Accepting the Unacceptable

Andrew Bonar 0:00
fun presentation,

and we can just get the alarm in queue.

It's Yanna-Torry Aspraki has a huge number of hats. Some of them choose which hat to put on you. She works with an awful lot of really big brands, agencies, fenders ESPs, just behind the scenes a brand new community that hopes will tell you about and also does podcast and stuff with NET Core. I will let Jana tell you all about it, but I do know OPM promised a session full of sarcasm and lols. So looking forward to this a big round of applause please for Janna Tory.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki 0:56
The red is the pointer over nice, okay, I don't think I'll need a pointer. So hello, everybody, I'm mandatory. It's very long name. If it's too long, you can just call me whitey. Today, instead of telling you what you can do or what you cannot do when it comes to email and deliverability, we're going to go through how we can get other people who don't know this, to listen to us. I'm going to assume here that we all get hired to do email deliverability things. And sometimes some of our ideas like, you know, simple ones, like cleaning or lists or reducing volume can be very, very difficult for businesses to kind of swallow and do it, even though they're paying us to tell them this. So today we're going to be going through, I'm going to be using some deliverability examples, because that's what I'm doing most of the time. So we're going to be talking about accepting the unacceptable. So who here is that they'll really specialist I noticed a couple of you up here 23456. Okay, nice. So I know that when I go to a company that has issues, okay, we're not talking about the practice companies, we're talking about the people who don't know what we do exists. We are always faced with having to explain over and over again, the same things, we're going to talk about authentication, we're going to talk about lists cleaning, not buying lists, reducing volume, warm up, not only IP warm up, but domain warm up, and all that shebang. So, sometimes when people are having deliverability problems, their answer to everything is to do absolutely nothing other than send more emails, if they're not doing very well, the more they're going to send emails, the better things are going to end up going. And they're having an issue understanding this because the revenue goes up, because they're having more chances of landing in the inbox. Another very popular thing that we hear is just buy more IPs. If some IPs are not working, just rotate some, buy some more and just keep sending. This is a misconception, obviously, we think that we can just hide behind the bushes, buy some more IPs, you know, Google and Yahoo don't have enough infrastructure to probably realize it's still us. And this is also a big, big, big problem. Because if it doesn't work, then let's fix nothing and buy a new domain. This is a really hard one. For me, I hate when people try to hide behind different domain names, we all assume that they're not going to get caught in, it gets caught, it's very easy. Send an email that brings people to your website, if you change the sender domain, and you're still bringing people to the same websites. And it's very easy to tell that it's still you. This is a very popular one. I know, we all we've all felt like this either with customers or with businesses, they're gonna hire you, and they're gonna do the exact opposite. It's great, you have great ideas, but we're gonna keep doing things like we're doing before. And now another one that's amazing to me, and I still don't understand it, is let's just keep doing the exact same thing and change absolutely none of the bad behavior. We assume that I've been doing things for a very, very long time, you've been making money through email doing a specific thing, that the world of email hasn't changed, you know, you send an email, the email exists, people receive the email, and that's it. And another than another the big question here is why do people do this? The most of the most common reasons are, notice what we've done for the last X amount of years, you know, we've been in business for a very long time we've been sending to Gmail, Gmail obviously loves us. Yeah, who loves us, everybody loves us. Who doesn't want our emails, you know, if somebody's bought a mattress, wouldn't they want to buy another mattress if I send them more emails, of course. Another one is you're new here, you have a new customer or a new business, your new employee here, and they want you to prove to them you can make positive changes without making any changes. So if you make any if you bring us some good results, then maybe we'll let you do all your crazy ideas like clean lists or thoughts, dedicate domains, or stop rotating IPs. This makes it very difficult for us people out there that are really doing email really want to make sure their businesses succeed. It can be very frustrating. Once we leave or once we have maybe a glass of wine, we'll think it's a little bit Any. But this is very difficult for us. Because when we want to make big changes, because there's issues of there's things that we can do better. We're having a hard time.

This one is a very amazing one where people saying, Hey, you Natori, I have an issue, can you please fix my deliverability. And then I'll let them know what they should do. You know, you have, usually it's very basic things, we're always repeating the same things. Even if it's complicated things, they get very annoyed, they feel like we're insulting them that we're kind of pushing them in the wrong direction. They're hiring you especially if you're an external person you're coming in, you might be saying the opposite of something internally. So the people inside or get a little bit offended, or they get a little bit stressed that you're telling them that they're wrong. And instead, you're just trying to help them. So if you're doing the opposite, or you're offering the opposite solution, you're gonna have somebody pushback, this was another really good one is just don't believe us. I don't know if we're trying to start a religion or something like that. But non believing us is one of the hardest things, the information is not easily accessible. The information, we don't really know what to Google, or the businesses who are pushing back don't really know what to Google. And it just says, like, I don't believe you. We've been doing it this way. It works like leave us alone. So what do we do? So this is the most interesting part for me, because I will be giving to you the advice that I had gotten out of the things that I've done to make it easier for me to kind of help businesses change towards the better course, it can be very difficult and can be very redundant. So the most important thing is to educate people. And by educating people, I don't mean, you know, telling people how DKM really works or how SPF really works. Educating people, first of all starts by talking to other people, email, people love to talk about email, we need to start talking to other people outside of email, I don't need to tell you people, then we need authenticator domains before sending them out, or we shouldn't rotate IPs. We need to talk to people outside of our teams, the people that might be pushing us to be sending more emails to people pushing us to buy lists, if you talk, and you tell them how things work and get excited. We're very, very, very excited people, we get excited about weird things that the rest of the world doesn't really understand why we're excited about. It's very important to talk and educate people. And you don't do this when there's a problem. It's a little bit too late, because then it looks like you're trying to push things your way or somebody else's way. You want to talk to people before things happen. You let them know about baby, you let them know about the mark, you know, Hey, did you hear about the spoofing. We're all on Twitter, we're all on the email geek Slack channel, we see a bunch of things that are really, really interesting. A couple of days ago, there was an article that came out about.co.uk, because the cool part is the domain. So if it was IANA tory.co.uk. And a Tory is a subdomain spammers are using that tactic is super interesting. share with other people share with the people who don't really care about it and make them care, the people who are telling you what to do, even though you don't want to do it, they're the ones paying the bills or your managers, they're the business that shareholders, it is extremely important to let those people know how email works, I don't need to tell my colleagues that how email works, they know they're obviously going to be on my side, they're obviously going to make a plan that is going to fit with us. But if you don't share with everyone else that's making the actual decisions, you're going to have an issue and that's where things get a little bit slow. And the other thing is push, you can just give up. I know it can be very daunting. Not everybody has the personality to push or fight. But it's extremely important. If Google changes or spam filters, Google changes or spam filters, not anything you can do about it. It's not us specifically that went to Google and say, Hey, block my domain, all my emails. So you need to push and you just need to keep going. At some point. If we start educating people outside of the email teams, we're going to have a bigger, bigger community of people that are going to agree with us when things you know hit the fan.

Or things go well that we will remain proactive. The other thing is to partner up. I know when I started the in the email world, the first email geek I ever met with Matt was Matthew Vernhout. And I was so stressed when I met it was the first person outside of my company it was meaning I got dressed lb went to a restaurant. And everything was fine. He was very nice guy. We had a few laughs had a few drinks, and we went to an event the next day. So please don't be scared to connect with people. If you have a question. The email geeks always tell you please, you know, bother us, you know, correctly, please on at one o'clock in the morning. Don't hit us up at that time. But please connect with us ask people questions. make other people that are might not be email geeks connect with people, because if you have other people, for example, I mean deliverability specialists, I don't feel threatened by any other deliverability specialists here. There's not enough people for us to do all the jobs that we need. So if somebody doesn't believe me or might not be sure they're a little bit stressed because this is a different thing that I'm offering. Connect them to another delivery specialist. They will repeat the same thing. Connect them to postmaster abuse teams, connect them to other people and you need to be Connect that as well. If you don't know, somebody just asked, none of us here ever gonna tell you like, No, we don't like you, like, go away. We want other people to agree with us and to do things correctly. So you need to make sure that you connect with the right people, they ask the right questions. And don't be shy, there's no question that is stupid enough to not be put either in the email geek Slack channel and the woman of email, Facebook group. Me and Jenna from nebula have created a new email geeks slash kind of channel to help younger new people ask these stupid questions that they can and connect them with the right appropriate people. It's important to find a mentor somebody that can might not be the person that will help you own in your career, but will help you also learn new things, you will change us constantly. And we're constantly as at least for me, as a disability specialist, I'm constantly learning from my peers, because they've had a situation that I didn't have. And then when I'm having it, I need to figure out who's had this situation happen to them, and what was their solution. The other thing is to find allies. So this can be business partners, this can be by being transparent, no one is going to steal your job. Because you show information or you show data, there is not enough of us out there, we need to find some allies that are going to help us move forward and is going to help. This is a very strong word, not manipulate, but push the world into a better direction. The world is kind of getting security is getting more intense, people are having a harder time to get in the inbox. And we kind of own all of this information, some people and don't count the spammers, some people can kind of figure out they can kind of see some trends, but they don't really really know how things work. So it is important to find some allies, businesses that compete partner up. So why wouldn't we do the same thing. The other thing is to listen, we tend to know a lot of things, but things change really quickly. And when we're in a business and the business has a couple of issues, making some changes, sometimes taking the time to listen to the business with the customer is the most important part that allows you to take all the knowledge that you have and find a middle ground that is going to work with the company or your client. If you listen, most of the time, you're going to hear that the issue is fear. People fear that they're gonna listen to you, they're gonna make a change, and then everything is gonna get lost, they're gonna lose money, they're going to lose their customers, they're going to lose engagement, and they're really going to have a deliverability issue, or any marketing, and they're not going to reach their goals. So it's really important to listen to the issues. Because some as much as we know that certain things have to be done, we do need to listen and to make sure that everybody's happening, happy not happening. And the other thing is community, invite your people into the communities, invite them to the events. I know sometimes it's hard enough for us to get the budget to come to these email events. But it's important that the people who are making the decisions and sometimes the ones, especially the ones that might be doing the wrong decisions, or because that's how they've done business for so long, attend these events. Because when you're here, you're taking notes, and you're going back to your businesses, this crazy lady from Canada said this, would they care what you who you senatore is right. So it's very important to make sure that these people also listen to it. So one of the tricks of what I was doing was, every time I was at an event, I would take a snippet, the tidbits of like videos, or parts that I thought a specific person needed to hear. And at some point, when you have like, Scott, Kevin, Matthew, Brian hood, three, sub Victor, st, authenticate your domain and clean your list, they're like maybe going to tour he's not exaggerating, he's not the only one trying to figure out a way there's these 10 random people that are specialists doing this, do it and it makes it easier for them. So if you bring them into the community, they will be able to listen, they will be able to understand and you will also change the way that they're thinking in a way that they're going to think just like you without even knowing it is extremely important. The community part and not only the whole email geeks just for us.

The other thing and this is an ode to a great partner in crime Yakko Copus, who is a Excel whiz, okay, he would put any deliverability monitoring tool to shame with the Excel sheet so he can come up with Excel is a an amazing tool that will allow you to do anything you can to prove anything you need. When you have a shit ton of data. In 20 million places. You have deliverability data, you have marketing data, you have the logs in one place, you have some requests from another company. If you know how to use Excel sheet in a space of 10 minutes, you can prove certain trends that come emanate from marketing maybe or through the business and are going to affect Excel, I'm not gonna affect the Excel, they're gonna affect your deliverability the money, the revenue, the ROI XL is the cheapest thing on the planet is called Google Sheets. It's free you can do and have it offline online. And at some point, you can even start doing things that are more complex like having all of lists of domains and checking, monitor the DNSBL you don't need to pay in a very expensive tool to let you know if any of the domains are on the block list or At any block list, you can use Excel to actually go pull that data. If you ever have any questions about that, or really like to figure out what this amazing man Yakko is doing, please let me know I will connect you with him. And he'll be more than glad to, to help you. But Excel is like a great thing, it's free. And you can show some trends. And what I like to do is to take different things that are happening with the customer, they bought a list, the upload of the list, they had a contest, the volume went up all these things like a lot, like just like logs of things that are happening, and you log those through time. So when you have all those Excel sheets, with all those nice graphs, popping everywhere, you have these dates that are popping up, and you can see if what is actually affecting what at the end. So don't push for another time. I know a lot of us, we keep saying we're gonna take an Excel class to be on top of things just just really, really do it is extremely important. And the other one, which is the most important, and the most difficult thing is we need to stand your ground. For me and deliverability I have a lot of pushback, we all know that it's very difficult. It's also very, like magical little world that's very secretive, we just have to do it. If we keep letting people by laser, we keep letting people you know, ruin our IPs, while they're paying us double the time to do something we shouldn't be doing, too. We're enabling marketing to, to kind of be stuck in the wrong mindset. So if we keep just kind of giving up, which is enabling senators to maybe perform, did you have bad habits, it's just as simple as that. And then, as marketers, as writers, anything that comes with email, if you're constantly doing the wrong thing, or can you know that you're just not going to help or it's not going to really help the business, gain any of their goals, we just need a center ground. And by doing all the things before, it's going to be great, we get to talk to it, we get to change the mentality within a business, we get to use the community, we get to ask other experts here that might be better than us, or just have the same knowledge as us. And we can just make sure that the senators become better senders. So we all know that email geeks aren't just like the writer is a designer as a strategist, deliverability specialist, the marketers and the whole shebang. They can also be product owners, C level people is extremely important to understand that the email geeks are not the ones that are doing the tech stuff and the marketing stuff. And the list of the email geeks are the people that are in your business. And many businesses don't realize that they are an email business. They actually aren't email business. If you're sending more than a couple 100,000 emails a day or the ROI realize like 20 30% on email, you're an email business, yes, you might be selling products. But if without email, you lose half of your revenue, you need to care a lot about email. So it is very important. My mom was very annoyed. I mean, she can listen to me talk about email, I think if I disappear one day, she can just take my place. It's just I've talked about it so much, she can do the same. And let the rest of the world know we all have to do we all do consulting on the side sometimes. And it's very important that the rest of the world knows security is getting really, really, really strict. deliverability is getting more complicated. normal, regular small businesses do not know that we exist as a community, they do not know that we know all these things, there's anything to know. So it is very, very important to let anybody know you have some friends that are starting a business. Make them dive deep, you know, we all go into YouTube spiral, just let them dive into an email, spiral, learn things and a lot of people are gonna end up finding a lot of things that you might not have known about. I think I'm pretty okay on looking at all these articles and being connected. And every time there's Oh, somebody wants to be the center of an article, Hey, have you seen this? And I did not. So it is very important to make sure that the email community thing grows and it doesn't just stay with us.

So because I'm here to represent a business that Sergey, Alex and I have started EmailConsul. We are in arguing our first stickers today. So for all you people at home or that are not here who would like some please use this link to give us your address. We promise we were not going to do anything other than send you one sticker, we're fine. You'll be getting the very sarcastic not inboxing problem, just send more. And we're hoping to come up with new stickers every month. I know that the email geek community loves the stickers so we're hoping to give them more. And if not, because we're inaugurating our first tool today, we are going to be offering a free audit reports very simply go in and we're also not going to be handling you for anything else other than you can test it out. And also the email people we do need your advice. We want to see what you think about it, and what we can do better. So thank you very much for taking the time to listen to me.

Andrew Bonar 19:51
Thank you so much. Yeah, no, sorry. Thank you everyone for being here. What a fantastic presentation on the subject of stickers. There's still some stickers on the back over there. There are swag bags back over there. And they have pens from spotlight. They have key rings from SparkPost there's there's all sorts of little things in there. I also have very few, maybe three or four if anyone hasn't got a copy of marketing strategy by Jenna Tiffany reached out to me I have a couple of copies left I can give you