SHOWNOTES
In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Matt Brown, a seasoned copywriter, full-stack marketer, and email deliverability expert. In this conversation, you’ll learn:
📧 The Fundamentals of Email Deliverability: Matt breaks down the importance of email deliverability and explains the difference between deliverability and placement, providing insights into why your emails might not be reaching your audience.
📧 Key Factors Affecting Email Reputation: We discuss how sender reputation, IP reputation, and domain setup impact your email deliverability and what you can do to improve it.
📧 Avoiding Common Email Pitfalls: From spam filters to image file sizes, Matt shares best practices for keeping your emails out of the spam folder and ensuring they land where they’re most likely to be seen.
📧 The Power of List Hygiene: Matt emphasizes the importance of regular list cleaning and how to use tools to keep your email list healthy and engaged.
📧 Engaging Content Tips: Learn about simple strategies to get more replies, which in turn boosts deliverability, and how to make your emails more engaging from the start.
📧 Resources for Copywriting: Matt shares his go-to resources for becoming a better copywriter and the unexpected sources of inspiration he turns to for email content.
Whether you're a marketer or business owner, Matt’s insights are packed with actionable steps to take your email strategy to the next level. Listen in and learn how to optimize your email campaigns to grow your business!
RESOURCES
Google Postmaster Tools - A free tool to monitor email reputation, spam rates, and other metrics specifically for Gmail.
GlockApps - Provides email deliverability and placement testing to help ensure emails land in the inbox.
ZeroBounce - An email validation and deliverability tool that helps clean email lists and improve sender reputation.
Emailable - Offers email verification and list cleaning services, including placement testing features.
Litmus - An email marketing tool that provides placement testing, email previews, and analytics.
Email on Acid - A platform for email deliverability testing, spam testing, and placement analysis.
SendGrid - A transactional email service used for high-volume email sending, often integrated with various platforms.
Mailgun - Another transactional email service, popular for sending bulk emails with reliable deliverability.
Copyhackers - Founded by Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers offers in-depth training on copywriting, including the popular Copy School program.
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00.520] - Gary Vaynerchuk Hey, guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuk. And you're listening to the Front Row, entrepreneur podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:00:08.480] - Jen Lehner Our guest today is a copywriter, full stack marketer, and email deliverability expert. Over the past five years, he's managed lists from 1,000 to 200,000 active subscribers in a variety of markets, including SaaS, e-commerce, online education, coaching, and more. Now, he partners with entrepreneurs and business owners to fix deep-seated deliverability issues, boost email performance, and grow revenue. He's the author of the Deliverability Now newsletter, where he sends out weekly tips and strategies designed to help you win big with email. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Lisa and Kat Clementine. Welcome to the show, Matt Brown.
Read more...
[00:00:55.560] - Matt Brown Hey, thank you so much for having me, Jen. Really grateful to be here.
[00:01:00.210] - Jen Lehner Okay, so let's just start with the fact that how amazing it is that email even still works. With all the tools we have at our fingertips, from AI to chat bots, automation, All the things, live streaming, just a million different tools, platforms, everything at our fingertips, somehow email still works. Why does email still work, do you think?
[00:01:28.030] - Matt Brown Yeah, that's a great point, a great question. I think email, at least for all of the clients that I work with, it's still their most effective and profitable middle of funnel and bottom of funnel marketing channel, especially if you're selling something that is a little bit more abstract, like coaching or education, something that's not an e-commerce product that can trigger a impulse buy. If you're on TikTok, you see, oh, a cool supplement that's going to help my skin or going help my brain or something like that. You click through, it's 30 bucks. Yeah, let's just go ahead and buy that. But we're trying to sell somebody $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 worth of products. Email is so fantastic because you can have a conversation with that person over a long period of time and build trust with your subscribers at scale. And I think it's just hard to do that on any other marketing platform just because of the cost, but also because attention is so divided when we're on social media, we're watching TV, we're scrolling Instagram or whatever. So people still use email, and it definitely still works. And I anticipate it working for a long time.
[00:02:43.010] - Matt Brown But maybe Jen I thought it will finally kill email. We'll see.
[00:02:48.290] - Jen Lehner Well, everything you said is true for my business. I'm in my 11th year in business, and we launch a product. We use all the other channels, but make the sales in email. But the ticket is, and this is what we're going to talk about today, is that in order for email to work in your marketing and to make sales for you, people have to see your email. Your email has to get through. It's a real problem. I guess, why don't we start by talking about the difference between email deliverability and email placement?
[00:03:25.590] - Matt Brown That's something that I like to talk with all of my clients about and all the people on my newsletter. When I work with people, I find that people can either have a true deliverability problem or they could have a placement problem. An email deliverability problem is when your emails are not being delivered. So that is the purest form of a deliverability problem. You go into active campaign or ConvertKit or Entreport or HubSpot, you hit send, and nobody gets them. And there's a variety of reasons that that can happen, to have your emails not being delivered. It can have to do with your technical setup. It could have to do with a block list that's blocking your emails. It could have to do with your reputation with certain inboxes, with Google or Outlook or AOL or Yahoo, where they're saying, We don't trust you as a sender, so we're not even going to deliver your emails. That's the worst type of problem to have. And it's very rare to encounter that, at least with the types of clients that I'm working with, because they're practicing opt-in email marketing. They're getting permission to send emails. That's typically going to be the problem with spammer encounters because they're just emailing email addresses they scrape from the internet in mass, and they're promoting garbage offers.
[00:04:41.500] - Matt Brown And so it's rare to encounter that. And when I do, it's almost always connected to a technical problem, meaning their email authentication records are not set up correctly. So what most people I'm working with, they have placement problems. So that means when they send out an email, a percentage of them go to the spam folder, a percentage of them go to the promotions tab, a percentage of them go to the primary tab. And that's what leads to really inferior email performance results is when you can't get your messages truly in front of your subscribers, the people you paid to acquire.
[00:05:21.100] - Jen Lehner So you touched on the factors that affect email deliverability. And over the years, I've just heard so many things It's like, don't put pictures in your email. Put pictures in your email. Don't put links in your email. Put links in your email. Make your email look really pretty, like a really pretty newsletter. Make your email look like it just came from your brother. Totally. What is the thinking now?
[00:05:49.680] - Matt Brown Yeah. So that thinking is really at a lower level of strategy when it comes to email deliverability. So anyone that's obsessing over content doesn't truly understand the factors that impact deliverability and placement. Because in my experience, I see this every single day with my clients, your content is secondary when it comes to delivering your emails. It's still very important, but the thing that is more important than your content is your reputation. So I'll break these up. And they're connected because your content creates your reputation, but your sender reputation as someone who sends emails to inboxes, trumps whatever you put in your email. And I have a little anecdote, and I'll prove it to you here in a minute. So your sender reputation is connected to your domain. So the domain name that you use to send emails. I send emails from deliverabilitynow.com, and I have a certain reputation that I've established with the inbox as someone who sends email from that domain. Your sender reputation Reputation is also connected to your IP Reputation. For most people, their IP addresses, the IPs that are actually delivering their emails, these are coming from your email platform.
[00:07:11.870] - Matt Brown So ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, HubSpot, Drip, they're putting you on a shared IP pool with hundreds or thousands of other people, and that's what's sending your emails. You need to check to see, are you on high reputation IPs or are you on low reputation IPs? If you don't know, then- For those of you who are just listening, I raised my hand.
[00:07:37.920] - Jen Lehner Yeah. Okay, wait. I've heard this, and this is very concerning to me because Obviously, if you're on ClickFunnel, if you're on Commerkt, if you're on Entreport, if you're on any of these places, you're sharing that space with a gazillion other marketers. You're not sharing it with a bunch of librarians, right? Well, maybe you are. I mean, maybe you are. It's a librarians with a course, though. It's a library with an online course that they're selling. But seriously, so how could we not have anything but a bad reputation when people are The name of the game is... When we're in a launch, we send a massive amount of emails, even though it's permission marketing. Every time I go into a big launch, it never fails that there are people that say too many emails fails, and they get mad, and then they... We try to prevent all that with a warning in advance, a thing at the very top, not hidden at the bottom, to let them opt out of the launch. We do all of that. Never fails, though. I've built up a suit of armor, so I don't get my feelings heard anymore. But if I'm doing that, and all 20, 50,000 other people on Convert kit are doing the same thing, how can we not have a bad reputation?
[00:08:56.810] - Matt Brown Okay, so that's a great question. I I also say the people who are responding to your emails in anger, saying you're sending out too many emails, they're doing you a favor because they're actually helping your send a reputation because they're replying to your email. So unless they're marking them a spam, then there's no issues there. Angry responses are as good as happy responses. But your question about how could you not have a bad reputation? This is connected to how email platforms stay in business. So ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Entreport, HubSpot, all these platforms, they are really in the business of maintaining the reputation of their IPs and making sure that everybody who's sending emails from their platform is above board, following best practices, getting good results. But here's what doesn't get talked about a lot. It's like a little secret in the email world is that the IPs that you get assigned to are based on your collective email performance. So if you get a lot of engagement on your emails, ActiveCampaign is going to put you on their best IPs because they know, Okay, you're a great player. You're keeping these IPs nice and warm and good standing with the inboxes.
[00:10:10.390] - Matt Brown We want to put you with all the other people that are like this because you're our A player. So these are our pristine IP addresses. But if you start getting low results, if you're getting low opens, a lot of spam complaints, balances, they're going to put you on more of a middle-tier IP. And IP is only one factor. I don't want to get too fixated on this. Your domain is definitely more important than your IP. But then you're on a platform with people who... Maybe they're not doing anything intentionally wrong, but they're not doing a good job with their list hijink. They're sending out emails with low engagement. And then those IP addresses that are actually sending your emails are in lower standing with the inboxes. It's not always enough to seriously negatively impact emails, but it can be. And then if I Things are really bad, then you're going to basically be quarantined in a really bad set. So it's like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer with IPs. And you want to be able to keep an eye on this to just know what reputation do the IPs that are sending your emails have.
[00:11:17.280] - Matt Brown So you have to be able to check that.
[00:11:20.160] - Jen Lehner How do you know what's going on? For example, just yesterday, I had a strategy call with my VIP-ers, and one of the VIPers asked me to audit her web page. So I went to her web page and I signed up for her lead magnet, and it didn't come. And I went to look in spam, and there wasn't spam. And I was like, Uh-oh. And her provider was... I had to look it up. It was from Funnel Gorgias. Do you know Funnel Gorgias? Also called FG.
[00:11:52.990] - Matt Brown I think Funnel Gorgias white labels go high level.
[00:11:57.510] - Jen Lehner Oh, do they?
[00:11:58.710] - Matt Brown I could be wrong, but I'm I'm sorry, Funnel Gorgias people, if I'm wrong, but a lot of these new platforms are just white labeling some other platform. So I think I've encountered this situation before where Funnel Gorgias, they have courses and they teach people how to do a lot of this stuff, but they also give you a tool. I think that email tool is just white labeled, go high level, which is Go High Level's business model.
[00:12:25.990] - Jen Lehner Well, would my client go back to them and be like, You need to help me with this? Well, first of all, how do we find out if we're going in people's spam? Number two, what do we do about it if we find that out?
[00:12:38.700] - Matt Brown Yeah, so for starters- Is that too big of a question? No, that's a great question. Let's work on the assumption that they are actually using Go High Level to send their emails. I've said it a couple of times, it's not my favorite platform. I don't have anything against it. It's just like it's a newer tool, and I'm just more wary of unproven tools. But I think the way Go High Level works is that they require you to connect your own Sendgrid or Mailgun account to actually send your emails. It depends on how they have this set up.
[00:13:13.950] - Jen Lehner Is that cloud Cloudflare, those two things that you mentioned?
[00:13:17.290] - Matt Brown No, Cloudflare is a CDN. It's a content delivery network. So that's going to be a way to serve up a cached version of your website and basically make your website faster. But cloudflare will take over your DNS records. So that's where all of your C-name records and text records will be, including your email authentication records. Sendgrid and Mailgun, these are enterprise-level transactional Bolt email tools. And in fact, a lot of the email platforms out there are just built on top of Sendgrid or Mailgun. Kajabi uses Mailgun to deliver its emails. Convertkit uses Sendgrid to deliver its emails. Active Again, I think they use an Amazon service to deliver their emails. But your client who has go high level, send a grid is probably sending their emails. But my guess is that the reason they're going to spam is not connected to their IP. It's probably connected to their domain or their sender reputation or their history of spam complaints. So the way you fix that is to, one, identify what the true cause of the issue is. And then once you know what the cause is, then you can rectify it, basically.
[00:14:29.920] - Jen Lehner Okay, sorry. Let's back up. Okay, so let's say I do an email campaign, and I can see because the software lets us see, we could definitely see the click-through rate. But as I understand it, we're not supposed to really pay attention to the open rate?
[00:14:47.850] - Matt Brown Well, yeah, no. I think open rates... The people out there who are telling you don't pay attention to open rates, first of all, the majority of them are email platforms because they don't have the ability or they haven't built the ability to differentiate between machine opens and true human opens. Some platforms, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, some of these other tools, they have buttons you can click to filter out Apple privacy opens. So They're giving you a much truer sense of what your actual open rate is. But like Kajabi and ConvertKit, they just haven't built these tools, and they don't necessarily need to because... Anyways, I don't want to go in a whole tirade about open rates.
[00:15:30.170] - Jen Lehner I don't want to get super technical either because we're going to lose. Everybody is going to be like, What?
[00:15:35.250] - Matt Brown You do want to pay attention to opens, though, because open rates are like your heartbeat. And if you're consistently getting a 15 % open rate or a 20 % open rate, you have problems. And if you dip below 10 %, you know- I thought 20 % was good. No, 20 %. 20 % is not good, especially if you don't have the ability to filter out Apple privacy opens. So let's say that you're getting a reported 20 % open rate in Convert kit. At least 5 % of those opens, if not 10 to 50 %, are coming from your phone or is coming from a browser that triggers the open pixel. So like a 20 % reported open without the ability to filter out machine opens, that's much closer to a 10 to 15 % true human open rate, which means that 85 to 90 % of the people you're emailing are opening your email. And when you do that long enough over time, that's how you create deep-seated deliverability problems like we talked about in the intro.
[00:16:40.890] - Jen Lehner Okay. So we look and we see, Oh, I'm getting 20 % open rates. That's not good. Although I thought that was industry standard. Not good. I thought 20 to 30 was like industry standard.
[00:16:54.590] - Matt Brown 30, you're out of the danger zone, I would say. As close as you can be to 50 % is amazing.
[00:17:03.540] - Jen Lehner Even to cold traffic, I get 50 with my... Your customers. My customers and a much smaller percentage of my whole email list. Okay, anyway, don't want to get too off top. But let's say we're looking at our open rates and we're like, Oh, man, Matt said 20 % is bad. So all these are like 20, and they're 15, and they're 22.
[00:17:28.910] - Matt Brown I don't want to just fixate on 20 % is bad. 20 % to me is a sign that something needs to be looked into. 20 % is an indication to me- That's where I was going with this.
[00:17:41.170] - Jen Lehner Whatever the number. I got a Whatever my business, let's say I'm looking, I've just got to feel... I'm not getting responses, I'm not getting clicks. Things aren't going well. So my question is, what is step number one? There's no one to contact, or were you saying to contact that?
[00:18:00.780] - Matt Brown So, yeah, if you're using a white label, go high level, I have very low confidence that whoever's on the other end of that support chat you open up is going to be able to help you accurately navigate the complexity of figuring out what's wrong. If it's due to a technical error, they may be able to help you. They may be able to say, Oh, you haven't added a decam record for your email tool, and you have a quarantine policy in your DMARC record. That's why this amount of emails are going to spam, or something like that. So that would be a pretty easy fix. But if you're like, I'm getting a 50% opener. No one's replying, I'm not making any sales. And you open up a support ticket, whether it's with go high level or active campaign or convert kit. You're encountering someone who's a tier one support.
[00:19:00.510] - Jen Lehner So what do we do? We just make sure we fix the stuff we have control over, the content, the list cleaning, and that thing, take control in that way and being more consistent with sending out emails or what?
[00:19:14.500] - Matt Brown Yeah. So if you're brand new to this, and this is the first time you're hearing of any of this, and you're like, I think I might have a problem. What do I do? Here's what I recommend. One, you need to set up a tool called Google Postmaster Tools. It's free. I think it's free for everyone. I could be wrong, but if you have Google Workspace for your business email, you're already paying for it. It's included in your subscription. It's essentially like an email deliverability suite within Google Workspace where you authenticate your domain that you use to send emails from, you prove to Google that you own that domain, and then it will start generating reports about how it views you as an email sender. So it'll tell you what your domain reputation is. That's how you find out what your IP reputation is from your email platform. It'll tell you what your spam complaints are. This is the really big one because now we're living in a post-February-1st world. That's when Google and Yahoo introduced their new sender guidelines for the next era of email. And the biggest one, the one that is the most important, other than all the technical stuff, is to keep your spam complaint percentage below 0.1 %.
[00:20:28.190] - Matt Brown So for every 10,000 emails you send, you don't want to get more than 10 spam complaints. And Google does not report spam complaints back to your email platform. So if you go into Entreport or ActiveCampaign or Drip, and you look at your campaign report, and it says, you sent out 30,000 emails and you got three spam complaints. You're thinking, oh, great, I'm golden. But none of those spam complaints came from Gmail users. And if your clients and the listeners or anything like my clients, 70 to 80 % of their list, use Gmail. And so the only place to find your Gmail spam complaint percentage is in Postmaster tools. So you could log into Postmaster tools and see like, oh, my goodness, we have a one % spam complaint percentage for the last 10 campaigns we've sent, that's what's going to lower your domain reputation and put you in trouble and put you in the spam folder. So that's like step one. It's like you want to figure out how does Google view you as an email sender if you mail a lot of Gmail users? If you're your B2B and you're primarily emailing Outlook, it's a somewhat different process.
[00:21:34.910] - Matt Brown But I really work with people who have consumer lists that use Gmail and Google Workspace with a small percentage of Yahoo, AOL, and Outlook subscribers as well.
[00:21:46.100] - Jen Lehner Okay, great. So we do that and let's say we're all good. Then what should we focus on next? How important is the content itself?
[00:21:57.410] - Matt Brown Yeah, content is really important. So I know So it's secondary to reputation, but an intermediary stuff, too. Before you look at your domain, you look at all the Google Postmaster stuff, before we start looking at content, I recommend that you run a few placement tests with a seed testing tool. So there's a variety of them out there. And I will say these tools are not 100% accurate, but they're more like a litmus test. But the way that they work is that you sign up for one of these tools and they give you a list of... It's a seed list. So they'll give you a list of like 100 email addresses or 30 email addresses from inboxes around the world. You'll have Gmail, Google Workspace, AOL, Zoho, mail. Com, Yanda, contacts. All the major inboxes are represented. And then you go into your email platform, you load all those contacts in there, and then you just send them a few of your campaigns, your actual campaigns. And then there's like a little text line that they'll give you and you insert that into the email. And then it'll tell you what percentage of your emails go to the Inbox, what go to Promo tab, the Newsletters tab, Updates tab, the spam folder.
[00:23:13.890] - Matt Brown So this will give you a really good bearing of, Am I in trouble? Am I not in trouble? Are things good? Are things bad? Some tools are a little bit on the negative side, meaning the results that you're going to get are going to be false negatives, and other tools are going to be a little bit on the false positive side. So it's really important to have a couple data points and triangulate them with your own data to get a sense of where things are at.
[00:23:44.510] - Jen Lehner Okay. Lay it on me. What are these tools?
[00:23:47.230] - Matt Brown Yeah. So there's Glock apps, or it could be Glock apps. I don't know, but it's like GLOCKAPPS.com. Okay. There's a tool called Zero Bounce that has There's a tool called Emailable that has placement testing. There's another tool called Litmus that has placement testing. And I believe email on Acid has placement testing. I only use that tool once for an e commerce project a long time ago, so it's hard to keep up with all these tools. But Glockapp, zero bounce, and emailable, if you run a test in all three of those platforms, you should have a pretty good sense of where you stand with the different inboxes.
[00:24:28.750] - Jen Lehner Awesome. And we went through Do that list fast, so we will absolutely put all those links in the show notes.
[00:24:35.300] - Matt Brown Going back to what we were talking about earlier, I said, I'm going to have an anecdote. I'm going to prove to you that content is secondary to reputation. When I work on deliverability optimization projects for clients. I know the project is done when I can send this one specific email that I have saved on my computer, where I have compiled, I went to every email platform and I compiled all of their lists of spam words. So do not use these words in your email. There's not really a lot of validity to those blog posts, and I don't really believe that there are any true spam words. I think it's more like there are true spam senders. You don't want to ever be considered a spam sender from the inboxes because that's how your emails would look spam. But I've got this document that has like, win free prize, like win of Tesla, become a Bitcoin millionaire overnight. Like all the stuff you're not supposed to say. And I know that the project is done for my clients when I can send that email to a seed list, not to real people. I don't want to actually build a reputation as someone who sends this email.
[00:25:43.570] - Matt Brown But when I can send it to a seed list and it inboxes, I know their reputation is so high that Google and the other inboxes trust them enough as a sender that they're willing to deliver that content. So obsessing over subject lines or preview text or images and body copy and the free is in the link and workshop, webinar. That is just an uphill battle if your reputation isn't high enough. If your reputation is high enough, none of that stuff really matters. There are some best practices that I follow for all emails, but don't obsess over content when you just get started. Obsess over building your center of reputation.
[00:26:24.410] - Jen Lehner But then with the content, what are some of the best practices that you always to follow?
[00:26:31.200] - Matt Brown If you're going to include images, you want to make sure that the image files are as small as possible. You have to think about Google, Gmail is a free product. They want to provide the best experience to their users to keep them on Gmail to get more people using Gmail so that they can sell advertising space and get data. And so if you have an email and there's an image file at the top, and that's the first thing in the email that's going to load, and it's four megabytes, that's going to take a little bit of time. We're talking about milliseconds here. It's going to take more time than a smaller image file to load. And that's a less optimal, suboptimal experience compared to a fast loading email. It's a mistake I see a lot of businesses, specifically e-commerce businesses make, is that their entire email is one big image. It's like this huge vertical image that's 16 megabytes. They've converted all the copy into an image file that looks beautiful. But that's one of the ways you get sent to the promotions folder because it's going to take a bit of time to load that email.
[00:27:41.140] - Matt Brown And Google just sees, okay, there's one image file in this email and there's 16 words of copy. That's just the unsubscribed Twitter. It doesn't have an ability to analyze the text that's in the image. So it's automatically more suspicious than an email that has one image with maybe some header text and then 500 words of copy about a free event or a workshop or a sale that's going on. It can analyze, it can semantically analyze that content to know what are they talking about? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it promotional? Is it non-promotional? That thing.
[00:28:19.590] - Jen Lehner It is factual, is it not, that getting a reply on your email boosts deliverability if people are replying to your emails, right?
[00:28:29.080] - Matt Brown Getting a reply your email helps build your sender reputation. So email is a communication channel, and Google wants to see two-way communication happening. They don't want to just see you emailing 100,000 people every Monday and Thursday and getting no replies. They want people to reply to you, and then they want you using the email address you use for marketing emails to actually have those one-on-one conversations with people. So yeah, replies are a positive signal for building your send a reputation.
[00:29:02.930] - Jen Lehner Do you use any tricks or tips or whatever, or strategies, I should say, to get people to reply to your emails, especially maybe that first one when they sign up for your email list?
[00:29:13.540] - Matt Brown Yeah, for me, I know that a lot of people have questions about deliverability. And so my call to action in my welcome email is to reply with your questions, and I will personally respond to them. And that's what I do. So I get a lot of replies to that. And then there's just fun things that you can do, too. If your main call to action is to book a call, have the person reply to start that conversation instead of clicking a call booking link.
[00:29:40.840] - Jen Lehner Oh, my gosh. That makes so much sense.
[00:29:43.910] - Matt Brown Yeah, exactly. I feel like it's also like, I don't know. I think it's different personality types, but I would rather start the conversation with that person before just clicking a calendar link and being like, do I run a schedule of 15 minutes sales call? Or do I want to start this conversation in an email through at first and see if they're a real person or see if they're actually going to reply to me? And I think that getting that personal response helps build a lot of trust, which is just another positive signal or email. For your business.
[00:30:16.730] - Jen Lehner Yeah, that is such a good point. What about, do you have a preference for the length of a nurture sequence? Three, five, and is the first one the about me? People do it different ways.
[00:30:30.490] - Matt Brown Oh, yeah, for sure. So it really depends on your business, and it also depends on what the initial goal is of somebody coming onto your email list. So I work with a lot of people who have self-liquidating offers where they promote a lead magnet or a free workshop or something like that at the front-end. And the goal of their welcome sequence is to sell somebody on a $37 offer so that they can recuperate their ad costs. And so if that's your goal, you're going to need a couple emails, three to five emails. It depends on how serious the problem is you're addressing or what the level of awareness or sophistication of your market is. But if you're trying to sell something, you're definitely going to need more than one email. Yeah, but if your goal is just to introduce yourself, to start to build that know, like and trust with your subscriber, and to frame the next communication that's going to come from you. You could just do that in one email. That's what I do. But I send a weekly email. So someone subscribers on Monday, they're going to get my next email on Friday.
[00:31:41.030] - Jen Lehner Yeah. I mean, I always heard that if you're going to have a nurture sequence, which most of us should have that your first email should have the best of. This is an introduction to who you are. And because most people, if they're going to open up an email, it's that first one, if only to just grab the lead magnet that they just signed up for. And then the rest of the nurture sequence tends to drop off. I mean, not always, but that first one supposedly gets the most opens. And so you want to just put your best foot forward in that.
[00:32:17.230] - Matt Brown I think you should put your best foot forward in every email.
[00:32:19.510] - Jen Lehner You're exactly right.
[00:32:20.750] - Matt Brown If you're in the mindset that no one's going to read this, I'm not going to care about this email, then guess what? No one's going to read it, and no one's going to care about that email. But if you put your best foot forward in every email, you're the people who are your best prospects are going to read it, and they're going to keep reading your emails. And that's how you build good deliverability. It's just delivering consistently great content that people want and enjoy.
[00:32:47.310] - Jen Lehner Very good point. Okay, let me ask you this, how often do you clean your list? And let me pause and just for our listeners who might not know, like list hygiene and list scrubbing. Is when you basically remove the people who are dead weight in your list. They're cold, they've gone cold, they're not opening anything, and they've been on your list for a while. And then, yeah. So however long a while is, I guess, is the question. When do you cut that person?
[00:33:20.380] - Matt Brown Great question. So one, it really depends on your email sending strategy and the volume you're sending. So if you're sending out a weekly a weekly email, then... And it depends on how conservative you want to be as well. But if you're sending out a weekly email and somebody hasn't opened, clicked, replied, subscribed to a new form, gotten a If they haven't taken any meaningful action in your world in 90 days, I would call them disengaged. I would call them disengaged because you've sent out, what, 12 emails, and they haven't read any of them. I wouldn't immediately clean them, though. I would put them into then a re-engagement campaign with a message you know can inbox, at least one or two, to just ask them, Do you want to stay in my email list or not? Give them that binary choice. Make it very easy for them to stay. And make it very easy for them to stay, and make it very easy for them to unsubscribe. Everyone who re-engages from there, great. They're just back into your engage list. But then everyone who doesn't, I would then put them into a temporary mute hold, where you basically pause emails for them for the next 90 days.
[00:34:32.120] - Matt Brown So from day zero to day 180. And then periodically have a process where you send out an email to the people in that muted purgatory segment because a percentage of them, people get busy, they switch jobs, they use different emails, they go on vacation, whatever. So it's fine to attempt to reengage them strategically and periodically. And then maybe you recuperate 10, 15, 20 % of those people. The people who don't reengage after your third attempt to reach them after 180 days, because you're still having these engage with monitoring automations going on. They haven't gone through and opened up through emails from the past. Those are the people that I think you're probably safe to just unsubscribe. And so this is like subjective engagement-based list cleaning Cleaning. The second form of list cleaning is like objective list cleaning. Bonces. Yeah, not just bounces, but where you use a tool like zero bounce or never bounce or emailable, and you validate every email address on your email list. And it tells you which ones are deliverable, which ones are disposable, which ones are spam trends, which ones are toxic, spam complainers. And then you can use the data you have in your email platform to then cross-reference the data you get from these tools and then just unsubscribed bad addresses, bots, spam accounts, all of that stuff.
[00:36:04.840] - Jen Lehner And then how often do you do that? That seems worthwhile once a month, I would think.
[00:36:10.080] - Matt Brown Well, it depends on the size of your list. If you're over 100,000 people, you need to be doing that quarterly. If you want to get really obsessive about it, you can validate at the time of subscription. So when somebody subscribers, you can just... You can pay for a credit that validates that email address. I don't think you really need to do that because you'll get enough data from the emails you're sending out in your email platform. But if you have 25,000, you can usually get away with once or twice a year. But if you start noticing performance problems, that would be one of the first things I would do as well, is just clean your list.
[00:36:49.990] - Jen Lehner I think the last thing we should talk about is for the people who are apprehensive about sending a whole lot of emails during their launch, because I believe, personally, that you just have to get over it and you have to send the emails. Oh, yeah.
[00:37:06.230] - Matt Brown I mean, it's definitely a mental hurdle to get over, and it's worthwhile to get over it. I think It could also be worthwhile to look at why you're so apprehensive. Maybe you're people-pleased or maybe you're worried about upsetting people, but this is also your business. And you have a solution to people's problems. You have an ethical responsibility to get your message in front of them because you can them. So there's lots of mental jiu-jitsu you can do in your mind to make yourself feel good about that. But it's also good for deliverability. As long as you're doing all the other stuff that we've talked about before, your lists are clean. You have really tight engagement-based segments. You're sending out your launch emails, you're getting 30, 40, 50% open rates because sales emails, promotional emails, are sometimes the most engaged with emails. You can actually fix deliverability problems through a launch if done correctly, or you can dig yourself deeper into a hole if done incorrectly. So it's just a great opportunity to reestablish or build your sender reputation. I will say one thing to What you need to consider is you need to be mindful of really sharp increases in volume very quickly.
[00:38:21.930] - Matt Brown That's a red flag for a lot of the inbox. So if you have it, if you've been emailing your email list once a month and you've been sending on average 10,000 emails a month, and then you're going into a launch phase where you're going to be emailing twice a day, and you all of a sudden go up to 500,000 emails a month, that can put you in spam, and that can create problems. So you need to gradually increase your volume of emails that you're sending to get to the point where the inboxers trust you to send a lot of emails every single day.
[00:38:52.520] - Jen Lehner Yeah, it's a good point. And it helps fix part of the problem where the person is cringing at themselves for blasting their audience with launch emails, knowing that they've been pretty quiet the last few months. Exactly. And then all of a sudden it's like, Hey, buy my thing. But the truth is, that's a lot of people. So anybody listening to this and you're like, Oh, I'm guilty of that. That's a lot of people are guilty of that. I think a lot of people aren't as consistent as they might want to be. So that's just something we can all work on together.
[00:39:29.630] - Matt Brown Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you're paying to acquire these subscribers. You should be talking to them. You're working hard. This is your business. And I know that not everyone's a copywriter. Not everyone looks forward to sitting down and writing their weekly email or daily email or whatever it is. But if you could find a way to make it fun for yourself, and a great way to do that is to study copywriting and to learn about it and learn about storytelling, how to make content engaging. If you could find a way to make it fun for yourself because you have all these new ideas to experiment with them. Yeah, it could be a great way to overcome the resistance here.
[00:40:07.430] - Jen Lehner Do you have a favorite resource for beginning copywriters?
[00:40:13.140] - Matt Brown I have a couple. So I've learned the most from my copywriting career from a group called Copyhacker. So it's founded by Joanna Wiebe. I've been a copy school student since, I think, 2019. I bought one of lifetime deals, which has proven to be the best investment I've ever made because they just keep making it better and I've got lifetime access.
[00:40:37.060] - Jen Lehner Wonderful. Yeah. Was that an AppSumo deal? Maybe we can go find that deal.
[00:40:41.410] - Matt Brown No, it's not AppSumo. You have to be on their email list. And I think that Copy School has moved to a monthly and annual model at this point. But there's so much in there where even if you joined for a year and went through all their content, you'll be miles above of everybody else. I've done a lot of the old-school copywriting training as well for people like Jon Carleton, which have been amazing, Josh Sugarman. But also, I learned a lot from just watching movies and seeing how movies and TV shows capture people attention and play with tension and stuff like that. Yeah, it's like we all live in this world of entertainment and storytelling. Once you put the glasses on, you can start to see a little bit of like, Oh, So, yeah, they started the movie this way, and I've been glued to the edge of my seat since then.
[00:41:36.460] - Jen Lehner Yeah. Interesting and helpful. Very, very helpful. Now, I know that everybody listening is going to want to get on your email list, and they can do that by going to deliverabilitynow.com. But there's also going to be a few folks I know who are listening that are thinking, Oh, my gosh, that was a lot. And I just really I don't want to tackle this, but I definitely need help. Do you work one-on-one with people and help them fix this stuff?
[00:42:07.060] - Matt Brown Yes, I absolutely work one-on-one with people. Like I said, I partner with clients and entrepreneurs to fix their deliverability issues. And really, the best way to get started is I offer a free 45 minute deliverability audit. So anybody who's listening to this podcast, if you're just thinking, Yeah, I think we've got some problems, and I don't have the time or interest or bandwidth to deal with this, shoot me an email, matt@deliverbilitynow.com. We can set up a free 45 minute audit where we'll just jump inside of your email environment. We can run a couple of the tests that we talked about in this call, and I could take a look at your email set up to see if there are maybe problems with easy fixes, problems with more complex fixes, or maybe you don't have any problems at all. Sometimes it just could be so nice to have an expert look at something and It's like going to the doctor, getting your blood work back. We're like, Yeah, you're fine. And it's just like, Okay, good. It gives you peace of mind moving forward. So yeah, happy to do that for any of your listeners.
[00:43:10.670] - Matt Brown Just shoot me an email, matt@deliverabilitynow.com.
[00:43:14.090] - Jen Lehner Awesome. Matt, thank you so much. That's so generous of you. And you've been so generous with your time today. I learned so much, and I know our listeners did, too. And I just really come back anytime. Thank you so much.
[00:43:26.080] - Matt Brown My pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
