Stop Breaking Your List Growth: The Truth About Email Deliverability

We also lost 90% of our revenue.

We're now moving into 2026, which the medias are changing rapidly. The algorithms are disrupting things. And the ISPs and ESPs, like, I mean, there's so many of those things that are just. They all have different rules.

You know, we know in the digital world you can't go by gut, you got to go by metrics 100%. When they get into the newsletter space, they don't realize this. We have to figure out how can we get back.

They're missing the bigger point because they're measuring the wrong things. So, so what should they be measuring? Or what do you guys look at that no one else is really looking at?

And it's not about how big your list is, about how engaged your list is. What are you doing in your email program if you're trying to grow your list, but do it in a smart way so that you're not gonna lose deliverability. That's who we can help.

I'm here with Chris McKell with Audience Bridge and Audience Bridge Insights, the new podcast you just rolled out.

That's correct.

Pretty amazing. So today we are gonna be talking about everything that enterPR enterprise, like whether you're a newsletter publishing company, digital marketing company, digital media company. I. You know, there was a time where we were doing 30 million in our supplement business. And one of the biggest mistakes that I did just to kind of start this off, kick it off, is I tried like bringing all these deliverability people in house and it was the biggest waste of time because there's no way we could master that and master scaling our offers and traffic all at the same time. And we're now moving into 2026, which the medias are changing rapidly, the algorithms are disrupting things and the ISPs, ESPs, like, I mean, there's so many of those things that are just, they all have different rules. So super excited to have you here on the show. And let's kick it off. Why don't we, why don't we just start off like, like you've been in the email game for a long time, so you want to give us like 30 second background and.

Sure. So I started way back. We had agency at first going on probably 20 years ago, doing marketing for everything. Email marketing was one of the aspects we did. And then from there we decided the agency wasn't what we wanted to do because we were managing a bunch of kids and all the employees.

Yeah.

So me and my partner wanted to decide how can we Grow technology for audiences. We figured that by developing publication and grow email lists we could do that. Right? Grow the audience. You don't have to keep on hiring people to make more money. You just grow your audience, deliver more email and then voila, you're making more money.

Yeah.

So over the years we built numerous publications and newsletters to monetize in different niches from political to trivia to finance. And then off of that we just learned how to deliver the email in the inbox, the optimal ways. Because things have been changing year after year after year after year. Especially in the last two years, things have totally gone bonkers.

Yeah, when we started, when you started in email it was like probably just like the atm, like you just print money, like oh wow, hey guys, you have this new thing called auto autoresponders and people would actually just print money. And then as you were just saying like now it's completely different. So what, what has changed? Bring us, bring us on the trajectory of the timeline there.

Back then there wasn't really spam filters and all that stuff. It was the wild west. You just sent emails and they accepted them all. Over time they started building some algorithm things to filter out so called unwanted emails. Not everyone was inundated with this stuff. Yeah, and it just gotten more and more complex over the years. But even just say five years ago, it was still pretty easy to deliver email, especially in the, in the older, we'll call them isp' inbox service providers like Yahoo or Gmail. Yahoo is still pretty easy to inbox and get in the, in the. Or sorry in the inbox folder. But within the last few years they've been sending their or changing their algorithms and their center requirements making it more difficult to get in there. So they've been blocking a lot of people. They've been implementing new center acquired for bulk unders. And because of that I would say 70, 80% of people I've talked to have had Yahoo deliverability issues over the last two years.

And then that literally crushes like. So if I'm a newsletter publisher or actually any business though, like if we're like trying to monetize things and I'm sending out say 2 million a month, which is not a lot, like up to 50 million. I'm just trying to use a round number, let's go a million. And instead of me getting say 30% of my, my email is being squelched and not even reaching, which most people don't even know this by the way that's going on. The concern Is like, okay, well, I don't really want to spend more money on email deliverability. But they don't realize yesterday they lost money because their emails aren't hitting inboxes correct.

Yeah. So there's a few factors that go into that. So people, when they are, you know, building their email lists, they think, let me just scale my email list. Let me grow it as big as it can go. It's a vanity metric. I want to get to a million subscrib, not realizing that, yeah, you can have a million subscribers, but if you can only deliver to 50,000 of them, you just wasted money on 950,000 subscribers. Yes. So making sure you establish in the beginning to inbox and have good email deliverability. So while you're scaling and you're acquiring all this, spending all this money, acquire new data, you're able to actually inbox those people and activate those people. So unfortunately, what happens is a lot of people when they get into the newsletter space, they don't realize this. So they're basically sending to their whole list every time. And as it grows, they don't even think about email deliverability. It's not a problem until it is a problem. Usually that problem happens is when it's too late, they actually have business, Right?

Yeah.

Actual business actually make money now. Oh, there goes their 15, 20 grand a month. They're making 50 grand a month that they're making. Goes down to five grand. Has major issues. So what you have to do is set yourself for success in the beginning by following the best practices. So as you're scaling, you're growing, whatever needs to be happening. As far as, like, subscriber, you shouldn't be sending to or falling off your list, only activating or targeting the sources of data that are activating for you. And, you know, monitoring it across all the ISPs, Gmail, Yahoo, all those, making sure. Because one could be doing good, the other one could be doing not so good. So there's a lot of things to look at, but want to make sure you're scaling properly. Yeah. And it's not about how big your list is, about how engaged your list is.

That's. And that's a key point. So it's not how big your list is, but how engaged. So I'm gonna ask you a hard question, super hard, but if we're running a company meeting and I'm the CEO and I'm like, hey, Joe over there is in charge of list growth. Joe comes into the weekly meeting with, yeah, we're Kicking butt. We just increased from like a hundred thousand, one hundred fifty thousand. The executives are like man, Joe's killing it. Right. But they're only looking at like top line data as we call like vanity metrics. Right. Which open rates again is another kind of vanity metric. I want to go into like how you guys help people and stuff like that. But I think it's important for people to realize like they're missing the bigger point because they're measuring the wrong things. So what, what should they be measuring or what do you guys look at that no one else is really looking at?

So the biggest thing is, especially when it comes to list growth and data acquisition is, and we've asked tons of clients over the years and as well as prospects and we asked them, you know, what is your, your KPIs when you're acquiring data? What's your list? Growth metrics. How are you monitoring what the source performance is, what's doing good versus the other one. And like my business partner likes to say they, they don't ever have a good answer. There's they say they're embarrassed list, but they just go by gut, which you know, we know in the digital world you can't go by gut, you got to go by metrics. So when they're acquiring the data, they don't know that source a, which could be Facebook, what it's costing them per activated lead. So an activated person, some will say that's engaging your email and they're clicking on stuff. So if someone's not clicking an email, you're not going to monetize them. Right. So that's our key metric that we look for.

Can I pause real quick? So this is really important for everybody watching like a lead being activated. If they aren't activated, you're going to, you're just going to ruin your. Am I saying this accurately? You just ruin your email reputation. The more you try and jam stuff at those people. If like a dead dormant lead. Is that a fair.

Yeah, if they're not engaging and you keep sending them over time. I mean imagine if you look at it like someone signed up for email list.

Yep.

And you sent them. I mean some people are sending say two, three emails a day to them.

Yeah.

For 10 day period. They sent it for 30 days. That's 90 emails. If that person never opened or engaged or did anything, you don't think the ISPs like Google or like why are you sending this guy? He doesn't want their stuff. So 90 emails and they're worthless. Now, is it the guy didn't care about those emails or is it because they weren't inboxing? Yeah, and that's where it is. The more you grow, if you're not keeping your list highly engaged and tight, you're less likely to have all these new subscribers you're trying to activate in the inbox to give the best opportunity.

That's awesome.

So you know that's probably the catch.

22 we're in now, right? Yeah, yeah.

Growing and scaling. You got to make sure. And that's why what we do is we analyze all of our stats through our system from the ISP level. So Gmail, Yahoo, what we call them domain groups do Comcast, which is going to Yahoo. Now that's thing things are changing too. So stuff merges and then each source. How's each source activating across those? Because you might have a source, say Facebook is activating really well on Gmail, that Yahoo is not doing so good. And then you might have another source which may be, you know, maybe you're buying email traffic from a partner and they're setting traffic for email and that Yahoo is engaging very well. You know, you might want to focus on that and not so much on, on, you know, Facebook or whatever. I said Google for that isp. It's a little harder when you do a media buying, obviously, because you can't just say I don't want Yahoo. But we look at those things. A lot of times people are doing co reg. People aren't familiar about coredge. You're basically opting in on someone else's creative offer landing page. And somewhere in the bottom it says you're also going to sign up for X, Y, Z. People don't really know they're signing up for you. Half the time they're not going to remember they sign up for you. So it's a lower quality lead. In that case, you can see how is that activating? It's not activating good on a certain ISP group. You can just tell whoever your core risk partner is, hey, I don't want any leads that are Yahoo. I don't want any leads that are Microsoft or.

Yeah, can I repeat back to what I think I understanding just for the audience. So because this. I didn't realize this was even possible. This is pretty unbelievable. So what that means is, is that let's say we're running Facebook traffic, Google traffic, msn, Yahoo traffic, plus we're buying, doing media buys and then we're doing a core. Core is for many of you probably already know it, you've probably done it, you're wondering why you're getting emails, you opted in, they've sign you up for five other things in the interest rate. Like, so I have joint pain. All of a sudden I'm getting three different companies messaging me about joint pain. Totally legal, by the way, because it's in the, it's in the privacy policies. But what you're able, you're telling me you're able to see is, is that what I understand because we, we would, we're guilty of this. And so people don't need to be embarrassed because everyone does. This is like we would treat every one of those lead sources when they came into our email platform the same across the board. And so what you're telling me is that what you guys do is you're able to see which source is activating better or not better and then communicate that back so that we're getting higher quality lead FL because it activates better, which then leads to a better net profit or profitable profit per lead.

Yep.

Okay, cool.

And so that's the whole inboxing help and inboxing.

Yeah. So isn't that amazing? So in other words, everyone's ignoring that blind spot which you guys track. And usually it's because they don't even know that this is something that exists.

Right.

Yeah. That's crazy. That's so good.

What's, what's interesting too is so, and this is a big argument out in the industry is about can spam. So everyone thinks can spam. This is one of the reasons why co reg is, you know, legal. I mean, you have the disclaimer, they're saying they're signing up, but that has nothing to do necessarily with can spam. Can spam is an opt out policy. So to be can spam compliant, you just gotta identify who you are in your email, be branded, allow the person to unsubscribe. There is no part of the entire law and policy that says that someone has to have signed up on your landing page or on your site for you to be able to send emails to them. Wow. Right? It's can spam. It means you can spam all those spams. Not, not a, you know, nice term to say, but it's just like, you know, imagine your, your mailbox at home, you're getting all this market material.

Yeah.

You know, what's the difference? There's a lot of techniques and other ways of doing list growth off of that that we can also help with. Yeah, but you have like the smart pixel, which is, was really big in the E commerce industry for probably the last decade, where all this traffic was coming to the sites. A lot of people were going to different parts of the website, adding stuff to their cart and their cart abandoning right on the, on the checkout page, whatever. They maybe never submitted their email address. But this technology allows you to capture that anonymous visitor, get their email address so that you can send remarketing messages to them, hard abandonment emails to them without them even signing up. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's been happening for decades.

Okay. So I just want to make sure we, we segment that out properly. So that's okay. So one of the services you guys provide, which we will recap, all services. But this is good. We're, we're transitioning that too is you guys have a service that you're able to actually capture that data by matching the visitor using pixel data. Is that correct?

Yeah, there's pixel data, fingerprinting data that kind of very techy that most people aren't going to care about browser IDs and all this stuff. And they create like a digital fingerprint of the person and they map that into this big identity graph that we have. And off of that we can track users from different devices, different browsers, on, on your, on your computer. And off of that we can tell you that because it's being tracked all over the place, they might have visited other sites and then we know that that person, they visit that site, that that's the actual user. That's better.

Okay, and that's part of your list. List growth service.

Yes.

Okay, so we'll get to that. One second, I just want to finish this one thing. If I'm sitting here watching and I'm going like, okay, these guys are way smarter than what I Deliverability. I really don't understand it. That's a good place to be. By the way, like what you said about feeling guilty or embarrassed. I mean I, I know you and I know your partner and I know your team. Like you guys are all good people. Like no one's out to make people feel bad. Like you shouldn't sit there and feel bad. You shouldn't not do something because you're like, oh, I feel guilty about no, what they. You guys offer an audit, don't you?

Yeah. So we'll do a deliverability audit. And it's more than just an audit. Right. We're trying to set these people up for success, for growth by having their deliverability in place and SOPs in place of what to do as you scale or when an issue does ar, so you can, you know, remediate it, fix it. So you keep on scaling and growing. But yeah, we look, we do a technical audit. Just make sure all the technical things are set up. There's been a lot of sender requirements that have changed, especially in the last two years. So we just want to make sure all that stuff is set up properly for you will confirm that things like one click unsubscribe and then all your credentials like dkim, spf, dmarc, everything's you know, polished and good to go. Make sure you're not any blacklist, stuff like that. And then we start looking into what are you doing in your email program, how frequently are you sending, who are you sending to? Are you segmenting your users specific ways? What's your sunset policy? Which is when do you stop sending to users? Right. Because they either didn't activate or they stopped engaging or you know, they may have been active at one point. They stopped engaging over time for some reason. Yes. As well as reactivation sequences. What are you doing to try to reactivate people that may have fallen off? So we put this all together and work with them. A lot of times there's, you know, the biggest issue will come down to who are they sending to. Yeah, sending to too many inactive people, which causes major problems.

Which means they don't have the sunset, they don't have some of these there.

So don't even have a base setting segment.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. So you work with, you guys work with some of the, can you just give a couple examples of like the types of big newsletters, publishers or big media companies that you work with and then narrow it down to like, is this for me if I'm somebody who's just trying to grow a brand right now? Because this all relates to everything I've ever done and, but I've never grown a massive media platform and I know that's one of the things like are these things you are saying most of these people are not doing?

A lot of them, they, they are doing. So we work with the MarketBeat. Yeah, they're in the Fin Pub space.

Fin Pub Spaces is a lot more financial publishing. Just so everybody understands that's insider language.

It's, it's a lot more, it's a lot more complicated than some of our general newsletter clients because they have a lot more sophisticated stuff up for, you know, triggers. They're sending way more email on average a day than Other newsletter publishers would.

What would that range be? Just so I. I don't know any.

They could be sending three emails per, per subscriber day, up to 10, 15 emails to a subscriber per day.

No, I want to pause everybody. Like you guys might think that's crazy but like my most successful friend who's a lead generator is like the more we send mail, the more money we make.

Right. And if you know the thought process there is, the more you're sending, you're trying to, you're trying to squeeze out the people that want your stuff and whoever doesn't, they're going to fall off. That's fine. They're not. They were never going to buy your stuff or make you money anyways. So they're just churning through that. But it makes it more complicated on a deliverability aspect on what could be causing issues because you're here, it's all over the place. So we help them try to navigate that. And then you have other publishers essentially sports a new one that's in the, in the, in the space. They're a bit very, very large publisher in the sports niche. And they started off strictly SEO. I think I want to say during COVID they were getting about 100 million views a day or no a month maybe that day would be ridiculous. That'd probably be more than any other platform. But get 100 million a month and over time they saw with. This is another thing we can talk about later but issues with algorithms SEO causing major issues where people were getting all these visits and then getting crushed when an algorithm changes. So they realized they had to start capturing and growing their email list so they owned the person so they could start bringing them back to the website as they. So they've been growing their, their list for some time now. Now we're working with them to make sure with some of our, our products help them grow their list as well as well as to make sure that they're delivering like they should based on, on the practices. Yeah.

And then so what you just mentioned there too, just so we're capturing that on the SEO side, what you're saying is and this is going to change again with, with the chat GPT growing at the rate that it's going is we now have a new media source happening and once chat becomes it now you're probably going to see multiple other AI like feeding the system so you're things like Panda, which I know it's older but like when they change their search engine rules. If the company was only reliant on that. They got murdered. Yeah. They have no business. Right.

I know plenty of people that they had to fire their entire staff, all their riders because they couldn't pay for anymore. Because from one day, the next.

Yeah, that's crazy.

And it's happened in email too. Some of these big updates, especially with Yahoo, put a lot of people out of business because they couldn't deliver. They're sending out hundreds of millions of emails a month. And then overnight with all these new updates states. Yep. They couldn't get to sending a million a month.

The faucet turns out.

Yeah, yeah, lock it in.

That's crazy.

And same thing that happens to social media. Their algorithm's always changing.

Yeah.

So all those social media SEO, you know, those are what we call shared platforms, right. You don't own it, the technology owns it. But your email list, you own.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you could always send them and you have to fight the, the inbox gods to get into the inbox, but you can, you're. You're still in control of your people and sending what you want them to see versus is.

That's right.

Maybe 1% of your people on your social media seeing your. Your post.

Yeah. Well, I have a good one for you. So like last week I was in an event and massive financial real estate investing publisher was on stage and he was encouraging people. He's like, what you should do is go out and hire the most expensive copywriter you possibly can afford. Right. He.

I know one of them.

Yeah, I know a couple. Right. Maybe one's in the room. And yeah, he was like, I remember when I could only pay 5,000 and then I was paying 15 grand. He goes and he goes. Now we pay $50,000 for a copywriter to write our offer every time. Because we know we have a better chance to succeed and win. Okay, now, I'm setting this up for a couple reasons. One is that when I launched my, my supplement 17 years ago, I hired a gal. 25 grand plus royalties. And you think about how businesses will spend all this money to build like the best product, the best offer structure. Get the team. You got this overhead yet your message isn't getting to your. Your leads.

Yep.

Isn't that crazy?

It's crazy.

So I just want to say before we, we segue into list growth here, folks, just one of the reasons why I wanted to interview Chris and kind of go through email deliverability in the state of the union on that is that sometimes you can't measure. Sometimes people try and measure what is it going to cost me to have a professional email deliverability team do this and make sure we're getting it. But what you don't realize is that you've already been spending money on this without it getting fixed because it's costing you money for the last 90 days, 120 days. And if it's a thousand bucks a day, 500 bucks a day, whatever that might be, you just lost a hundred thousand dollars and you don't even know it.

Right. You know, so just, just to add on that.

Yeah, please. This is good because people need to realize the investment opportunities that people don't.

Understand as well that, you know. And it's, it's. Once all that's put in place, then they got the media buyer. Right. And the creatives for all the advertising that's going to drive all this traffic to generate all these leads.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden they're like, it's not working, it's not back, it's not backing out, whatever. The media buyer must be the problem. Oh, right.

Always fire the agency first. Yeah, that's always the issue.

But is it the buyer is emails or your stuff just not getting the people because you weren't set up? Or they're like, they see the initial stats, oh, this looks great. Let's push it. Let's scale to, you know, the nth degree too fast. And now the deliverability tanks, possibly because they're just pushing in too much data too fast and have enough time to ramp up and you know, warm up their, their email or whatever offer they're doing here and it could implode. And then all of a sudden, again, it's the media buyer's fault or it's the creator's fault.

That's so good.

But maybe it was tied to the email and it not being. And people don't look at that enough. They're looking at the media buyers, they're looking at the landing pages, the conversion rates. But what's happening on the email side of all this?

Two quick questions, then we're going to segue to list growth. This is very. This is good. Hopefully you guys are enjoying this because I am. This is amazing because it's stimulating more questions. What I'm hearing too is like, it, you don't have you CEO or marketing cmo, whoever it might be, you don't have a true unbiased source of data giving you what's really working or not working. And so you're going off close to sort of. I'd like to have the Data, but you don't have that. Okay. It's pretty amazing. If I'm watching this and I'm immediate media buyer, I'm like, I'm referring everybody to audience Bridge. Because if I was a media buyer or even a copywriter, I'd be like, hey, if you don't have the inboxing side figured out, then we're just kind of guessing on if my offer's actually performing or not for you. That's so good, dude. You know who else should hire you guys? All these webinar platforms that, like, are promising they can get deliverability. Oh, God, go high level. I mean, all these software should be just hiring you. They should, because they promise all this stuff and then you set it up and you're like, wow, my. My stuff's in spam or promo folder immediately. Like, what do I do with that? So now we've been talking a lot about deliverability at this point. And so now the next part, which is everybody is the sexy and attractive part, right? It's the woman in the red dress. Everyone wants to go. It's list growth. Where's my leads? I need more leads. I need more leads. But as you and I both know, leads aren't created equal. And you guys are doing something. I think what is only going to become more and more important important as CPMs continue to rise across the big traditional mainstream platforms. That's one. Number two is AI is making it so that a very amateur media buyer can go into any platform and start buying media. And even if they don't know what they're doing, they're cluttering the mud, which is increasing cpm. So we're. We're in this weird time where quality of data is becoming harder to get. Our message is getting drowned out. But if you could get me the 55 year old, like, I'm talking about my stem cell client, like the 55 year old who was just injured in the last six months, who is being told his only alternative is pain medicine surgery, and he's beginning to consume regenerative medicine stem cell content. I could send that dude an email and he's gonna be like, oh, Lord, you knew what I was thinking. This is divine intervention. Which it might be because Chris McKell's making things happen at Audience Bridge. But let's go through list growth and kind of the cool technology that you guys are.

Are.

Have available.

Yeah. So at the heart of it is our reporting. Okay. So we feed in all the lead sources into the system so we know what the activation Activation rate is across each lead source, each lead provider, whether it be your Facebook, your, your currently.

So you could take their current data, that's phase one.

Yeah, data, and have it feed in through our system and it goes to their platform afterwards. But it kind of you. We pipe it through our system so we can capture that lead that came in, knowing that it came through. And then we use that as well as the activity signals that are happening from the client's ESP to find out how those sources are activating, what's the activation rate, how long are they staying active on the list? So that we can then provide the user with what we call a cost per engaged subscriber. So how much it's costing to get an actual clicker? More than anything. And then over time, once it's been tracking long enough and enough data is there, we can then then start building an LTB model which will show you what the average length of engagement is. So how long has someone that acquired been clicking and how long are they staying active on your list? Is it on average, this source is 3 1/2 months? Is this source 7 months, 8 months? And then off of that, you can kind of get the lifetime value for newsletters, publishers, which in general is hard to figure out because you're not, you know, a lot of these people are sending advertisements. People are buying their ads or ad newsletter ads. So it's hard for them to figure out what an actual subscriber is worth to them from a source source. And we're trying to solve that. So having all that information, there is a first key with our product so we know what's working and then we have what we call.

Can I ask a follow up on that real quick? This is really important. This is actually a breakthrough because like with a lot of sales teams or with like webinar, like you're trying to, you're trying to get like, okay, what's my cost per. A person who watches my webinar to the end. But what you're telling me is if they're not engaging based on a certain media channel, the advertiser, the media buyer is looking at, here's my cost per lead, here's my roas. That's all they're looking at. I mean, there's a. Okay, so sorry, there's a couple other points to look at, like how many show and stuff like that. But you're telling me, like I could look at. Okay, well guys, guess what? Our, our inflated cost per registrant and show rate is high because our Activation rate is so low. Like if we just fix the activation rate, the C rises over here. So if you're so listen this, if you're making money right now, this is just going to be a plus plus because you're going to improve your activation rates or you're at least going to know the real data.

Right. And, and also it's, it's what they call like cohort analysis. But what happens is as well as you might say, you get a co regulate and it's costing you 50 cents, 25 cents. Your cost, we'll call your cost per Engage subscriber is a dollar. Now you're buying Facebook leads and it's costing you one 25. So now your cost per engage subscribers say it's 250 for that. So now you got co reg at a dollar and then you have the other one at 250. So you're like, oh, I'm getting quality leads that are, that are engaging at a dollar and this one's cost me 250. But then you got to understand over time time what happens with that source.

Yeah.

Who's staying on the longest? So my co red is only staying on for 2 months, but my Facebook is staying on for 7 months. Now you can see that the cop. The average cost for the engagement is lower. So you're actually gonna end up making more money on Facebook.

This is so good, dude. So pretty much the guys from two or three years ago, they were like, oh, I'm just killing it in list building and monetization. If they're just like in the dump truck mentality of I'm just dumping all the leads in and they don't know this data. Every time there's a Yahoo or whatever update, they get wiped out. Wiped out. Or they, they don't even know what to fix.

Correct. So then go now that's the whole reporting thing. Just to see what's going on. Now our one of our major products is called the smart feed. And the smart feed is our identity graph which is tied to our first party clicker activity through our entire network. We know through all the publications we have and partner publications who's actually clicking on things as well as our identity graph has their audience makeup. So their demographic information, their age, their interest, finance, health, whatever they're interested in. And then using data, we can match our identity graph and our audience with our clients. They can say this is who we are. They can provide us a sample of their data and we can match it in our identity graph to get a lookalike audience, you could say fingerprint what ideal subscribers for them. And then we can provide off of our identity graph and our network which will provide subscribers directly, feed them directly to their ESP through API, help them grow their lists. And this is what I called what we call second party data because it's our own data. We're allowed to distribute this as we want. It's all can spam compliant client. It's in our disclaimers on our terms and conditions and practice policies all throughout all of our publications. And we call it, you know, kind of like the, the new way to do co reg because the old way was you're just getting these people signing up on a list or signing up on a page. It could be their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th email address. You don't know what email address they put in there.

Yeah.

And you're paying for it. Where this, you're only getting email address email addresses of subscribers we know are actually clicking and engaging somewhere. Yeah. In our ecosystem.

Do you mind sharing like, like a price range? I know, I know. It's totally perlated lead like varies based on the volume because and stuff like that.

Right. So on average you could, it's probably 50 cents a lead. 505050 cents. It can go up depending on the niche. It can go down obviously like you said, based on the volume. But 50 cents, you know I've.

Because so the big, the big, the big turn off to like co reg. I can already hear people like I could hear them in the, on the other side of the camera saying I tried Coredge, it didn't work. But when I tried Coredge, first of all I've done courage and it has worked. I've done courage where it hasn't worked. Right. But when I tried doing higher volume correge, the fact matters, I had no idea our activation rates. I had no idea how any of the inboxing looked. I just like, oh, we spent a thousand bucks or two grand and we only made like 300 back. And what I'm hearing you say is it had no reflection on the quality of my offer. I just have no idea how many people actually saw the offer. Right, okay. So with this though, with $0.50 per lead approximately, you're taking behavioral data an advertiser or like a company or a newsletter publisher would want more of and they're able to give you their demographic, geographic, behavioral data and then you guys can reverse append that or reverse engineer that.

Yeah, we can do demographic data. We have, we have local newsletters that use our service. So we were able to pinpoint a geographic area around a city based on zip codes and geo targeting. Obviously you can do statewide all types of stuff.

So this works local and national.

Local, national. It's actually that's a good thing that you brought that up. This is also only US based. Yeah, you can't do it in the eu, Canada, wherever. They have their own different privacy policies.

Well, you know they're not even allowed to watch this video anymore because it's just kidding. But I don't know if I am.

I don't know. You might.

If you're watching it now, just send the sos, we'll come get you.

But yeah, so just all of our products are just our US based customers because we don't, we don't deal with the European.

Okay. So you can go local, nationwide. I guess my one question, maybe this is too specific of a question but like why would a big publishing company want local data or are they just feeding from the local.

Well if you think about this would be more for local newsletters that are popping up. I mean it's a huge market right now, right. So like 6am City they have, I think they have 65 what they call core newsletters, letters on big cities. They have I think 450 other ones across other cities. That's like their little like seed, I guess you call them seed that they're trying to grow before they get to put more resources into it. You have people like the Flyover, they have a bunch of state specific newsletters. So yeah, the Florida Flyover and Georgia Flyover, they have a national brand and then you have a bunch of other things popping up in Austin and all these. They're just the local newsletter space is big. Obviously legacy media has, has fallen way behind and this. And they're. They're getting passed by all these people that are going with the local route and they're really targeting more like the feel good stuff, the event stuff, lifestyle things in these newsletters versus all this political stuff that, that people are sick of.

And they, but they have to make money still. So your point on that is like still they need deliverability. They need to know okay, this is great. Okay, yeah.

So we can help them grow their list at a geo level through our targeting. I love it.

It's interesting how many like guys that were in digital marketing like direct to consumer, whether it was just selling products now they like chunked up a level and they're just like in San Diego and they have a really publishing business or you know, a media company. That's pretty amazing. Okay, so we talked about Smart List. Now is that also with. What's with Smart Pixel? We talked briefly about that earlier. Can you tell me how that's different? And then also I know it's another way, it's another thing we can buy traffic from.

Yeah. So Smart Pixel, like I explained earlier, it's basically identifying the anonymous traffic that's come to your site. So visitor comes to your website, you have no idea who that person is unless they submit an email, Right? Yeah. This technology allows you to identify that person person and then based on their activity. Also tied in with some AI to to know if they're a quality consumer time on site, how many visits they've had and using that information to then give you the, the person who's most likely going to want to subscribe for your publication and provide that email address to you. So it's a warmer lead. They already know your brand, they've been engaged with your brand looking at stuff. They just whatever reason didn't sign up for newsletter. Maybe you're not good at getting people set up for your newsletter. You don't have calls action on your website. You don't want to break up up your, your user experience flow because you're SEO heavy website.

Yeah.

But then you can grab these users and then start emailing them.

Yeah. And see when they activate.

Right.

Okay, that's amazing. And then you have Smart Activation which.

Is another relist building Smart Reactivation. Yeah, this is one that we're very excited about. So Smart Reactivation is a product where you could provide a dormant list of subscribers. So people that haven't engaged a long time, you haven't been sending email for a while because they just fell off your list. You can provide that list to us and it can be an MD5 format or email if you can't do that. But we capture that and then we get signals from all of our network of publications as long as well as from a bunch of partners that provide their anonymous clicker activity too. And we have a feed that comes through and whenever we identify that this anonymous click happened that matches your dormant file, we send you that. No kid, that ping saying like hey, this person person just clicks. Somewhere in the, in the universe they're still active. Try sending them something now because they were once engaged on your list. It's a good time to send it to them now. Wow. And then they use that to then trigger an automation, a win back. You know, it could be used for whatever they want. But they know that that person they should be sending emails to versus the old traditional outdated way of of re engaging people of just grabbing a chunk of people in a segment that had an engage and just throwing them in your your boat sand which can hurt deliverability. You're not activating that many people because because you're sending too much volume on it. So this is a smarter way to try to re engage people.

Okay so on a list building front so I know we got two different chunks here. We got our like our our inboxing and activation and measurement. Then we have list building side we're if I want to do an audit or get on a call with yourself or with Justin or anyone on the team where do I go and how do I sign up?

You can just go to the website audiencebridge IO and right there there's a book booking link at the top menu. Click on there and you can we have a HubSpot integrated meeting link. You can just schedule a time right there.

Okay great. What have I not asked that I should be asking as far as that would help with a potential buyer to know that this is right for them.

If you're trying to grow your list and you're unsure the best way to grow it or you're looking to if you have an established list but you want to make sure you can you can scale the list but do it in a smart way so that you're not going to lose deliverability. That's who we can help key to all this like we have all of our list growth products products because you know we know how to grow lists and we've been doing this for a long time but the fact that we have the list growth tied together with our delivery all one to make sure that whatever's happening is working or if there's issues to it'll show you what to do and fix it before it becomes a major issue. As well as showing like our smart feed we're providing data all it's going to be is it's going to show up as another source of data for you in the reporting that you can compare against all your other your Facebook, your your Gmail this campaign you're running your email buys and send out me source and if our source isn't performing to the standards of everything else then you just don't buy anymore. We're trying to be upfront. We want the client to see get the best bang for their dollar on what they're spending their money on and helping them grow. And if that product of ours. If it's a smart feed, smart reactivation, the smart pixel isn't up to snuff or what they want. That's fine. We're trying to be transparent.

Well, it's transparent. Data is what you're just giving. And I think what's kind of cool is like, you know, you talk to growth focused people, they're always like, I just need more leads. Let's just grow, grow. But when you're combining that with no first, it's actually one of what I liked about your answer earlier when I, I said okay, on list growth, you like actually started with, well, we need to see how your data is activating and what's working.

I love that. And another, another thing too is, I mean, this is also perfect for, for media brands.

Yeah.

You know, that might have multiple newsletters or multiple lists and they may be looking to create new lists. Right. So we can help them identify what subscribers in their list activate. They should start with. To activate, you know, build off a new list. Right. Think of, say like think of Morning Brew for instance. Instance. They were just one big newsletter.

Yeah.

And over time they figured, hey, we need to, I think, I mean, I heard this or when we spoke on a cop or something, they, their advertisers like, hey, you know, if you want to get more of our budget, we can't just send to this national thing. We need other stuff we can do. That's when they came out with their, their B2B little niches of, you know, whether it be marketing or, you know, whatever. The CEO, I don't know, they have a bunch of different verticals now. And they seated those with probably their most engaged people that they know were, were, were interested in certain aspects within their main newsletter. So being able to use this and, and help feed your own data. Yeah. To start off, kick off these new brands or these new lists that you want to do. It's perfect platform for it. Yeah.

That's fantastic. That's fantastic, man. If I was a media. If I was. So do most of these guys buy like most of your clients? Do they have their own internal media teams or are they working with agencies or both?

Let's say it's a mix.

Yeah. Because if I was an agency, I would call you guys like right away and be like, like, I, we need to have some kind of partnership relationship, like referral relationship. Because what if I was a CRO? Like, I'm not. See, I know, it's so funny. Like, this is why I like doing these things, these interviews, because I never know where it's going to go. Like if I'm a conversion rate optimization specialist and all they do is focus on the funnel. Well, yeah, but your emails aren't getting delivered. They're not inboxing. Okay, well you suck as a CRO, but maybe you didn't. If I'm a copywriter, well, I'm sending people audience bridge. Well, you got to make sure the data on your inboxing is working. Otherwise we don't know like, oh, what's your opt in rate? Well, who cares? No one's, no one's reading them.

Right?

Right. If I'm a media buyer and we, we're like, we think we're doing good. So I mean, if I'm a CEO, I'm just letting you guys know if, if your direct reports are coming in and they're giving you surface level data, you're just not getting the truth. And it's not a judgment. Especially if you're like a CMO or someone else who's watching this. You're like, oh, well, I'm not bringing this for, because I'll get fired. Well, then you should be fired. But if you bring audience bridge in, you're going to get the true source of data and now you can grow so things don't just hit a wall one day. You know, one of the questions I'd have is like, how did you, how did you even get into trying to sol and inboxing to deliverability? Like, problem. It's a big problem.

It's a hurtful story. We'll begin there. So this is probably back six years ago. We were sending out about 100 million emails a month through our publications and doing very well. And then all of a sudden, just overnight, Yahoo had a big algorithm update and our deliverability tanked. You couldn't deliver anything to Yahoo. Our bond went from 100 million down to about 5 million. Wow. And from that we all also lost 90% of our revenue. So what do you do? You have to, we have to figure out how can we get back, what do we have to do to get back in the inbox, what caused us to get in the spam folder or get blocked. So I took that journey of trying to figure out what had to be done to fix our deliverability and over time learned all the aspects behind it, what the technical side was, how the engagement affects deliverability, the content, you know, every aspect of product of it. And slowly over the next 365 days, we're able to fix our deliverability, get Our volume back up and running, get the ship back on track. And based off of that I just put together this whole email deliverability SOP process, an engagement process along with things like the base sending segment and other things that we do to make sure we're always staying in the inbox and when there is an issue, you know how to remediate it because we fixed it. We've seen everything. There's nothing that we haven't seen as far as getting totally blocked by someone or emails getting stuck in the spam all the time. You don't, don't main rep going from high to low in a 21 day period. Sorry, bad, not even low bad. And then having to fight your way back up to get the high. Yeah, you know, so we've been through all that and what people don't understand is once you get to bad you can tank your, your domain rep in a couple weeks. It might take you three months to get it back.

Is that right?

So trying to not get to that point is, is a big part of everything.

I love it.

So through a lot of pain.

Everything, everything Great man. If it's not working for you, it's working on you.

Right.

If you keep going. So really what I'm hearing is that if I'm a large media platform is focused heavily on increasing subscribers and we, we have to because our business model we have to monetize, we got to make money with those email subscribers which means they have to be opening up our emails and engaging and clicking Audience Bridge is, is really the one stop shop for all that. Meaning that you guys can help list growth. But the big leverage point is that we know the data and we have the inboxing happening.

Correct, Correct. We know it's happening inbox wise and deliverability wise. So if there is an issue we can control it before really hit, you know, shit hits the fan. That's right. So you know, and most of our clients, they are large larger newsletter publishers and what they're, you know, they're basically usually most of them are sending daily emails, you know, about whatever their topic is to their list. Large media brands with multiple newsletters and things like that.

Yeah, multiple segments, three to 15 times a day. This is what you guys do. It's pretty incredible. Okay, so this has been awesome. So hey listen, if you are wondering, hey, do I have a deliverability issue? Do I have a list growth issue or can I does can audience bridge help me? You're going to head over audiencebridge IO and they're gonna. You're gonna book a free call from that free call. What's the main takeaway? Besides just learning more about Audience bridge that I would get as a potential client of yours.

Yeah. So, I mean, right off that initial call, we're gonna know if you have a deliverability issue. Right. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll diagnose if there's any issues upfront, because if there is, you're gonna need help with some, some deliverability help before we get into the list growth phase.

Yeah.

If delivery looks good, then we can talk about list growth helping you grow your list the right way.

Yeah. And most importantly, you're gonna walk away with clarity and confidence and of your next steps. Because, because we were talking about earlier is just. Most people just don't know. So they're, they're throwing darts at a wall with a blindfold on.

Right. They might, you know, they might be happy with their list growth right now. And if we give them the thumbs up, deliverability looks good. Then they can keep pushing.

Yeah. I love it.

Whether they work with us or not, but they can always work with us to grow even more.

Yeah, that's perfect. So stop what you're doing, go over to Audience Bridge IO and book your free call with the team and get the answers. Okay, cool. So it's been great. So do you have like an example or two of company looking to grow their subscribers? But this was definitely their limiting factor.

Yeah. So we helped a, you know, a media brand with multiple newsletters across the country. Bro. From 750,000 to 2 million subscribers in a year. We also helped a, A recipe, niche recipe website actually using our Smart Pixel, go from 250,000 subscribers when they started to 750,000 subscribers. Active subscribers within. Within a year as well.

Yeah. That's awesome. So do a lot of these, like, I would imagine that they, they rely on the inboxing to be able to either with their. They're selling their advertising or they're selling whatever it might be. So without that in the growth that's directly increasing revenue, the more they grow their, their, their subscribers. And, and what you were saying earlier too, about they, they know their value per lead over time from each source.

So that's, that's incredible. And another good thing just popped my head. When you're, when you're saying that is, people don't realize when they're growing their list that as you grow your list, the churn of that list compounds to a larger number. So if you have a, you know, say an industry standard of 5% list churn. I just mean people that are either unsubscribing from your list, not being gauge, falling off, you have to replace those people.

Yeah.

Or your list is shrinking. So if you just have a list of 100,000 people each month, you got to get 5,000 new active people in there just to keep that baseline.

Is that right?

Keep those advertisers or you're shrinking? Yeah. If you want to grow to get more advertisers, then you, you got to actually get exponentially more people, you know, activated to be able to grow.

Yeah.

So you're fighting the churn too. So having a, you know, a robust list growth strategy is necessary.

It's.

Yeah.

It's the lifeblood of every business. Awesome. Chris, so one of the things you mentioned was identity graph. And can you explain what that, what that is? Because I don't really understand that.

I'm glad you asked that. So our identity graph is different than most identigraphs you hear out there for a few reasons. One, the entire base of our identity graph is tied to a click signal. So everyone in our identity graph we know are active, engaged subscribers somewhere in our ecosystem. They're not just signals from somewhere else. Some third party data we received, we know these are actual people that engage with emails. And then we have what we call the feedback loop, which is based on the activity of these people on, on our clients lists and stuff. And the data that they're getting, they feedback those that data to us. We're capturing the, the engagement of these people. And if they're clicking on emails, are they unsubscribing, are they complaining? And we take all that into account. Comes back through the feedback loop into our identity graph. We can identify which types of people may be causing spam or you know, unsubscribing more often. So when we're providing and helping people with their list growth, we can kind of exclude those type of people.

It's almost like it's getting smarter. You're like taking the collective wisdom of all of it and, and then you're able to do that where when people are on their own, they're just working in their own silo.

Correct. It's, it's, it's self optimizing itself over time as well as using all that stuff for the deliverability aspect of the platform for smart, smart delivery. Who you should be sending to. I think I've mentioned before, you know, maybe some people you don't want to send to every day because they only want it for maybe a few times. You can send them less. So it all ties back into that. The signal loop is what feeds our smart delivery product to feed our smart feed product. And then as well as the reactivation everything, all those signals are coming back to get a better idea of who's in engaging and what they're doing and who's anti engaging we could call it.

That's awesome. Did you go to that school like where all the X Men went?

The hard knocks.

We're all like the geniuses are like. You're like oh my gosh. I didn't realize he was this intelligent until he started. You're like seeing the globes and everything. It's what it sounds like. It's pretty amazing stuff. This is great. So what most media companies don't realize is that every single month that my leads are not activating, they're not being inboxed. We're actually rapidly stalling and decreasing as a company which then the money is a trailing indicator. The most people are sitting there, they don't even realize their business is actually about to hit a brick wall if they don't get their the right true data around inboxing in order to grow their business. Correct.

Correct.

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you. Hope you hopefully you enjoy the show. Head over to Audience Bridge IO and get the free audit. Like there's subscribe later. Just get the free audit. See if this is the right fit for your company. It's no risk. Can't lose anything because you're probably already losing money not knowing about it. So that's it. I'm Ed o'. Keefe. Thanks for being here.

We'll talk soon.