Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/06/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing amazing. Let's get this thing kicked off another mic minutes Mastermind. Happy Wednesday. Let's get started.

Looks like we got a couple questions came in.

Boom. Let's get started here.

All right, first, first question is from Colby from Daphne, Alabama. Number one, if marketing emails are opened immediately after sent. No looks clinked. What's the probability of that being a spam filter? If it is a spam filter, what's the likely of the email made into the customer's inbox? To get around spam filters, do click the links. Can a second link be added? The link could be hidden in a general disclaimer. The additional tag generated for that the client would let us know that the primary link was likely triggered by a spam bot.

In general, any link in an email is going to reduce your email deliverability. So since February when there's so many changes made, this is when it's really, really started impacting basically any third party sending emails. Any link is going to reduce. Now if you send a link to somebody that and same with pictures and graphics. Like I if someone was ever, which we haven't had this rampant, but if someone was ever having really big trouble getting even estimate emails to people, I would take off all the.

I would take off all the texts or all the images because images alone will again reduce the likelihood. It's a likelihood. It's like a. Think of it more of a range and think of it more of as a like a slider. If you have pictures, you decrease the likelihood of it being getting through a spam filter. If you have links, it's going to decrease if you have multiple links, even more so if you have hyperlinks, which is a link behind text, even more so there's like many, many layers to this. If you look up email deliverability. Mailchimp does some really good articles on this. Instantly does some really good articles on this mailchimp though yesterday I was reading theirs is very good actually. I could put it in the chat. Give me one second. Mailchimp email deliverability. I read it just through yesterday and it's pretty solid email. Here we go. So here are some of the things that are important. I will put this in the comments of YouTube. Boom. Feel free to look at this. We monitor this in terms of deliverability. The deliverability. To answer the question more directly here, one second. It'll get into the inbox. It's a matter of. Oh, and another thing that really affects it is if you track whether or not it's being opened and clicked, just that alone will impact it. So having email.

Where we know if it's opened or if they click the link, just having that tracking the email link tracking alone inside, where even if you just send straight text, but we know that they got it, they know it was received and they know that it was opened, that alone is going to impact your deliverability. It just is. So it's a matter of like, well, I kind of want to know if they got it. I want to know if they clicked on the link. I want to have a link, I want to have images so it looks more professional. So it's like what level and layer are you willing to kind of reduce email deliverability? If you're going straight cold email to customers that don't expect your email, they don't know who you are, you're going to want like no text, no art, sorry, no images, no links, et cetera. This is something we're looking at even with the leads program for next year is like, if you're going after a cold audience, you have to go with text only strategy. You can't have links, you can't have a bunch of pictures, you definitely can't be tracking whether or not it's opened. These are the type of things that are just generally used for spam related emails. So they're getting weeded out and they're just going to get better and better and better. So take. To answer your question, if there's two links in an email, will it help? No.

The link could be hidden in a general disclaimer. A tag could be added if a primary link was triggered by a spam bot. So Isaac, you're saying basically a link to another page where they would then click.

Yeah, but then that one would have to get linked up to every single account.

I would probably. If you're going this direction, it's like, hey, I want them to click on this link and then go to another place and I want them to click a button there.

I would probably just tell them to respond with yes or respond to this email. The respond yes thing has been working decently. It's not as high of a conversion rate because they do have to click like respond Y E yes, Y E S. But like if you're asking them to click on a link that goes to another page, that they click another link and then it goes to another URL, they've already clicked that many times and now they have to wait. They have to go out of the mail app anyways. Like it's going to go from their mail app to the Safari or like Chrome or whatever. So that is five seconds for that page to load. Then they got to click it again, then it's going to load again. So you're talking about 10 seconds. They might as well just click respond or reply. Yes. So I would probably go that route if you're getting a bunch of false flags. Let's keep reading here. Two, I used a URL extension from an external site for my opt in to monthly service link. Okay, are external URLs an issue to use like any sort of like tiny URL. Any sort of URL extension like where you are, what's it called? Like a URL compressor. These are flagged many times. Same thing like Google voice numbers, Google form links.

Could then you team make a generic ALICE extension that says thank you or confirm thank you. So everyone has this. Once you've submitted an estimate, a thank you page for your estimates, you can, you can send them there. But having that if you compress a URL it is going to again another email deliverability, it's not like a yes or no thing with email delivery. It is a, it is a sliding scale of how, how diligent do you want to be in terms of email deliverability? Because if you were gung ho about you would do text only, no images, you wouldn't track whether or not the the email was opened, you wouldn't have links, you wouldn't track if links were opened, you would have no PDF attachments, et cetera. So that would be like extreme but like well I want the PDF attached because if they don't click on the link I want them to still get it or print it off. Two, I want to have the link so they can go to their client portal and they can immediately see invoices and estimates and it's a one click in and there's no login. Two, I want images because it's going to look more professional. I want to be able to know if they got the, if they opened the email and if they did click on the link which is true tracking. Now that, so those are all things that are going to be against you. So if you're having a massive problem with this, for example a one click estimate email, I think that would work the best currently as I see it now is text only. This is hey Mr. Jones, you know, first name comma, it's you know up here in Daphne, we're doing, we're doing a special deal for our current, for, for, for current customers it's 20% off if you get the estimate done before whatever date. Let me know if you, if you're interested or respond back to this email. That's gonna be the most natural. And so that's probably gonna be your highest way of getting through the spam filters through any sort of robot or bots that are clicking through any link. But I would say if you send an email and within one minute or two minutes you're getting a bunch of one clicks it is these spam filters are clicking through links. So I generally believe right now it is ask for a yes, ask for just reply to like people, people. People will reply just at a low, lower rate than a one click. And so if you, if you really want to make sure they have intent to buy it would ask for a reply the same way we do with email or sorry with text. The same thing like if you're going to have a text inbox, just ask for them to reply and do it in a very conversational way. We were talking about it in a group the other day is like sometimes having a mistake of like your type your spelling on a text or an email might actually be a good thing because it shows like you wrote this and so even if you're sending out via mass, make it super personalized they will respond. And so in the past much more like hey, let's have pictures and like make one click estimate email click on one link and let's go. And that's worked great in the past. But with all of this email deliverability stuff as well as now scrubbing of links, getting clicked on, I do believe going to just text and really leaning into like as if you typed this in and like the subject of the email being very much around your lawn, your flower beds. We notice this at your property like very as make the email or the text the message of any sort as if you were writing it to one person. I believe that's the move right now. And I know there are some locations that are still using the one clicks and they have not seen this as much. But I believe this is the way it's going to start moving. And so I would adjust as we go into 2025 your one click strategy. If you're getting a lot of false clicks to be text only, respond back to us. Reduce the links, reduce any sort of images, reduce attachments, reduce video inputs, don't use a URL extension like compressing things and having a bunch of links throughout an email unfortunately. But text is hands down winning like across the board if you're not doing text, I would highly Recommend it. Brenton, UT if you were to analyze the entire United States to determine the best air to star gust locations, what metrics would you look at? I've learned the hard way that city size can greatly limit growth. Yeah. So if anyone wants is thinking about this or starting another location, talk to Lee. We now have a new software that we are using to get very, very detailed information about like it's like a 30 page report about the, the demographics, the size, the population, what people, the average income, the education, the trend of population. The number one thing I am looking at if I'm opening a territory is population trend. Because if you have a population trend that's going up, you will undoubtedly have a price appreciation of real estate. And if you have price appreciation of real estate, you will absolutely have a business that is growing in home services. Because you have building, you have higher demand than do have supply which will drive prices up. And now a 40$50 cut or a $1,000 property cleanup doesn't look so bad because they have $150,000 of equity in their house. So you want a big discrepancy between homeowner appreciation in their home and equity and your cost of service. And if you're in a market where there's a slight decline, so say there was 150,000 people there 10 years ago and now there's 120,000, your property values are going to be flat, you're not going to have higher supply than demand or sorry, you're not going to have a higher demand than supply. So the price of the real estate will diminish or, or stay flat and they won't have as much equity in their house. So then when you do charge $1,000 that seems like a bigger deal. So.

That'S probably the number thing I'd be looking for. I'd be looking for that I'd be looking for. I generally want a more educated population. I generally want household income that is trending upwards and an aging demographic. So again I'm saying these words but like if you're thinking about a market, please talk to Lee. We now have a very, very sophisticated way of actually showing this with you. And we can actually show it on a map. We can give you very, very specifics of a market. So for anyone like now I just say it's basically not just recommended, like required almost. Talk to Lee and he can give you this report. It's extremely valuable and we don't charge for it. We eat the cost of that.

I need to zoom out on these pages when I do this, because otherwise. There we go. Cool. Blows out all my other docs. All right.

Is it really Mark? Tomorrow is Mike Mint 5, 600. Dude, that's crazy. 600 episodes? That's nuts. Dude, that's really cool. I'll have to go back maybe. Maybe tomorrow we'll look back like, number one or two. I remember when we first got started and why. It was a pretty low moment. So that's pretty cool. I'll have to take a look at that. I think it'll be really cool. Like when we're at, like, you know, 2, 3000, be able, like, look through the whole history, how many people are on the calls, the type of questions being asked when we launched certain things, and the kind of the response through the three M's. So very cool. I can't wait. Like, next year is going to be so cool. There's some. Just come to conference. There's some really cool stuff I'm really looking forward to sharing with everyone. I stink at keeping secret, so if I can keep my mouth shut for next two months, I'll be surprised. All right, everyone, have a fantastic November 6th, and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.