Email Insights: Best Practices and Strategies with JT Torres

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally. Today I have Jonathan Torres or JT from mailgun with me. Jt, how's it going today?

It's going great. We're recording on a Friday afternoon, so that's an awesome time to be just in general and looking forward to the weekend.

Yeah, yeah, it's tgif, right?

Yes, definitely.

Really appreciate you taking the time. For those of you who don't know, we here at Valley use mailgun for our emails and so we work with them to help get your emails delivered. And we wanted to bring JT on to answer some questions about emails and deliverability because we get a lot of those questions and we thought we'd bring in someone who can really answer them well. So let's dive right in. And jt, if you know nothing about emails or marketing, what are some best practices?

Yeah, there's a lot, there's quite a long list of best practices and you can really start from the very top where if you're starting from scratch, if you don't know anything, anything at all, the first recommendation that we're always going to have is just pay attention who is on your list when you're starting to send out? We'll go through a few, I'll go through a few, we'll set up some pillars and what we like to talk about is knowing who you're sending to, making sure that you have ability to send to them. And that really becomes an opt in question is do you have permission to send to the email addresses you have? And we start with that very basic concept and we start building from there. And the concept itself is just that in itself, that question we expand out to what kind of opt ins are being utilized, what kind of information is being relayed to the customer and your customer base to, to let them know that you're wanting to email them. And it really becomes a foundation of what we're doing whenever we talk about deliverability. And that's mostly because that's what the recipient services, we call them ISPs. So the Internet infrastructure where people host mailboxes and their inboxes, they have rules, they have ways that they want you to communicate with your audience and they have things that they don't want you to do. So most of that is encompassed right with that permission to send, they want to make sure that you are doing that, that you have that permission to send to this audience and then we build from there. It's one of those things where if you don't have that or if you are building your list in a way that isn't great, that'll become very obvious to them. But for the most part, you know, as long as you're starting with that consideration, you know, somebody walks into a business, somebody gives an email address, somebody signs up on a website and you're giving them the option to be put on a mailing list, then that's already one point that we can talk about dual authentication or dual opt in. You know, there's, there's a few different ways to do it and there's a few different things you'd want to do with that. But we start with the very basics of it. That's one of the things that we want to make sure first. Then the second thing is what, what we love in email and I think becomes the foundation of a lot of us within email data, love data. Like if you are in email and if your focus is email, a lot of times you're also a little bit of a data nerd where you're looking at information, you're looking at what is happening, your email platform, what is happening within your business itself and who it is that you're talking to for your audience. And once you start building that data, it's using that data to connect the different points overall, right? Like we're looking at who's engaging, who's communicating with you, who's doing things with the email, who is not. And then that allows us to then set up the cleaning portion of this, which is the last thing we do is once you have that data, you have good data, you've built up good data and you can also decide who should I send to and who shouldn't I? Because that is one of the things that can lead down, I know for the few other topics that we have with an email constantly and I'm sure we'll touch here within this call you're going to be looking at who should I continue to send to, who should I not send to and when is, when is it right to stop sending to somebody in general?

And really what it comes down to is opt ins consent to receive emails. I mean this is a two hour long topic, right? I mean there's so much that we could go into and maybe we, we should tackle this in the future for today. You know, let's set aside, let's assume that people have the right email list or to the best of their ability and we definitely should do a different session on that in the future consent and all that. But in terms of crafting the emails, once you have built the right list, you know who you should send to, when you should send to. What are some of the pitfalls that you see in terms of the content, length, subjects, you know, what should people be looking to do to have the best deliverability and open rate?

Yeah, definitely. There's a wide range of topics within this also, which again we can dive into at least for an hour or so. But one of the things that we like to focus on is we start with the basics again. What is the content? How long is that content? The thing that we always caution people is that there's very basic rules that can get you caught pretty quick. And the first ones that we start off with are how many images compared to how much text is there in there. Usually a 50, 50 split is your very, very baseline. And I think most of the Internet already knows that. But we know that the trappings really come in when you start going to either of those extremes. If you put in an email that's almost all images, that's just a link to images that's going to formulate the text for what your business is. The text to your links or not to your links, the text to even your message that you're trying to get across on that particular email, if that's all contained within an image and that's all in ISPCs, they're going to flag something that's going on there for them that just looks suspicious. That's a very spammer like behavior and you don't want to get get caught up with that crowd. And that's really what, it's what it's meant to trap and stop from coming through their system. So you don't want to do that. And again, on the other side, the extreme for that is when you have a lot of information that is just text and a lot of links that are just linking to out to all those pieces of information. If your email looks like that and just has all those things as a baseline of what you're sending out, you end up in a couple of different traps. One is that again looks like spamming behavior, looks like something that somebody's trying to do in a bad way. But then the other thing is that the more text you put in there, the heavier you put that in, the more links to different locations. Hopefully everything's a link to your site or through a tracking system that you're using to track those links. That'll help out a little bit. But even in those cases, once you start putting in all that text, you start putting in all those links, each one of those pieces of the text, each one of those pieces of the links is known as a fingerprint. And this goes back to a little bit of my days before Mailgun when I was working for the ISPs themselves or for an inbox provider. And that's the kind of things that most of those businesses will do is look for pieces of information that match up to other pieces of information that are bad links and are bad fingerprints. So, and a lot of times it's, you know, maybe a disclaimer. Like if you, you know, you Google disclaimer for a, you know, a business and you know, insert business type, it'll give you a disclaimer and you can definitely copy and paste that right into the bottom of your emails. And but if you don't change it, if you don't customize it, if you don't do things to make it unique to you and your business, there's no, not nothing, nothing in the world is stopping a spammer from doing the exact same thing, pulling up that exact same disclaimer. And then they're going to get that disclaimer fingerprint listed on a spam list and then you're never going to get your emails through. But same goes for links, same goes for, you know, anything you're utilizing within that. So just, you got to be careful, you got to pare it down, do what you're going to do again, 50, 50 split, keep it tidy, keep it neat, focus what you're doing for your audience. And when it comes to subject lines, subject lines vary a lot. A lot of people think emojis, they're a no go. That's not true. Really. It's about knowing your audience, what is going to speak to your audience. And a lot of times it's building your brand. And I think that circles back a lot too. Whenever you're building a brand, you're really showing your consumers, your customers, what is it that your business is going to do. If your business is a fun, happy business, that you're attracting people with giant sides outdoors, if you're a storefront or your website is filled with a bunch of fun things going on, great. Use emojis. If that's what your customers are expecting and that's what they know you to be, great, you can do it. If you're very serious, if you're a law firm and you start using those emojis, it's probably not going to look really good. So you really have to brand yourself. And then that brand translates into what you're doing with email. And that's when you really start getting some good results. When people know when they see and recognize your business within that subject line, within the body of the message, that's going to help really just create a cohesive experience for them. And then that's going to lead them to click and open on those emails, which is the most important thing that you want.

One of the other things that you see with emails and folks run into this problem is maybe they've sent a bad campaign or a bad newsletter, whatever it may be, and then their emails are, their individual emails are not getting delivered from that same domain. So do a lot of the things that were and we'll get to how to repair, how to help your domain and manage your domain's reputation in a moment. But do a lot of these things, subject lines being having a consistent feel that fits your business, not having copy pasted text. Do all of these things also fit the one off emails in addition to the broadcasts?

They do to an extent. And that's going to be mostly if your broadcast, when you broadcast, obviously they're being picked up, they're being classified. People are looking at those whenever you're doing the one off emails. And those are, if they're similar in nature, even then an ISP can't always detect exactly what's going on. So if you look at a system like Google, Google is massive. Google is a huge platform and they have a lot of power behind their analytics, behind their machine learning that they're doing on their side. They can start to pick out those emails fairly quickly and they see those individual emails coming through and then they start knowing and realizing with simply machine learning that you are sending the same email over and over again, even if it's a more transactional sense and it's, you know, maybe it's the one that you utilize, you know, immediately after a customer makes a purchase. And it's always the same, always the same, always the same. That, that is a transactional message. But they can start linking those together and if people aren't reacting to those things positively, then that will, that's when we start getting into problems. If they're reacting positively, that's going to have great reputation in and of itself. And that does translate up into, into the next stages. So as, as you're looking at that, it's a, it's a tiered ladder. As you start going through the individual messages, the, the domains, the ISPs, sorry, the IPs themselves, everything has a reputation Everything carries a reputation and that can definitely translate to one to another and start building off of each other.

So that certainly makes a lot of sense. You want to make sure that whatever you're doing, folks are opening your emails, responding to them. If there are links, clicking on the links, let's say that you have disaster strikes and a lot of your emails are not getting delivered, let alone opened. What are some of the things that you can try to do to rehabilitate your domain's reputation?

Yeah, there's a few different things you can do. The hard thing is that you have to start utilizing that data and you have to start paring down. And that's the most difficult thing, I think, for any business to do because it's scary. It really is one of those things where it's intimidating. You have to be confident in what's going to happen and really trust experts when it comes down to that kind of thing. Because I really haven't seen any business just do this on their own. It's usually on advice whenever somebody's talking to them, whenever somebody's helping them through this situation. And you want to really remove the people that are not engaging, the people that are that, I don't want to say problematic, but there's always an unengaged audience when it comes to that portion. Again, Google is my primary example because of who Google is and what they're able to do as far as size and breadth of email that they have. Whenever you start concentrating for the ones that still remain on your open, still remain on your good side, still are engaging with your emails, you want to pare down to who that core audience is and then start building your audience back up. And it is, it's scary. We've seen customers go from, you know, millions of sends in the, in the, you know, approaching double digit million sends and we ask them to pare down to, you know, close to a million, really bring it down to a lot of, a lot less that they're trimming or a lot more that they're trimming out of the list. So only send to that concentrated audience and that will help because it really just comes down to a lot of math behind the scenes. And if, if an ISP is seeing that you are sending a million emails and you know, 80% of the audience is not doing anything with those emails, they're going to put you in a bad spot like, because they realize, like, hey, people aren't really looking at these emails, they're not doing anything with them. It's not going to Good spots. We're not, we don't, we're going to assume people don't want this. You trim it down to that, that 20% of the audience that's engaging maybe a little bit more. You give yourself a little bit of breathing room there. Now they're going to see that, you know, 75, 80% of the people are engaged with your emails and then it can start building back up. And one of the things that I always caution people is don't just go in there and delete your email addresses. You want to remove them, slow down your cadence to them, like put them on a quarterly yearly list or something. That's going to be what we call win back campaigns where you know, after you repair reputation, after you've built back up, then you can start including back in at a slow pace. You don't want to just jump them all back in, but you want to bring them in slowly. You know, as, as you're, the rest of your data dictates.

Right.

And that's why we look at so much in data and why we, we focus on that so much. Because it is important and we do see those things kind of, kind of relate and, and how we choose to do that is a.

And similarly on the one offs then you want to make sure that you send emails to folks who will open and respond. We actually ran into this with my personal, well, not my personal, my work email. My personal work email. About a year or two ago we accidentally sent a marketing broadcast from my email address. And so then my one offs to, you know, even customers, they were not getting open, they weren't getting delivered. They were hitting their spam filter and it took many months of, you know, one offs. You know, send an email, text the guy, hey, did you get my email? And have him open it. And you know, many months before that problem went away. It is you, you gotta send thoughtful emails when you're having issues.

And it really is one of those things too or you know, kind of, kind of to deviate a little bit. Right there is that, that, that texting them and making sure that they got it and finding a different way to communicate with them to make sure that is great. We always recommend that too. If you have the ability to tell somebody right when they're, when they're signing up for your list, like hey, be expecting an email from us. If you see it, make sure to bring it over to your inbox, put us on your safe list. We see that happen a lot. I think there is requests out there, but not Everybody does it. And it's one of those things that can just easily, hey, here's a reminder, we're going to send you something. Make sure to safe list us. Make sure to bring us into your inbox. And that helps build up reputation a lot as well.

What would you say for a newsletter broadcast, you send it to 5,000 people? What percentage of them need to open the email for it to be not a red flag to you?

There's a few different numbers. The way that the landscape has changed with a lot of what we call them, proxy opens, or sometimes known as bot opens. Auto opens is another term you'll hear, but that has really changed the percentage of emails that are getting opened immediately to a much higher number. So, you know, we used to say like, 40% open rate is really, really good. Now 40% rate is about your bare minimum of what you should be expecting. Usually your open rate should be a little bit higher because of those auto opens. Those proxy opens, like, they just, they create a lot of noise. The, the minimum we want to go to and see is once you start getting into that 20% range, you really start to know, hey, something is not right. Something is definitely tipp scales in the wrong direction. And then that can like topple over pretty quickly if you're not careful. So, you know, paying attention to that, seeing when that happens, starting to adjust at those times is definitely super helpful.

So the adjustments you would make is trimming. Trimming the list to start with. Yes. Okay.

Yes, yes.

So one of the other things we wanted to talk about today, and it's a pretty timely question, but there has been a new Apple software update. Can you talk about how that relates to emails?

Yeah, it's. There's a, there's a lot of things that Apple loves to do and they're pushing the envelope with these things. The auto opens is definitely one of those things that did come up from them a while back and that changed the landscape. And that's why we talk about the open rate in a much different way today. The next thing that they're doing is a segmented inbox. It's very similar to what Gmail has been doing for quite a while now. And it is, again, one of those things that we love to say is a little bit scary. It's a little bit, you know, we go in a cautious way, we move forward cautiously just to see what the end result is going to be. One of the things that we have always said when it comes to the Gmail segmented inbox is that Gmail still considers that the inbox and we need to respect that as part of the inbox. And it's one of those things that is definitely a hard pill to swallow because I know I've seen it before. Your email is going into that promotions folder, which is, you know, exactly what Apple's getting ready to do is create that promotions folder for, for a large segment of their customers who choose to opt into that. And that is, that's not the primary Inbox folder.

Right?

Everybody wants to be in that primary inbox folder. What we always say is you really, really need to pay attention to what your audience is doing and how they're reacting to those things rather than just like want one particular thing, your inbox land in the primary inbox folder and then people not doing anything with it is much worse than it landing in the promotions folder and then maybe them not checking it as often. And that's why we, you know, again, data is king there where you're really wanting to pay attention to how often are they opening, when are they engaging with it, what are they doing, how often are they clicking on that message, if ever, utilizing all the data points you have outside of that. So anything that you have, you know, maybe in your business, you know, a storefront or on your website, if they're coming through, if you see other fingerprints of them interacting with you as a business, that helps and that, that knows, that makes you know that this person is engaged, somebody that's safe to continue to send to if you're not seeing that, if they seem to be completely unengaged, you know, it's, it's one of those things where like maybe it's time to remove them because, because of that. The way that the promotions folder works and the way that the updates folder works, they all have very specific rules as well. Google does some really, really good stuff in the promotions folder and, and that again, a topic for another time. But one of those things that I would say is, is a very good thing to look into is how they provide certain benefits for that promotion folder. There's a carousel that they term it a carousel where you have images and prices and sales that you can highlight within the promotions folder that won't show up in the primary folder. So it's a benefit, it's something that you can utilize to really highlight you as a business knowing that technology piece and doing those kind of things. So there's different parts of that and with Apple it's going to be the exact same kind of thing. I don't know exactly what they're going to introduce for that. But I know that they're going to have certain things in that promotions folder to do it. So the thing is not to be afraid of it. Just know and be informed. And that's one of the things that we always say is be informed. Talk to whoever you can about this. If you have a direct person to talk to and to leverage and seek some of that advice, great, do that. We like to provide resources. I know for me myself that's part of my credential set is I do co host a podcast that all we do is talk about emails. And this is one of those topics that I'm sure will be a thing that comes up, you know, later this year and, you know, early into next year once we learn more about it and once we get more information, we love to tell people how to utilize it, how to best do that. Because at the end of the day, the way that email keeps going and the way that email is not dead, which is the name of our podcast, but that's, that's the way we keep email alive. Is everybody being respectful and doing the right things with an email because we want everybody to be a good global email citizen. And that definitely helps, you know, kind of, kind of keep this thing alive.

I think we need to go ahead and wrap it up today, folks. When we were hopping on, I was like, oh yeah, you know, maybe 10, maybe 15 minutes. It's been 20 and counting. So we need to go ahead and, and wrap it up. A lot of great nuggets here and I'm sure there's plenty of follow up topics that we can, can do another volley rally on. But jt, if people want to get in touch with you, if they have any more direct questions or want to learn more directly from you, how can they get in touch with you?

Yeah, definitely I am on LinkedIn. I'll provide my LinkedIn information, but that's primarily where you can find me. We also have the podcast Email is Not Dead, which I'm sure we can provide some links for that too. And there's an email camp that's coming up near the end of September where we're doing a panel from the Email's Not Dead side and a bunch of other topics are going to be talked about. So if you have anybody that you know, if you yourself want to come in, if you have people on your team that are more email focused and you want them to attend something like that, it's a really good educational piece where we'll talk about a lot of this stuff as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you all so much for tuning in. Jt thank you very much for the time. We really appreciate it. A lot of great information here. And for everyone else tuning in, let us know if you have any questions or any other topics that you'd like to see me cover with jt And I hope you all have a fantastic day.