Tom Kulzer - How To Ensure Your Mailing List Sees Your Emails

And I think it's really important when you think about the folks that you're communicating with as actual people and not your list or you're not blasting them or you know, like these are all things that you don't want to do. Like I had a conversation yesterday on Twitter with somebody where they were commenting about no reply addresses. Like how many emails do you get in your inbox where if you hit reply it goes to like noreplyingbank.com and I basically equated that to. That's essentially giving everyone that you send an email to the middle finger. Like hey, give me your money but go away. I don't want to talk to you.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey.

Hola.

Hi. That's. That means hi, I think something like that.

Okay.

Cool.

Cool.

Or means holla.

Holla.

Hola. Holla.

Oh yeah.

Holla. That's good. Yeah. Wow.

I'm slow.

I never thought about that. Just one L. You know.

Get out of here.

You know what we're doing today?

We're talking into microphones.

That's what we do every day.

Talking to a pink microphone.

Yes, you are.

Boring black one. Boring.

Snoozer.

Have you ever heard of Aweber?

I. Indeed I have. It was the very first email autoresponder I've ever used.

Me too. It was actually the first one I ever even heard of.

Me too.

Yeah. That's ironic because we started at the same exact time online and probably signed up the same. Probably under the same day. And I think Tom Coulter was actually the CEO and founder at the time too.

Yeah. Well if he's the founder then he's the founder now.

Yeah. So we have the head honcho of Aweber on the show today. His name is Tom Coltzer and he's. He's been doing this for like 20 plus years. Yeah, dude's been doing it since college. Sophomore year, I think you said. That's amazing.

Yeah.

And now it's grown to shoot. I forget what you say. A lot of people basically. I think it's. Yeah. Over a million customers now have grown their. Their, their businesses with Aweber and I think they said they have 60 plus folks on staff. Tons of engineers. Yeah. Yeah, tons of engineers and folks to basically evolve this thing all the stinking time.

All the stinking time.

Stinking time. So yeah. Here. And he's basically. Tom's a cool guy, man.

Yeah. So I mean on this episode we talked everything. Email. So we talked about what goes into getting your emails in the inbox and out of the spam. We asked him specifically, how does AWeber feel about affiliate marketers? Because we're affiliate marketers and we want them to feel good about us.

That's right.

It's very selfish of a podcast. You get that though.

We talked about all of the sort of changes through email marketing over the years and we also talked about all of the upgrades and things that are.

Coming to AWeber and the things that are already here.

Yeah. Oh, dude.

The freaking amp concept.

I'm not gonna talk about it now, but the amp thing inside of email. Holy crap. Did you know you could do that before this?

No, no, we knew of amp with the SEO stuff, but we'll just leave it there. Basically it's gonna upgrade your emails like big time. Yeah, big time. So yeah, we talk about all sorts of stuff.

If you wanna figure out how to get more results out of your email marketing, this is a masterclass, basically.

Yeah, I mean, I think there was so much. I didn't write the notes because there's a. I actually have a lot of scribbles on here, but I don't even know what they mean anymore. But basically we go through a lot of the fundamentals around emailing, but also some of the really ninja stuff you could do with emails. A lot of stupid common mistakes, but they're not really that stupid because most people aren't aware of them. He highlights what those are so you can actually show up in people's inboxes and not in the spam or all these filters. And essentially he's like giving you the rule book from the perspective of a dude that's been in the game for over 20 years from the side who actually controls one of the largest email sending services. So now you're literally cracking open that whole fricking thing and he's just spilling the beans.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know what I was expecting going into this, but I was kind of thinking we're gonna go in and we're gonna talk to like a suited, stuffy CEO kind of guy. And he was one of the friendliest guys and I think it was just such awesome conversation.

Friendly guys in suits exist. No, they're rare, but they exist.

You can't wear a suit and be friendly. Those do not match.

Wow.

No.

Jim is pissed at you right now.

Well, Jim, take off the suit.

Take off the suit. At least loosen the tie a bit, huh?

Oh man. Anyway, Tom's amazing. We had A really, really great conversation. And he actually blew our minds around email marketing and how we could get more results out of our emails. So.

Well, there was one thing specifically. He was like, oh, this dynamic, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to talk about it.

You should just say it and we can censor it out and.

Okay, no, don't, don't.

Because I don't want to do that. I don't want to go through the effort.

There you go. Just did it. Basically it's going to save us a ton of time and it's, it's going to eliminate a lot of like double work, triple work, quadruple work every single day. Like that. You do that? I do sometimes.

It's going to, it's going to double my productivity when it comes to writing.

Emails and I'll probably make conversions better too. Probably. So that's a safe bet. All right. Tom is. It's going to be great. So we'll just leave it at that.

Yep.

And Aweber's awesome. Yeah, there you go. So. And aweber, I just wanted to, you know, there's the backstory of Aweber's name too, which I thought was pretty funny. But Aweber, if you've been living under a Rock, that's spelled aw e b e r.com if you want to check them out. All right, so yeah, what else we got? We're doing the notes things. So if you want to get the notes. Of course we're always doing the notes for you. Yeah. We can't stop them. Notes, it's like crack.

This is like an email deliverability masterclass and the notes are like going to be your email deliverability handbook.

Yeah. And you know in classes you don't probably want to go in public too much right now from at least the time of this recording. It's not. Most of these schools are going virtual so. Hey, might as well learn with this new version of a textbook.

There you go.

We basically made it for you. I just spent. I don't know. Yeah, it just went cross eyed backwards and all different reach. It's a four page textbook, dude. But then you get the letter. Now we're talking legit. I'm telling you man, like all those back issues, that's probably good. 300 plus pages that probably way more than that.

Oh dude, I think we're at like 600 pages or something.

Jesus. All right, so get the notes. They're absolutely free if you are quick. Only two weeks that they're free for this episode. Just go to hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m p. That's hustleandfluechart.com computer.

Or you can text the word comp c o m p to 38470. That is comp c o m p to 38870, folks.

Matt can never have a straight face when he says the text the biggest grin goofy.

Oh, I hate you so much right now.

Oh, I'm sure. And just I want to shout out and give some love to our Facebook group. It's been a revamped Facebook group, as you might have witnessed a month or two ago. We had Molly Mahoney on and she ripped us a new one on our branding, and that's where that group basically was revitalized. So it's called flowchartgroup.com totally free. Just a Facebook group. That's just a little link that makes it nice and short. So go over there, discuss the episodes. You can hang out with us, hang out with other listeners, and hang out with the guests as well. We invite most of them in there. We don't invite them all because some of them we just don't want in there. Just kidding. We want them all. Some of them aren't on Facebook.

I mean, some of we kicked out for spamming. No, I'm just kidding.

Yeah, we're hardcore, man. So flowchartgroup.com I know we're throwing a lot of call to actions at you and we're going to throw another one at you because we're sponsored as well. Yes.

By Ahrefs.

Ahrefs, our favorite SEO tool. And I would say cheat sheets for the interwebs to be seen and noticed and all that good jazz. How do you love. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Ahrefs?

First thing that comes to mind is their site audit. You go plug in your URL and it will basically do a deep dive in your site. Of all the technical SEO that you need to do on the site.

What does that mean?

So it'll tell you, like, oh, you know, you need to fix this image size and you need to compress this and you need to.

What does that do?

It makes your site load faster so that it helps with SEO.

I don't know.

It gives you a whole bunch of SEO advice.

You're a freaking SEO guy.

I am. But you're asking me to explain what an audit report that tells you, like 100 things that you can do to optimize your site.

What's it going to help me Achieve.

It's going to help your site load faster. It's going to help you show up in the rankings for the keywords you want.

That's probably the biggie right there.

And it's. Well, making your site load faster does help you show up in the rankings.

End result, basically, you're going to be seen by more people in the Googles. In the Googles.

And all the search engines, not just the Google.

Yeah, I think even YouTube shows up in there too.

And Amazon.

That's pretty cool. Damn. Forgot about that. All right, so Ahrefs has been absolutely gracious to sponsor this episode or this podcast multiple times. A lot of times. Yeah, they're good peeps.

They're our longest running sponsor.

They are.

They love us. All's good.

All is well in the world. So go to ahrefs.com that's a H R E F S dot com and.

They have a seven day, seven buck trial.

That's a dollar a day if you're fast at math like I am.

So here's what you got to do. Go pay the $7, get in on the seven day trial, run a site audit, find out where all of the places your site is screwed up and not working right and then start fixing them. And you're never going to want to leave Ahrefs because you're going to see how badass it is.

Yeah, pretty much that.

Yeah.

Or you can even just sell a site audit to your buddy or something for seven bucks and be like, yo, you want to site audit. And then it's like a free trial. Sure. But you should probably use it on yourself. You probably make more money. Probably. All right, so go visit Ahrefs. They're going to hook you up. So hrefs.com 7 bucks, 7 days.

Go. Do it.

Do it.

Let's go talk to Tom from Aweber.

Do it. Hey, Tom. Welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, guys.

Of course. Yeah. We're doing the standard procedure of Wait, whose voice is who?

It's a little tough when we're virtual and you know, the first time we're chatting, but we get that all the time.

And no accompanied video to go along with it.

Yeah, I know. Do that on purpose to be mystery.

We do do videos sometimes, but today with the weather being as it is in San Diego, I think we're opting for saving the bandwidth. That and it sounds like a lot of people are staying home these days right now. And that's also straining the Internet streams these days.

I'm really curious on Zoom's uptime these days so they seem to be withholding their, you know, holding their own. But it'll be interesting to see how that goes in the next month or so.

I haven't even thought about that, but yeah, that's very true. You never know. Well, speaking of that, I mean you have a system, big service of your own too that I'm sure is going to handle maybe a little bit more or no. A little bit, yeah. Maybe some trends will be with the whole virus talk.

Yeah, it's interesting. We just pulled stats.

On virus related keywords being sent in content from our platform and we're sending millions of emails each day regarding, you know, specific like Covid and coronavirus related things. So it's definitely something that people are using email marketing to, you know, keep in touch with their customers and you know, events and all of those sort of. Sort of things. So anytime people are gathering and whatnot, they're just trying to.

Oh yeah.

Communicate out what's going on. But it's, it's seen a massive uptick. It's like, it's just like a hockey stick as far as the infections. It maps exactly with our.

Platform usage of those keywords and where we're seeing it across different customers.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I actually never really thought of the idea that you kind of could keep your finger on the pulse of sort of what's popular right now by kind of spotting keywords that are getting commonly used. That's really interesting. Never really thought of the sort of data side of things.

No. We could have a whole conversation for hours just about the data. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.

Well, cool. We may have to touch on that a little bit later after we get through some of the stuff that we had sort of pre planned on talking about.

Got me curious now. Well Tom, let's go back and let's give all of us a picture of who you are, what brought you to where you're at now with Aweber being the CEO over there and the founder. Take us back a little bit.

Yeah, I mean before you do, I wanted to say with aweber, I don't know if it was the first sort of autoresponder service that existed but for me it was the first one that I ever remember seeing or ever hearing about. So if it wasn't the first, it was definitely the first that was actually well marketed. So I'm actually kind of curious how that whole thing came about and how you got started there.

Well, I'm not as old as it Sounds like I am based on this conversation.

I started aweber.

When I was in college. So I'm one of those entrepreneurial dropout success stories. So some are good, some are bad. Mine so far has been a pretty good one. So I was a sophomore in college. I had started studying mechanical engineering and switched to. That was my freshman year. My sophomore year I switched to finance. Two totally related subjects. And in the process I was selling wireless modems at like computer shows. You go to the computer show and you buy all your parts and assemble your computer. I'd have one of the booths there and I was representing some hardware that was cellular back before we all had iPhones and Android phones and so forth in our pockets with multiple megabits worth of connectivity on them. And I had basically developed a little.

Program, computer program that would follow up with the people that I met at those computer shows and answer common questions and those sort of things. And it was an automated, you know, kind of email follow up process, which is ultimately what Abubert became. But one thing led to another, ended up stop. I stopped selling that hardware and I had been sharing that program with a number of other people in other parts of the country that were also selling the same hardware because it was something where they would then help me with copywriting and those sort of things. We could figure it was a bigger, it was a wider subset of people that we could share, like what copy worked and what didn't and what appealed to people and what, who had what common questions and how we could answer those best. So it was a really great kind of network of people. And when I decided to stop doing the modem thing and focus on school, because that's hard and important. So my parents said.

I stopped doing the program and all of those people that were using it started coming to me and saying, hey, I'll pay you for that. Like, can I pay for that?

Yeah, that's a good start.

That's just not a bad idea. Like maybe I can make this something that people can pay for. And this was back before you had PayPal and you know, really all the tools that you have to set up E commerce or accept credit cards online. There were very, very few vendors that you could do that with. And it was a month or so to get approved for a merchant account, all that kind of stuff. But ended up launching in 1998 and I ran everything myself for the first two years. Entrepreneurial mistake number one.

And you know, today we have 100 plus team members just north of Philadelphia and you know, tens of Thousands of customers around the world.

Wow, that's amazing.

Now is there, is there a story or a meaning behind the name Aweber?

So yes.

I'd like to say that there were in depth case studies on what to name the company.

You know, in my youthful exuberance, it was, it was just kind of a fluke. Back in the day when I was testing this with some folks, we were calling it the automated web assistant. So think like logo with a spiderweb behind it. Like very Internet cliche these days. But that wasn't what our logo ended up being. But that was suggested a number of times. And so it was automated web assistant. And it's like, well, that's way too long to name a company. What do I name this? And we were trying to shorten it and it's like Aweb. Aweber. No, that's a different kind of website. We can't.

So it just kind of got tweaked to Aweber. And we always capitalize the A and the W because it's automated web. And also because the kerning between the capital A and the capital W looks better than when the W is lowercase. It just looks weird.

Yeah, I'm staring at it right now.

Always just capitalize the A and the W so it's not two different words. A lot of people try to abbreviate it or whatever with the A period. Weber. There's no Adam Weber. There's no Alex Weber.

Mr. Weber.

It's always kind of funny. Back in the day, I used to get sales calls. It's like, we'd like to speak to Mr. Weber, please. You didn't read the website at all.

You're like, yeah, I'll connect to you. Just hold on. Really, man.

So yeah. So automated web assistant, but you can't name your company awebass. That just doesn't work.

Nope. Get some interesting clients.

It always gets chuckles. That's good.

No, that's fascinating. It's over 20 years now since you launched and like you said. Yeah, millions of users. It was actually Matt and I, both of our first autoresponder email autoresponder. And it's just wild. I mean, that big success story, especially now when there's so much competition. But you were one of the leading charges out there and way ahead of the game.

Yeah, absolutely. So we're doing, you know, the platform looks totally different today than what it did back then. So you know, we're constantly. We have an engineering team of 50, 60 people here. So we're constantly like every Day. We've probably pushed a dozen different improvements to the site or some functionality behind the scenes in some way this morning already and it's only one o' clock right now. So it's, you know, it's constantly evolving.

Yeah, well, let's chat about that because the evolution of email, I'm sure since the time you started to now, it's just been light years different.

What are some interesting things that we should all be kind of thinking about? I know there's a lot of best practices that I'm sure you guys live by. Let's start with some of those and then we can kind of open up from there.

Yeah. Back in the day it used to be really simple. Somebody gave you permission, meaning somebody opted in to receive your email and you sent it, it was pretty much going to get delivered.

I think that people take that for granted these days. Permission is still a huge component of having successful email marketing campaign. You always think about what you want in your inbox.

Think about how you should be treating the people that are subscribing to your.

To your communications. And I think it's really important when you think about the folks that you're communicating with as actual people and not your list or you're not blasting them or these are all things that you don't want to do. I had a conversation yesterday on Twitter with somebody where they were commenting about no reply addresses. How many emails do you get in your inbox where if you hit reply it goes to like noreplyingbank.com and I basically equated that to like that's essentially giving everyone that you send an email to the middle finger like hey, give me your money but go away, I don't want to talk to you. You know what I mean?

I'm going to talk at you, not with you.

Exactly. And that's so that's like if you want to not get your email delivered, absolutely have that mentality of like give me your money, I don't want to talk to you because you won't get your email delivered over time because the major mailbox providers so think your emails, your Hotmails, your Yahoos, Verizon's of the World, Comcast, etc. They're generally in most B2C business to consumer type businesses can account for anywhere between 50 and 80% of your overall subscriber base. And Gmail is frequently 50% of of most people's mailing lists. So you have to play by the rules that they set or you don't get your Emails delivered. And at the same time, the way that you get your email delivered to me might be different than the way that we get your email delivered to Matt or Joe, depending on how you interact with it. So just like you guys can be sitting and you could Google the same thing in a Google search engine and get two totally different sets of results. The way that you interact with your emails also results in one person's email maybe going to the spam folder and you getting the exact same email, but yours going to your inbox. And it's because you reply to them and interact with whoever the business is or list owner is, you click on their links, you open the emails, you save the email to a different folder in your Gmail account, you might have forwarded the email to another associate. All of these things give indicators we what we call engagement indicators that yes, you're interested in these things. Whereas actual spam that you get, you don't save it, you delete it right away, you mark it as spam, you don't forward it to friends, you don't reply to it, you don't engage with it the same sort of way. And that's how Google's able to make these determinations of where they're going to put your email. So you want to be encouraging those engagements with your subscribers. Like, don't just send an email that has like, okay, now what do I do with it? There should always be some sort of call to action, like whether it's trying to get them to click through to a website or reply to you or in some way interact with the email. Besides, just reading it is the best way to overall get your emails to the inbox over time. And it's the same thing as so kind of one step beyond that is looking at engagement. People's engagement falls off over time as they might have subscribed today to solve a particular problem six months or a year from now. While you might have their permission to email them, meaning that they opted in at some point, they might not have opened or clicked anything from you in the last six months or 12 months or however long it's been. And the longer that period of inactivity goes and the greater percentage of the people on your list that become kind of unengaged, the bigger the signal you're sending to Google and others that like, oh, out of 100 people, only 10 of them actually open and engage with these emails. So I'm going to put 90% of them in the spam folder and maybe continue with the other 10% in the inbox. But even then over time, if it continues to inch up, maybe I'm just going to say like, maybe this is actually just all spam and we're not going to deliver it at all because most people don't actually engage with this and don't actually seem to want this anymore. So it's why you hear a lot of best practices around email marketing being, you know, run a re engagement campaign, try to keep your users engaged, but at the same time.

Look at your stats and look at how many, when people have last engaged and if it's been a super long time, just cut them out. You've already lost them. They're not opening, they're not clicking, they're not additive to you. If anything, they're hurting you. So you know, it's, it's kind of like if you're, you know, you got the, you know, you got the ball and chain tied to your, tied to your leg, it's just, it's holding you back. You know, release the chain and you're free to move forward and interact with new folks. But yeah, you know, if you hang on to those old, the folks that are no longer engaged, it's just going to hurt you in the long run. So. Yeah, well, one of the people get tied up with that list size, you know.

Oh yeah, the list size. I'm like, that's costing you more money too.

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And it's funny because like everyone's always like, well, why would you encourage me to do that? It's like it's, you know, the way that, the way that our service is based is based on the number of subscribers, the number of people that you have on your list. So like it's directly contradictory to our revenue success to tell you to like literally delete, delete people off your list. But like, we do that because it's in our best interest in the long term to make sure you have good deliverability, to maintain the, our overall platform deliverability and to also just look out for the viability of email marketing as a communication method. Like if we just, you know, if you kind of wipe snot all over it, it just ruins it for everybody.

That's true. So what are the common pieces?

I'm timely with my analogies here.

I was like, very timely.

One of the common pieces of advices that I've heard quite a bit recently is early on when somebody gets on your email sequence is to actually ask for the reply, get them to actually reply and then kind of start some Communication outside of the email marketing tool. And that'll actually help your engagement with the email marketing tool. Is that something you found to be true?

Absolutely, absolutely. So you know, but have a genuine reason for them to reply and don't just. When they do reply to you, don't just give them a form letter response like engage with people or people. So, and I think that goes to. That's also very similar to when you're writing your emails. If you're not writing getting an email to 100 people or a thousand people or 10,000, however many people are on your list, you're writing it to one person. People don't sit around in a stadium and read the email together. They read them individually.

Hey Bob, what do you think of this email over here?

Whether it's like on the couch, in the car, on a plane, on the toilet, wherever people read their emails, it's one person connect with that one person. So writing it like you're writing it to Joe or Matt or whoever it happens to be that you're writing it to write it to one person, you're much more likely to create that engagement that you're looking for.

It is interesting. I love that you're saying that because that's such a common theme on this show too. With any content that you create out there, even YouTube videos or Facebook posts, speak to that one person. And remember there's a human on the other side of the screen. Let's go back to basics here. Communication 101 Again, let's have a dialogue. Yeah, we love engaging our list and asking questions. I mean, we do it on the podcast here too and prompt them to email. But I would say half of our emails have some reason to reply. And guess what? It's like the people that reply are usually your best subscribers too. So it's just gonna serve you better and them.

Absolutely. And you create fans that way. That's how you create folks that are really interested in what you're doing. It's interesting. Like Google recently launched.

A new technology called AMP for email. Amp. If you're looking it up and it's something that it basically turns an email that you can send to Gmail or any Google hosted email address. It turns it into basically an interactive webpage in a sense of like I could send you, I could be a bank and I could send you an email that has real time updating stock ticker in it so that you always have the most current stock ticket quotes or inventory. You can update your inventory in real time via the email. Some of the things that we've been doing internally we have like we do surveys and you can embed an actual survey with an actual form response and then when you hit submit I can show you the results right in the email. So there's a lot of stuff that like so Google already has support for it. Microsoft and Verizon who owns Yahoo and AOL domains these days, they're also working on support of it. So like the vast majority of mailboxes will soon be enabled for this kind of technology. And it's the sort of thing that as email marketers it's always good to be kind of on the leading edge of interactivity because again it sends signals to the mailbox providers that people do want the stuff that you're sending.

Well it makes sense. I would bet that emerging technology like this or brand new technology are kind of favored in the eyes of places like Google Gmail to get folks favorable placements if someone is leveraging it to the best practices.

Yeah, if you're doing good things with it I think. Yeah, absolutely. It's just something not a lot of people know about and a lot of platforms don't have support for it like on the sending side. So Aweber is one of the first that has it in like built into like our message editor and the ability to send AMP emails from our platform which is pretty cool.

Have you heard of that, Matt?

No. I mean I've heard of AMP from like the sort of SEO perspective, the accelerated mobile pages where they basically instantly pop up if you click the link in Google. But I've never, I haven't heard about it.

I'm the expert. Something new.

How would you. You said surveys. I mean I'm sure you could. What can you embed videos and other kind of media like that.

Videos. There are more limited support for that currently because a lot of platforms see real time playing of videos in an email client as potential vectors for abuse.

So. But you can do the like animated gifs and those sort of things but think, you know anything that can be dynamics. So think like weather forecasts, countdown timers for sales that are actually real and not just that like baloney, you know, 30 second, you know or 30 day countdown that just. It looks the same for everybody. Yeah, you know, live update, count of engagements. So like clicks on blog posts or like social engagements. You could put the actual tickers in there. Shipping status of a package.

Oh yeah, I can see uses in school announcements and community announcements and things like that where people need to be updated in a timely manner. On things.

Absolutely. So think like a live feed of comments from your blog directly in the email that announced the blog post. That's smart.

Very smart.

Twitter feedback, Twitter comments, those sort of things. You could put like a live ticker of those sort of things in there, like who's last doing those. So there's tons and tons of different. Like it's really only limited by your imagination. But I think anything you can pretty much do on a webpage to some extent you can do in amp. So which is pretty slick.

Yeah, this is definitely the first time we've heard of this. I haven't heard anybody talk about it.

Aweber supports it, so check it out.

Perfect.

Google AMP for email. It is definitely a distinction. Distinctly different thing than AMP as like the SEO thing that you guys are aware of. So it's similar but there are different components that are supported and not supported. Gotcha.

That makes sense. Now I think when it comes to like the sort of email sending the email autoresponder services, I don't know if it's a misconception or not, but I think it's a misconception that you know the service that you're using has a big impact on deliverability. From what it sounds like, it sounds like your sort of list hygiene and your following best practices and things like that are the bigger factor around deliverability as opposed to the actual company you're using to send the email.

It's a combination. So a big part of we have a whole dedicated engineering team that is dedicated exclusively to getting emails delivered from our platform. A lot of platforms these days aren't even actually delivering their emails. They're just passing it off to somebody else where they outsource it, whether it's Amazon or others, which I think is interesting. So it's do they have the skills internally to do that? So there definitely is a component to if your platform is abused by spammers, the reputation of your domains. So think like your click tracking domains, your open rate tracking domains, your image hosting domains, all of those things build a reputation for the mailbox providers. And so like if you're ABC email marketing company and tons of bad guys are sending from your platform, your platform is going to get a negative reputation in the overall. So like it doesn't mean that you're not going to have senders on that same platform that do get to the inbox like their reputation. That individual sender's reputation might be able to outweigh the bad email marketing provider's reputation. But it's definitely a Very, you know, it's a big concerted effort on both parties, but it's also like having the right technology behind it so supporting different authentication methods. So there's an authentication method you might have heard of spf.

Which just kind of authorizes which servers are allowed to send mail on your domain's behalf. So like when you put in your domain in the from line. So like if you put in, you know, joe@evergreenprofits.com There's a way to set up a thing on your website that are in your. It's technically in your DNS but to set up configuration that says aweber is allowed to send emails for me.

Yeah.

And then there's also a thing called dkim. Dkim, it's an acronym and basically it's a, it's a cryptographic thing. But I don't want to get too technical with that because it's. Most people don't. It's a point and click configuration kind of thing on our side. But it's something that basically authorizes us to again send mail on your behalf and it allows mailbox providers to tie your reputation to your emails because they know they came definitively from your domain and somebody that was authorized to send on your domain's behalf. Whereas a lot of providers still are not supporting that level of authentication which kind of like muddies the waters as far as any individual mailbox provider being able to build their reputation for each individual sender. So like the things that we do are constantly about trying to attach each individual's customer as each individual customer's reputation as strongly to their own domain as possible.

That allows them to build a domain that is representative of the their mailing practices. So you know, I like to say we have, we have, we have senders on our platform that, that have practices that range from good, better to best. It's not, it's not a matter of like bad to good because the really bad ones we either you know, are trying to remediate and educate to get better or we kick them off the platform.

Yeah, because that drags everyone else down.

Potentially because it can drag other, you know, if it happens too often, it can drag everybody else down. So you know, we kick dozens of people off our platform every week. But you gotta, you also have to think about that in the big picture of like, you know, one person can come in and try to create dozens of accounts and you have to, you have to have processes and automation and reputation system to be able to detect that sort of thing and keep those people off your platform. And a lot of platforms just don't have the knowledge or the sophistication in their technical systems or frankly the history to have seen all the different ways that people can use you. Let me just say people are really creative.

Yes. And I'm sure more creative by the day too.

So yeah, it's a game. We like to call it Whack a Mole. It's like you hit one and then another one pops up somewhere else.

Oh yeah. Well, that's why you have a bunch of good engineers over there.

Exactly.

But at the end of the day, we probably shouldn't be sending emails with like bitly links in it and things like that that have been used by a handful of bad apples.

Oh, more than a handful, yeah. No, I would actually say if you're using a third party link shortener service, you should absolutely not do that. There's really no reason in an email to even use a link shortener service because like most emails are HTML these days and you shouldn't really not generally have like a visible URL. You want to be linking the words, not the URL, because oftentimes if you have a visible URL, what ends up happening when you send through most email marketing platforms is they're going to rewrite that link behind the scenes so that you can track the clicks on that link. But what ends up happening is the link that's visible might be evergreenprofits.com but the link that someone's actually clicking on might go to like clicks aweber and then redirect to evergreen profits. And because there's a mismatch there that can be a reputation sign. Like you've probably seen emails in Gmail that come through and say this might be a phishing email. Yeah, might be a fraudulent email. And those are one of the signs that they look for to potentially do that. So I always recommend link the words.

Go here to contact our support, click here to contact our support, link those to your support URL and that way there's not a visible URL, it's just the URL that they click through to. That's totally fine to have the click tracking links on. And it also, it makes how long the URL is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter because no one ever sees it.

That makes total sense. I've heard some advice in the past that, you know, if I'm sending an email to Joe and I was sending him a link to a website, I would probably just copy and paste the URL in. I wouldn't Take the time to say, hey, click this link and then, you know, make that into and hyperlink that and send him an email. I would just copy and paste the URL and send it an email to Joe so it looks more natural if I use the URL. But what you're saying makes total sense, is that if you're gonna do that, you probably can't use the click tracking because then there's that mismatch.

Exactly. There's a difference. So the email that like, you and I might personally send back and forth to each other is typically like plain text. Whereas a lot of emails that people send through marketing platforms, they might look like plain text, but they're actually HTML. And there's a syntax difference there that on the receiving end makes your emails look different to a mailbox provider. And that's how those reputations get attached and so forth. So it's a little more subtle than that. So, like, you know, like in our platform, we make it really obvious. Like, if you want to send a plain text message, it's literally called the plain text message editor. And like, you can't do things like bold and italics and underline and change the colors. Like, if you can do any of those things in an email that you're sending, if you think it's plain text and you can make the text bold, it's not plain text. Yeah.

A simple test is go whip out if you have like a Mac or something, what text edit and you put it to plain text. You're like, look, you can't do anything.

Other than plain text. Exactly.

That's it.

Exactly. If you can make it different colors or bolded or italics or change the font size, it's not plain text. It's an HTML email.

Totally makes sense.

I mean, that's really super helpful because this is a lot of invisible stuff that people just aren't thinking about. What are some other common mistakes that you guys see that hurt? Deliverability, engagement. All that stuff with email.

I would.

Say some of the most common ones are they happen before you even send an email is not setting proper expectations up front when somebody subscribes to whatever it is that you're going to send. So you want to make sure that you're telling them what they're going to get and how often they're going to get it. And then if you tell them they're going to get. If they opt in for your free download from your blog, I'm looking at one here on my screen on your blog, like, okay, I'm going To get that download via email. What are you going to send me after that and how often are you going to send me? Because you and I both know you're not just sending me one email, right?

So I guess the follow up question to that would be is it okay to set expectations in that first email or should that expectation be set right there from the point they opt in?

I would generally try to make it at the point of opt in and I would reinforce it in the first email and potentially even the first couple of emails. And there's ways that you can segment those lists like hey, if you'd rather only hear from us once a month, click this link and like on our back end you can tie like someone clicking a link to, you know, add a tag that just says monthly and that way you can just segment your subscribers and know that anyone that's got the monthly tag, you should only send a, you know, a follow up newsletter to them like once a month, right? Or you might add them to a different campaign. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with marketing automation these days to be able to segment folks based on their preferences and not like what you as the business owner might do. Because like you in your head might say like, yeah, I'm going to send them one tip a day and they're going to start to get them and they might deal with them for four or five days and they might unsubscribe if they're unhappy. But you and I both know they're far more likely to either keep mashing the delete button or eventually when they get fed up enough that you keep showing up in their inbox and they don't want you, they're going to mash on the spam button. And now that's just told the mailbox provider that they don't want your email even though they signed up originally. But what they signed up for and what you delivered don't didn't match their expectations because they weren't clear. So they get upset about that. Whereas if you're clear, you know, it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like you go on a date and it's like up front at the beginning of the day it's like, hey, we're gonna go out to dinner, we're gonna go see a movie and at the end I'm probably gonna try to kiss you. You know, it's like up front like, okay, ground rules established. At the end of the day you can make sure that like if Everyone knows that's probably gonna happen.

Yeah, yeah. And get ready.

The real world doesn't work like that. But, you know, I'm just set the expectations up front and you're not likely to be surprised and caught off guard and make somebody upset.

That makes sense. And I like the fact that, you know, of course, segmentation is huge with email and the fact that it's almost like you can give them a good customer journey or a custom journey if you're allowing them to self segment based off of links and things like that.

Absolutely, yeah.

One of the.

We were talking internally in our internal chat system this morning and.

Somebody saw a newsletter somewhere where the first message after you signed up said, we've already sent our issue out this month.

It'S going to be next month until you get the next email and go here to look at our most recent archive kind of thing to see the most recent issue they'd already sent. And so our team was like, hey, can we like, I wonder if they change that every time they send out their newsletter. And I was like, probably like knowing the platform that they sent, it didn't support that. So our guys were like, can we do that? You know, like, how can we automate that internally? And so we came up with a little, some conditional content syntax that could look at what today's date was and you could basically enter in this little snippet that would say like what your normal publish date is. And if it was before that date, it would say, hey, the newsletter is going to be delivered next week. And if it was after that date, it would say, hey, the next newsletter is going to be delivered next week. You can make it completely conditional, which means it's completely automated and you don't need to update anything like that. So it's like little things like that that make it really automated so you don't have to go in and tweak these things, but make that customer journey really personalized.

We have a bunch of folks that have.

Totally blanking on it that do like the crowdfunding around.

Patreon for a second. They have like Patreon supporters and they send out a newsletter, one that has ads and one that doesn't have ads. And they were sending out two newsletters and in the course of them talking with our, our customer solutions team here, they were like, hey, you know, you know, you could just send one newsletter out like, but we want ads in one and not in the other. It's like, yeah, but you have your Patreon subscribers tagged as like paid Subscribers and you have the free ones aren't tagged. So basically you can use a conditional tag around your ads. So if you're a paid user, you just hide the condition, hide the ad. And they were like, they basically made that nice.

Well, we actually do that right now in our own business.

It saves all this overhead. So now they don't have to create two newsletters. And while that was relatively easy, you know, it's now they're literally only working on one newsletter and they just conditionally put the ads in.

Well, just think about how much time that just saved and probably consistency of the emails too. I mean it just benefits everyone.

We literally do that in our business right now. Every weekend we send out a newsletter to our audience. The one goes to our customers, one goes to our non customers. And 90% of the email is exactly the same.

Exactly the same. Yeah.

Thank you, Tom. You can save this if you tag.

Them in the platform and then use a little bit of conditional syntax. You could make that one email nice.

So smart.

Perfect. Love it. Thank you.

So one topic that I wanted to chat about while we had you is the topic of affiliate marketing. So Joe and I, a big piece of our business is affiliate marketing. Now the way we do affiliate marketing is we never drive directly to an affiliate link. We always create, you know, blog posts and content that might have some affiliate links embedded in it. But I'm curious what your stance and what your company's stance is on affiliate marketing and affiliate marketers. Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions that, you know, the, the autoresponder companies that are out there, they, they hate affiliate marketers.

There, there's definitely some email marketing platforms that, that dislike affiliate marketers. We do not have a blanket ban on affiliate marketers. Now I would, I would kind of quantify this a little bit. There's kind of like two different types of affiliate marketers that I see. There's folks like yourself that are driving thriving content related business. You're creating a lot of value on your own sites and you happen to support some of that by occasionally referencing some other third party thing that you get an affiliate commission off of. And it's very transparent as to when you're sending somebody to an affiliate offer and what your relationships are.

That's one side of affiliate marketing and that's the awesome side. And those are the folks that are hustling and they tend to be small businesses and creating a lot of really good value out in the world. There's a different kind of Category of affiliate marketers that are.

The best way to kind of quantify them here, like maybe like kind of churn and burn.

You can tell how it is, Tom.

You know, it's, they're acquiring people to email to through questionable means. All of their emails tend to go directly to third party affiliate landing pages where like the first thing you do on that page is it's asking you for your name and email address. And it's like I'm already signed up to your list. Why is every email you send sending me somewhere where it's asking me for my name and email address? And why are you sending me four emails a day? And every one of those emails goes to a completely different company each time. So you can see where like there's like one side of affiliate marketing and then there's this whole other category that, that is, you know, that is bad and does get a really bad name. And I think it's, I think rather than make a distinction between the two, some platforms have just said no. Affiliate marketing. Yeah, that's not aweber. We don't, we don't ban affiliate marketing, but we do have, you know, a very robust reputation system. We have all kinds of things that we look at as far as the campaigns that our customers are mailing, you know, the people that they're adding to their accounts, where they're coming from, how frequently they're mailing. Like we look at dozens and dozens of different metrics around each sender's account and lists and subscribers, you know how many of those subscribers are in other customers accounts? What are those engagements there? Are they likely really email addresses? Are they typos? Are they bots? Like, you know, there's, there's tons and tons of, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes in order to, to do email marketing effectively and to keep the bad guys off your platform. Because any self service, unless you're enterprise and you got to sign a big contract and even then the bad guys go through those processes too. But like any platform that's self service, a significant component of their business has to be actually kicking bad users off your network.

That must be tough to keep up with too because like we were saying earlier, like you're just getting new.

Just.

Different methods and yeah, you kick one.

Person off and they come back with a dozen different accounts in a different direction that you know, you may or may not be able to tie back to the original one. Fortunately, the tools are pretty good at doing that these days and we've seen just about Everything at this point, knock on wood. There's always something different next week.

But that's part of what differentiates us from maybe new platforms that might be, you know, a little shinier in one area. It's like, yeah, and they might get your emails delivered for a little while and then the bad guys are gonna find them and it's gonna kill them because they just, they don't have the capability or the resources to deal with the level of abuse that they will get. So. And it's not a matter of like they will or they won't, it's they definitely will. It's just a matter of time. Yep.

That's when. Well, that's, I mean that's what benefits you guys being 20 years plus in the game and. Yeah. And you're still evolving. Like you're saying you got the team. Let's highlight aweber a bit. And what's coming up for you guys? I know you mentioned prior to starting you guys have landing pages now and I'm sure a bunch of other capabilities that we're not even aware of.

Yeah, we just, on Monday we just launched some formal landing page. We've always had like custom web form builders and flyovers and pop ins and all that kind of jazz. But we now have dedicated landing pages that customers create, come in and build. We've already seen hundreds of those being created just in the first couple of days of this week, which is really awesome to see generating thousands of subscribers each day, which is super cool. But at the end of the day, a lot of our tools are. The philosophy that we approach things with is make a really easy to use tool that is also powerful when you need it to be, but simple when, when you don't and even simple to do the things that are more powerful. So like the tagging or the conditional content that we were talking about, those things are all pretty straightforward. It's just a matter of knowing that they exist and that you can use them. And it's pretty cool. But we're constantly looking at new technology to make sure that our customers are able to engage with their subscribers in the most effective ways. Whether it's the Google's, the Amp for email, whether it's the authentication communication profiles that help make sure that your emails get delivered to the inbox with spf, dkim, to conditional content, to tagging, to list segmentation, all the statistics that go along with it. But it's funny like, you know, I talk about all those things and predominantly the vast majority of our mail volume is around Somebody that just publishes like a newsletter, whether it's once a week or once a month or once a day, like they just publish a regular newsletter that goes out through a whole bunch of subscribers and they might segment it a little bit here and there, but like it's generally fairly straightforward, fairly simple things. So a lot of the time that we spend on is making sure you do that effectively. So think like there's a lot of platforms, most of our major competitors like, think about when you put your content into your newsletter to send it out, do you individually click on each one of those links and make sure that the link is correct?

I know we do, but yeah, I doubt most people do though.

Most people don't. And most platforms don't tell you when you screw it up. Whereas we have a behind the scenes link checker that you probably never even notice when you copy and paste one into our platform because nothing looks different unless it's broken. So if it returns an error page, we'll flag that in the editor so that you know, like, hey, there's a problem here, go go go fix it.

And it's like little subtle things like that that a lot of platforms don't have that it's like how many emails do you get where it's like, oops, we sent out the wrong link. We sent out a broken link all the time.

Even from the best marketers too.

But there's simple automation that we do on our back end to make sure that customers don't shoot themselves in the foot with those sort of things. Or like send out an email with a blank subject line. It's little things like that. Or the default subject line where it's like replace your subject line and send it out. Replace your subject line here. And it's like simple things like that that while they sound really trivial, it's that level of polish that you get from a platform that's been there, done that, versus somebody that's like, you know, they have some, they made some slight tweak on it and they gain a little bit of market adoption based on that slight tweak. But it's all these other ways that they have that they leave their customers hanging out to drive by like, you know, screwing up simple things.

I love it.

So it's interesting. So it's definitely interesting and ever evolving.

So for the people that are listening to this episode that maybe they're with another platform already, but they're like, man, this stuff sounds amazing. I'm gonna switch over to AWeber. What does the process look like of moving from another platform to Aweber because I know that's probably one of the biggest pain points if you're already using something is just the thought of man migration might be a big pain in the butt. So what does that look like for somebody wanting to move to you from another platform?

Oh man. So I have to asterisk this with. That was not a setup question at all.

No, it was not. We did not pre plan that. I know from my own experience that moving between platforms is a pain in the butt.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So we actually just about two weeks ago we started a free migration process where we'll do the whole migration for you from one platform to the other because we do recognize that that is something like we're intimately involved in not only our platform but like the vast majority of most of our competitors platforms. So we often know how they work better than the users themselves that are migrating away from them. So we actually have a free, we kind of call it our free concierge migration where you just give us a couple of key details whether it's you want to give us access to that account or whether or not you have the messages and your subscribers and whatever tags or anything you might have and we can import them into your account automatically for you. Make sure to the best that the system you're moving away from allows us to export like a state. So like if you have automation campaigns or something like a follow up series set up so that we can kind of move people across and where they pick up kind of where they left off. Some platforms support that better than others but we can put people in the right spots in the overall sequences. So we do the vast majority of the work for users and make that as simple and stress free as possible. So because that can be, you know, depending on the size of your operation can be a bit of a daunting task. And we've done some, we've done some pretty mammoth migrations for people but at the end of the day it's a fairly straightforward process for us because we've done, you know, it's like you might have done it once or twice. You know, we've done it a dozen times this week already.

By the one, one person in our team has done it at least a dozen times times this week, let alone the others that are doing them as well.

I don't know if that person likes their job or not. I'm just kidding.

Yeah, no, it's cool.

Though. Part of the reason that I have such a depth of being Able to see all the different kinds of stuff that people do and the little tweaks and twerks is like, somebody might tweak this over here in the finance industry and I can go use it for, for retail or I can go use it for a blogger. And, you know, they might only hear about these tips in their specific niche, whereas I get, we get to see them across all, all the different swaths of the world.

That's really cool. Yeah, that's valuable. I mean, you're looking at the data like we were saying earlier. You're seeing interesting things that most people probably are never aware of.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Now, are there, you know, speaking into that, are there any other. I know at the beginning we kind of mentioned that with the current state of the world right now, you are seeing a rise in the talk around coronavirus, but are you seeing any other trends forming recently in what people are emailing about or anything like that?

We see a lot of seasonal trends and those sort of things.

I will admit I don't spend a whole lot of time personally looking at content trends. You see a lot of the typical.

You know, Valentine's Day stuff and, you know, you'll see St. Patty's Day stuff and those sort of, you know, you see things around Christmas and shopping and those sort of stuff. Thanksgiving, you know, all the big, like, holidays both, you know, in the US and internationally, you see, you see those kind of keywords kind of pick up and drop off.

But it's.

You know, I think the coronavirus right now is definitely the hot topic button of the day. So, like, we're, we're only marginally halfway through the day here today, and mail volume around those topics is probably going to be another order of magnitude higher than it was yesterday.

So it's just, it's interesting to be able to see, like I just hit refresh on the graph in front of me and I've hit refresh on it a couple times while we've been talking and it's gradually inched its way up. It's definitely going to be higher than it was yesterday by a good clip, which is fascinating to be able to look at. Just as the world, kind of the world brain space is kind of totally around this both externally and even internally. We've been planning things with our team here on how we're reacting now, but also in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, well, you do have a big staff, so, yeah, taking care of them and making sure you guys are good too, and keep an eye on the trends. I think is really fascinating. So Tom, what's the. You know, we'll wrap it up here just so you can get off here. What is the best place folks can go check out? I know aweber.com I'm sure is the main place.

Yeah, definitely. Check us out on aweber.com youm can also follow us on Twitter under aweber. You can find me on Twitter under T Kolzer or you can hit me up via email. I'm tomkaweber.com so really hard to track down.

Keep it wide open.

Always happy to interact with folks and learn what they're doing and how we can provide more value for them.

Love it.

And finally too, what's a book that you just find yourself going to often or maybe recommending others.

Something quick off.

The top of your head.

The book that I've recommended most recently is Remote Remote. Remote by the guys over at base camp.

Yeah, I'm trying to blame all the other guys names. Jason Freedman.

Oh yeah, that's right.

David.

David Hanemire Hansen and Jason Freed.

Yeah, there it is.

Sweet. All right, well, Remote it is. Awesome, Tom. Well, yeah, check out Aweber everyone. And thanks for taking the time with us today too. This has been fascinating.

Yeah, very eye opening.

Thanks for having me on, guys.

Have a good one. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. And these guys have been sponsored supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of Easy Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zieman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, you know, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial trial to test out their software, Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell Hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle you can go grab a free trial and EZ webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars. I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times, and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're going to make more money and you're going to work less with this thing and you're going to create better relationships with the folks that are listening because it's a good experience. You want to give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle that's easywebinar.com hustole alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance and we will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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