Danielle – 00:00:03: Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity. In our day jobs, we work with senders all over the world and help them tackle their toughest email challenges.
Guy – 00:00:14: But once we’re off the clock, we get together to share our experiences and discuss what’s keeping us and most other senders up at night. It’s all part of our mission to answer the single most important question for email senders. How can we give subscribers what they really want? We’re your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle – 00:00:37: And I’m Danielle Gallant, and this is Email After Hours.
Guy – 00:00:44: So, Danielle, we got to tell the audience who we are, what our day job is, when we’re not doing podcasts, and why we’re email experts. You want to go first?
Danielle – 00:00:53: Who we are. I feel like a total email nerd will describe me pretty perfectly here. Email nerd, dog lover, podcast junkie on this side. And I mean, you know what I do Guy. In the day-to-day and working with our clients to solve their deliverability issues. I’m looking into the trends and research. And you’re on the move always. What about you Guy? Who are you? What’s that question mean to you?
Guy – 00:01:22: I oddly dare tell you, but I’ve been in the world of email for over 20 years now. I feel like I’ve got the grey hairs to prove it. I’ve been on the technical side, I’ve been on the agency side. I’ve led a team of global consultants, and now I’ve fetched up sort of being a face of email, running Validity, state of email series, speaking at events, writing content, and it’s a really great role and I love it.
Danielle – 00:01:50: Yeah, I definitely feel like you’re everywhere in the email world right now, Guy. You’ve been, I feel like, on tour, on the Email World Tour for months at this point.
Guy – 00:01:59: I have, but it’s not a bad way to make a living.
Danielle – 00:02:02: Well, and I’m sure in all that time that you’ve probably heard your fair share of challenges that email marketers are facing. I can’t imagine the variety that you’re facing there. What’s the number one thing you’re hearing?
Guy – 00:02:17 : I don’t feel like it’s so much the number one thing. I think there’s a combination of factors, and certainly we’ve been talking about the fact that email is such a successful and popular marketing channel that especially since the pandemic years, global volumes have doubled. And that’s a great success story, but it also creates its challenges because when you’re sending a load more emails, you’re clogging up inboxes, you’re posing a risk for subscriber fatigue. But then on top of that, here we are right in the middle of peak sales season, and it just seems to be getting longer every year.
Danielle – 00:02:52: You’re speaking directly to me at this my email inbox is bloated. It is not to date this episode recording, but we are in Cyber Week at this point, and it is complete chaos in the inbox Cyber Week.
Guy – 00:03:07: Sort of Black Friday month. So there’s that. I think we’ve had all the ramifications of changes in the privacy landscape. Apple introduced its male privacy protection and that’s made it harder to carry out best practices like recency management and list hygiene. And now we’re in the middle of a really tough economic landscape as well. So never mind how great your emails are are people going to respond to them if it’s a serious decision about whether they can buy the products and solutions that you’re offering?
Danielle – 00:03:41: I feel like you’ve just given us the perfect sound bite for exactly what we’re going to be covering in this podcast for the foreseeable future here. That’s exactly what I’m hearing from clients. So you’re hearing it face to face? I’m getting it on Zoom or Microsoft teams. But yeah, this is kind of what we’re doing all day is tackling these email problems, email challenges, and the privacy world.
Danielle – 00:04:04: All of that, 100%.
Guy – 00:04:06: And I’m talking about the causes, but I think you’re also seeing the impacts because all the mailbox providers and the filtering companies are upping their game on there.
Danielle – 00:04:16: Yeah, especially right now. Q4 is like the showdown, prime mailbox provider showdown time because there’s just so much coming at them. I mean, even in some of the webinars that we’ve worked on, like Validity’s State of Email podcast, we had some great guests. We had somebody from Yahoo who was telling us a percentage of the mail just doesn’t I mean, there’s no chance that it’s even going to get through. That comes up that ups the game, especially around this time of year. And little tips and tricks too, like don’t send at the top of the hour. It feels just like there’s so much for marketers to adapt to at this point and mailbox providers are the exact same way. They’re going to adapt and become even more strict at this point.
Guy – 00:05:00: 100%. You talk about that Yahoo presentation and he was saying to us 70% of global email marketing volumes in the first few minutes of every hour. You can’t believe it, can you?
Danielle – 00:05:10: Well, and I feel like this becomes one of the main monsters under the bed, right? One of the things that is a major gap for marketers today, a problem they don’t even really know they have. And I don’t know how many times somebody’s come up and said this to you Guy, but my ESP is telling me I have a 99.9% delivery rate. Why am I not seeing any Opens, why am I not seeing any clicks? What’s your go-to answer for that?
Guy – 00:05:42: I’ve heard that so many times and I think maybe it’s because here you and I have got a slightly different definition of deliverability. Because for me, it’s not a question of sent minus balanced, it’s a question of are your marketing emails going to end up in front of your customers? Where they’re going to see them and they’re going to engage them and they’re going to buy your products and services. And there is a big difference between the two.
Danielle – 00:06:13: Yeah, it’s like going into a grocery store and there’s the item you want is not on the shelf. They’re not going to buy it. They can’t see it.
Guy – 00:06:19: Yeah, absolutely. So inbox is only one place those emails might end up in the spam folder, the junk folder. They might get caught by your corporate spam filter. If you think about sort of Gmail or Outlook.com where you got tabs as well, that’s another piece of the deliverability puzzle. Which one are they going to end up in?
Danielle – 00:06:38: I just checked my promotions tab this morning and I was like, oh man, I have been neglecting you to your promotions tab. But yeah, we’re officially a naughty or nice season for email marketers, too.
Guy – 00:06:50: Your promotions tab must have been looking full after this weekend.
Danielle – 00:06:56: Because neither of us are Americans here. But it was like the equivalent of a Thanksgiving Super Bowl situation in my promotions folder at this point. But yeah, you’re totally right. Delivery is making it through the gateway, actually making sure the mailbox provider receives accept the mail. And then for us, that definition of deliverability is whether or not it gets in the inbox, whether or not subscribers can actually engage with the message.
Guy – 00:07:24: Absolutely. And that’s why you’ll hear us talk about inbox placement rates. That’s our deliverability currency.
Danielle – 00:07:31: So what happens when marketers get it wrong? What happens when that message does not land in the inbox?
Guy – 00:07:38: I feel like there’s a few different impacts. The obvious one is revenue. If your marketing messages aren’t hitting the inbox, you’re going to make less money. And you know what? You and I have both done the consulting game over the years, and you think about the language that a CFO uses. He’s not going to challenge his team or she’s not going to challenge her team and say, have we got a deliverability problem? It’s wise. Our revenue from email channel down. So that’s a fairly fundamental issue, isn’t it?
Danielle – 00:08:12: Yeah. And one that people don’t even know exists necessarily. Right. Like, if you are not in the world of email all the time, you wouldn’t even know that it’s possible. I was literally talking to a client maybe half an hour ago who was trying to explain this concept to the execs because of one reason or another, and it’s a big one.
Danielle – 00:08:33: This is why we’re here.
Danielle – 00:08:35: This is our day job, right, to try to get to the bottom of that for everybody.
Guy – 00:08:40: Absolutely. But I think there’s other issues as well on that Danielle. I mean, if you’re an email subscriber, you start to expect to receive your marketing emails from a particular sender. There’s going to be a certain cadence, there’s going to be a certain frequency to them. And if suddenly there’s a gap because the deliverability is tanking, it starts to create trust issues, doesn’t it? It’s like, hey, why have I stopped receiving that email?
Danielle – 00:09:04: It starts to create trust issues. It starts to create gaps where your competitors are going to get through and like anything, right, if you leave something long enough, or even if you don’t know the issue exists for long enough, it compounds, right? It’s just going to get worse and worse and worse as all of that mail ends up in a junk folder going unloved. Going unengaged with going unclicked. Right? And certainly as someone who has worked on the sender side, I know that you do not want to be that person that has to go tell your boss, oh, this is the reason, this is why we haven’t been hitting those KPIs.
Guy – 00:09:48: No, that’s right. I mean, we spent most of our lives trying to make our customers look great, but when it goes wrong, it’s the opposite. And you’re right, you don’t want to be sitting in that seat.
Danielle – 00:09:58: So I have a couple of kind of quick fire hot take email questions for you. Can I all fire some of you? Okay, so what is the one commonly held, if there is one? Because Lord knows there’s probably 20, but the one email marketing belief that you disagree with or that you want to.
Guy – 00:10:Debunk, oh, gee, where do we start?
Danielle – 00:10:24: I’m so sorry, that was not easy.
Guy – 00:10:27: I want to say it’s. You know the whole concept of spam trigger words, that there’s certain words you can’t stick in an email because a spam filter is going to catch them. You know what, maybe spam filters in 2005, but I think we’ve moved beyond that now. You can put free in block capitals in your email if you want, and you’re not going to trigger a spam filter, but that’s not necessarily saying go ahead and do it, because it’s far more about the impact it has on your customers who are receiving those emails. And if they’re looking at it and going and looks a bit spammy, that looks a bit rubbish, they’re going to hit those complaint buttons, they’re going to hit those markers junks, and that’s what’s going to get you into trouble. What about you, Danielle?
Danielle – 00:11:14: Well, first of all, I’ll back you up on that because, you know, so when I worked on the sender side, I worked for programs that did adult dating, essentially, and I’ll use the phrase adult dating, right? But dating is loose. Like, there’s a lot of content in these emails that is at best questionable, but people were opening them, clicking on them, replying to messages, and they went to the inbox. So I think you’re totally right. Like key words, key phrases. I mean, if your whole email is built like you’re a Nigerian prince and you’re trying to save somebody, right? This is something that mailbox providers are trained to train to react to. But yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I’m backing you up.
Danielle – 00:12:01: On the content bar there.
Danielle – 00:12:02: And it’s a common question and, you.
Guy – 00:12:03: Know, not just mailbox providers, but I think increasingly email consumers are becoming more and more savvy. I mean, you think about your own experience, Danielle, when you see a slightly dodgy email drop in your inbox, what’s those red flags for you? That you look at it and go, I’m not sure I like to look at this.
Danielle – 00:12:23: Well, a couple of things. One, if I’m not me, right? So if I’ve been completely misidentified or I’m being located in a completely different place, I mean, a it’s a bummer because odds are I want whatever is coming to me from those messages, spelling errors, anything that looks a little bit careless, right? And maybe this is just the season, I guess, to notice this, but false personalization is not going to cut it. We have harped on in other venues, right? We’ve harped on personalization, making sure you are creating a one to one relationship between brand and subscriber.
Danielle – 00:13:08: Right?
Danielle – 00:13:09: But if I’m getting an email that’s like personalized for you and it’s just using the you, right? The universal you and I open it and none of that stuff has anything to do with me. I got something for kids. It was, here’s what to get your kids this holiday season, right? I have a dog. He’ll make an appearance at some point, I’m sure, in the background on the couch, but that’s not for me. And it’s just been constant, right, for the last especially the last month as we ramp up and gear up towards the holidays.
Guy – 00:13:49: You know what? I’ve got two dogs, two cats. It’s just as well. I’m recording today’s episode from The Office, so you’d have seen them all by now. So come on, Danielle, let’s test each other out here.
Danielle – 00:14:02: Okay?
Guy – 00:14:03: Tell me about a really crappy email you’ve seen this year.
Danielle – 00:14:08: Okay. Are we naming names?
Guy – 00:14:10: Only if you want to.
Danielle – 00:14:12: Okay, well, what I will say, and this is not necessarily one that I received this year, so I can Mea culpa a little bit in terms of what I’m not going to, but I saw something that was pretty bad. There was an apology issued for it. So I will give the company credit that way, and I won’t even name them. Now I’m chickening out it’s a coffee company, right? So they sent an email promoting one of their blends, right? This wonderful Central American blend from Columbia, which I mean, guys, this is bad for a couple of reasons. One, just because it’s inaccurate. But also this touches on something that I think a lot of younger generations are dealing with right now, which is we want to be culturally appropriate, we want to be sensitive, we want to be empathetic in our email marketing. And like, if we can’t even appropriately, geographically locate the product that we’re talking about, we’ve got a problem that was a little bit of like an OOH we missed the mark on that. However, I bet you the apology email that they sent because everybody kind of loves to watch a car crash and anytime you see a subject line that’s like, oops, here’s what we did. But you that got some good engagement.
Guy – 00:15:36: I love a good ‘Oops’ email.
Danielle – 00:15:38: Yeah, you now you are in the hot seat. Your turn.
Guy – 00:15:43: So, little bit earlier this year, my energy company here in the UK put out an email because the sort of economic conditions were really starting to bite and they wanted to provide the customers with some advice in terms of how to save on their energy costs. But they tried to turn it into a bit of a joke and they were offering advice like, hey, have a nice bowl of hot porridge in the morning and do some star jumps and cover one of your pets. And it actually ended up in them getting into a lot of trouble because it’s a serious topic, especially elderly people. If they can’t afford their heating, they are going to die in their homes.
Danielle – 00:16:23: I’m going to say that’s not funny.
Guy – 00:16:24: It was pretty tone deaf and same kind of thing. They needed to get out an apology and say, hey, sorry, we misread that one pretty promptly, which they did.
Danielle – 00:16:34: Well, I think that’s a big deal right now anyway, because the thing about deliverability is it all ties in together, right? The response you get from subscribers goes into the engagement you get goes into your inbox placement and the way that mailbox providers perceive you. So things that we think we’re doing right, yeah, maybe our reputation is great, but mistakes like that, even for the healthiest vendors, can have major ramifications and it’s a mistake you don’t want to make around this time.
Guy – 00:17:04: Absolutely. And you know, consumers are becoming more demanding. Their expectations are high. For them, email isn’t just a question of sending promotions and offers. They genuinely expect a relationship and they expect the brands that they engage with to be good corporate citizens.
Danielle – 00:17:20: I feel like this is a perfect introductory episode we could have gone on and we will go on 10,000 of these tangents and Hot takes over the course of the podcast. So I just wanted to say I am so excited about this Guy. We’re going to get into all of the email nitty gritty.
Guy – 00:17:41: This has just been awesome. We’re going to have so many good conversations. I can’t wait for the next one already.
Danielle – 00:17:46: I can’t wait while everybody remember to check the show notes. Keep coming back to Email After Hours and we cannot wait to talk to you again soon.
Guy – 00:17:55: Thanks, see you next time. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. And don’t forget to visit senderscore.com for a load more resources to help you become a stronger sender.
Danielle – 00:18:15: To all you sleepless senders out there. Thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.
