TCC Podcast #396: How to Get Your Emails Opened with Matt Brown

We've been talking a lot about email on the podcast lately (see the last four or five episodes). But getting your emails opened takes more than good copy. So for the 396th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Rob spoke with copywriter and email deliverability specialist, Matt Brown about all the non-copy things you need to know about getting your emails opened. And...how to add deliverability and ESP management to your services so you can attract long-term email clients. This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: deliverabilitynow.com The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Looking back at the last four or five episodes of this podcast, you might notice a theme. It wasn’t intentional, but somehow the last several guests have all focused on email, email strategy, and creating or running a business focused on a regular or daily email. For some reason, email seems to be having a moment. Maybe it’s the rise of new email platforms like Substack and Beehiv that make writing emails and growing an audience easier than before. Or it might be the fact that it is getting harder to connect with a regular audience on social media… posts, tweets, reels just don’t reach as many people as they used to. And paid ads on those platforms are getting more expensive and less effective. So attracting an audience that you can connect with regularly with email is as important—maybe more important—than ever before. Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed copywriter and email deliverability expert Matt Brown. I wanted to talk with Matt because it’s one thing to write and send emails and quite another to do what it takes to make sure those emails actually arrive in your reader’s inboxes and get opened. It happens less than you think. And Matt knows how to fix that. He shared a lot of technical stuff that you have to get right. If you know this stuff, you can be far more valuable to your clients that if you just hand over a google doc with the text of your emails. This is a skill set that can result in long term relationships with great clients. So stick around.   Before we jump into the interview, I want to let you know about an upcoming training happening in The Copywriter Underground on this very topic. After recording today’s interview, Matt mentioned that it can be tough to wrap your head around some of the ideas he shared without a demonstration where he opens up an email account and shows you how to make adjustments. So he offered to show us exactly how to make sure your emails land in the inbox in a training for members of The Copywriter Underground. If you’re listening to this episode and think, I need to know how to do this, or I want to be able to offer this skill to my clients (and earn thousands of dollars from them in the process), then this training is for you. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu and join the Underground today. And we’ll send you details on how to access this incredibly valuable training. And with that, let’s go to our interview with Matt. Matt, welcome to the podcast. I reached out to you because we've been talking to so many people about email. I feel like there's kind of been a change around the way people are thinking about email with all of these new tools that have come online in the last couple of years as far as managing email newsletters and that kind of thing. So I thought it'd be really helpful to have you on, but before we get into all of the things we want to talk about email, tell us how you became not just a copywriter, but an email deliverability expert and copywriter. Matt Brown: Yeah. So I'll give you the long story since we're on a podcast together and it has the inciting incident from a story and then the point of no return. I think this was back in like 2019, I kind of got my start in marketing and SEO and content writing, and then I wanted to learn more about copywriting. And I kept learning about that. And then I started working with people who were doing course launches and sort of Jeff Walker style product launch formula emails and for a few years, I was working with people where I'd write my 12 emails, 15 emails in a Google doc, and then just send it over to the client and say, Hey, here you go. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you want any edits. And then we'd work on the copy from there. And then either they or their team would load the emails into whatever email platform they were using. And I was like, great. And after the launch, we’d check in like emails did great. We loved it. Yada, yada, yada, that sort of thing.  But I was working on a launch—'ll have to go back and figure out exactly when this was, but it was 2019, 2020—and my client was like, Hey, Matt, our ActiveCampaign person just bailed on us. Is there any way you can build the automations and load these into ActiveCampaign? I had never done that. I had used other tools like Drip and MailChimp and ConvertKit and stuff like that. I'm pretty technically savvy and I wanted to help the client. I was like, sure, yeah, no problem. Not realizing that this was its own skill set and this was like its own thing that people paid for. And I just did it for free. They gave me the login credentials for ActiveCampaign. I went in, I figured out how to use it in a basic way, built the automation to deliver the emails.  Because of that, once the launch started, I had access to the backend metrics, which I had never really looked at before throughout a launch. And I think this person's launch list was around 15,000 people. And I was like, Oh man, we are going to crush it. This is going to be awesome. It was a really great offer. And he already had a super successful business. And so I knew that the launch was going to perform well. And I was kind of like, Oh, I'm going to turn this into a case study and I'm going to do all these cool things. And we went through the launch and at the end, the launch did very well for this person. So he was selling an annual membership that was billed monthly. So people were signing up for an annual commitment, but it was split up into 12 payments. And he ended up adding about $20,000 to $21,000 in monthly recurring revenue to his business. So that was like a really solid lift for him. And so I was like, okay, that was great. But as I was looking at the email metrics, I was like, man, these emails got a 7% open rate or a 10% open rate, 8% open rate, like what is going on here? I had really no idea at that time what the factors were that impacted email performance and placement and deliverability. And so that was the moment where my eyes really opened up into, okay, we did well with this launch, but what if we doubled the open rate? Or what if we got the open rate to 30% or 40%, how much better could we have done? That's when I started going down the rabbit hole of, What, how do you increase the performance and open rates and click rates and visibility and all of that? And then there was a year-long exploration process there. Then I had a conversation with Brian Kurtz, who you actually have had on this podcast a couple of times. Rob Marsh: Brian's an amazing mentor and friend. He's great. Matt Brown: I love Brian. Brian has sent me a lot of free stuff over the years. He's just such a good guy. So this is my moment to pay it back to Brian. Thank you so much, Brian. I was interviewing him for a podcast I was working on at the time. I was kind of doing a pre-interview, information-gathering sort of thing. We just started kind of talking about some of the stuff that I was doing and thinking about and I was talking to him about things like list management and email lists because I knew he had a background in mailing list management and then he just gave me this whole download. I wish I would have recorded it because I now just kind of have to remember it in my memory.  But he just gave me this whole download about the importance of lists and list management and all of this stuff. And I was like, OK, there's really something here. So that's when I shifted my focus to trying to do everything I could to optimize this performance email deliverability. And from there, I took a lot of courses. I've talked to a lot of ESP support people, tier two deliverability support people. And there was a time where I'm having more conversations with active campaign deliverability than I am with my own family. It was a lot of learning. And it was around 2022, I think that I developed my own process and I started working with people almost strictly in an email performance optimization capacity. Rob Marsh: Okay. So as I listened to you talk about looking at the numbers, the metrics and seeing, okay, they're not that great. Most copywriters would respond, well, let's try a different headline or, let's try a different topic or maybe, that idea was wrong, but there's a whole bunch of stuff before we even get to the copy that impacts deliverability and whether people are opening or not. Let's go through these almost item by item. And in some ways, I'm almost asking for a 30-minute webinar or podcast-inar about all these things that we need to do to make sure that our emails not just get to the inbox, but get opened. Matt Brown: Yeah, absolutely. As a copywriter, I tried all of those things, you know, I was like, okay, maybe this subject line isn't working. And then I would do split tests, and then maybe the preview text wasn't optimized. And let's try a trick in the preview text line. And no matter what I tried from a content perspective with the from name, the subject line, the preview text, it never significantly moved the needle. So that's when I discovered deliverability and placement,. There are levels to a deliverability problem,