Demystifying Email Deliverability

Speaker 2
That's very important to me as well. I love that. Okay. We have talked. We have talked for a while and I can't believe we've gone this long without this topic coming up. But let's hang out in the email deliverability department for a little bit.
Speaker 1
Is that something that you help people with quite a bit? Oh, so, so, so much. And there's a reason why that was the first self-contained course that I put out. I mean, one, it does have some boundaries around it, so you can teach it as a subject all on its own. But more than that, fundamentally, there is no point learning how to automate your emails if your emails are not getting to the inbox. That's it. Game over. And it was happening. I could see it happening so many people, so many people. And it's completely avoidable. And I got mad because there is so much misinformation about deliverability. So deliverability needed demystifying. So I was like, I am on a mission to demystify this and help people who are running their business actually understand what's going on and be able to do better without breaking a sweat or swearing or something. Or swearing or throwing stuff out of the window. Okay. So I started out by thinking what exactly is the game of deliverability and how do we demystify that for people and make it make sense. And so we came up with deliverability is just like you're throwing paper airplanes and there are some people involved on the way throwing the paper airplanes. So you write your letter on your piece of paper, fold it up into a paper airplane, you hand your piece of paper to active campaign. Or whatever other provider you're using. It doesn't matter. They send the airplane off to the internet. Okay. Then the mailbox providers got to catch it. The mailbox provider is the one who decides whether to put it in your inbox or not. They are the guardians of the Citadel. And if you're if the mailbox provider, which is like Gmail or Hotmail or Outlook, whoever it is, if they look at your paper airplane and they think, hang on a minute, that looks like a paper plane. That looks like a pirate airplane. That has all the hallmarks of being a skanky spammer. They are not going to deliver it to the inbox. That's it. Game over. If, however, it looks like a nice, shiny, responsible, well-behaved paper airplane that has been dispatched by our friend active campaign, who is a trusted sender. And we can tell who it's from and they can match it up with a website that has real words on it. It's a bit more authentic. It's got a bigger chance of not looking like a pirate. And then it gets delivered to the inbox. So it's just a game.
Speaker 2
I love that. I could picture in my mind that the airplane floating through and then the gatekeeper deciding whether this was a pirate or not. I do. I do. I think this is something people struggle with quite a bit. And so I love that metaphor. But the next, you know, the next progression there would be, okay, how do we make it look not like the pirate and make it look like the nice, shiny thing that they want. You know, what are those some of those things that we need to make sure we're doing? Cool.
Speaker 1
Great. So number one, you have to do two technical things that sound absolutely terrifying, but actually aren't that scary and they're one and done. They are called D Kim and SPF or that they sound kind of like an old Dickensian shop. D Kim and. Every platform does them slightly differently and they are basically like a little badge of authenticity. It's like putting a stamp on your letter when you put it in the post. If your paper airplane arrives with this stamp on it that says it's definitely from K. Great. The citadel guards are more likely to let it in if it has these authentication stamps on it. Okay. So that is the technical authentication side of things. You have to do it one time for each sender address. Okay. The other thing you can do for being real
Speaker 2
quick real quick because that's that's real, real techie and some people like, wait, what the heck did she just talk about. I'm familiar with what you just talked about in the sense that I know it should be done to increase deliverability. I have done it for my businesses beyond that. Like what does D Kim stand for all that? No idea, but I know active campaign has a really good article on exactly how to set it up or not everybody listening to this certainly is using active campaign. But even if you're not, you're sending emails in your business, it's important to do these steps. Really, for me, I find it very frustrating as a business owner. I have to do that super techie thing or tell somebody running a online course business teaching quilting that they have to learn about D Kim. But if you want to increase email deliverability, that's something you do need to set up one time. If you're using convert kit, just do a Google search for, you know, D Kim and was the other one SPF? SPF, yeah. Most emails. D Kim. Convert kit.
Speaker 1
Most of the sending platforms do the SPF bit for you. The bit they can't do for you is the thing that's called D Kim. It doesn't matter what D Kim stands for. You just don't need to know. I can't even remember and I do not care what it stands for. In terms of actually doing it, you just need to know where do I go get this little bit of text from and where do I need to paste it in. It is literally a copy and paste. That's it. And so long as you know where to get it from in your, which your email sending platform will tell you and then you have to figure out where to put it. And where you put it depends on where you're hosting your emails. And that's where it can get a bit tricky, which is why we have a little course in the active campaign academy and we help people do it because it does look scary. It's just a copy and paste, but knowing where to paste it is the challenge.
Speaker 2
And it would it be fair to say that the reason it's necessary is because active campaign is basically sending these emails. You know, they're kind of throwing the paper airplane for you. And so we just need a way to let the receiver know that we gave active campaign permit like this is coming from like you said earlier, like this is coming from K. Otherwise it's not, it's not guaranteed.
Speaker 1
Exactly that. The, the dee Kim bit is saying this domain has specifically said we are sending from this place. So for me, when I set up my dee Kim with active campaign, I'm saying to everyone who has any contact with that email, this email was definitely sent by me at slickbusiness.co.
Speaker 2
Okay, got it. So what's next? Somebody's like, somebody's listening to this or like, okay, no problem. I said a dee Kim years ago. We're good. What's next on the checklist? Make sure I'm getting emails and inboxes. Great. The next bit is really simple. Don't look like a complete stranger when you turn up at the door. Don't wear a disguise.
Speaker 1
And that means your sender information needs to look right. So make sure that your name, the name that the from name on your email information says something like KPC, hyphen slick business. Do not just use your first name. Because people will not recognize you on the doorstep, especially if you're not sending off enough. You could be anyone. Right. So if you just put Bob, there's a lot of Bob's in the world. You want to make it really clear who you are when you turn up on the doorstep again. That is going to help them let you in because what you want is for the person at the inbox to be really clear that this is the person I signed up for. It's not random Bob. It's KPC from slick business who talks about active campaign. So if I happen to see her in the spam filter, I'm going to drag her out of there and put her in the inbox. And all of that helps show that you are a wanted sender. So nobody's scrunching you up and chucking you in the bin. They're not deleting your emails. They're not scrapping them or leaving them unread. They are opening them and clicking them because they can see they're from you. And tied in with that is when someone first opts into your email list. Set their expectations really early on and say, I'm going to be emailing you. It's going to say it's from KPC hyphen slick business dot co and the subject line is going to be this. So literally tell them what to do and then you can tell them what to do. If it does hit their spam filter, if it's not there in 10 minutes, go look in your spam filter. Go fish it out. Put it in your VIP or your primary tab. Boom. It's like you want to enlist these guys. Is there inside the Citadel, right? The Citadel guards trust them. So if they see these guys opening, valuing, cherishing your emails, clicking in your emails, that tells the Citadel guards, the mailbox providers, that you are a valued and wanted sender and they are more likely to let you through next time.
Speaker 2
Can we trust the click and open rates that active campaign or other email software is telling us we're getting?
Speaker 1
There are two separate questions in there. Open rates, no click rates, broadly speaking, yes. So open rates, I have always said right from the beginning, even if you knew that someone had opened your email technically, you didn't know that they'd read it ever. We never had that information. So open rates to me have always been a bit of an illusion in that sense, a bit of a smoke and mirrors. And since Apple Mail privacy protection came in, we definitely do not have that information for sure, whether someone opened or did not open any given email that you send out. Okay, nobody has that anymore. And that's good. That's right, because that protects consumers. A click, however, if you have link tracking, which we do in Active Campaign, in almost all scenarios, if active campaign can see that a link has been clicked, that's going to be correct and valid information. So anytime you are looking at, are these people engaging with my emails? Are they liking what I'm saying? Do they care? A click is what you should be looking for.
Speaker 2
So it's fair to say, don't even worry about open rates, just completely ignore it, but a click rate is a good indication of, to some level of success.
Speaker 1
I would say for your open rates, you can watch the trend of your open rates, but don't give yourself a hard time and don't throw someone out. This is where I see it going wrong. It's people throwing out contacts because they can't see any opens. So a contact looks as if they're not engaging with your emails. It looks as if they're not there. They've gone to sleep or they were never there in the first place, whatever. It looks like that because there are no trackable opens on the contact. That contact could well be opening. So you have to be more cautious now about how you choose who to throw out. I call it identifying the zombies in your account. So in active campaign and most service providers, we pay for people to have a spot in there as a contact, a recipient of our emails. They cost us money to be there, they're not free. We do not want to give house room to people who are either bots or invalid email addresses, bounce email addresses, or people who've just gone to sleep or people who are putting us in the bin every time. So we have to get rid of them one way or another. We have to stop sending them and get rid of them because otherwise the mailbox providers, our citadel guards, start to think that people don't value our emails. Because if you've got a whole ton of people who are not opening or who are just chucking your emails in the bin or putting them in the spam folder, that paints a bad picture to the citadel guards, makes you look bad. So we don't want to keep sending to them and we don't want to keep paying for a room full of zombies to live in our house. So you need to be able to identify them and clicks are really the key to that now, much more so than open rates. And that's changing the way that people write their emails. So we've got to get then onto the content of the emails. What are you actually putting in there? You need to be doing content that actively seeks people to click because it's so important now that we can show that our emails are wanted and
Speaker 2
desirable. On these topics of email deliverability, list housekeeping, I mean, obviously you've got a whole membership with tons of courses where you go into depth on all these topics. So I'm not going to ask you to give all the all your best secrets and everything here on this platform. But let me ask you about any tools you might recommend in these categories. Are there any other any tools that can help us out or is it more just implementing the best practices?
Speaker 1
Implementing best practice, definitely. People can pay, you can end up paying a lot of money for deliverability tools. And there are some reputable ones on the market. I'm absolutely not dissing them. And if you have got a large number of contacts and you have got deliverability problems, seek professional help to rescue it because it's skilled work. However, for most cases, if you simply learn some basic steps and implement some best practice, you are going to improve immediately because so much of it is about really basic stuff, like making sure that your sender name is clear, being consistent about that, letting people know that you're going to be in the inbox in 10 minutes with this subject line. There are some really basic steps and also being more human in your emails and inviting clicks. That's easy. We can all do that. And the truth is, even if you were paying for an expensive deliverability tool or consultant to come in, if you were not doing those basic things, sender information, human content, inviting clicks, those two things would just pull against each other and blank out any advantage you were getting from having your D-Kim sorted out and somebody monitoring your click rates. None of that matters if you're not writing the right sort of emails. And I do have a whole series of blogs on deliverability that are on the website in my, so it's www.slickbusiness.co.org. There's a deliverability topic in there and that stuff is valid for any email platform. It's not just about active campaign. It talks about authentication, content, enlisting your contacts, how to not dress up like a skanky spammer by accident. It sort of demystifies that whole stuff and then there's an action plan. It's a freebie. If you sign up for a, you end up on my list and I will send you emails. And then you can see me doing it in real time, which is a good strategy to learn how to do better deliverability because I have to walk the walk. Absolutely.
Speaker 2
Sometimes it's better to just watch and see what people are doing rather than what they're telling you. Yeah. Okay. Okay. This has been a fantastic any, are there any other topics or any other messages you think would be worth sharing with this particular audience?
Speaker 1
Oh. Online course providers. Go for it. Just go for it and be your most human self. Delivering online training is the most valuable thing I've done for me as a personal growth thing. This is going to sound really weird, but I am more fully myself than I think I have ever been at any other time of my life. And it comes from that human closeness with the people that you want to please and serve in all the good ways. There's nothing better. And it kind of makes me sad that I resisted it for as long as I did. I knew I wanted to do it sooner and I held back because I was scared. But I'm really, really glad that I did it and it's a total privilege.
Speaker 2
So you mentioned, you mentioned the blog, where else, what other calls to action can you give to people to learn
Speaker 1
more, join the academy, things like that? Cool. So there's the free training, which is called accelerated active campaign. That is on our website, slickbusiness.co under the big heading free stuff. And under the free stuff heading, you will also find a link to our Facebook community. So we run a free open community for active campaign users, which is really, really lovely. And we drop hints and tips and stuff in there all the time. There are also calls to action on there to join our mailing list. And then when you want to up your game, when you want to get on to K as your ninja active campaign in your pocket, come on into the active campaign academy. It honestly is a total steal because like even if we talk about the deliverability training, that thing is worth its weight in gold because it's actually going to get your emails to the inbox. And it takes half a day to do it. That's it. So come in for a month. Join the fun.

202: Email Deliverability, Email List Housekeeping, & More About Email! (featuring Kay Peacey)

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