The New Rules of Email Marketing

Great to see you pretty again this year. I know we do business with a lot of the people in this room so we're not doing business with you guys already. We would love to. Okay, a little bit about marketbee. We are a digital media company so we have our website, marketbee.com we have a giant email list. We have about 4.2 million people on our email list. We have a big SMS list, about 116,000 people. We have a push notifications list, about 700,000 and 15 million people on our website every month. We have an app, we have a YouTube channel. We try to be a little bit everywhere. Yeah, what else? We did about 30 million top line last year mostly in promoting all of your guys products and services. So for promoting your stuff, thank you for the business and we would like more of it. We do have a premium product that we sell. It's research software called Market Beat all access and that's a small part of our business but you know like everything we hope to grow it. Our team has 16 employees right now hoping to grow that a little bit but not too much this year. And we like to think of ourselves as everybody's top affiliate. So people that have great offers that are great matches to our list, we just want to send all the traffic and get you guys a bunch of customers. So like our friends who are behind the markets had a new year sale like at the end of last year. We sent in 2,800 new customers in a week. So that's kind of the scale that we can operate at when things are going really well. Yeah, I mean our mission, like we, you know, like John said we think there's about 15 million people in the space. We have 4.2 million hydroelects now and we just want to go get the rest of them. So that's what we're trying to do this year, next year and the following. So today's topics we are going to talk a little bit about the history of email. We're going to talk about the new roles that are coming down in type for Gmail and Yahoo which we shall be paying attention to. We're going to talk about compliance with that stuff. We're going to talk about some different ways to improve your deliverability and some more stuff related to that. Okay. A brief history of email. Okay. Yeah. So in 1971 first email was sent. So we are like 50 years into email now. 93 AOL launched their email client in 1996. 97 Yahoo and Hotmail launched their email client Gmail launched in 2004. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal said that even email is dead. 2013, we all freaked out when Google launched their promotions tab and then they put us on a promotions tab and it turned out that wasn't that big of a deal. In 2015, Inc. Magazine sent email as dead again. So email died for the second time. 2018, GDPR went into effect and we all freaked out again. Credit kind of turned out to be fine. 2021, we had emails. 50th birthday. 2021. Also, Apple kind of killed the ability to accurately track opens, which we all freaked out about, but then turned out to be fine. And in 2023, there are a bunch of new rules coming into effect from old senders, which is all of us, and we're all freaking out about it, but it will all be fine. And then I'm sure somebody next year or this year will declare email to be dead yet again. So that is the history of emoji. Okay, the new rules for 2024. So both Yahoo and Gmail are changing the rules for bulk email centers. They define that as anybody that sends more than 5,000 emails a day. So anybody that has a list in this room, that's probably you. So what they've kind of said is that these rules are going to go into effect in February and they're really going to start to enforce them hard in April and, and then kind of slowly ramp up enforcement over time. So they said they're going to start maybe rejecting 10 or 20% of traffic that's not compliant and then ratchet that up so people kind of get the message and are compliant. So they're just going to bounce more messages. They're going to put more messages in the spam holder if you don't kind of do the things that they would like us to do. Okay, the first thing that they're going to require is what's called the list unsubscribe header. So on many newsletters you're on, like, if you have a Gmail account, there'll be a big unsubscribe link in the top. Now that's what that is. And there's actually like three different ways to do this. And it's very unclear. Like, you know, different ESPs will accept like different types of list unsubscribe headers because, like, the best case scenario you have a link and then like, they will go to your website and click the unsubscribe button. And then even after they unsubscribe you can promote them something else. Like that's the best kind of way to do it in my mind is there's a monetization opportunity there. Only Gmail accepts the hyperlink version of that. But then Yahoo and Hotmail, Microsoft, they require you to send an email to some address to unsubscribe people. And now there's kind of a new method called this unsubscribed post, which is basically an API call to your server to say, this person doesn't want emails anymore, please stop sending them emails. But then they don't actually ever leave the Gmail experience. You can't get them back onto your website. And it's kind of unclear if that's. They've kind of told you like they would they want you to do the list unsubscribe post or it is just kind of that API call. But it's very unclear if like that is actually a requirement or if any of the other disks are still going to be okay. So how do we navigate this? You know, first we kind of get, you know, shouldn't be afraid of like people unsubscribing from our list. Like that is the natural part of an email life cycle. We all know that making unsubscribing easy is the right thing to do. We're just kind of afraid of it. But you know, we shouldn't be because like we all unsubscribe and stuff all the time. It's not a big deal. Maybe you unsubscribe, unsubscribe again. That's just kind of the nature of email. So once you implement the send subscribe properly, you are going to see higher unsubscribe rates because more people will just click the button. But you will also see lower spam rates, which is really good for your deliverability. So if you make it easy for people to unsubscribe, they're not going to click the report spam button and then more of your messages will go to the inbox. One thing we always did like before list unsubscribe was a thing, we would put an unsubscribe link in both the header and the footer of our email to really make it easy to unsubscribe. And then that way people, you know, don't click that spam report button and our messages get to the inbox. You know, the other way to mitigate this is, you know, it is kind of scary because you are going to have a lot more unsubscribes. But the real question is like, what are you unsubscribing people from? Are you unsubscribing people from Will's emails or Matt emails or Lacy's emails? Are you unsubscribing them from all of MarketBeat or just like MarkBeat's Canadian newsletter, or you unsubscribing them from Markabee's daily ratings? So really be thoughtful about like how you implement that. And you know, really kind of the way to think about it is to unsubscribe somebody from that specific brand. But you know, if you have somebody on six different lists kind of in your universe and they unsubscribe from one of them, you know, is that really that big of a deal? And I think that the answer is no. The second thing they're going to require is the use of dmarc. DMARC is a. Basically it's a DNS record on your domain name that says so there's kind of to validate, like, Matt actually sent this email from Markaby and it was like sent from the real server, the real IP address. There's two kind of technical things called SPF and dkim, which basically like says, yep, this email is actually from Matt. It's not from somebody pretending to be Matt. And DMARC is. Those have been in place forever. I'm sure you all have it on your domains. But DMARC is kind of the new thing that tells ESPs what to do if an email fails kind of SPF and DKIM authentication. So now that's going to be required and you can just set it to what's called PD equals none, which basically says don't do anything. We do have DMARC record, but we don't actually want you to block these emails. DMARC really comes into play for like banks and financial institutions where like people are trying to impersonate their email all the time. So like they will set a really high DMARC enforcement like rate. So like basically any email that isn't valid, like, they'll reject because obviously you're bank of America, you don't want people pretending to be you. But if you're Mark, maybe it doesn't matter as much. So they want you to have that in place. It's really easy to do. It'll take all five minutes to do. Okay, next kind of thing is they want to see lower spam rates. So kind of what Gmail has said is that they want to see less than a 0.3% spam report. Rate and like in total and generally speaking, they want to see less than 0.1 as kind of, they said it should never be higher than 0.3%. And then some of the time, like as a general rule it shouldn't be higher than 0.1%. So if you don't know what your Gmail spam rates are, you can set up an account in Gmail Postmaster Tools and then they will tell you what they are and then you can monitor it and kind of impact it. Okay, what's next? So, yeah, check it. You know, if your numbers are higher than that, you should really address that like as soon as you can. Because if your spam rate stays above kind of that threshold for a long period of time, you're going to see worse deliverability. And obviously we can't sell people anything if your messages aren't getting to them. So the way to do this is one, do the list unsubscribe header to make your unsubscribe links really easy to find. So header and footer then. Yeah. Then if somebody clicks the report spam button like Gmail doesn't, like send these back to your ESP, but the other ESPs do. So if somebody clicks that report spam button, you just want to unsubscribe them immediately and take them off all your list. And one thing we do is we keep a database of people that reports spam and then if somebody's clicked that button like more than three times in a year, we just don't let them sign back up because we know they're going to click that button again. The other thing is don't email your inactive users very often. So we email like our 30 day actives like daily. As a general rule, if you haven't opened in 30 days, but maybe you open in 90 days, we'll send an email once a week. And then if you haven't opened in 90 days, that might be once every other week, once a month. People don't like to, I don't know, the people that like aren't opening your email, it's like when they do open them, they're more likely to pick that report spam button. And that's just kind of a general good rule for email in general is you want to email, you're more active people more often, you're less active people less often. And that'd be great. Yeah. The other thing is like we're all buying traffic from lots of places and we all know that some places are more reputable than others. So you want to track your open rates and your click through rates and your unsubscribe rates and your spam report rates by source. So that way you can see if MarketBeat.com is giving you lots of users that are reporting spam and then maybe another source is like, you know, way better than MarketBeat and they're not doing that. That way you can pin it on us and say, you guys are sending us a bunch of traffic. We're not going to buy from you anymore. But you really want to understand if there are problem children in like your traffic acquisition, you'll kind of know that you can break it down from like, oh, the guys over at AfterOffice are sending us great traffic, but marker B is generating a bunch of spam reports like, well, maybe you don't want to buy from Markbeat then. All right, let's see. Okay, other requirements, they are now requiring where to card forward in reverse PTR records, which basically like says, this IP address maps to this sending domain and this sending domain back to this IP address. Your tech guy can check that out. There's another thing called DMARC alignment, which basically means that the domain on your DMARC thing needs to match, like the domain that the email is from. Your ESP should do this for you. And then there's some other stuff that none of us would need to worry about that your ESP will worry about for you. So what does this all mean? Getting good at deliverability is going to get harder. It's going to make it tougher for new people to establish an email reputation on their domain name. And it's just going to be hard if you're a newer player into the market to compete with people like MarketBeat, who send out tens of millions of emails, let's say a day. But this is great news because it's like any regulation, like if you're on top of it, like you're paying attention, you do all the things, it is harder for people to eat your lunch. So if you can do the things that I mentioned, it's going to be really good for you. Because a lot of people aren't paying attention. They're not aware of these new rules. They haven't done them yet. If you're the person that has done it, their stuff's going to spam. There's less competition in the inbox, your better engagement and ultimately this can be a very good thing for everybody in this room. Okay, we are going to talk about 24 different ways to improve email deliverability. You Know, that was kind of the main thing I want to talk about in my talk. That's the thing that we need to pay attention to this year. But in general, I think we could all do a better job getting emails into the inbox. So I made a list of 24 ways to do that. Okay, item number one is to target a 20% open rate after you take out all the fake opens. So like the people that are on Substack and Beehive, they're all kind of like saying, oh, we get a 60% no you don't. Those are just Apple users that are like, you know, Apple opens every email now. So of course you're saying you get a 60% open rate. Like really, it's whatever you're like if you're counting the fake Apple opens, just divide that number by two and like that's your real open rate. But generally speaking you want to target like a true 20% open rate. And then if you're not seeing that, you need to cut down your segments. Like say, okay, we're only going to email instead. 30 day active means we only email 25 day active. It's a 21 day active until you kind of hit that because that's where the ESPS wants you. Number two, run any new email that's going to go on your list through an email verification tool. So we use one called Kickbox, but there's also Neverbounce, there's Bright Verify, there's much fees and they all kind of do the same thing, but they can tell you like ahead of time. Like if an email is a bad email that you shouldn't put on your list, you want to run every new email through one of these before it's on your list. Number three, you want to do engagement based unsubscribes like at the beginning of the journey. So somebody's on your list for 21 days. They don't open a single email, they don't click on a single link. You know, that's probably a dead email address. You just want to unsubscribe those people and forget they ever exist. Like it's going to be like really hard to reactivate them later. So you just want to kick those people off and send them on their way because they're probably not real anyway later, like if somebody's on your list, they're clicking and then maybe they're like inactive for a month. Like you still leave those people on your list. But if somebody's brand new and there's just never any Signs of engagement. Kick those people off your list. All right, Number four, targeted sending frequency. Yeah, I talked about this. You want to send kind of your 30 day actives daily, 30 to 90 days weekly and less than that every now and then. Just try to reactivate them. Number five, if somebody's email boxes a spam report, it comes back as an invalid email. Just kick those people off your list right away. Number six, don't count the fake Apple opens from your list. Number seven, we talked about this a little bit but do an analysis by your lead source to like see what the open rates are from MarketBeat or after offers or Investing Media Solutions or any of your traffic sources to see like who is giving you users that are actually opening and clicking on email. Number eight, bot clicks. Who would have a problem here with bot clicks? You all have, whether you know it or not. So the way that you get rid of bot clickers is to put your click tracky domain in Cloudflare and then you can set what's called a page rule on Cloudflare that will track all the traffic that goes through your clicking. And then you can set up captchas for like, oh well we get 40,000 clicks a day from Microsoft Azure. You know they're bots, right? And then you set up a captcha for those users based off their esp. And then if they don't get through the captcha then you know they're probably not a real person. And it's not even like a type these letters in. Nobody can recapture it. It's just a, isn't this a real browser? Then if it like it is, it will redirect you. So we've been really successful at identifying that like blocking that junk traffic just by doing that using Cloudflare. And then the other thing that we do that we learned from Darwin many years ago is that you put like a hidden link in your footer and then if an IP address is clicking that like probably not a real user for clicking on like the period and at the end of your disclaimer and then you can filter out those IPs as well. Let's see, what number are we on? We are on number nine, check the blacklist. You want to run your IPs and your domain name through a bunch of blacklist checkers. I make Andrew do this a couple times a week just to make sure everything's good to go. Number 10, use deliverability software. So we use Inbox Monster right now most because it comes for free from sender Blog apps is great Your data source is a good order, but also good. Like you want to use one of these tools to monitor your inbox placement, especially when you're you know, doing stuff at scale. Number 11, don't buy the shadier leads until like you've kind of established yourself. So we all know that like not all leads are the same. Like somebody like coming through Google AdWords to your website, typing in their email, clicking on a confirmation, that's gold standard. But not all leads are that way. You know that co regs like they could be opting into five things at once and then like they maybe like didn't even read too hard that they're you know, signed up for your email. Or maybe it's like a pretty pre check core eng and like they didn't read it at all. So like avoid that kind of stuff until like you're established and then can like handle some email signups that have lower engagement rates. Start with the really high quality stuff and then move on to the more say larger volume, lower quality stuff like later. Okay, next thing. Okay, number 12, ask your affiliate partners for unique copy. So if any of the, let's say any of the big mark wiser Agoura brands has a huge offer, you know that everybody who's an affiliate is going to send that out. And if you know somebody else sends it out and it gets a bunch of spam reports because they just isn't good, like that copy is going to get flagged by spam filter tech kind of across the world. So if you can persuade your affiliate partners to write unique copy just for your list, then what other people do with their copy won't impact you and your list. And that's kind of a great thing if you can get them to do that. Number 13, content first promotion. We all know that if you only ever send out promotions and ads, it's probably not going to go very well. People aren't getting engaged with ads. So try to send out at least one content email for one to every promotional email that you send. Number 15, 14 Again, make sure your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records validate. You can use mailgastester.com to do that. If you don't have that like good to go like that will screw up your deliverability. Number 15 treat different ESPs differently. Like Microsoft Email. Like their spam filter is much more like strict than, than Gmails and Yahoo. So like you got to treat those users a little bit differently. Don't send them as many emails, don't send them as Many ads I will have a PDF to this on the web. So you don't need to take phone screenshots if you don't want to. Yeah. So just kind of have good balance there. Okay. This is P. Okay. Okay. 17. Don't share your email list with people. Like, you would think we would all know this by now, but like somebody accidentally sent us their whole list in the last three months. So just don't ever give out your email list. Like if you're going to send out a suppression list, like it should be MD5 files, don't ever send out your email list to anybody because like once it's out of your possession, you have no idea what's going to happen to it. Number 18, don't share an MD5 suppression list of your buyers list. So we all use MD5 suppression lists in this industry. But here's the deal. If you send me your buyers list, I could just match that up against MarkerBeat's list of 10 million emails. So if we have the entire finfab universe, I can calculate MD5s for each one of those and probably match at least half of your buyers list. And like, do you really want me to do that? Probably not. So like don't ever use your buyers list because unsafely people can use that. And like figure out the emails that are on that list based off that. So just don't send it out. It's a bad idea. Don't do it. Okay. Number 19. This is a kind of a retreat from last year. So last year I talked about how awesome retention.com or it was getting most.com back then was. Turns out it didn't work out so well. So I don't recommend you use it anymore. So that's like a tool that would like tell you who's on your website that like didn't fill an opt in form and then you can email them and invite them to get on your list. Turns out like nobody wants those emails. So like just we stopped doing it and would recommend you guys do the same. Okay. And 20, be cautious about confirmation emails. So what we find is that like our confirmation emails are like some of the highest spam report rate emails of anything. Because like maybe you're like on a co reg page and you sign up for five different lists at once and like I don't wake up doing this and you click spam report. So what if you just send out fewer confirmation emails and don't do that as much? You know, I don't think anybody is really using like you Know a verified opt in like anymore where like you send out an email and then you have a quick confirmation email. Like that practice kind of died 10 years ago because nobody clicks on confirmation links. But we still send them out because if you click on the confirmation link, we can still show you another co reg and make another two bucks off of you. So we show the confirmation emails, but we like don't really do anything other than mark you as confirmed. We still send out the people email people that don't confirm, but we probably want to do fewer of those in the future because confirmation emails do get a pretty high spam report rate. All right, number 17, send them from a dedicated IP address. If you are in a shared IP address, this pool like other people's email reputation will impact yours and you really want to live or die on your own health. So if you're like using mailchimp. I don't know if he's using mailchimp in here, but if you're using an ESP where like how to share IP address pool with other senders, like I would get to a dedicated IP address as quickly as feasible because you really want to. Do you really want to live or die on your own reputation? Number 22, encourage user interaction. So if you're in Gmail, if you're Yahoo, if you're Hotmail, how do you know that like, an email is a good email? So if somebody like replies to your message, like they probably wanted your message to begin with. If they click on a link in your email, that's great. So you really want to encourage replies and clicks on your messages or like have them drag your email to the primary tab, which of course nobody ever does, but we still tell people to do that anyway. But a great way to do this is just to email people and ask them a simple question like, hey, Andrew, we're curious about what investors think about dividend stocks today. Like, you still like dividend stocks in 2024? Or like, are you thinking about something else? And like reply and let me know and then like you will get a shocking amount of replies and then it's 14 SB of them, obviously. But like, that is just gravy to ESPs. They love to see replies. So if you can get people to reply to your messages, that is fantastic. Okay. Oh yeah, send engagement rate. Yeah, That's basically the same thing. Okay, 24. If you're really struggling and you don't know what you're doing, hire a consultant. We pay a consultant like $8,000 a month at SendGrid. To keep an eye on our email stuff and like make sure we're getting delivered or if there's a problem like they keep an eye on it for us. So like if you're a big company, if you're think hub of 100 people, like you should have a deliverability consultant that just watches your email and like tells you like, oh, your numbers aren't good here. You should or like this category of email is problematic, you should try to fix it. They're really valuable. So like inbox monster has email consultants SMTP conda send your desk and yeah, these people are worth their weight and goal. If you are sending a lot of email and it's not getting where it needs to go, that's 24 key takeaways. You know financial publishing is an email driven business. It has been since 2008. We stopped sending out postcards and mailers and lumpy mail that just doesn't really happen anymore. It's all through email, it's a little bit through sms, it's a little bit through the web, but it's just an email driven business and we need to kind of give email the love and attention it deserves. Especially from a technical deliverability standpoint. Like I mean half of your email is going to spam and you get that up to like 90% of the inbox. Like that is a game changer for your business. So we need to pay attention to this stuff. You know, the more emails that make it into people's inboxes, the more people that are going to click, the more people that are going to buy. Good deliverability equals more revenue and I really think we all just need to get good at email deliverability and yeah, just get good at this stuff. Okay, last slide. Kind of three things, takeaways. If you want to download this presentation, it's markbeat.com 2024PDF we'll leave that link up. I'll say the next few weeks but she left last year's presentation up until like three weeks ago before I deleted it. So probably not going to remember to delete it. So markfleed.com 2024pdf I did write a book about email marketing called Email Marketing Demystified. It's on Amazon, it's on its third edition. Feel free to grab that. If you have like a new like junior person that just joined your company. They don't know anything about email and they need to learn about email. Feel free to give them a copy of that book. Cost 99 cents on Kindle so check that out and then if you want to buy leads from us, go talk to Will. That's Will. He is our kind of affiliate manager person. So if you're not buying leads from us and you'd like to go talk to Will. We have a media kit@instankbeat.com advertisements. You can check that out as well. That's what I have. I know it's going to be about lunch, but I'm guessing we have time for a couple questions if you have any. Can you elaborate why protection.com is such a fail or. Yeah, well like we got people to convert to the list and then they just have a boxing is what it amounts to and like the number of complaints on like those, you know, it's like I never gave you my email. How did you get my email? Like a lot of that. So it's had a lot of promise when we first tried it and then it just went downhill really quickly. When you create a new list or a new name newsletter, how do you like warm it up and get the leads into it to get it to a point where you can start taking some of the coverage leads? Yeah. So like one of our secrets is we just kind of all sent from the same domain. So like if you have an established like domain and you want to launch something new, like don't try to like reinvent the wheel and your deliverability, just use the domain that you got and like just use a different from address. Like we run dividendstocks.com but the comes from dividends at Analyst Trading St like we used to be analyst training network and then when we switched to MarketBeat like our sending domain is so good we just kind of switched. So I don't feel the need to like send from like all these different domains. Just send from one and then if you are like going to like start a brand new list on a brand new domain, it's really important to like start slowly and ramp up because like if you go from like sending nothing to thousands of emails per day and like you want to start with like 50 emails a day and then 100 and then 115 and really ramp up over the course of a month or two and then that will kind of show the nice ramp that ESPs really want to see. Have you done anything with brand identifiers? You mean like a picture thing? Yeah, we did that. What are those called? Verified mark certificates. Right. Bmps. Yeah, so we did that and we actually got rid of ours not so we found that like did we make an impact on deliverability. And then, like, no matter what, it would show the same picture for every email from a domain. And, like, we didn't really want it to do that because, like, if we send an email from dividend stocks from the same domain, like, it's going to show the market I time. And we just didn't want to do that. Cool. So it sounds like it's lunchtime, but Aaron's up there. I think we're done. We're done. Yeah, we can do it. Lunch. Does anybody have. We have time. Come on, Cory, we got a question. What's your favorite drink, Matt? Coffee. Black coffee bars. Request. Anybody have any questions? No? Can we get the slides? The aftercast? Any questions? Questions, Questions? Anybody? All right, break it for lunch. We'll get you back here at 1:15.