Holiday Deliverability Survival Guide: Expert Insights from Matt Vernhout

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Welcome to another episode of Audience Bridge Insights. I'm here with Matt Bernhaut. Just learned how to say that about five seconds ago. Who's another email ability expert. Been in the biz for a long time, 20 plus years, and going. Very excited to have another expert here with me. Matt, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah, just to get started, I already told him that, you know, your background, you've been doing it for a long time. Why don't you go ahead and give us a quick overview of, of who you are. You're at Emo Industries right now. I know you're. You're also part of a bunch of other things as far as events and things that are out there. If you want to give a little insight of who you are and what.

You do, I mean, the list is long, so I'll just, I'll keep it short. So, yeah. I'm Matthew Vernhout. I'm currently the principal engineer, or, sorry, principal consultant for Email Industries. We are an agency that focuses very heavily on deliverability consulting, helping brands understand where their delivery challenges happen and working with them to resolve those issues. We also make validation software Alford Email Outside of work. I founded Email Karma, which is my personal brand. I have a website. It's been going 18 years now, I think I've been writing. I also founded the Canadian Email Summit, and I sit on a number of different advisory boards or boards from a coalition against unsolicited commercial email, the BIMI Working Group, also known as the Authenticators Working Group. Most recently, I joined the Rise infosec Security Group. And I've been involved heavily in the mog, the Mobile Messaging, Malware, Anti Abuse Working Group, for close to two decades. So I'm sure there's a few other things I'm missing along the way.

Basically, he knows his stuff, all right. Anything that comes to policies, anything like that, he's your man. With that being said, what's the most common misconception you hear that newsletter operators have about deliverability?

I mean, the list is long, but I think a lot of it really comes down to data. Data is the number one thing I think that I spend time working with clients on fixing, you know, subscriptions are only good for so long. Activity and engagement's important. So proper data collection, proper data management maintenance is huge. And then, you know, proper data cleanup after you're done with it, if you will. You know, not to get too preachy, but we've seen, you know, data breach every other Day, it seems like. So if you don't keep it because you're not using it, you can't lose it. Data is probably the biggest misconception of that.

Cool. This is one that I've been getting asked about a lot lately. More and more emails now are showing up and in the Gmail mainly, but in the in the promotions updates tab, people like, you know, it's still part of the inbox. People don't necessarily understand that. They do know it's not the end, but it's not the spam, it's not junk, it's just how they're classifying it, unfortunately. What recommendations do you give your clients or brands about how to combat that, how to land in the primary more often, you know, and get away from that?

I think it's more about changing their perception of what it means to be in the promotion stage tab as opposed to how do you get in the primary tab. I spend very little time working with customers on how to get to the primary tab. It's really explaining to them, you know, it's still the inbox. Consumers read mail in the promotions tab. They go there and they look for it during a downtime. Right. They're saving their primary tab for those high value communications between individuals as opposed to, my God, the latest offer from Technology Network.com or whatever it happens to be. Right. Like so I think it's a bit of education and sort of changing the perception of people, but also the understanding of not everyone has tabs turned on. Not everyone, you know, sort of has them functional. If you use, you know, Maybe prior to iOS 26, for example, Apple Mail didn't have the idea of tabs, it didn't have the idea of any type of sorting. And it's probably the number one mail client that most people use on moat. So there are perceptions that people just, I feel it's education almost to say like you're in the inbox, your open rates, your click rates, your engagement rates. They're not changing so it's not hurting you. And what I've actually seen is if you do get your marketing mail into the promo or the primary tab, more spam complaints. People are more likely to report it as spam because they don't want it there anymore. Consumers have learned the promotions should be in the promotions tab. If you spend all this time fighting to get in the primary tab, the consumers don't like that either.

Got it since those changes. Well, I didn't talk about it, but we had all the big bulk center requirement updates Year and a half back, Microsoft just adopted it earlier this year. Are you seeing any changes or you know, what's getting weighted heavier versus authentication engagement? And then content filters content in the email.

Yeah, they're all still super important, but, but if you think about them in order of the conversation that email sort of has between networks, authentication is going to be the first thing they're going to look at. Right. Did you even tell them your SPF was right, your DKM was right? Do you have DMARC if you don't have those things? Mailbox providers, you know, and Google specifically has come out even recently with, we're going to get more picky about authentication and start returning soft bounces and hard bounce codes for poorly authenticated mail. So they're basically. I'm not even going to waste resources scanning it or looking at it or spam filtering it. If you can't get authentication right, which is the way it should be. Like they're going to offload some of that stuff by immediately saying it's not authenticated. I don't want it. Now if you're authenticated. Yeah. Then they're going to layer in rbls reputation services and then take that as the next layer. Because again, if they can do that first, any mailbox provider, not just Gmail, but any mailbox provider, they can then say, this is listed on spam House, this is listed on Spam cop, this is listed on whatever. They're going to then say, I don't want your mail either. And then they'll layer in authentication. Sorry, they'll layer in reputation, the layer in engagement, the layer in their own metrics along with some content filtering. Because I've seen clients with really good engagement metrics still get filtered because of content.

Right. Tell me. Get, get your free. Whatever they're, they're throwing you right in the.

I mean, but not even that. Like some of the content is perfectly good content. It just tends to be maybe a little more sensitive in nature. Right. So hygiene products, health products that are perfectly legitimate, but because they're talking about specific parts maybe of your anatomy, they get filtered a little harder than those that don't.

Yeah, it's a, it's a tough one. And I've been talking to people about trying to adjust their, their katan language. Uh, and it's, it's such a pushback. Like, well, this is how I write. This is. I know how it needs to be. Or, and it's just an uphill battle. Your best bet is to get to me. It's Just focus on the engagement, the content, you know, it is what it is.

If you have good engagement, good reputation, you can get away, get away with a lot more than if you have a poor reputation or poor content.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times you're just going to put that content into my, my experience, into the other folders, not necessarily spam. So, so how do center domains and subdomains play into the reputation tracking? Does the subdomain people might not understand, is it, you know, are they taking all the reputation from the root domain? Are they all isolated?

What, what's the, there's, there's certainly separation. I would never say it's 100% separated, but there is certainly separation. So if you look at the sender best practices published by many of the mailbox providers, published by the MOG sender committee are all publicly available and if you look at a lot of different sort of consultants and what they talk about, they're going to say have a subdomain for marketing, they're going to say have a subdomain for transactional messaging, they're going to say have a subdomain for potentially your support or your password reset. So have those sort of all segmented out because different value streams, you want to have different reputations, you want your password reset email to be incredibly high value, incredibly well timed so that it delivers an immediately to your customer. So having it on its own subdomain makes sense. Anything that's sort of account related, if you will. Transactional mail, again is high value for a lot of people. They want their shipping notices, they want their E receipts, they want that type of information and they're generally triggered based on a user action. So again, super high value. And then your marketing mail and depending on the type of marketing you're doing, the value of that might fluctuate in your consumer's point of view and obviously your corporate mail, you want to stand alone, but to think that they all operate independently would be misleading as well. There is certainly a reputation that is shared, but each domain's reputation on its own as an element, if you will, is weighted independently. But if you have one brand that's doing really bad things or one subdomain, it will impact the others.

And then how are you, how do you, how do you, how do they layer in the IP infrastructure for each of those domains?

Yeah, I think, you know, we've started to see a transition from IP reputation a bit. It's not gone. I know. I don't know if it'll ever be gone, gone. Domain reputation is becoming a lot more important from what we've been seeing. And I think that's a good thing for a lot of senders, especially senders with good reputation. Because if you move networks, your reputation on a domain level can move with you. But if you're on an IP and you move networks, you can't typically take that IP with you. So you're starting from scratch every time. So there's a consistency that can get applied to a domain regardless of source ip, which has both pros and cons for a lot of senders.

Do you see? Or is there any time where a sender can is accident, accidentally cross contaminating between the domains or subdomains, or trying to split the, you know, their channels up. But there's some that people always seem to forgive or mess up on. Examples, things I can think of. Not sure if this perfectly ties into it, but like people that are sending Zoom invites and probably from a domain, and they don't tell the person who's helping with deliverability that, oh Yeah, I send 10,000 invite requests to webinars all the time and it's affecting. You didn't even know that that even existed.

Yeah, I mean, I think from the point of view of the larger your company, the more moving pieces there are and there may be less things that you see from a visibility point of view. What we look at when we're consulting with customers, we try to look specifically at the subdomain or whatever they've come to us for help with. So, you know, I'm having challenges with my ESP on this platform, this domain, this ip. But one of the other pieces we always want to do is take that step back and then also look and say, you know, what else is happening in your network that could be influencing your reputation? Right. Like we were just saying, your domains typically are segregated for reputation, but because they're all part of the same domain, they're all tied together. So you could, like you were saying, you could do something really bad over here and annoy a lot of people and it could impact the rest of your, your brand. So we always try to look holistically at everything and work with our customers and clients to track down those pieces that are maybe not authenticated at all, or they were unaware of that another team was sending, that could be, you know, outside of their normal band. Maybe they're not honoring unsubscribes, maybe they're not including list unsubscribe in those messages or any type of unsubscribe potentially in some of those messages. So there is carryover. So we try to look holistically and then solve all those little pieces to say well what's this over here doing? And like well that's not what we're talking about. I'm like, but that's the piece that might be breaking your reputation or your issue. Right. So you know, deliverability isn't a single channel problem. Sometimes you do need to step back and look holistically and say what is this random piece over here? Can we identify who's using it and how is it impacting our reputation positively or negatively?

Right, Yeah. I mean especially in the last few years I've come across this probably a thousand times, especially with the, the increase and mainstreamness of cold email outreach for business and just blasting away especially for like sales where I had some newsletter operators, you know, a successful newsletter, great quality, good content, great engagement. When they started sending out advertising, a cold email to try to get advertisers sponsor and stuff on the same domain as their newsletter and just shot their reputation and deliverability tank 100%.

And I mean there's even silos within businesses where the sales team is doing something that the marketing team isn't aware of.

Right.

Had no idea and it could be impacting them. And that's why we always try to take that step back to say like what are you doing holistically in your network that could be impacting you.

Cool. So we're talking about those good, good segue to the kind of the B2B part. But there's a lot of these especially because of this cold email freaking boom or whatever you want to call it. I think it's kind of going on its way down because they're getting smarter about it. ISPs are kind of getting smarter about it. All these like warmups, services that are out there to help you warm up your ip, warm up your domain, you know, they're sending it. I, I see it a lot in and obviously B2B called email space. People using it to help help get that first layer of reputation. But then I've been starting to hear and see bigger newsletter provider, you know, operators trying to do it to warm up new stuff on, on a more of a bulk sending strategy versus the cold email still considered kind of one to one when they're doing it. What are you, what are your thoughts on the whole warmup service? Is there, is there a value to it? Is there, is it just a gimmick, somewhat conflicted?

There's maybe a little bit of a time and play. It's not any. I'll back up. I mean, anytime you're going to do something like this, it should be a short term effort. Right. Like you were just saying, like you're just getting started. You want to give yourself a little bit of a push the boat. But at the same time, mailbox providers, like you said, are getting much smarter at looking at what does fake engagement look like. So, you know, there are brands that turn these things on and just run them forever, forget about it. And, you know, I don't think that's the way it should be, personally. There are lots of sort of, you know, B2B companies out there that you never hear about or you never see complaints about or things like that because they're looking at outreach from the point of view of, you know, how do I use a pin to pick the targets I want to talk to? And the ones that you hear people complain about typically are the ones that are like, how do I, you know, throw as much pasta at the wall and hope that something sticks? There's a huge difference in the effort and there's a huge difference in the type of communication happening. And there's a huge difference, I think, in the perception of is it valuable or not. Right. I look at the cold email that I receive, none of it's valuable because I'm not an hr, I'm not in sales, I'm not the SEO webmaster guy. I'm not. Right. Looking for funding, I'm not looking to sell the company I don't own.

Right.

But that is all the cold email I'm receiving is like, do you need funding to grow your business? I'm not the owner, so I don't.

Get all those text messages too.

Right. Fortunately, I mean, maybe I'm lucky because I live in Canada. I get a lot less text messaging that way.

I get at least 15, 20 a day.

Yeah. So I think, you know, maybe geographically I'm a little lucky that way, but I get tons of cold email and I don't think a lot of people understand that it's actually illegal in Canada to send it.

How about to ask you that? Cause I think Canada's. Canada's privacy laws and stuff were super strict that I'm surprised that you get that much cold email that people even.

Yeah. And a lot of it I think is coming from people overseas that just don't care.

Right.

We're just going to keep blasting you. We can get you ranked number one on Google. Right. Over and over and over again.

I Mean it comes down to how they. Yeah. Is the enforcement, can they really enforce it? I don't know. I don't know legally either. If I'm even if I'm in the US and I'm sending something to Canada.

So like that there are enforcement agreements between the Canadian agencies and the US enforcement agencies along with. What are they called? Basically it's an information sharing. So if the Canadian government gets enough complaints about a mailer in say New Zealand, they can then take all that data and send it to the New Zealand government and say maybe you should investigate this under your law and then the New Zealand government can investigate it and do something with it and vice versa. If there's a lot of spam going on in New Zealand from a Canadian company, the New Zealand government could send it over to the Canadian government and say hey FYI, you may want to look into the sender's behavior and then enforce it under your own legislation. So they have data sharing agreements between those.

But the problem with the US is the can spam is the, is the least strict. As far as you know, there's no real, it's an opt out policy. Right. So you can basically send email and unless they say I don't want your email, there's, there's no real legal recourse to it. They're not going to go, I signed up here there. They haven't gotten that far in the US until then.

Yeah, I mean I don't know of anything off the top of my head that has come through one of those cases yet.

Right. That's why I don't know either of them. I don't.

There are the enforcement are the enforcement agreements.

Right.

So at least it should be looked at.

If you talking about the, just going back a step, talking about the subdomain, your domain makeup, if there's one stream that you had to isolate from everything else that you think could impact your deliverability the most, which would that be?

New user segment. So, so there's a few things. So new user segment and I always look at new user segment as someone who subscribed within say the last 30 days and has not taken an action. So they've come into the program, they've never opened, they've never clicked, they haven't done anything. You are still in that call it dating phase or romancing phase. You're trying to get them to engage in your program and become a active, engaged member of your list. Different streams do it better than others. A lot of brands don't send a welcome Email like it could just be as simple as send a welcome email and say, hey, thanks for subscribing. Here's what you're going to get from us.

Right.

One of my coworkers recently did a test. They subscribed with two email addresses to the same sender, opened one and engaged with their welcome program and did nothing with the other. The second set of emails they received, the email address they engage with went to their inbox email address they didn't engage with. They went to their spam folder. So brand mailbox providers are looking at it to say did you engage with this ever? And if so making adjustments. And that's where I think having that welcome program, welcome series, confirmation of subscription, something that gives a subscriber an opportunity. And I've talked with lots of other consultants about this in regards to, you know, if you have a 30 day welcome program and someone hasn't clicked or opened in 30 days, do you want to continue mailing them?

No, no, no, no. That's even too long.

Lots of brands just put them in the marketing program and off they go for two years or three years or however long they do long.

30 days is like me, I got, if you're sending every day, 30 days too long.

Sure, yeah, it varies by program but you know, right.

I, I mean for example like and this is more on, on the IP level as an example we have like all of our engaged subscribers are active lists is getting sent on our dedicated IP where all of our new subs that haven't activated yet are being sent on a shared IP until once they activate we move them over. So all new people, we, you know, we, I think that brand we have like a 15 day activation. If they don't activate then they just fall off but during that time if they haven't engaged, they're still in the shared IP just so it doesn't affect the dedicated ip.

Yeah. And that, that's where I think new user segments an important one for people to pay attention to. Right. If people aren't engaging with your brand, your most active subscribers should be your most recent purchasers and most recent subscribers. And if they're not, you're not talking to them. Right.

What are your thoughts about the, you know, inbox monitoring? What's the, what's the, what's the best way that you have found to monitor inboxes for yourself, for clients in general? There's a lot of obviously monitoring software out there. Tons of different tools, majority of them, all of them to a certain extent, but they're using CD email addresses that they have that they're making you use to send out. That's how they're tracking the stuff. Some are a little more advanced where they're, you know, doing some, some engagement stuff, you know, still bot activity. So I don't know how, how strong that's going to be. But they try to mimic behavior. There's some like, I mean one of the, probably the original primary data source seems to have a bigger network of. I mean they call them a panel of real consumers. I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know what the heck that means or if that's even possible. People signed up for either a lot of to check their emails at the large scale. I don't know. But what is your whole thought on inbox monitoring these tools that are out there? Is it, does it give you a good insight? Is it more, you know, just a guess?

I, I'm totally biased, if you will, because I used to work on a product that was built to do exactly this. There is a, there is something innate about that product. You know, I think part of it is seed testing to a degree is which way is the wind blowing today? Right. It's giving you a baseline, it's giving you an understanding of how seeds or how recipients could receive your mail. The caveat to all of that is your mailbox at Gmail compared to. My mailbox at Gmail is trained based on the content you receive versus the content I receive receive and then how we each engage with that. So if you're reporting something as spam and I'm clicking and opening that same message every week, chances are for you it'll go to the spam folder and for me it'll go to the inbox. Deed tests are going to find that happy medium almost of what if the consumer's never really done anything with their mailbox from the day it was subscribed, like open other than login check email. So there's a directional information that as a consultant is helpful because I don't need to then have a delivery like an email address at every mailbox provider on the bus on. I can use a tool to give me an approximation, show me some headers, show me some data, things that I can look at that will actually help me narrow in and find that piece of what is potentially causing your problem. So from my point of view, they're great for that. But you know, do I believe they're 100% accurate? No, I don't believe any of them are 100% accurate. Where I like to look for that kind of stuff is your engagement metrics, I guess, opens and clicks and all of those types of things are like.

Like the way that a lot of them are, are kind of pitching and pushing them is like to be used as a precursor to an actual send. Like test this, test your, your mail here first before you send it to the, you know, the main part of your group and, and you know, see if it's more going to spam and try to adjust your stuff and, and, and then send it. I mean I just to me seems like it's, you're, you're basing your thought or what you think's going to happen based on, on this, the software that's telling you, but then you're, you're making a small tweak to it and you're res. Sending to the same people or not. I mean, I'm not sure exactly. And, and how is that really going to affect the performance?

Yeah, I like them as a heartbeat as well. Like for a brand that's not having a lot of problems, just do like a once a week kind of cadence just to make sure that things look okay. Right. If you are a hundred percent inboxing, according to seed testing, 10 weeks in a row and then week 11, you're 50% inboxing. But what happened in the last week or two that maybe has impacted your reputation, there's certainly an indicator again which way is the wind blowing that will help you potentially navigate where you've tweaked something or something's changed in your network. But yeah, I don't think it's, it's certainly not in my opinion, every campaign, every day, pen tests. Right. That doesn't help.

Even worse than that. Now there's these tools that are out there that are, excuse me, preaching that they're going to magically fix your email and it's going to hit the inbox all of a sudden. So you upload your email code, it does whatever and automatically now it's going spam and now it's going the inbox. And I've seen a couple of them out there that claim this or do this. I don't know what they're doing. I mean they're probably fixing bloated code, maybe compressing some images and stuff like that. I mean I could see like that can help. You know, to me, a minimal versus like real issues that people have. And who knows, when they're showing you their, their test, they might have an Image or stuff that's super bloated in there, just so it's going in the spam box when it's showing you the example. And then they do the, the clean version and then like hits the inbox. So I don't know. I just want people to be cautious about.

Absolutely. I think there's, there's lots of snake oil. People see an opportunity and try to take that opportunity to, you know, capitalize for their own needs to say, like, I'll get your message from the promo primary to the, or from the promotions to the primary tab by adding this, you know, 400 words of content at the footer of your email.

Right.

Like, that's great for today's campaign, tomorrow's campaign, it doesn't work. So now pay me another fifteen hundred dollars to do it for you again.

Right.

It becomes this just pay me to do it cycle as opposed to a permanent fix. The permanent fix is just doing things better, honestly. Just doing things better. Like you said, image size, message bloat, extra code, too many comments. All of that stuff fits into the reputation and content filtering.

That should be a, you know, that should be a standard policy quick fix. You know, once you have it implemented, you should be able to check that off the box. I mean I, I personally just live in and GPT and now this you Yahoo sender hub just monitoring the complaint rates, that's to me the biggest key and super happy now that Yahoo has that for, for pretty much any brand that wants it can access it and see what their true complaint is versus just looking at the feedback loop not realizing that, yeah, they're showing you the complaints that. But you're comparing it, you were comparing it to all the Yahoo that was sent, not just what was in the inbox. So you think you're, oh, maybe my complaints weren't that bad. But they, they were way above what they needed to be.

Yeah. And I would say like a lot of, lot of reporting that I see in ESPs too. It'd be like you got 10 complaints and you sent 10,000 messages. That looks really good. But it's like you got 10 complaints at Yahoo, but you only sent them 100 messages.

Right. Everything else was a Gmail doesn't give you any information. And they, and the, and ESPs in general, they're, you know, you know, they're there to make money obviously, but a lot of them are far back on the, on the transparency wheel when it comes to the stuff for their users. A lot of them don't break down deliverability By Domain Group. You couldn't even see like how Gmail is doing, how Yahoo's doing. I've had to go in and set up a gajillion different segments for people just so you can kind of see like oh look, you're having your Microsoft is not delivering. See here this is. You have 99.5% deliverability, 50% open rates, but your Microsoft here is 5%. Actually you would have a 65% open rate but this thing's killing you. They don't give you that transparency. I think more and more they're slowly starting to do it. But for them like the more volume to send, the better the numbers look, the more money I'm going to make.

And that's true. There was an initiative like 15 years ago that the, at the time the Email Evolution Council, the EEC tried to put together. I don't know if you remember them, they're now part of the ana. They were, they were acquired by the DMA and then through that the ana, but it was called the Same project Standardizing analytics and metrics for Email Same. And the idea was come up with a set of standard reports that all ESPs would use and very few platforms took up the opportunity. Probably from what you said, I can.

Make the numbers 100%. And on top of that, you know, a lot of these bigger platforms, they're tying you into these long term contracts. Even if your deliverability goes down, they're still charging you nla and you can't even send emails. You know, that being said, you're doing things you shouldn't have been doing and your delivery goes down, it's on you. But I have seen more in the past and now because now a lot of it's more like you said earlier, getting more heavily weighted towards domain reputation versus like IP reputation. But I remember a few years ago where I won't say the ESP or whatever but one, one of their, their shared stream got just destroyed and like flurry tanked because of whatever was going on there and you couldn't do anything to fix it. Like I was like try to fix it but it didn't do anything. Move to a different ESP and all of a sudden no, look, the emails are delivering again.

Yeah, I mean it can happen. You know we talked about that earlier, like reputation bleed between domains, but there's reputation bleed between IPs as well. It can absolutely happen. If you have a bunch of bad actors doing different things across your network, some providers might just say, well there's enough bad in your network that I'm not going to accept anything from your network. And then you got to spend time figuring out who the bad actors were that caused the problems. Either educate and remediate or remove them from your platform and hope they go somewhere else to the point where then you can fix the rest of your network.

Yeah, this next stuff is going to be good because you are. You got a lot of good insights from the protocol side, all the organizations you're part of and groups you're. You're involved in. Are there any shifts that you see coming in the next 12 to 18 months that most senders aren't preparing for?

I don't know if I necessarily have the exact timeline, but things that are on the Horizon at least dkin2 or whatever we're going to start calling it, currently named DKIN2. And that will have a lot of impact on things like dmarc, a lot of things around. You know, it might make SPF something we don't need anymore. Right. But there's a lot of infrastructure that has to go behind that. You know, there's DMARC Biz, which is basically DMARC version 2, additional reporting, additional things like that that will come out of that. You know, I think we'll continue to see development on tools that help with, like the Sender Hub. Sender Hub is brand new, it just released. But if you think back, like the original, all of this was SNDS, right. Microsoft was first they came out with SMDS. It kind of tells you about your IPs, what they think of you. Then Google came out with Postmaster Tools and then now Yahoo's come out. Are we going to see this for other providers? Maybe. Are we going to see other opportunities for them to provide feedback to senders also? Maybe, maybe there'll be some innovation.

Are there going to be other providers or are they all going to be.

I don't necessarily know, but it's a few.

The Comcast is on the way to Yahoo too now, Right.

So Yeah, we've seen AT&T migrate to Yahoo. Verizon migrated to Yahoo at some point. Comcast is migrating to Yahoo. But we've seen other mailbox providers internationally that are starting to now follow suit around DMARC requirements, authentication requirements, spam complaint metrics. Right. So while Google and Yahoo seem to be pushing the envelope, you're seeing the other providers also benefit and fall in line and say, you know, yeah, we agree these are good policies, we want to implement them too. So that's all coming. And I think as Brands move forward, it's beneficial because then you don't have, you're not jumping hurdles that are different sizes. You're going to start to see a consistency of if you behave this way everywhere, you should have better performance or at least more consistent performance, hopefully.

And where do you see Bimmy playing in any of this? Or Bimmy kind of just like the stepchild that would be left behind in the process?

No, I mean as the communications chair for the BIMI group. Again, I think I'm a bit biased on some of this but you know, BIMI exists and the way that the spec has been thought about, it could exist in a lot more places than just email. It could exist in search, it could exist in social, it could exist anywhere there's a domain name tied to the brand. It just currently is being developed for email because our efforts as a collective organization have been how do we get people to adopt authentication? And Dimmy was the carrot. And then we tried that for a bit and then Google and Yahoo said well now maybe we need a little stick to get people moving along. And so we had the carrot and the stick and you know, people are still adopting it, people are still, you know, implementing it, but I think, you know, again in the future, I can't say how soon because I don't have an actual idea but you know, in the next year or two we could see Bimmy expand into search, we could see it expand into social, we could see it expand into other places where it makes sense to have a verified logo.

Yeah, no, I mean I never even thought about it outside of email, but it makes, it makes total sense. I mean I've always liked it outside of, you know, even the, you know, outside of the, the trademark which kind of been the biggest hurdle for it. I think adoption wise it was, but.

We'Ve now implemented common mark, common mark certificate which you don't necessarily have to have a trademark for. You just have to have proof that you.

Yeah. Has that been adopted by, by Yahoo or Microsoft? I think Gmail was.

So Microsoft has no current involvement in anything BIMI related. Yahoo doesn't require cert at all. They just require reputation to be good. But Google has adopted it. I believe Fast Mail has adopted it. Other mailbox providers are currently looking at it. But really the push has come from Google to implement CMC and yeah, you.

Know, it's just, I've always liked it because it's the one. The way it was set up, it's outside the trademark is a whole nother thing. I mean it's another layer. But to me it was like you're actually identifying the business, the entity, entity who's setting the emails through the verification process. So to me it's like that's good email to get sent out from, you know, whatever the business is in general versus someone could just spin up a new setting domain and new whatever the next day or whatever and just keep on spinning these things up that it would be a great security protocol in place of email. Like, hey, if you don't have a, you're not a real entity, you shouldn't be able to send bulk email. It's that simple.

But I mean we're getting there with if you're not authenticating, you can't send email. We're almost there, I think.

Right, right.

No walk, no entry. Ten years ago was a pipe drain, but now it's actually looking more realistic.

No, but I guess, I mean, I don't know what DKIM2go gets into it but like what's the, what's to prevent anyone from getting like a, you know, authentication outside of the current setup if they're not a real business?

Yeah. So with dkim, I mean high level, I sign the message and I send it. The intermediary that receives it signs the message and it passes it on. And then the next intermediary, if there is one, signs the message and passes it along. So what happens is you get this received chain that you can then work back and verify through basically dkim signatures. It's almost like they've taken ARC and added another layer to it. So there's, there's a verifiable chain through encrypted tokens to say here's where it started, here's where it ends. Whereas before we saw some dkim replay issues and if things weren't configured properly, your brand could be spoofed even with dkim. So dkim is that next evolution of here's all the things that we didn't do right the first time and now we're trying to, you know, add them in to the next version and make it that much more secure. Got it.

And now since AI is a big thing of the, the future of the world today, tomorrow, how is that going to affect email deliverability?

I mean, I think we're already seeing it. So filters respond faster. Like mailbox providers are using LLMs to build better filters, build more efficient filters so they can adapt faster. And I think from the sending side you're seeing senders that are building more complex emails, maybe even in, in a Better way with less formatting errors or less issues from that point of view to generate content. And I really think it comes down to, like you said, it's here, it's going to stick around, it's not going away. Learn to use it, learn to adapt, streamline your process. And I think that's what we're going to see on both sides of the fence. Mailbox providers are going to do the same thing. They're going to use AI to determine is this a promotion, is this a update, is this a primary type message? Yeah, I mean, so all of those things are going to start to apply to AI.

This one's probably a little late to the, to the party but with the holiday season and Black Friday coming around the corner and obviously, you know, the volume of emails shooting through the roof to fight for inbox space and all this stuff. What's advice, the best advice you would give an email marketer, publisher or whatever, how to handle that, the whole environment.

Right now, let me think, let's see if I can give you a short list. If you plan on significantly increasing your volume, start warming up now. Don't just go from 10,000 messages to a million messages. No mailbox provider is going to like that. Build some guardrails. I feel like every year we hear the horror story of one big brand somehow landing on the spam house list because they've implemented bad data practices or didn't hygiene data on the way in properly. Make sure like use the next two weeks from the point of time we're recording this. But you know, use the next few weeks, confirm all your authentication's correct, all your lists are cleaned and hygiene, your consent process has been updated and is clear and that you're not gonna basically blow out your volume. Right. I can't tell you how many brands with I've worked with over the years that Black Friday comes up and then in January we're doing nothing but reputation repair. Right, because they just blow it up for the entire month of December.

Yeah, that's good, good advice. And what would you tell smaller mid sized mailers, you know, if there's one thing that you do day one to help protect their center reputation moving forward. What would that be?

Authenticate your mail. Do it right. Authenticate your mail. Doesn't matter the size of mailer you are. I have a single user domain that gets spoofed all the time. Authenticate your mail, do it properly. T equals none is nice, but it's not the end state it should never be. And talk to your ESP if you were using an esp, they're going to have a support forum, they're going to have a support person. You may have an account manager. Talk to them about strategies, talk to them about your challenges. That's what they're there for to help you with.

Got it. And you've touched on this multiple times during this chat. About your data quality data, about validating the data, you know, rechecking it, revalidating it. So what's the I guess how often should people be validating, revalidating or pruning their data?

There's no one size fits all answer. I would say anything that you're uploading should get a validation pass. So either at the point of collection, you're validating them one at a time, real time, almost, or if you do batch uploads on a weekly basis. If you're a small business that doesn't integrate directly with your email platform, do it before you do an upload. But when it comes to sort of that maintenance and hygiene of data, you know I like to look at probably five or six different segments regularly. So I already talked about new user segment and there's your engaged active segment which is usually somewhere between 60 and 90 days depending on the brand. Then you have your your moderately engaged which is going to be your 90 to 120 day or 90 to 180 day group which means they've engaged with you somewhat recently but not regularly. You're going to have your unengaged group which is going to be that group, you know, 180 plus call it and then you might have your win back group and that's that group that just hasn't engaged in 365 days or whatever your outer boundary is. And so if you're going to start doing a re engagement campaign, hygiene those addresses, especially if you've been suppressing them for hygiene them before you start. There are certain times I don't think you have to redo your whole list every month or anything like that. I hear customers sometimes like well we hygiene the validation service once a month. That's almost too frequently. You have a good bounce processor, you don't need to do it that often.

Right?

Do it on those problem segments, your old segment, your unengaged segment and your brand new segment, that piece in between of your active engaged groups. However you define them, your bounce processor should be hygienic.

And when you talk about your your re engagement segment, like the non actives that were active at some point, what's your best strategy as far as trying to reactivate them because I know a lot of times people just grab a chunk of that chunk that they haven't sent to in a while. Just out. I'm in a one big blast that usually is.

Yeah, one big blast is never. One big blast is never. If you want delivery problems do that and then call me, I'll help you fix it. The, the way I like to think about that is if you can automate it, right. So if you've never automated it you're going to have these huge chunks or these sort of quarterly groups that have to go out. But if you can automate it that when someone reaches, you know, 180 days with no clicks and no opens, they fall into a, they fall out of your regular stream and they fall into a win back stream then you're doing it handfuls of addresses at a time.

Right.

As opposed to buckets of addresses at a time. But normally I would say never mix in more than 10% per day. So if you have good quality traffic that you're sending and you want to do a win back never more than 10% of your good volume a day and I think that is a good balance and it's proven to be helpful for customers. But the other thing I will caution, most win back programs you're going to.

See.

2 to 5% of those people come back maybe. Right. So it's a lot of effort sometimes for little reward and it gets less reward the longer they've been inactive. And that's where I think those automations really play. A big difference in regards, you know, dripping them out a few at a time. You never have to worry about volume limits. You never have to worry about is it too many people? It's just handfuls of addresses drip out every day to say are you still interested? But I also think people need to look at what engagement actually means.

Yeah.

Did they sign into your website, have they purchased from you? It's not just did they click and open your email, have they been on your social app, have they. Right. Or in your app on your social media, are they engaging with your brands and can you track them across platform? And you know as much as the, the 360 view of your customer has been this term, I feel like it's been used to death over the years. There's something there to say.

Omnichannel. Omnichannel, right.

It's just, it's just not. Did they click on an email this in the last 180 days? It's did they engage with your brand by visiting your website, buying something. Because you know there are lots of people that receive an email, they read the subject line and say oh yeah, I should just go to the website. They don't click on the link, they just go to the website or they go in store and make a purchase because it was something that triggered them, reminded them like oh yeah, I was looking for that product, I got the back in stock notification. Well now I'm just going to go to the store on the way home because it's in stock. I don't need to click the email to do it. But I've engaged with you.

Yeah, that's, that's good insight. I mean what we've been doing as well as it means automated. So when they fall off our active segment we just put them in the, in a, in a holding pool. We had them set for it's either usually 30 or, or 60 days where we don't send them anything, give them time to rest and see what happens. And then we send them through a like a one month automation series. It's like I think day one, day three, day seven and maybe like 1430. So I think it's like five emails spread across a month. But just in case someone's on vacation, they're not there, whatever happens, you kind of hit them different points and then if they don't reactivate at that point we just throw them in a dormant file. Some don't send to them anymore. And then what we've been testing now what we do do is we get activation signals from different networks and partners of, you know, some, some people get open activity, some get click activity, anonymous signals coming in. And if we see that anonymous activity matches one of our emails then we're like okay, well it's still real email. Some of them we'll try to send them some type of reactivation at that time. And we've been finding good success on that. Getting like a, up to like a 15%, 15 to 20% reactivation off of those, I mean off of the matches. So you might have a million people and you're only matching 15% of them and then you're getting 15% of that to reactivate but you're not sending out the whole 1 million to try to find that 15%, you know, and that's.

What I'm saying, like that's your automation, right. The other thing I like with brands is that declining frequency. So if you think about like the five or six segments I talked about, right, the first two segments, new and Active get your regular cadence, less active get a weekly instead of a daily. Even less active gets a monthly instead of a weekly. And at some point you're just like, I'm not going to send you any more email. I'm going to drop you into that retention program. And then if you go through the entire program and don't engage, then I just drop you completely. But at any given time, you could put people back at the top of the funnel if they engage.

Yeah. Well, cool. Matt, appreciate your time here. If you want, where can people find.

Connect with you pretty much on all social networks? You can find me as Email Karma and you can find me email karma.net that's my website. Or if you're looking for me on LinkedIn, just drop a note, tell me where you heard the name and why you want to connect.

Nice.

You know, obviously you could drop a note to Email Industries and we're around. And Mike, are you going to be.

On any events coming up? I mean, Inbox Expos coming again next year, so.

Inbox Expo? Yeah, I didn't know if you wanted me to drop that, but Inbox Expo is coming up. So we have an open call for presenters right now. Early bird tickets are now available as well for Inbox Expo. And shortly behind that, I'm going to be starting all of the same sort of similar recruitment process for the Canadian Email Summit. So that's scheduled to be in September of 2026. That one just.

You guys just had that not too long ago, right? We did.

We just had in September. We're going to have it again at the exact same location and yeah, I'm really looking forward to it again.

Awesome. All right, Matt, appreciate it. Look forward to chat again. Take care. Talk soon.

Chris, as always, great chatting with you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Yep, take care. Hey, I hope you enjoyed that episode of Audience Bridge Insights. If you did, go ahead and do me a solid, click the subscribe button right around here. You can also subscribe to the newsletter. I have a link down in the description below. Now, we have a lot of amazing guests lined up, but until then, keep sending smart.