Email Marketing: Email Deliverability - Part 2 (Don't Send Emails Until You Watch This)

Hey guys, I'm back here with Jesse for email deliverability part two. Got so much great feedback as did Jesse on that first part. So we're really pumped to bring you guys the second edition. Jesse, how are you doing, bud? I'm doing pretty good, man. Can't believe we're up to part two already. Yeah, dude, I'm excited. I don't know if we'll get up to part three, part four, part five, but as long as the people are liking these emails and kind of additions we're putting out, we'll keep doing them. So Jesse, what are we talking about today? Awesome, so yeah, last, you know, the first part we were really going into how does email deliverability work when it's compared to a car? And we kind of did a deep dive in terms of how do you make sure that your emails are properly authenticated? So that's really looking at, you know, do I have my registration, my insurance, you know, all the things you need to get on the road and make sure that if you do get pulled over, you can kind of identify that you're a legitimate person, legitimate driver. But today I kind of wanted to talk to you guys about reputation. And in terms of tying in that analogy, it's kind of thinking about, you know, every time you drive a car, when you go to your insurance provider, they're actually gonna look at your driving record and your history. So it's very important that you understand how reputation works in email. And there's a few different things to go over. But once you understand how reputation works, it should allow you to be able to get more opens, more clicks and more sales. So I could just dive straight into it. There's two types of reputation that we're gonna be talking about today. The first one is IP reputation. And I'm actually gonna share my screen to show you guys kind of how to look through this stuff. So this is actually pretty straightforward. So anytime you get an email, I mean, in a lot of like in the e-commerce scenario, typically what happens is you have, you know, you send an email from ActiveCampaign, you send an email from Klaviyo, and anytime you pull up an email, you can actually click the dropdown here and click show original. And what it's gonna do, it's actually gonna give you the whole message headers and it starts getting pretty crazy in terms of, you know, technical details. But what you're looking at is the IP address here. This represents the IP address that the person used to send the email. And the first type of reputation we're gonna talk about is IP reputation. This is very important. The reason this is important is because the IPs that you use to send emails are one of the factors, one of many factors that the filters and firewalls look at when determining where your email should get routed. So for example, when you're sending from MailChimp, when you're sending from Klaviyo, or any type of e-commerce or any type of email marketing program, all of them have different types of shared IP addresses that you're using, and all of them will have their own unique IP reputation. So I guess the takeaway here is if you're using any type of email marketing provider and you send emails, the best way to check your IP reputation is basically go to Gmail, click Show Original. It's gonna show you this IP address here. And what you're doing is just checking the overall reputation of this IP. The easiest way to do this is gonna be coming in here and just typing in the IP that you saw in the email and running a blacklist check. What it's gonna do, it's actually gonna check to see across all the major blacklists and see if you're listed. So you can tell here, the emails that Neil Patel was sending, the IP address that he was sending from, I believe he was using ConvertKit from this email, were on a blacklist. So that is actually, it's not a huge deal. So emails can still get delivered if they're on a blacklist because there's two things that matter. There's the reputation of your IP and there's the reputation of your domain. But the main takeaway here is that when you're sending emails, it's important for you to have a good understanding of what's the quality of IPs that I'm sending from. So again, you just hop open into Gmail, you hit Show Original, you can paste the IP on here. And it's just gonna tell you, is my IP address clean? Is it on blacklist? You can also take the IP address and go into something called Cisco Talos or Talos Intelligence. And then you search the IP here. And what it's gonna do is again, it's gonna tell you the reputation and it's gonna give you the volume history. So you can kind of see email reputation good. And then you can kind of see, look, they're sending emails consistently. So everything looks good here. The main reason to take away from here too is that you have the ability as a sender to send from either a dedicated IP or from your shared IPs. So in the scenario where you are sending emails from your own dedicated IP, which means that you're responsible for your reputation, I highly suggest using MX Toolbox to make sure it's not on any blacklist, Cisco Talos to make sure that your reputation and volume is consistent. And then this is another blacklisting tool. It's called Multi RBL. You can do the exact same thing that you did in MX Toolbox, except this one is checking more blacklists. Again, not every blacklist is equal. They're all different in terms of how they affect your deliverability. But it's important just to get an overall idea of like, okay, I'm using this IP address either from my provider or it's my own dedicated IP. How do things look overall? Is there a lot of blacklisted IPs? Is it clean? These are all important questions. And on top of it, I forgot to mention, you can also just send a test email to mailgenius.com. The cool thing about this is we actually checked both the email, sorry, the email body. So anything that you have in the email, we check to make sure that that's not on any blacklist. And we also check your IP and domain. So you could actually run a free test on mailgenius.com and we do all of those blacklisting checks for you. And that really covers IP reputation. So those are the biggest ways or the easiest ways that you're gonna be able to look up an IP address and kind of understand, is it on a blacklist or isn't it? And then, yeah. That's a really good question. Those two tools you just shared, were those all free tools? Were they paid tools, a hybrid? All of those are free. So MX Toolbox, completely free. Multi-RBL was completely free. MailGenius is free. You can run unlimited tests. So all of the tools I'm showing today are actually gonna be completely free. Amazing. And then the last question is, if you were someone that was concerned about deliverability or just wanted to check, would you go through that same process of checking those three tools as well as sending a test on MailGenius or is just one sufficient? Yeah. So I would probably suggest the first thing to do is take a copy of your email and send a test on MailGenius. That's gonna give you an initial indicator of like, are things configured properly? Are there any big red flags? That's probably the best, easiest, quickest, most personalized way to kind of get those answers. But on top of that, if you did notice that your opens, clicks, maybe just your open rate was declining a little bit, clicks weren't as high as they're used to, it's important for you just to kind of check, what's the quality of IPs that I'm sending from? And this is something I would suggest, probably the order that I would do things is actually run a test at MailGenius first. And then I think actually, this is exactly kind of what you're asking is, the first thing you wanna do before you even get started with this journey is you wanna figure out where are your emails being delivered? Because that's gonna determine everything. So are they going to inbox? Are they going to promotions? Or are they going to spam? And then, if they are going to spam, then you're definitely gonna wanna double check, all those blacklisting tools I mentioned, because you definitely have some type of deliverability issue, and you're gonna wanna try to figure out what the root cause is. Thank you. Yeah, and then next is, so you kind of understand IP reputation, and then what's more important is your domain reputation. And what that is, is just in general, that refers to how much positive engagement or negative engagement do you get? So this kind of refers to your driving record. When you're driving your car, you know, your insurance provider, they're tracking everything you're doing, right? You can kind of think of it as one of those providers where they plug into your car, and they know how fast you're going. They know every turn you take. They know when you're on the highway. It's the same exact concept with email and domain reputation. If you can prove that you're a good driver, and you can establish a good sending history, in other words, as long as people open, click, reply, and engage with your emails on a consistent basis, you'll be able to establish a good driving record or a solid domain reputation. And when you're looking at providers like Google or Gmail, that's the most important factor. And in general, the most important factor of deliverability, you know, year after year, is trending towards domain reputation. So at the end of the day, the most important thing is having a domain and building a consistent positive engagement. So consistent opens, clicks, and then making sure that people aren't marking your messages as spam, making sure that people are not, you know, the messages aren't bouncing or blocking, just keeping everything clean. Just like if you're driving your car, you don't wanna get, you know, a bunch of parking tickets. You don't wanna get a bunch of speeding tickets. It's the exact type of thing. And the best way to kind of manage your reputation is using this free tool called Google Postmaster. So you just sign up at postmaster.google.com. And then you basically have to sign up your domain. And I believe they don't give you the specifics, but in order to see results, you have to send at least 500 emails a day, roughly, to Gmail users. And what you're looking at, once you do sign it up and you verify your domain, very important, you're monitoring your domain reputation, keeping that as high as possible. If it is low or medium, you definitely want to start segmenting by your most engaged users and only emailing those engaged users to build your reputation back up. Then you also have IP reputation, which you wanna keep very high. And then on top of that, you have authentication, which again is your SPF, DKIM, you know, the things we talked about in our last episode. And that's really the main thing is that you're looking at and spam rate. Spam rate's very important. Just kind of seeing, are people marking my messages as spam? If so, why is that happening and how can I fix that? That's the main things that I'm using in Google Postmaster. And once again, they don't tell you that exact amount. So sometimes you could sign up and it might take a few days, a few weeks before it starts populating results for you, but it's completely free. And it's the best way to figure out what Google thinks about your emails. Awesome, thank you. And then the last thing I wanted to cover, which is, you know, I think the most important and most relevant in general is it's called Inbox Track. This is actually a new product I'm working on. The product's gonna be really, really cool, super simple, but we actually have a free part of the testing tool that you guys can use today. And this is important. The first thing I would suggest anyone to do, and this is something you should do before you hit send, is copy all of these email addresses and then load up the exact copy of your campaign and hit send. And then you wanna check, where are your emails being delivered? Are they going to the primary inbox? Are they going to promotions? Or are they going to spam? This tool is completely free. Again, you just copy these emails and you hit send. Try to send the exact same subject, the exact same, you know, everything has to be one-to-one because you wanna see, you know, this gives you a good representation of if emails are going here, I can predict or I can kind of forecast that they're also going here for the rest of our customers. And this is inboxtrack.io. This is gonna turn into a full product where you can actually get alerts if your emails go to spam. And you'll be able to keep track historically of, you know, are your emails going to the inbox or spam, you know, over the last week, over the last month. And then the last free tool, it's very similar. It's called gmass.co slash inbox. I just wanted to give you guys another tool to check out. Same exact framework. Basically copy these emails, send a copy of it, and then search for your from address in here or your subject, and it'll actually show you where your emails are being filtered. Both the tools are completely free and they're very important. This is something that you wanna do. I would suggest if you have a legit email marketing program, you know, especially in the e-commerce space, this is something you're gonna wanna do ideally daily because I can't stress enough, between your IP reputation, your domain reputation, and the different words, phrases, and links in either your subject or email body, your emails can change where they're going every single day. They can go to the promotions folder, they can go to spam. You know, the filters and firewalls and different, you know, things that customers that you're emailing is very dynamic. So try to implement this type of workflow into something that you do every single day. This is awesome. So anyone that's just listening to this part two but missed part one, go on the YouTube channel, watch the first part. Jesse does a great job kind of laying the foundation and the groundwork that we talked about in this video. And we will be doing a part three, I believe. So if you guys like this, let us know. Jesse, how do people find you? I know lots of people mentioned LinkedIn and then also find you on MailGenius, is that correct? Yes, yeah. I would say the best way to, you know, work with me right now is I'm gonna be working on getting, if you didn't wanna do consulting or anything, it's actually gonna be jessejhernandez.com, but my main focus is actually gonna be InboxTrack. So if you guys go to inboxtrack.io, just start running some free tests there, you're actually gonna notice in the next few months, we're gonna have a full fledged product and we're definitely gonna have free trials and it's gonna be awesome. But you're completely able to run right now unlimited tests. You could see where your emails are being delivered. And again, the one thing I wanna stress too is if you notice your emails are going to promotions, for example, I do suggest messing with the subject line, messing with the body, messing with the links, because if you can get more of your emails to the primary tab, for all the consulting I've done with clients and for a lot of the different people I've talked with, more emails in the primary tab means more opens, clicks and sales. So that's definitely something that you should start doing today. Awesome, man. Well, Jesse, thank you so much. Excited to get you back on for part three. Thanks so much, man. Yeah.