um, we use one called million verifier, and you upload your whole list and it does uh checks and says, Okay, you know, the these addresses are showing a balance already, so you know, take them out of your database because you shouldn't send email to them. And then obviously, you know, when you get messages in your inbox, um, like when we send out the Trust Insights newsletter, I get the replies to you know, newsletter at TrustInsights.ai. When you get that message that says, you know, uh, you know, Katie Robert no longer works at this company, you know, uh autoresponder.

It's like, okay, you know, manually take that out of the list. So it sounds like there's, you know, in terms of takeaways, there's a few things that you as the person running the email should be doing all the time. One is don't send spammy emails. Um, probably number one. Two is you know, make sure you're getting ahead of the bounced emails and keep your list clean.

And um the third one is basically if someone unsubscribes, then make sure you're removing them as well and keep an eye on how many times you're being marked as spam. So obviously that doesn't cover all the things, but you know, it sounds to me in terms of priority and the things that you have control over, those are the things, those are the some of the best practices that you want to make sure you're doing on a regular basis. That's exactly right. Make sure your list is clean, make sure everyone is on it, is that you know actually wants to be there. And then, you know, when you go through these these different options, uh, some of these things, you know, spam rate is pretty much on is somewhat under your control.

Like, don't add people to the list that shouldn't be there. IP and domain IP reputation, that's an IT thing, so you're gonna need some help with that. Domain reputation, it's a company-wide thing, make sure people aren't misbehaving. Feedback loop is an IT thing, authentication is an IT and DNS thing, encryption is a probably a vendor thing, and delivery errors are are your responsibility as a marketer. So, yeah, there's there's different areas of responsibility, but in each of these things, there's something that you can do to improve your your your overall scores from Google's perspective.

I think too, don't be afraid to let people unsubscribe from your list. If they don't want to be there, then don't waste that mental real estate trying to get them to stay. Yep, exactly. And make give them other options. So for example, there's with the analytics for marketers Slack group, you go to trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers.

You can um you can go and you know see some updates and things there. Um we post the company newsletter on our website. So if you don't want the email, as long as you can remember to show up on Wednesdays, yeah, we'll we'll typically try and post the newsletter. Um if there's a text messaging list of some kind, you can uh notify people that way. So give people lots of different ways to get content based on the way they want that works best for them.

Um don't insist that it has to be through you know just through email. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter as long as they're reading your stuff. That's true. And if they don't want to, you don't need them. Exactly.

And so that's Postmaster tools. Again, there's a lot of stuff where this is where you're really talking about true marketing technology where marketing and IT are joined at the hip. And what both parties do um has an impact on the overall outcome. So you can't go it alone. You shouldn't go it alone.

Um if you want to, you know, make things as easy as possible, buy a six-pack of beer, go down to IT on Friday afternoon and say, hey, you know, I'm just checking on some things. You guys want to you know walk me through what we have in place and stuff if you have an IT department. And if you don't, if you're a smaller business, um work with your vendors, work with the the companies that are providing you these services and you know, do some of the checks, you know, checking your own postmaster tools. And if you see things that don't look right, like Katie was saying, don't be afraid to ask those vendors that you are paying money for um to help you out. That's it.

Make sure that you can utilize that. Contact us and support. Um, because that's what it's there for. And if they don't know there's a problem, they're not gonna spend their a lot of vendors. Don't proactively just go ahead and fix things unless you raise your hand and say this is a problem.

So be that annoying person. If you're paying for something, make sure you're getting what you're paying for. And if they don't fix it, it's time to change vendors. Mm-hmm. So, John, how long is your to-do list these days?

Yeah, well, the good news is I do have the marketing over coffee list uses a different domain for email. So that's cool. I'll check the other uh domain and see how screwed up that one is. But as of right now, there's nothing new from today on the list. So we'll uh save that for next week.

Um in exciting news, a little bit of a preview. Next week is our one year anniversary show. And so one year ago, next Thursday, we actually started doing this live stream. And so if you have questions that you want us to cover, just questions about doing a weekly live stream. Um, you know, if you want to find out whatever happened to that air conditioner that my husband threw out of the window during the first recording of the live stream, uh, those are all questions that we are happy to answer.

It it has now become the joke of it's the one year anniversary of my husband, you know, tossing appliances out the window when I'm trying to get work done. I'm looking over at my own air conditioner thinking, oh, I'm gonna not touch that. Just don't don't touch it while you're trying to record a show. Yes. Toss it out the window after.

All right, folks. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash T I podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustIsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.