The One Fix That Saves Your Inbox (and Revenue) — with Bryan Jenkins

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Audience Bridge Insights. Today I have Brian Jenkins, the sales or the director of sales at Email Oversight and Email Validation Company.

How you doing, Chris? I'm good, buddy. How are you?

Good man. It's been a while I haven't seen you one of these trade shows that you go to all the time lately.

Yeah, man, they're getting to be a lot. They're pretty exhausting, my friend.

Cool. Why don't you go ahead and give the people a quick overview of your role and what Email oversight does.

Yeah, sure. So I'm the director of sales over at Email Oversight. We're a multi threaded process email verification and hygiene company. So we focus mainly on data quality issues, helping mailers, data aggregators, lead generation companies just get their email lists or email data cleaned up so that it's both deliverable and safe to send to. Just making them have the peace of mind they need when they're setting up their mailing infrastructure so they can continue to mail with some good success.

What, what type of clients do you work with mostly? Or you set some aggregators, data aggregators and all this stuff. But are you focusing on E comm and then media operators? Is it.

Honestly we don't really have a specific genre or niche within that like ecosystem. It's more or less just anybody that's got email data, whether they're actually the ones mailing it or if they're collecting on behalf of other companies. We work with a lot of, with like what we would, you and I would call like a traditional data broker where they're aggregating data from different sites and different sources, but they don't actually do the mailing themselves. But then we work with just direct mailers themselves as well. So it's really mixed in together. You know, there's really no vertical specifics when it comes to data quality or data hygiene. We tend to not be discriminatory against it. Right. Like I just want, we just want anybody that's got mail to know that you've got the ability to get a higher level cleaning and verification done on that so that they can have some really, really high level quality data for again they make the determination, hey, we're sending it ourselves or we're going to pass it off to our partners to do that sending for us.

Nice. And as that email validation provider, what would you say the cost of sending to a bad list is?

I mean really what your, your, your largest risk factor is always going to be your mailing infrastructure. Right. Like you spend a lot of money building out all of the things that are needed for a typical mailing infrastructure. Whether that's if you're using a third party service like an email service provider, you know, working with some of these larger ESPs out there, you know, there's a lot that goes into building up the accounts and setting up your domains and your IPs and all that stuff. Or if you pivot and kind of go the old school way that you and I grew up with, with, it's just more or less, you know, working with, you know, sort of like a Volo setup or using your own MTA. But again, same idea, you're building out your IPs and you're getting your sending domains ready. And once all that's sort of done and ready to go, you've gone through some warmups and things like that. The data aspect of it can make or break it. So if you're not focusing heavily on your ability to have the cleanest data possible, but not just clean, but deliverable as well, you're essentially setting yourself up for failure and you know, you're just resetting every single time. And it's the worst to have to sort of rebuild everything back up from the ground up.

Yeah, exactly. And as far as validation, I get this question all the time. People are always asking me, clients and colleagues, you know, when is the best time to validate the email? Is it just at the acquisition? Is it ongoing? What do you recommend as far as when to validate the data?

So it's kind of like a loaded question because everybody's situation is very different if you're a typical, let's call it like a first party mailer and that means you collect leads from your own websites and things like that. I would always say at acquisition is probably the best time to do it. So as the leads are coming into your websites or your, your portals or however you're collecting on the email side of things, I would say placing an API call to like an email oversight or an email verification company is the best practice because you're nipping it right at the front. And so working from it from the front end perspective is always going to be the best way to attack it. You're not going to collect leads that are invalid. You're not going to collect leads that are potentially going to cause you guys problems. When you're sending to those leads, you're marketing to them. That being said, after a collection base it's always good to have like a maintenance driven program like data attrition. We Call it is pretty, pretty common within the industry. So over time, a lot of the email addresses that you guys are mailing to or marketing to, you know, they're going to fall off a little bit. You're going to have accounts that get disabled, you're going to get accounts that have gone sort of dormant and they're not really as active as they used to be. So doing a maintenance driven program where potentially you're recleaning data every 60, 90 days, something along those lines is usually common practice. In the reverse of that, if you're not really working off of typical first party, in other words, you're not collecting a ton of data from point of sale or point of lead and you're working off of more just brokered lists or third party stuff. Taking batched data and cleaning them as a whole is great practice as long as you're doing it in a sequence that makes sense for your mailing. And so what I mean by that is if your plan is to send like a segment of data on a Tuesday, I would clean it on a Monday. If your plan is to deploy something on a Friday, you know, clean something on a Wednesday or a Thursday. You don't want to get too far ahead of things when you're cleaning just because again, that average attrition rate these days is like 1 to 2% every month. You know, all the ISPs now are deactivating old accounts pretty rapidly. So you don't want to get ahead of your cleaning. But at the same time, you know, having a good cadence with it is always best practice. But there's really no wrong way to do it as long as you're implementing it to some degree.

Got it. And for, for the viewers listening, can you explain kind of email validation process and what you guys are looking for as far as checking it by the syntax? The domain, you know, trap spots like give them a breakdown.

So, so the way that email oversight does it is probably a little bit different than like traditional verification only, but verification just so that sort of the audience understands what that is. It's what we call an SMTP ping. So that's where we're generating what's called a hello to that email address. The ISP or the domain is then responding back to us, confirming the deliverability of that email address. So hypothetically gives back us code. That code then indicates whether the recipient of that email can send or receive mail. And so we make the determination based on that code that it's a quote unquote deliverable address. We go Then take it to another layer. And that's kind of what you were talking about Chris, with regards to like the hygiene aspect of things. That's when we're doing checks for things like your spam trap technology. We cross check over on high level litigator complainer databases, we double check for bot technology and then we look for things like disposable email addresses. We'll highlight all your role accounts. So like anything that's departmentalized emails and things like that. The idea is again we want to highlight anything that we deem to be nefarious in nature including delivery based threats, but also reputation based threats.

Yeah, I mean you guys, when someone knows when you, when you ping the email for the, the verification now they'll, they have like 20 different responses they'll come back to you with and tell you where, where it lands for your clients and mailers. What do you guide them to do as far as what emails to use? You know, what, what, what would be the, the best practice? I guess obviously verify golden, you know, golden goose. You're going to want to always send to them. But are people sending to role based, should they not? Are people, you know, some people see that there's, you guys have complainers but you know, if you're a complainer but someone signed up to your, your website first party, do you want to take those out because they signed up, right? If they complain, they complain. But I'm not going to like, you know.

Yeah, so they're like the golden rule for me. So I give all of our clients sort of like a best practices sheet for, for lack of a better term and it highlights each of those individual categories based on like what your risk level is to mail that. And like you said, I would say the most common that comes up in question is the complainers. You know, it's not going to be a large amount percentage wise of your database, but I think dependent on the business model that you run for email marketing that becomes probably the one that most clients tend to bring back into their ecosystem. And like they may do it cautiously but that's probably the one that comes up the most in question. And like you said, it's mainly because the age old rules like, well they complain for something else, not for what I'm sending and I may have collected it first party. The other rule of thumb that I give with things like that is you've got metrics on your data. If something comes back and it's, you know, it's got purchase history from you know, a day ago by all means you can overrule whatever comes in through my system. We're designed to just showcase what we know to be problematic. You know, you guys can make the determinations based on your internal metrics. If you want to keep some of those problematic emails just again based on purchase history or, or some level of engagement that's important to you. You know, I'm, I'm not proponent of like open and click data being the end all be all. You know, for me it's got to be you know, some semblance of like transactional history. You know, whether that's again like a sale or a purchase or something to that regardless. But I would say complainers is probably the biggest role. Accounts is another one that's also business sort of centric because you're not really going to see like a, an info@gmailmail.com right. Like if you're working more on the B2B side of things, you're going to see a lot more of the sales at the info the admins at and that's just becomes personal preference for the company. You know, that's probably going to go to a large group of people. It's probably not going to go to a singular person. So depending on what you're marketing to or what your, your designated piece of marketing material is, it could be beneficial to go to multiple, multiple people at that company. So that's probably the second one that comes up the most often. And then bots actually over the years has become one that people again depending on business model. Like we're mainly used to the affiliate space, right. So you know, that's probably you and I are the most familiar with, with regards to those types of mailers. You know, bots is a big no, no, we don't want to touch them. We don't want to touch them. When you move into like the enterprise space they're, that's not something they're, they're concerned with. Right. They're not worried about an overload, let's call it of clicks. You know, for them if it's a, it's a user that's got history on them on their side for transactional use they're going to just bypass that. So those would probably the three that I would say are the lowest risk in that regard. The rest I tell everyone it's just not worth the hassle. You know, you don't want to really run into reputation issues over the, over the course of you know, X amount of months or years.

And as far as spam traps. How are you guys identifying a spam trap or how do you got access to what a spam trap is? I think people get confused, like how does they really know it's a spam trap?

Sure. I mean, I think the biggest thing you have to explain to clients is like there's two variations of what I would consider a spam trap. I mean you could talk to a million different ESPs and they're all going to give you a probably translation of this. But to me, the most basic two ways you can explain it is there's what we call an anti spam site spam trap, which would be defined more so as something that's owned, operated or controlled by a major anti spam site. So companies like Spam House and Spam Cop and S U R B L and Barracuda and those types of places they control, operate or own the email addresses that are what we call or would consider a spam trap. And the idea behind those is they're collecting information with the purposes of listing your resources on their anti spam website. So if you catch your, you know, you've got a, a spam cop listing on your ip, if you've got a domain based listing on your domain, a lot of that is resonated around data and it's strictly specific to the website that it's been listed on. And that's again using sort of what we would call a spam trap for that website. Then the flip side of that would be what I call like a recycled spam trap. So that's traditionally more so on like the major domains. So you know, use like a Microsoft domain like Hotmail. Hotmail will deactivate an email address and then over the course of the, you know, a few weeks to a few months, reactivate that email address solely for the purposes of what we would call monitoring. And so that spam trap doesn't act in the same way that an anti spam site spam trap works. It's more there for monitoring purposes. Right. They're looking at what is your reputation, what are you sending to, why are you sending to that. And they look at that to police how you're going to be placed, whether it's going to be through just traditional, you know, diversion into a spam folder, whether it's going to be to do what we would call like, like a soft block where you know, you're not really getting full delivery, could block in between or just a full block on deliverability for that ISP as a whole. So like once you make that determination the way that I explain how we do it for the recycle spam traps, we follow, we follow the line, right? So when does the email address become inactive, when does it become disabled and then why or if it got re enabled. A lot of them are pretty straightfor forward. There's not other than maybe AOL and a few others, there's not really an indicator for the user to come back in and make that account live again. They don't really give you that choice anymore. So it's pretty high level to indicate whether or not that spam trap or not. With the anti spam site spam traps you're just looking at resources, right? So who owns the domain, what who owns the soa, the SRA record, you know, you're looking at the MX information and how that pertains to the ownership. And so once you decipher who owns what and why, you can make the determination based off those rules to indicate what's trapped and what's not.

Got it. And does the spam house or any of the other big anti spam companies, are they using Gmail, you know, regular email accounts as traps or I haven't.

Seen it in such a long time like and typically Gmail, Yahoo and those, they don't necessarily even care about those websites anymore.

Right?

Again, it's more if you're mailing what we would call like general Internet data, GI data. A lot of B2B mailers run into more of those issues than sort of like a top level domain style mailer. It's just not as prevalent anymore. I mean Hotmail still sort of works in conjunction with I think Comcast and Icloud and Apple domains also. But a lot of the major, major ISPs it's not really, they don't commingle as much anymore.

So as far as let me know if this works or not. So a lot of domains now not domains but email providers like Gmail have a very common balance classification where they have their, your mailbox is full, right? And then you know now Yahoo just came out where they lower their, their storage capacity for their free account from like a hundred gigabytes I think down to 20 or something. Yeah, bunch of accounts. We saw huge spikes in the last week and a half from Yahoo because emails aren't deliverable now because their mailboxes are full. When you guys are doing your validation and that that ping, is it still showing that that's a deliverable email address work or is that showing that it's.

Not deliverable it'll show that it's not deliverable. The one thing to go back to your Gmail comments the one thing that we've had to do over the years was we've had to pass back the bounce code for the user because there was a lot of companies and customers that did not want to remove the mailbox full or the over quotas from the true undeliverables. So they almost like separated them and they wanted to give them some time to say hey, if this person clears their mailbox or this person doesn't receive as much information or as much mail this period of time we can check it again or we can make an attempt for it. So we've done that with Gmail, we're in the process of doing that with Yahoo too. But that think was important to give them transparency. But as a whole, because the ISP labels that as a hard bounce, we then transparently give it back to you as a hard bounce so you're not getting a false positive reading just because it's either a low storage issue or like you mentioned with the mailbox fulls.

That'S a good thing to go over because I know a lot of people have been seeing that with Yahoo now. So check your list, make sure you're not removing all those people if you've been cleaning lately. Yeah.

I mean again they give you the opportunity to come back to it. I like my own rule of thumb is like once a mailbox full, always a mailbox full. Like it's not that many people that you know go in there and not clean it out often. So like if you, if you clean it out once you and then it comes back again, you're probably going to continue to have that trend. Right. So it's probably not the greatest user to have in your customer database.

But yeah, we usually do. If, if, if a mailbox is full, stop sending for 7 days, try again and then if it's still full we'll wait 30 days out.

Yeah.

And then if it's still full then, then we purge that record because I mean if, if someone's not fixing their after third days you're not really monitoring that inbox anyways. You're not using it.

So 100 agree. I mean it's such a habitual type of a scenario with customer so it's like it's not worth the trouble to try to salvage.

Yeah. What, what would you say a common misconception clients or prospects have about validation tools in general?

I would say the most common is we could do that in house, we get that probably more often than anything else. You know, you get somebody that's like, well, yeah, we can, we can do our own SMTP things and we can do this and that, and there's no shame in doing it on your own. Right. It doesn't really, it doesn't correlate to being able to do it in bulk. You know, that it's a lot of work to be able to handle a large amount of email addresses in that capacity. You know, if you're a lower, lower volume mailer and you're only taking on a few thousand leads a month, I mean, it certainly may be more cost beneficial to do it yourself. But if you're working in bulk and you're working with, you know, hundreds of thousands of leads a month or even millions of leads, you know, it's really not cost effective to try to, you know, do it in house in that regard. And then also, you got to remember, most people aren't really educated on the hygiene portion of things. If you're coming from a traditional marketing background, and especially if you're in the enterprise space where you've majorly just collected leads, point of sale or point of lead from, you know, your large generation portals, you know, they don't know a ton about after the deliverability aspect of it. So that the general education is super important to understand, like the added layer of threats that you're going to have and you know, the hurdles that they're going to have if you continue to mail to that sort of stuff. That's probably the most common two things, you know, that you get, like, hey, you know what? Why do I even have to do this? You know, we're not having these types of issues. It's like, oh, well, do it. And then look at the removals that come in and then mail again and maybe you'll see like that spike in deliverability and just helps overall with your reputation growth.

Nice. I had a question here. How can implementing email validation boost your roi? I saw, I saw a blog post on your website.

So there you go. Yeah, I mean, the one thing you have to remember, it's almost like insurance. It's like you're paying into something to mitigate the problem before the problem happens. So if you're investing in a really good verification and hygiene program, you're protecting your mailing resources, which then provide you with the peace of mind as you're mailing. But also you're not having to throw money back into the pool, swapping out IPs and domains consistently is a huge pain in the ass. And it's like, you know, you've seen it over the years, I've seen it over the years, you know, jumping from different email service providers, you know, different ESPs, because you've had bad reputation or you've had like a spike in your hard bounces and all that stuff. It's a pain to get a whole new setup all the time. So you're, you're paying into an email verification company is going to give you a lot more return because you're not having to spend as much money on the infrastructure over the years and you're just allocating a budget to do the preliminary work and continue the data quality side of things. It's that to me, there's nothing worse than throwing money at a problem and then just the problem repeating itself. So it's like you can nip it in the bud early on and then just have like a continual maintenance process with it. It's gonna, you'll see such a big return, not only just in money, but also just on how well your mailing reputation grows and gets better and the deliverability footprint overall gets higher. And that's, that's, that's what we're all looking to do as mailers. We're trying to get the best inbox placement we possibly can.

Yeah, exactly. Every client I have and I talk to them, I tell them that, you know, one of the first things we have to do is revalidate all your emails. If you haven't done it yet, make sure they're validating them because the data quality is the most important thing. Because if you have any bad apples in there, your deliverability is going to tank quickly and then you're not inboxing. Even if you do the tightest you can tighten, tighten your list as tight as you can go and you still have those bad emails, it's not going.

To go well for you. Yeah, one bad can ruin a lot of good, man. I've seen it a ton over 22 years.

Do you have any examples of a client that had bad list hygiene practices and went ahead and started using the email validation and had good success or improvement?

Yeah, we've actually had a couple, I mean, we've had more than a couple of those scenarios. We've got a couple different scenarios like that where we've had clients that had never done any verification at all and they were more on the enterprise side, so that wasn't something they were super familiar with. Mostly first party coming in again, their own Sites, their own, their own sales. And they saw almost like a drastic uptick in how the bounce rates were affecting their ability to continually send. And they're a high volume mailer. You know, they have a large customer database. So when we first started working with them, they were probably seeing upwards of 25 to 27% hard bounce rates. And after implementing email oversight, not on, not just on the existing marketing database that they had, but also on their front end with their websites and how they're collecting, they went down from 27 to 28% down to 0.05%. And it's been pretty consistent, you know, maybe a spike or two to get about a 1 percenter. But that's one of the better success stories because the com, the customer is so transparent about how when they started, like what were our numbers when we first started versus our numbers, you know, after 30 days. That's probably the most big success we've seen. I've also had customers come and tell us, you know, we were dead, dead in the water with deliverability. You know, we were, we weren't having high level bounces per se, but we just weren't able to, to get consistent inbox placement or we weren't able to get consistent deliverability for let's say Gmail or Yahoo or whatever ISP they were sending to. And after they, they had a pretty rigorous cleaning schedule and they ripped through what they had existing database wise and then took care of new data, they were able to see some consistent growth on their deliverability footprint which again to me sometimes that speaks volumes. More so than just reducing a bounce rate because it's great to reduce bounce rates and have a good mailing reputation, but if it's not equating into like consistent deliverability, it's still hard sort of to, to manage. But that, that's, to me, those are the good ones that I like to hear about because it's like you see the improvement almost instantaneously within the first 30 days.

Yeah, it feels good when that happens. Same thing when we, the first time I tell someone how to tighten their segment, they're sending segments, they see the results, it just blows their mind.

Isn't it wild? It's almost like we know what we're talking about a little bit.

Just a little bit. We've kind of touched on this already throughout because it just flows that way. But what are best practices around integrating validation into your stack? The esp, your CRM landing pages.

This.

Call from a first party newsletter or media company acquiring leads through their Their website.

Sure.

Landing pages or anything like that. Like, well, what would your ideal stack look like for those people?

First and foremost I would take you know, API yourself into an email verification platform on the front end. So as a lead comes into your system, you're verifying it on the fly. So we're not importing leads that are potentially threat based or potentially going to bounce. That would be the, the first line of defense. And if you've got an existing database before you start mailing again, definitely give it a once through, clean it the one time, look at the report with your, with your verification provider, see what that looks like in terms of those results and then make a plan on how often you should be re cleaning that existing database. You know, I have clients that reclaim so heavily on like a 30 day trend and then I have clients that are pretty tightened up or buttoned up with regards to like how they handle their leads. So for them it's more quarterly but you know, every situation is different. But if you're not, if you're bringing leads in in real time, I would always implement that first check. And then existing databases always have to be taken care of just because otherwise you're, you're, you're shooting ducks before they come in but then there's a bunch of dead ducks inside and it's going to start rotting the whole place out.

Right. Do you have any examples of like smart email validation? Like automate, they'll be smart based on, on engagement outcomes or say someone hasn't opened an email in 30 days. Yeah, validation and any other ideas of triggered or.

Yeah, I, oh, I always try to give advice to companies to like have your own internal hygiene. Right. So if something hasn't engaged with you guys as you're mailing 30 days, just archive it. Because the longer that that sits in your ecosystem where it's actively mailing, the longer it's more likely rather it's going to start affecting the rest of the good data. So implement some kind of an internal regimen to say, you know, we have a threshold of 30 day activity. If you don't reach it, we archive that data. That's my, my first go to every time. And then I would also say, you know, if you're not, not fully engaged in how your data interacts, get familiar with that because you know, opens aren't as valuable to some people as clicks versus the other way around. And so you've gotta be like sort of in tune with what your data is doing and then does it equate to transaction does it equate to sale? So it's like, it's, it's. I hear people every day talk about, well, this is my engaged list. This is my engaged list. I'm like, well, tell me what it means. Is it clicks, is it opens, is it sales? I'm like, because if you're giving me a list of people that have bought before, to me that's the ultimate engaged. Right? If you're giving me people that opened and clicked, yeah, that's great. Like, what's the time threshold on that? They open one time, they open a hundred times. So like get really in tune with what your metrics and what they mean to you and then make some determinations based off of that. Because the best mailers that I know that implement a third party hygiene and validation regiment with us, plus an internal maintenance program, are the ones that succeed the most and probably have the least data quality issues that I've ever seen.

Yeah, it's good advice. Let's switch gears and kind of talk about any current trends or evolving threats that you're seeing in the industry. Are you seeing more fake bot signups or typo traps lately or you know, what type of.

I wouldn't say more or less. It's pretty much the same trends with, with typos very specifically because like, especially if you're bringing in leads on a first party, it's the most common thing that happens. You know, you fat finger everything. So it's, it's not, you know, unfathomable to think that you're going to have those still sitting in your database to some degree. I wouldn't say there's trends into higher direction with it. It's just, I think it's just a common pract. The board. You know, the biggest thing that I'm seeing lately is just, you know, everybody's having some struggles on the Yahoo side, you know, just since they've really buttoned down the hatches with what they want to do internally. You know, it's, it's definitely seen the industry as a whole dip in deliverability with regards to Yahoo. So that's the, to me, that's the biggest one that I think we've all been struggling with over the better part of the last eight months or so. And then just like Comcast is now moving fully over to Yahoo. So that's another fun one where, you know, half the addresses are still on the Comcast servers and the other half around Yahoo servers and it's like a slow play of when that fully takes.

Place and Then when they're going to bulk purge the ones that don't move over, you have to actually move over. Right.

They're not making, not giving you a choice. It's either a yes or a no deal for that. And then they'll just dissolve the account. It's it. Those are more the trends that I'm seeing lately. Like I wouldn't say there's any like brand new, cool, you know, hygiene thing that you have to look out for. I definitely think you have to be more aggressive than you used to have to. You know like ISPs are disabling accounts now every 15 to 20 days used to be pretty average on 30 to 45. So that's something that you have to consider. You know it's not as drastic when you're collecting in third party or in first party like that because it's more or less somebody that's targeted and wants the information as opposed to like a third party list or something like that. But yeah, I mean just the ISP changes right now are the biggest ones that we're seeing.

And since AI is the big talk of the town everywhere, where do you see that playing a role in validation or.

I don't know if it plays a role in validation as much. I mean you can maybe use it algorithmically to pick up trends with different. We used to call them keys. You and I would know it as general keywords that people place within email addresses that we would auto flag them. Right. So you see like a curse word in there or you see something silly that doesn't. It looks like it stands out. I think AI is great to sort of search that out, right? Like an automatic algorithm to kind of pace out like numeric number letter combinations that repeat on the same domain. Things like that is pretty useful like AI. Where I see it, the biggest benefit from the email world is like you can start to really do some pretty cool stuff with your creative and your. And some pretty cool stuff with like how you're auto generating your practices and things like that. I think that's where it becomes useful. But from a hygiene perspective, like I don't know if we can teach it to do, to do it better. Right. You know what I mean? Like it's our, it's. It was always computer based anyway. So I don't know if that, that's going to make it any better or worse. But yeah, I mean it's got some great use cases right now, especially with some of the new companies coming out that are utilizing it for like campaign Management and deployment strategies and stuff.

Well yeah, the big thing we got to look at is how it affects your email engagement with all the AI summaries are putting at the top. Right, that's we have to see what happens. Does email oversight integrate with currently integrate natively with any ESPs out there?

Yeah, we have a handful of integrations that we did ourselves. Emergeries. One expert sender is another. We've done a handful like manually with those companies. Others have done them on the back end through like client integration. So like we may not be aware that they're there but our clients over the past like eight or nine years have connected themselves with I don't know, hundred if not more different ESPs out there then I know that they're back end integrated to some degree, whether that's through just direct API or whatnot. Yeah, it's like it's not one of those things that ESP ESPs love to announce that they're, that they're friendly to integrate with third party vendors like us. But yeah, we definitely have some, some high quality integrations there and like we have some third party data management companies that are fully integrated with ESPs like Waypoint Technologies, Relevance Reactor, List Flex, like Email Element, things like that where you can do it through those third parties and they're the manual sort of like branch that connects to the esp.

And have you guys or do you know of anyone who's developed any, any plugins or add ons for like forms on like WordPress or somewhere that they can. Someone who's not technical can link up email oversight and yeah you can, I.

Think you can go. There's a bunch of different like quick hitters that you can go on to. I'm trying to think of the most common one where you essentially can just go right into the system and search just any of the third party vendors that you're potentially looking to integrate with and it gives you like a very technical or a non technical breakdown of how to do it even with code and everything implemented in there. I'd have to think about what those were. I know we just did one a couple months ago. We had to fix up some stuff because they had their technical team had added like their own variations of it and it wasn't correct so it wasn't working. So they fixed it up. But yeah, I'll talk to the guys over here. It's really escaping me. It's actually bothering me that I can't remember it but there's tons of them out there like especially they're basically integration help tools. And it's a ton of. They do them for ESPs, they do them for verification providers, they do them for like advertiser web links. They do them for a bunch of stuff where it's just like an easy implementation guide into different CRMs or ESPs and things that like, like that.

What do you say for the people that are out there that are afraid to clean their list because they have, they don't want to send to less people. They have the vanity metric of I.

I haven't heard it in such a long time. That was always my favorite when I first started was always like that. Why I don't want to, I don't, why am I trimming the list down? It's like I look at it very much like you're trimming fat, you're not trimming muscle. So it's like you don't, you know, the goal isn't to be overweight. The goal is to be like in shape. And so you want, if you want to be 200 pounds, that's great. You know, you should be 200 pounds of muscle and have very little, little fat on the body. And it's like the same concept with data, right? You, you want, you want to get rid of some of the, the dead weight there and not have to worry so much about it. It's like I think the, this is going to be such a non PC way to look at this. But it's like, it's like the swinging dick days are over. It's not about how much data you have, it's, it's how the data is performing. So that's the message that I try to bring across to everybody. It's like I'm not gonna, I'm not taking your data down to the bone. The percentages of removal are so mediocre to low these days where you're talking like I barely see more than 20% get taken out of a list these days. You know, most people are sitting between like 8 and 12%. Maybe 15, 16 is the high. Unless it's like a very old, old data set. But outside of that, I mean it's like I'll use those compare comparison metrics just to say like there's really no fear in it anymore. Like you're not taking out a bunch to find very little. What we're taking out is got value to it to be removed. So I think when I show them sample reports and things like that, they get a lot less of that puffed out chest and peacocking about. I need it to be all or nothing.

I mean that's why I launched my newsletter, that's why I'm doing this podcast, is to help educate people about really the importance of keeping a helping list and segmenting your list. Because a lot of people, especially with this creator economy and all these, you know, beehive and kit or Convertkit or kit now, you know, all people have no idea about what to do with the manager list. They just think the more the merrier and they keep on sending the whole list. They have no idea what segmenting is. So.

Right.

I've been putting that together to help all those people out. Second here, this is the controversial one that always gets talked about and you have haters, real big haters. What's your opinion of purchasing an email list?

Mind it as long as you clean it. I think if you're buying it and you don't clean it, you're crazy. Because I don't care what any data broker, any data provider is going to tell you or sell you on that. This is the golden goose of data that you're getting or you're purchasing. Right. Don't buy into the hype of it. Just pay into an email verification and a data or and a data quality firm like ours and just give yourself peace of mind to know that it's okay. Once something's cleaned, you're good to go. Like it may not work from what you're trying to market to it with, but it's going to be clean, you're going to get delivery on it and all that. It's up to you at that point to figure out if it's going to, if it's going to work from an ROI perspective. But I don't mind buying. I think over the years sometimes it's a little bit cost beneficial to do it if you can get segments out of that data that are pretty valuable. But if you're not running data quality to it, then don't even bother with it because it's just going to cause more of a headache than it's going to cause you any, any return.

You ever heard of anyone using your service or another service for like auditing on the sale of a all the time of a list or purchasing a new newsletter like I'm going to acquire whatever. XYZ.com and then yeah, all the time.

Like I, I have a couple pretty close friends that still go into the data brokering business like from a purchase perspective and they will only use us on for the third party stuff because we even work with some data brokers that sell data and I, that we, you know, they have date timestamps on when the last clean dates were and all that stuff. And those companies still will double check just because it's just against more of a peace of mind thing than anything else. You still want to take the risk. You know, you're not, it's not as expensive these days to buy lists anymore. I don't think so. I think it, you know, to add the rest of the budget in to get the data cleaned. It's just going to be beneficial in the end for you. But yeah, we're, I would say the auditing side had gotten pretty popular. Right.

All right, we've got a few rapid fire questions here.

Hit me.

What's the most dangerous domain pattern you've seen?

Like in terms of like made up domain pattern? Yeah, that's a good question. Back when Spam house was really, really popular and we were cleaning a lot of GI data, we seeing like a sequence of these like, like ABC 1, 2, 3, like style like formats. And we saw one, they were all based on like sequential curse word combinations. So they were like I think we've cursed a couple times, but do you want to hear a couple of them?

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah. All right. So that they were basically like shit fuck, four, five, six shit fucks. Like sequential like that. And I remember this is prior to me being an email oversight, but I remember we had a client who had came and was like can't believe that people would put these in here and blah blah. And they were all owned and operated by like and I won't say the name of the anti spam site but like of one specific anti spam site. I just thought I found it to be hysterical that they, they couldn't be more creative like creating a domain that wasn't so obvious.

Yeah but I think it's great if you can't tell that this is not a real email address and you're sending to a group, you deserve to be on my platform blacklists. Oh, I totally agree with you but you're an idiot. And now they have freaking the extension xyz.

Oh I know, it's wild. Even like some of the, if I don't know if you've ever gone like the, some of the disposable email domains like where you can go in and create your own like temporary email address. Some of those are wild. Like it's, I know there's, there's not very many variants of like. Well Known like words that you could still use without combining them with some other crazy ones. But Jesus Christ, so many wild ones out there.

I forgot to ask about that. How do you guys know an email address is a temp address?

So there's I think there's like four or five different temporary email address domain creators like websites that are designed to do that and they all have, each website has their own sort of like specific like tracking footprint on it. So we go in and we just indicate it based off that.

What's the most underrated sign of a bad lead?

The most underrated side bad lead isn't something we would remove or bad lead that we would indicate is still a deliverable and safe email address but you could still get value out of it.

I would say like what's the hardest thing to identify to make that it could be a bad lead? Obviously undeliverable is undeliverable. Is there any other signs someone can use that it might not even be within your validation process? Something they can do internally that this lead is bad because I saw this happen or.

Yeah, I mean I think the engagement stuff is a good, the easiest low hanging fruit. Like if you start to mount to that and you don't see engagement after X period of time, like just get rid of it and that's it's something every, anyone can do. A lot of ESPs I think even have that trigger in like their settings where it's like hey, if you don't you want us to remove this after X days if it doesn't open or click. I mean that it's such a low hanging fruit way to be able to do your own policing. You should definitely be doing that. I mean outside of that you should run your own like quality checks on stuff. Like just look for basic keywords that you shouldn't be sending to. Right. So like if you see a recipient in there with some crazy verbiage, I don't see the value in keeping that lead. Yeah.

Let'S see if you can figure this one out. What's the best validation tip but in under 10 words?

Best validation tip in under 10 words. Let's see if I can keep it under 10. Reclaim your data.

Yeah, I mean that's four or five.

There you go. Yeah, that's, that's three. Reclaim at the end of every sales call. That's what I tell everyone. I'm like if you look at this like a one time thing then don't, don't even bother doing it. You have to re clean it.

Cool. And where can listeners learn more about you or email oversight or if you have any thing you want to pitch or handles or anything?

No, I mean, if you got anybody that's looking for a really high level verification product and service, you know, emailoversight.com, brian, at emailoversight.com you can reach out to me at any anytime. I got a bunch of different handles on Skype or not Skype anymore, teams on Telegram, on Slack, on every other channel that we still have to use.

Now after Skype shutdowns.

Like, yeah, I will. I would love to go back to the days of AIM if I'm being honest, but it's. Yeah, you guys can reach out anytime. Happy to answer questions or help you set up accounts and just, you know, resolve any data issues that you guys might have.

Cool. Awesome, Brian, Appreciate your time. Great catching up and likewise, Chris.

Thanks for having me.

All right, talk soon.

All right, buddy.

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.