Respect for Subscribers: Your Ticket to the Inbox

Lauren Meyer 0:08
Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Inbox Expo 2021 spring edition from emailexpert, it's only at the beginning. And already we're off to an amazing start. I'm grateful to be part of such an incredible event. And I want to thank Andrew, Nely and all of the wonderful folks who have helped make this event happen. My name is Lauren Meyer, and my session today is called respect for subscribers, you're to get to the inbox and respect comes in many forms. Even when we're talking about email, you've got to respect the rules and regulations that have been put in place by legislators, mailbox providers, anti spam filters, and email service providers alike. But even more importantly, you must respect the wishes, intentions and feelings of the people that you're sending emails to. Over the years. I've found that by putting the recipient at the centre of your email marketing strategy, hitting the inbox becomes a lot less difficult, because the goal of all of these industry players is to help provide email users with safe and positive email experiences within their inbox. And regardless of how each mailbox provider is filtering mail from a technical perspective, they all aim to deliver only highly valued unwanted content to their users, and everything else is rejected or sent to the spam folder. So the focus of my session today is to help you identify ways to ensure that you have the very best chance of consistent inbox placement by inserting a respectful approach into the heart of your email marketing programme. So a little bit about me, I have about 14 years of experience in email, having worked with small and mid sized companies and agencies as well as many fortune 105 100 companies. I've traditionally been on the sender side working for a couple of different ESP is consulting with customers on how to resolve their deliverability issues and sending emails myself as a marketer. The last several years of my career have been much more focused on deliverability compliance and anti abuse until earlier this month, actually when I joined the team at an ESP called socket labs as their VP of product marketing and brand strategy. And then excited to jump out of the trenches and start telling the socketlabs story because we've got a really powerful and versatile email delivery solution for every level of sender from those connecting via SMTP and API who want to get set up and sending really quickly to high volume senders who are looking for a customised solution that can scale with their business as they grow and help them cut off challenges that they probably aren't even aware they're going to face yet. So we've got our own MTA, and we offer cloud based hybrid and on premise solutions, so you haven't if you haven't done so yet, come check us out over at socket labs. So with all that covered, let's get down to business. In this session. My goal is for you to walk away with an understanding about how taking a respectful approach to email can help you hit the inbox more consistently, and also build greater loyalty with your email audience. So we'll start with some key concepts about inbox placement to set the stage. Next we'll dig into some data impacts your strategy for your startup. Next, we'll dig into how data impacts your strategy and and your deliverability. Next, we'll dig into how data impacts your strategy and your deliverability both the data you're taking in namely people's email addresses and other personal information, as well as the data you're using to measure performance, your email engagement stats, and other data points that are important for deliverability monitoring. Then I'll share some strategies that you can use to show respect to your email audience, while simultaneously improving your sender reputation and your inbox placement. So as we get started, I'd like to frame the discussion by sharing some concepts that are essential to understand when it comes to the science behind hitting the inbox. There are a lot of that that best practices out there and not all of them apply for every sender. Instead of wondering about which best practices you need to be implementing for your business, I found that focusing on applying that respectful approach to the email experience of your subscribers will actually simultaneously help you hit the inbox more consistently. So it's just a matter of where you place your focus. And for me, that focus is on the recipient experience. So first and foremost, I want you all to accept the fact that deliverability and recipient engagement are moving targets. On the deliverability side, there are 10s, if not hundreds of factors that go into determining if your message will be delivered to the inboxes of your recipients or not. So if ESP uses different algorithms to make their email filtering decisions, and many of these mailbox providers use multiple layers of anti spam technology in their filtering decisions, some of which are powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. So when a new spam or phishing attack happens, those filters adjust accordingly and the changes are happening in real time. So what works for hitting the inbox yesterday might not still work tomorrow, which is why reviewing your results Adjusting accordingly is of ongoing importance. And then on the recipient side, a person's reaction to your emails can

change over time, right? Life is long priorities change, budgets change, interest change, and people. And you'll have really how people spend their time, particularly within their inbox can change to della quist, who actually gave a keynote earlier today has done extensive research into recipient behaviour to show that someone can go from highly engaged to unengaged, and vice versa multiple times throughout the course of when they're actually on your list. And sending email to them can have an impact, even if they don't show signs of engagement. So it's super important to follow the data that you do have to continually improve the quality of the emails that you send, and to embrace the fact that getting email right is a moving target that requires continual monitoring, monitoring, and testing and tweaking, you're really kind of never done, this is not the kind of thing that you can just set and forget. So moving on to the next one, much more often than you think marketers ask about whether a certain email tactic they want to try is legal. But what I really want you to consider here is that legality is literally just about the lowest bar that you can set when it comes to respecting your email audience. If you're aiming for inbox placement, and you really truly want to surprise and delight your recipients with your emails, you need to aim higher than simply what is legal. And don't get me wrong here. You know, understanding what you're allowed to do from a legal perspective is a good thing. And it's important, but it's, you know, even from the strictest forms of legislation that are in place today, they have hard time competing with the emerging threats and security and privacy that are they're coming right now. So, you know, mailbox providers aren't often able to tell if someone has opted in or not. So they don't really put a tonne of emphasis on legality when they're determining what goes to the inbox of their users for that decision. They're measuring what their users seem to find value in through the positive and negative actions that they're taking within their inboxes. So for the love of email, please say it with me. legality does not equal inbox placement. Okay, all right, good. Okay, cool. So moving on to the next one, database Quality Matters. I'll talk more about data in a bit. But at a high level. Just note that the quality of your database involves a focus on your list collection and management practices, and goes well beyond knowing if an email address is valid or not. Permission is such an important part of database quality. Sending to recipients who haven't signed up for your mail can have a huge impact on your engagement rates and your deliverability. So stay tuned for more on this one. Lastly, the content and frequency of your emails does matter as well. You know, content includes the subject, line and body as well as the sender address and the friendly from and all of the links within your email. And while it's important to note that most deliverability issues are not caused directly by the content itself, it can play a part right, so issues such as links within the body of your email that have a poor reputation, they can cause problems for you. html emails that only contain images, but no plain text to kind of follow up with that those can be an issue as well. Also think about things that cause a recipient to mark your messages as spam, which can be very, very deliberate, damaging for your deliverability. So things like sending way too many emails to people and you're overwhelming them, which could lead them to market messages, spam, or maybe not sending enough emails to people, leading them to forget that they've even signed up which again, could lead to them marking your mail as spam. So all of these things can prevent your messages from going to the inboxes. So testing your emails before hitting send, and aligning your content and your frequency with recipient expectations is so so so important.

So Alright, we you know, with all of this out of the way, let's move on to the ways that data impacts your email strategy. There are a lot of data points, and you can track them to understand how your email programme is performing from a deliverable perspective as well as a revenue perspective. So starting off with your database, you know, building a quality database of valid email recipients who've opted in to hear from you is essential because you can't have a success story in email marketing. If you're not able to successfully reach anyone, right, you can have amazing content. But if your recipients aren't able to see it, because of some faulty lis collection practices or because your mail is going to the spam folder or getting rejected, the strongest copy and call to action in the world is not going to save you. But by pairing database quality and high delivery rates. With engaging content that your users are finding value in, you can expect to see higher open and click through rates which will inevitably lead to more conversions for your company. So focus on this entire funnel from beginning to end. And be sure that you're tracking your opens your click throughs your conversions, as well as those negative reactions from subscribers such as unsubscribes and complaints to ensure that you have a solid understanding of what your audience likes, and doesn't, which will help you reach those target KPIs that you're chasing as well as identify problematic trends. that could impact your deliverability and your revenue. So speaking of deliverability, there are a lot of data points that can help you in that sense as well. So they can help you understand what mailbox providers think of you as a sender. They can help you identify what issues within your email programme need the most attention, and they can help you troubleshoot deliverability issues when they pop up. So starting with postmaster data feeds such as Google postmaster tools and Microsoft's smds reporting. They give you a general sense of how those mailbox providers view your sender reputation. And then we can use feedback loop data to allow you to track user complaints through most of the mailbox providers that you're sending to. So a great way to kind of measure that, that that negative engagement that's coming through. And the next one on the list, if you're seeing low delivery rates, bounce data is extremely helpful in determining if you've got an address collection issue or management issue. But that might be causing hard bounces or user complaints, or ascend a reputation issue that stemming from blocked listings or spam trap hits. You know, this info isn't always easy to decipher. But it can be very helpful if you sort of know what you're what you're looking for. And you just use that to kind of follow to the next trend, right. So also pay attention to block listings that you encounter as these can impact delivery, especially if you're hitting a you know, spam possible listing. And they can also highlight areas that you need to improve if you're able to identify what is driving that listing, right. So most often it's triggered by user complaints, or spam trap hits or an issue with your authentication. So if you know the source of that issue, you can work backwards and resolve it, and then maybe avoid being listed by that company again, as well as other other listings that are out there, right. And don't overlook the value that can come from recipient feedback or that dreaded call that's coming from your ESP s compliance team. Well, most of this feedback might start off, as you know, on a negative note, the goal of everyone who is involved in that process is really to improve the email experience for senders and recipients. So use that information constructively, you know, don't just bury your head in the sand and hope those people are going to go away, because quite honestly, they don't really go away until you fix your issues. So really focus on what you can do to fix that issue quickly. Alright. And then lastly, there is recipient behaviour to consider when we're talking about data, and how mailbox providers are measuring that, I'd like to just leave this slide up for maybe just a minute. So we can as we head into the next section on ways you can impact sender reputation by showing recipient recipients respect, right? So you know, because, well, email senders are only privy to details like opens and clicks, replies, unsubscribes. And complaints, mailbox providers are actually looking at a lot more in an attempt to kind of figure out if their users are finding interest in the mail that you're sending or not. And you can use these various forms of recipient engagement as inspiration for finding the most beneficial ways to positively impact your own sender reputation by working these into your existing email workflows. So basically, how can you move the needle to get your recipients engaging in positive ways as often as possible, right, so opening, clicking, replying, forwarding emails to friends, or storing them as important, and limiting their negative engagements as much as possible. So namely, those use those spam complaints, or perhaps you know, having people never open or click and let that mail to sink further into your inbox or deleting it without opening these kind of things. Or what I want you to be looking at as we're heading into this next section, right? Just Just keep this in mind, because there's lots of little things that you can do to get creative in the sense if you can kind of really just understand the journey of your users, right? So Alright, so are you ready to jump into some strategies that you can use to show respect to your email audience, while simultaneously improving your sender reputation and your inbox placement? Yeah, you're ready. Okay, cool. All right, let's do this. Alright, so spend some time considering your goals with email. First of all, this is the first one and I want to be sure that your lead magnets and your content strategy are aligning with the goals that you've set, right? It may seem really great to have a large mailing list or really high open rates. But if those people aren't driving your conversions, then they're sort of worthless, aren't they. And that's a waste of time for you, as well as those recipients who don't really find value in the content that you're sending, right. So don't focus on list size alone. And don't get stuck monitoring just one or two KPIs. Regularly monitor all of your email metrics, and do it over time looking for things that stand out as abnormal performance that's trending downwards over time, or maybe it's fallen off a cliff overnight, you'll learn from these signals that your audience is giving you and quickly work to understand you know, the why behind it. You know, when there's a certain campaign or a type of content that seems to be eliciting a particularly negative response because again, these are very damaging for deliverability. So you really want to nip those the user complaints in the bud as quickly as possible. And then go back to your lead magnets and ensure that they're bringing in the right kind of subscribers, those who want to engage with the with you via email, and ones who are going to drive your KPIs and your revenue that comes from email, the ones who are going to make it through that funnel and can in whatever way it is that you want them to. So otherwise, you're gonna end up with a bunch of people who've signed up for a trip to Italy or a million dollars. And they have absolutely no interest in the emails that you're sending, or the products that you're trying to sell to them, right, because they don't have any connection with the lead magnet where these people came in. So this is bad for businesses also bad for deliverability. So breaks, really make sure that you're aligning those goals with everything else that comes after that, right. Alright, so the second one is permission, get permission before sending always, always, always people, I understand that for some businesses, it really is tempting to send cold email. But try to find a way to get permission because it's key to building a quality database. So you know, make sure that all those people have just signed up to be there that they're expecting to hear from you in some way, shape, or form that they've at least heard of your brand as well, right, there is no silver bullet to the inbox. But having a quality opt in process that properly sets expectations about what kinds of emails people are going to receive, and how often you're going to contact them will ensure that our subscribers stay positively engaged with your content instead of unsubscribing. Right away or worse, marking your emails as spam, which as we've talked about, is quite damaging. So there's a tonne of email that's sent globally and the internet is massive. And it's up to you to show these mailbox providers and your recipients that your emails are legitimate. And they're worthy of hitting the inbox. Right. So let me give you an example based on some facts that were previously shared by Google 50% of what Gmail receives each and every single day is spam, about 50%. That is those massive, right? They're also receiving more than 100 million phishing emails per day. That's crazy, right? That is that is a lot of phishing mail and 68% of the fish that they receive has never even been seen before. So brand new threats that are coming at them. And they block about 10 million emails per minute per minute. So with all of this really awful email that's being thrown at mailbox providers each and every single day, it's important for legitimate senders to legit differentiate themselves from spammers and fraudsters, by having lower complaint rates by getting permission first, and really setting themselves apart. So moving on to the next one playing off of that, because almost just as important as getting permission, and setting those expectations about what kinds of emails people are going to receive, is to make those emails as personal and useful for them as you possibly can, right. So tell them what you're going to send up front and then follow through with that, you know, you'd want to know if a line for one poster that you were about to pay for is three hours long, right? Well, your new subscribers would want to know what they're signing up for as well what they're getting into. So after you've done that, after you've set those expectations, you want to review your email engagement stats to start learning what recipients react to positively and what they do negatively. And also, don't be afraid to ask them what they want. Right? Studies have shown that 81% of people say that they will share personal information to get a more personalised online experience. And 50% of those people said that they would actually pay a premium for that service. So you can use progressive profiling to ask people about the sending frequency, the types of emails or other types of personalization that they might prefer. And there's lots of ways that you can do this, right? via email, of course, because we love email, you could do it in app, you could do it on your website, you can ask questions as part of a profile setup, if that's part of your process, you can offer a preference centre that allows them to manage their email frequency and choose the types of content that they receive. In fact, I bet there's probably some some really cool people that are showcasing ideas this week for things that you can do like with with amp for email. So be on the lookout for that I'm not going to talk about it, but I'm sure there's brilliant minds that are going to do it. So Alright, we're gonna move on to number four, which is following the data to identify opportunities. You know, I keep talking about data. Because data is super important when it comes to email right, regularly reviewing your email metrics, as well as the additional deliverability focus data points that I mentioned earlier. And anything else literally anything else that you know about your email subscribers from other channels, is going to give you the opportunity to identify an opportunity, right, for example, high bounce rates, postmaster datafeeds, suggesting Google or Microsoft don't really think very highly of your spending habits, you know, unblock listings that are triggered by user complaints and spam trap hits. These can be signs of poor data collection, or a sender reputation issue that you need to tackle right away. And this is presenting you with an opportunity to improve your list collection and management practices or tackle that deliverability issue head on before it causes more damage for your business. Another example for you is maybe some high levels of positive engagement so such as opens and clicks. You know, these can indicate recipient interest giving you hints about what content certain parts of your email audience really prefers. Now on the other side, high unsubscribe and spam complaint rates can highlight problems with less collection, expectation setting and content that really just didn't land well with your recipients. So digging into the positive, and the negative engagement data really just gives you an opportunity to optimise every move part of your email programme over time, and can also help you proactively monitor your deliverability. Which who doesn't love that? Right? So number five is using segmentation to improve the recipient experience, right. So having a healthy database and consistent inbox placement to match involves more than just basic list hygiene where you're removing your hard bounces or unsubscribes and your spam complaints on that regular basis. That is very important. But if you really want to optimise your ROI from email, you need to spend time reviewing your data getting to know your email audience know who's engaging and should remain on your list and get mailed to very regularly versus the recipients who aren't engaging and maybe should be contacted less often. So you know, we don't have time to dig deeper into sunset policies or reengagement strategies today, not in this session. But I do want to call out how helpful they can be in improving the level of personalization that you bring to your subscribers in terms of content and frequency. Not to mention these can be very helpful in reducing the impact of deliverability issues that are stemming from your sending behaviour. So a few quick tips have a sunset policy, on average, it costs about five times less than to re engage with a past customer than it does to acquire a new one. So don't give up on these people too soon, right? Spend time creating reengagement strategies where you mix up the content, and try to win them back before deleting them forever.

I swear, there can be gold in those hills, people, you know, really go check out that work from della quist. There's evidence to support that you might want to keep mailing them longer than you are today. Not forever. But But definitely check it out. Okay. And second is run some tests to see what works best Cathay actually spoke about AV testing earlier today. So if you missed that session, go check that out on demand, because AV testing is so important to an email programme really to understand what's working the best. All right, number six, respect respect to your recipients privacy, there are so many ways that you can show respect to your recipients when it comes to privacy. get permission before emailing. I've said it before, but it bears repeating get permission before emailing, only collect the data that you need as well right be transparent about the data that you're going to use and how you're going to use that. These are things that people are basically expecting, but you really just want to let that shine, right? You're going to follow local and global privacy laws, right. Depending on where recipients are located. You might be dealing with can spam in the US or ccpa, or C, RPI in California, the consumer data protection act within Virginia castle in Canada GDPR. within Europe, just to name a few that you guys maybe have heard of the point is if you aren't sure where your recipients are, aim to be compliant with all of these forms of legislation by focusing on doing right by your recipients not just keeping it legal. So back to my point earlier, legality does not equal inbox placement. But it also typically is not enough to make your recipients happy. So go that extra mile, do what's right by them. Okay. Also try to avoid things like clickbait and other forms of trickery to sort of get those people to open your mail. Right. Some examples of this might be using that little arienne reply or forward to make it seem like you already have a conversation that started with somebody, you know, people are going to open these mails, but but they're just as quickly going to mark your mail as spam, which is really bad for deliverability. So stop gaming the system and try to do it right, right. And then make that that unsubscribe process really easy. If people want to get off your list, let them it's better than marking your email as spam. So enough with the small fonts, the hard to read text, the tiny hyperlinks those eight steps to finally get off a list. Make it easy, right make it easier than it was to sign up a whole lot easier if possible. And make it error proof as well, right? Don't ask them to re type their email address if you can help it because chances are, they might enter the wrong email address, right? If you have forwarding setup from one account to another, they're gonna enter the wrong email address. Maybe they have a typo in there. So they're gonna think they unsubscribed and you're gonna keep mailing them, which is only going to make that issue much, much worse. So make it really, really easy for them to unsubscribe, and then accept replies as well. Right? Some recipients will actually try to unsubscribe by emailing you. Others might want to reach out to discuss customer support matters or share feedback, whether that's angry or otherwise, or simply just to build a relationship with you on their terms in a way that they're comfortable. So give them this opportunity. And if you can read through the replies to identify issues with list collection, or maybe broken unsubscribe links, and who knows what else you might hear about. So this is not exactly a hack to hit the inbox. But it can be good for deliverability since the positive signal to to have replies right suggesting that mailbox into too much mailbox providers that recipients like your mail that they like you as a sender, they trust you as a sender. So those replies can really help. And you know, even if you aren't able to monitor this button this mailbox closely, it might be a better experience for your recipients because they can contact you via email rather than taking that complaint to social media or again, just marking your email as spam. So lots of good reasons to do this from a deliverability perspective. But again, the whole point here is to respect people's time and interest and if they're not interested Don't just you know, take them through this process and make it really hard for them to get off your list.

Alright, and then lastly, you know, send emails with consistency, mailbox providers love consistency, and so to your subscribers, right? consistency drives engagement with recipients. And it also allows mailbox providers to see the patterns in what you're sending. And to start to get more and more comfortable letting your emails into the inbox, right, if they're seeing good good engagement from your users, why not, they see that the mail is coming very predictably, which they love. So send regularly, so your email recipients never forget about you, and the mailbox providers really just build that trust, you know, and if you're doing this, right, you know, recipients may even look forward to receiving emails from you. And they might even ask what's going on if they don't land in their inboxes, as expected, and that's a great problem to have, right. So really focus in on consistency as often as you can, right? Don't drive yourself nuts, but just get there. Alright, so a couple of key takeaways to close us out. inbox placement is all about recipient satisfaction. And the more that you can get on board with that, stop trying to game the system with all these different mailbox providers, and really just provide an awesome experience that gets people to engage in positive ways, and not the negative ways. That is how you win at hitting the inbox deliverability. And recipient interests are a moving target, we've talked about this, but it really is not something that you can set and forget. So keep digging into that recipient data, keep following where your recipients are going and deliver an experience that matches what you're seeing within the data points that you have access to remember the database quality database Quality Matters, right that email address collection and management is the key to finding email recipients that truly want to engage with your mail and with your brands. And then lastly, get creative with how you engage with recipients. being respectful does not have to mean that you're boring, right? You've got to respect your subscribers because any time and attention that they give to us is truly a gift and it should be viewed that way. The inbox is a ever crowded place. And it's only getting busier thanks to the fact that the world is becoming even more digital as we speak. So use the tips that you've learned today from my session and all the other sessions that are happening today from all these great presenters to create a recipient experience that is both respectful, obeying the laws and also something that keeps them back coming for more. Again, my name is Lauren Meyer. I'm the VP of product marketing and brand strategy for socket labs. And just thank you so much for joining me today. And an even bigger thank you to Andrew, Nely and everyone who has made this event happen. Have a great rest of your week. Email geeks, see you out there