Leveling Up Your Email Strategy and Reaching the Inbox with Alyssa and Melissa from ConvertKit | EP. 170 | Business Podcast

Summary

Alyssa and Melissa are email experts who host the Deliverability Defined Podast and work at ConvertKit.

We talk about about email marketing stategies, the upcoming Apple udpate and how to approach it, and tons of other tips and tricks about how to level up your email marketing.

Links from the show:

• Get 2 free weeks when you sign up at ConvertKit for being a listener >>>
• Deliverability Defined Podast

Brandon: 

Hello friends, Welcome to the Edge. 

Today we’re talking with Alyssa and Melissa from convert kit and these two ladies hosts a podcast called delivery ability to find, which is a podcast that convert kid puts on to talk about everything email and I invited them both to come on the show today and talk about everything email, how to do email marketing better, how to make sure that your emails show up in the in box and not in a promotion box or an update box in gmail. 

What’s the difference between the gmail client and Apple and yahoo and how to get your emails delivered better so you can reach your customers on a regular basis. 

Melissa and Melissa are absolute experts at email and you’re going to walk away with this episode with a ton of tips and tricks that you can use to do your email marketing better melissa and melissa from convert kit. 

Here we go. 

Welcome to the Edge podcast, your weekly playbook about the inner game of building a successful business making you a happier, healthier and richer business owner and here’s your host, Brandon White Elissa and Melissa, how are you? 

Hi, how are you all? 

I’m doing good like a shoeless Sunday.

Alyssa: 

I love that I’m going to steal that. 

Alyssa: 

It says it all, doesn’t it? 

Alyssa: 

It does. 

Brandon: 

How’s your day so far? 

Alyssa: 

Oh my God, it’s great. 

Brandon: 

The sun is out here in half Moon Bay. 

Alyssa: 

Normally it’s really foggy in june and july and I’m super excited because our solar panels are producing energy. 

Brandon: 

That’s exciting. 

Brandon: 

How about you Two ladies? 

Alyssa: 

One of you is in Tennessee and one of you is in Seattle, is that right? 

Alyssa: 

That’s courageous. 

Alyssa: 

I’m in Tennessee and I’m good. 

Brandon: 

The sun is finally starting to come out here which is good because I want to get outside after work for sure. 

Alyssa: 

I’m in Seattle and currently as per usual it is overcast but it has been incredible lately so I can’t really complain and I think the sun will start to peek out here this afternoon. 

Brandon: 

So well that is good. 

Brandon: 

I’m so grateful for you both coming on. 

Brandon: 

You know, I listened to you in my car all the time, figure out how to get my emails delivered. 

Brandon: 

That’s so weird. 

Alyssa: 

I know like we’ve had a podcast for a long time but it’s still like, it’s weird to me that people listen to it. 

Alyssa: 

I’m like really? 

Brandon: 

I think I think the same thing if it makes you feel any better. 

Alyssa: 

Oh good. That’s good to hear. 

Brandon: 

It’s sort of weird isn’t it? 

Alyssa: 

Very very strange. I can’t listen to our podcast because I can’t listen to my own voice. 

Brandon: 

I can’t either. 

Brandon: 

Oh well I actually I started that way but I’ve been editing the podcast myself now because I realized that I say um and you know and pause too much. 

Alyssa: 

So so here we go. 

Alyssa: 

Here we go. 

Alyssa: 

It has helped me with that. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s all I would say to you with you but you ladies, I never noticed. 

Alyssa: 

I mean you have a, sometimes I have to do these solo things. 

Alyssa: 

Those are super hard. 

Alyssa: 

You both have a great reporter with one another. 

Alyssa: 

Oh that’s great to hear because sometimes I’m like there are days where we’re both like, oh it stays hard, you know, like not today, but other days and it’s nice to have that like conversational aspect. 

Alyssa: 

So I give you props for being able to do that solo sometimes because that’s really hard. 

Alyssa: 

It’s the hardest. 

Alyssa: 

And then I’m listening to myself thinking really do people listen to this? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, every time we stopped recording, I’m like, oh people are going to hear that. 

Brandon: 

I hope it was good. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, every time I woke up last night because I didn’t interview with a really amazing entrepreneur out of new york. 

Alyssa: 

She’s actually a comedian and she runs this safety app and I said some things and I was like, you know we don’t, I don’t edit, I told both of you ladies and we don’t edit it. 

Alyssa: 

It’s it’s a conversation. 

Alyssa: 

So I I think you both sort of role that way too, don’t you? 

Brandon: 

For the most part, yeah. 

Alyssa: 

For the most part uh we were going to give you a warning melissa does have a puppy. 

Alyssa: 

So the only editing I think we do is if the puppy gets a little, you know, he wants to be part of the podcast. 

Alyssa: 

So we kind of pause respected. 

Alyssa: 

Well if you have a puppy, I’m not editing it out. 

Alyssa: 

That’s part of real life. 

Alyssa: 

I mean, I like that. 

Alyssa: 

So, you know, you can hear my dog, we, I got to jack Russells in a toy poodle in the other room in kennels that could easily start whining at any moment. 

Brandon: 

But you know, that’s part of life. 

Brandon: 

I think part of the podcasting world is is that it’s more authentic than this Polished piece that you spend six weeks getting out century. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, we definitely uh have like moments where we just have to roll punches and we definitely don’t always end up that out. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s very true. 

Alyssa: 

Well, you, you threw me for a little bit of a loop because both of you have different hairstyles and I’m used to seeing on the cover now. 

Alyssa: 

They’re both good. 

Alyssa: 

They’re just different than I’m used to seeing on the uh, on the little icon. 

Alyssa: 

I think probably people have sticker shock with me sometimes too. 

Brandon: 

They’re like, you’re, you’re in a t shirt. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I’m at home. 

Alyssa: 

We have to get scrounged those up during covid. 

Alyssa: 

So we, we had to just use whatever like they had to make us look like we were in the same room and I had spent like an hour trying to go through all of my photos like which one looks like the most plane. 

Brandon: 

And it was really hard for both of us because it was, we couldn’t get our photos taken. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, melissa and I have never been in the same room. Yeah, we never met mild, never well, I think that’s cool. 

Brandon: 

I’m a big remote remote worker person myself and I’ve always run that being in the technology world, but I think you can do it anywhere and for all your listeners who are wondering who Melissa and Melissa are, They are from convert kit, which is our email provider and they run a really cool podcast. 

Brandon: 

I think it’s called deliver build. 

Alyssa: 

I, I know deliver abilities, the main word delivery ability explained or something defined to find, I got close, I just really, I know your icon and these ladies know how to get your email delivered and I have been with converted, if you can believe it when Nathan was not famous. 

Alyssa: 

Well he might have been famous running in the same circles in the online, what we call media or educational material world, back when we were all sort of doing that, but which ages me and probably ages him a little bit from both of you. 

Alyssa: 

But I remember when Nathan was just like had no, there was this idea for this email thing and I, the reason I was attracted to convert kid and Nathan and I didn’t know Nathan as a person, We exchange emails now Now and again the other this weekend, he and I were working on Monday, so we went back and forth like 15 times, but we came from this sort of the same early internet world where we had been on the internet a long time and I was like finally, and I like some other email providers, you know, there’s other ones out there. 

Alyssa: 

But the thing that I liked about convert kit coming out of the gate was, was that it was not, it was built for creators who were doing online media type products or it was a very different thing than just this general email is so, and you have this magical, I’ve told people, I don’t think they do it because they feel like they are nervous about it. 

Brandon: 

But you have this magical feature. 

Brandon: 

That’s better than any other thing that I’ve seen, where you’re able to hit deliver to the people who don’t open it. 

Alyssa: 

And that raises open rates. 

Alyssa: 

I mean it can literally double your open rates. 

Alyssa: 

So it’s a big thing. 

Alyssa: 

So thank you both for taking time out of you’re busy deliver ability. 

Alyssa: 

I can’t imagine how many what you guys ladies experience every day. 

Alyssa: 

But let’s talk about, I think we, we exchanged some emails beforehand. 

Alyssa: 

Seven tips to master your email marketing. 

Alyssa: 

How does that sound? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, that sounds great. 

Alyssa: 

I’m excited. 

Alyssa: 

Do you want to go do one of you want to go with number one? 

Alyssa: 

Sure. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah. 

Alyssa: 

And thank you for having us. 

Alyssa: 

This is so exciting. 

Alyssa: 

Yes, Thank you. 

Alyssa: 

It’s nice to be talking to someone else and we’re not just hearing our own voices over and over. 

Alyssa: 

So yes, we’re excited to be here. 

Alyssa: 

And the first tip we wanted to talk about I think is the baseline for sending good emails that reach the inbox of your subscribers. 

Alyssa: 

And that is to always get permission to add subscribers to your list. 

Alyssa: 

That might seem really straightforward. 

Alyssa: 

But I know there are some ways that some people can collect email addresses and grow their list really quickly, which we all love big numbers and you know, that’s really tempting sometimes to, you know, maybe purchased the list or get a public list of email addresses, but it never goes well, no matter what you do, if you do that, if you send emails to people who didn’t sign up to receive them, you are going to start hitting the spam folder even for people who did want to receive your emails and at that point, all of your efforts are wasted. 

Brandon: 

So we always like to talk about getting permission first, make sure every single person on your email list truly wants to be there. 

Alyssa: 

It was not some sort of trickery or got their email somewhere sneaky, but they want to be there. 

Brandon: 

They want to get your emails and that kind of includes like, I think sometimes people think like cold emailing like just one person here or there from like linkedin profile that doesn’t really count, like that’s still not really permission based and we do see that quite often, you know, we’ll have people be like I, I collected this list from linkedin and that’s still not the best way to go about getting subscribers. 

Brandon: 

It’s, it’s not really permission. 

Brandon: 

And we’re talking do you both think that double opt in is the standard that everybody should strive for? 

Brandon: 

That’s a good question, I would say for most people. 

Brandon: 

Yes, it’s sort of an it depends situation. 

Brandon: 

So the big reason double opt in is so important is that we see all the time. 

Brandon: 

Like really great email senders. 

Brandon: 

Really awesome creators who are doing a great job there, deliver ability will get tanked because they didn’t have double often turned on and a bunch of bad email addresses that were added by bots get added to their list. 

Brandon: 

This happens all the time and it’s so sad to see and it hurts their reputation and it takes some time to repair that. 

Brandon: 

So double opt in is a great way to make sure that if someone gets added to your email us, but they didn’t actually sign up, they’re not going to click to confirm their options so they won’t receive all your emails. 

Alyssa: 

But one little plug for a convert kid, I will say is that we have probably the most robust bought blocking kind of technology I’ve seen and it does a lot of work on the background to be able to detect about sign up using all sorts of different data points. 

Brandon: 

So whenever we see customers use our forms directly on their website to collect subscribers. 

Brandon: 

We don’t see that they have bought issues. 

Brandon: 

So I’m okay with those people not using double opt in as much because they’re protected in another way melissa. 

Brandon: 

Do you have anything without getting too into like another topic to add to that? 

Brandon: 

If you’re cleaning your list regularly to, you don’t typically have to worry as much about that, it’s, we see this happen a lot with people who have large lists that don’t clean their list very often and probably aren’t notice saying like sometimes bought sign ups are really obvious what they have. 

Brandon: 

Like Weird you RLS and the subscriber name field and stuff like that and you know, you instantly know something’s not right. 

Alyssa: 

But other times list bombing can happen and it’s kind of like behind the scenes and you don’t realize what’s going on. 

Alyssa: 

So if you’re one of those people that has a larger list and you’re not like really like scrolling through your list and paying attention to sign ups, but you’re cleaning your list often. 

Brandon: 

That’s going to also help protect you if you’re not using a double often. 

Brandon: 

So that’s just another tidbit. 

Brandon: 

So I think that was number seven, but let’s talk about that because I’m not one to follow the rules regularly. That’s my favorite deliver ability tips. 

Alyssa: 

So I always thought about first, you went right to that. 

Brandon: 

Let’s talk about cleaning the list because I and I’m guilty. 

Alyssa: 

You know, that scares you because you either getting through a funnel most likely or your contact form. 

Alyssa: 

I’m not sure how many people do that anymore or you’re giving someone something or they bought something from you. 

Alyssa: 

I think that about covers it and then you do all this work to get these people’s emails that you want to stay in touch with and ultimately sell something to whatever that is, whether it’s just your message or a product or service and then you’ve got to delete 1000 emails. 

Alyssa: 

So, I mean it’s painful, but it’s important and without, I know you’ve done a whole episode and you probably both could do whole day’s seminar on just that. 

Alyssa: 

There’s a lot of technical things going on there, but why is it so important to clean that list technically as it relates to google seen that things aren’t getting opened and how that affects you actually getting into someone’s inbox. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, this is a great question and I’m excited to talk about it. 

Alyssa: 

Okay, so for the most part, the reason why it’s so important to clean your list and what we’ve seen happen to a lot of singers who again have great intentions but they just haven’t cleaned their list in a long time. 

Alyssa: 

What’s happening in the background is mailbox providers like Gmail like you mentioned or yahoo or whatever it may be, they want to do what’s right for their users for the people reading the emails and they want only the really wanted emails to go to the inbox and pretty much everything else to go to spam because that’s how they keep their customers happy. 

Alyssa: 

The subscriber and the only way they have to know if the email is wanted or not is by looking at user interaction. 

Alyssa: 

So every time you send out an email, your subscribers send signals to mailbox providers that tell them does this belong in the inbox or the spam folder? 

Alyssa: 

And there are positive signals like opens and clicks and replies and all those good things you want as many of those as you can get. 

Alyssa: 

And that is telling mailbox writers. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, they should go to the inbox, let’s end it. 

Alyssa: 

There. 

Alyssa: 

There are negative signals and one of the negative signals a lot of people don’t think about is a no opening emails. 

Alyssa: 

Just leaving messages unopened for a long period of time is a negative signal. 

Alyssa: 

So the more subscribers you have that are sitting there not opening and the longer you allow them to be on your list and you keep sending to them without cleaning them out, the more and more negative that becomes, and it’s going to hurt your domains send a reputation and you’ll probably start to see mailbox providers start to place little bits of messages and spam until you know, when you might see your open rate drop a little bit here and there and then usually it’s more of a sudden drop if you still don’t clean your list after that little hint and then we see people’s open rates drop pretty dramatically. 

Alyssa: 

It’s probably one of the things I help customers with the most when they have like quite a significant drop in open rates, they usually haven’t cleaned their list in a while and from like a marketing standpoint to like not only are those technical aspects of like deliver ability important, but we also like to bring up the fact just to help encourage people to clean their list, you’re typically not going to re engage someone after a certain amount of time. 

Alyssa: 

So if they haven’t been opening your emails for, let’s just say six months, it’s going to take a lot to get them to re engage. 

Alyssa: 

Not that you couldn’t, but that’s probably you’re paying for that subscriber basically. 

Alyssa: 

It’s good to look at it that way and if you continue to pay for that person and there’s nothing really happening in return, whether that’s opens and clicks or maybe they purchase something from you. 

Brandon: 

If they’re not purchasing, they’re probably not going to purchase in the future. 

Brandon: 

So essentially you are kind of wasting your time and money on that person and it’s probably best that you cut ties and if they ever wanted to re engage with you in the future, they can always sign up to your form. 

Brandon: 

Again, it’s not like once you remove them from your list that they’re unable to re engage in the future on their own terms, but it’s it’s definitely causing her to your deliver ability, like your sender reputation as well as from, you know, just your business in general, you’re wasting time and effort on some of those subscribers by continuing to send to them. 

Brandon: 

I think there’s a really good tips and and for any listener who’s listening to this and saying, well that logically makes sense. 

Brandon: 

But that’s going to be really painful. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s going to be painful. 

Brandon: 

It’s painful. 

Brandon: 

We actually run and if you use convert, get they have a script if you go into the customer service that you can put into the automation and we actually run that every week now and after listening to. 

Brandon: 

So I’ve been in the email game a long time, a little bit older than both of you, which asian me a lot. 

Brandon: 

But back in the day with this whole email thing, people would actually email you back and be like, thank you so much for spamming me. 

Brandon: 

They didn’t say that, but they said thank you so much for telling me that this thing was out there because they weren’t getting all this spam intuitively, even I know it, but after listening to that episode and reading some stuff on convert converted and some other sites out there that there’s some good people out there who write about this stuff is that your net Net going to win by getting that open rate higher and you’re going to benefit? 

Brandon: 

So with that some people clean it once a month I think or maybe they clean it every quarter. 

Brandon: 

I have just decided that I’m going to clean it every week. 

Brandon: 

And at the end of the day I really only want people who wanted to hear the message. 

Brandon: 

People do go through cycles as you both pointed out. 

Brandon: 

You may like, oh I’ve had enough of, I’ve had enough of Brandon and then and then a year and a half goes by and you’re like, oh I need that piece now and you can go back and subscribe. 

Brandon: 

But I think it’s a good thing want, here’s a question for you. 

Alyssa: 

What happens when you, which a lot of businesses do run a gmail corporate account and they open it with either an outlook or apple mail client does google still get the signals that way. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, that’s a good question. 

Alyssa: 

So in that scenario, whatever platform they’re using to open the message is the one that’s determining inbox placement. 

Alyssa: 

So google can see what they do. 

Alyssa: 

But it doesn’t really matter as much. 

Alyssa: 

It matters more that their mailbox client is seeing that activity because that’s going to like Apple mail for example, they have their own spam filter and their own spam filtering settings so they’re going to be the ones that matter and they do see it as well. 

Alyssa: 

I got you. 

Alyssa: 

And what other question did I have on that? 

Alyssa: 

I don’t know, it’ll come to me because it’s number seven and Melissa jumped us ahead. 

Alyssa: 

So we’re going to say something about it again. 

Alyssa: 

I think that’s all All great advice on the permission and cleaning your list. 

Alyssa: 

What is number 2? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah. 

Alyssa: 

So we kind of touched on number two a little bit, but we can get into some more detail and number two is to optimize for positive engagement in decrease negative engagement. 

Alyssa: 

So some really, I think key pieces of information here to know is that the positive engagement subscribers can take is opening, clicking and replying to your emails and marking you as a safe sender, those sorts of things. 

Alyssa: 

If your message goes to their spam folder and the market is not spam, that’s a really positive signal. 

Alyssa: 

So if anyone ever tells you, hey, your message into my spam folder, you should definitely ask them to mark you as not spam. 

Alyssa: 

But the one I really want to call out there is replies because we see this as a huge boost for deliver ability. 

Alyssa: 

And it’s not one that people think of often and especially people out there who want to get out of the promotions tab in gmail, replying helps mailbox providers see that there is a more 1 to 1 close relationship there it looks like and kind of hyper engagement. 

Alyssa: 

And usually once you’ve replied to someone’s email, their emails are going to always go to your inbox and specifically the primary tab. 

Alyssa: 

This is when I love to suggest to people who are maybe practicing, like who have really good deliver ability practices already in place, but they’re struggling on the marketing side trying to figure out what other things they can do to improve because you kind of, you know, you have to have what you can’t really have one without the other. 

Alyssa: 

So I really like to tell people when I look through their emails and try to find ways to help them increase engagement. 

Alyssa: 

I always say, try to ask your audience a question they can’t not answer. 

Brandon: 

It’s my favorite thing to tell people because I think it kind of helps them get in a different mindset as like what Melissa said with that one on one conversation, You know, you might be sending to a group of 100,000 subscribers, but everyone could have an individual answer that’s different. 

Brandon: 

And that does make you look like you have A relationship with 100,000 people instead of looking like a business sending to 100,000 people in a promotional way. 

Brandon: 

That’s great advice. 

Brandon: 

What do you think about this trick? 

Alyssa: 

I don’t know that it’s a trick. 

Alyssa: 

I dumped into it. 

Alyssa: 

I used my main real email address as the sender address because when I learned that the reply stuff matters that and my email is b at Brandon, see white dot com. 

Alyssa: 

So I use that email as my daily email. 

Brandon: 

And what I put into convert it as the center because I think it helps. 

Brandon: 

So I’m wondering that it sees me replying to people. 

Brandon: 

It’s these people replying to me. 

Brandon: 

And then when it gets our email list, I think right now is like 18,300. 

Brandon: 

When those bulk email goes out, maybe it knows that this bulk email went out, but it still sees that be at Brandon. 

Brandon: 

See white dot com email as a real email. 

Brandon: 

Does that work? 

Brandon: 

Because I see some people put in support at or info app because they’re like, oh, well I can’t answer all this. 

Brandon: 

Well, first of all, that’s a whole separate discussion. 

Brandon: 

Like you should probably think about getting in touch with your customers. 

Brandon: 

But if you’re Procter and Gamble maybe, But don’t they have like 100,000 people to answer email? 

Alyssa: 

I mean, I can’t find a reason why you wouldn’t want to talk to your customers. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, that’s such a good point. 

Alyssa: 

So most of the reputation lies within the domain, you know, so whatever is coming after the at symbol. 

Alyssa: 

So it wouldn’t make a huge difference. 

Alyssa: 

Usually whether you send from, you know, hello at or be at, but it definitely might help you. 

Alyssa: 

Some we’ve seen it have the inverse effect for, you know, some people will have an email address that they, their sales team sends tons of cold emails from and then they use that for their marketing and that doesn’t go well because their sales team is hurting their reputation. 

Alyssa: 

So it’s definitely not hurting you that you’re doing it that way. 

Alyssa: 

And it could be giving you some sort of boost from your personal messages, sharing that reputation with your more marketing messages. 

Alyssa: 

Uh, I see that you both have this battle rhythm and and Elissa goes first and Melissa goes second. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s really good because then you have to moderate but Melissa, do you have anything? 

Alyssa: 

I don’t, I think I was I mean unless I answered it exactly how well. 

Alyssa: 

Perfect. 

Alyssa: 

Let’s go on to number three, which is focus on clicks purchases in light of, I’m glad we’re going to talk about the Apple privacy changes. 

Alyssa: 

This is a fun one. 

Alyssa: 

Well, if you want to start to start, okay, keep our caden. 

Alyssa: 

Sure, sounds good. 

Alyssa: 

So yeah, this is a big one. 

Brandon: 

I feel like we could talk about it for a long time. 

Brandon: 

So I’ll try not to go too deep. 

Brandon: 

But if you haven’t heard already, Apple is making some changes that are going to be in their new OS that is released around september, I believe. 

Brandon: 

You know, it takes some time for people to actually do the downloading. 

Brandon: 

But essentially for any person who uses the Apple mail app on their phone, laptop, ipad, Apple watch any of that with a new operating system. 

Alyssa: 

Apple will show their emails as automatically being opened no matter what, whether they open a message or not, it’s going to say they opened it. 

Brandon: 

So for a lot of senders, open rates are going to skyrocket potentially in the fall. 

Brandon: 

It’s hard, nothing has happened yet. 

Alyssa: 

So it’s hard to know for sure. 

Brandon: 

We don’t want to panic too much, but we also do want everyone to be prepared. 

Brandon: 

So there’s a chance that come september you’re open rates are going to be way more inaccurate than ever before and it will be time to focus on other metrics, which has always been a good practice anyways because open rates have always been a little not the most accurate metric. 

Brandon: 

So we highly recommend using clicks purchases any other sort of conversion metrics you have you focus on to measure the success of your emails in light of this new Apple change. 

Brandon: 

So like one example I have is that I look at our podcast downloads pretty closely every day, you know, see what’s happening and right after convert kit sends its newsletter, which happens on a certain day. 

Brandon: 

And I know when it happens, I look at our podcast metrics because it always links to our podcast and I can see it go up and I can see how successful that email campaign was for our podcast. 

Brandon: 

So instead of looking at the open rate only, you know, focusing really heavy on that open rate. 

Brandon: 

What I really want is to drive podcast downloads and I’m looking at how that email is able to do it and it’s really helpful to focus on that because I can see, oh wow, when we had the podcast at the very top of the email is the first link we had way more downloads than if it was the third thing down. 

Brandon: 

It got way less downloads. 

Brandon: 

So yeah, we recommend looking at other pieces of data and not using open rates as your number one top priority metric. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I mean, and this has been something that people have been talking about for a while, like in the deliver ability world, open rates are considered a vanity metric because they can be skewed even before this announcement was made. 

Brandon: 

Sometimes people will see a huge drop in open rates and it’s because their emails being clipped because their email file sizes too large or maybe they like did something to their email template and the open tracking pixel is not even there at all. 

Brandon: 

So there opens weren’t being monitored. 

Brandon: 

So there’s like, there’s a lot of reasons that open rates can be sometimes a little bit sketchy if you will because yeah, they’re just, they’re not always accurate. 

Brandon: 

And so that’s why we really like to encourage people to focus on other metrics in general. 

Brandon: 

Like it’s a good thing to start now, regardless of the impact of what this apple change will have. And like Elissa said to, we don’t want to panic too much because we don’t really know what’s going to happen. We’ve had a lot of customers reach out and ask, you know what we think things are going to look like. 

Brandon: 

And it’s just really hard to say right now because um, this, this sort of happened unless has also mentioned this before. 

Brandon: 

Like with the promotions tab with gmail when they announced that people were really worried about the promotions tab and everyone’s kind of figured out like it’s going to be okay even though that’s there. So it’s hard to say right now. But I think focusing on like I said those purchases and clicks, which people should do anyway. We’ll just kind of better you as a sender in the long run. 

Brandon: 

I think it’s good advice but it’s still scaring the hell out of me because, and I think you both point out a really good point that the pixel tracking, Which is one x 1 little for listeners. 

Brandon: 

1, 1 x one pixel really small Little image that’s clear that’s put in an email and when someone opens and it draws it and it’s really used to, we used to call it the vanity metric back in the early or the late 90s on websites was how many hits did you have? 

Alyssa: 

And it was how many times images loaded? 

Alyssa: 

It was such a joke because you could just load up your page with like 50 Images and it was 50 hits, but no one understood what that meant. 

Alyssa: 

Nonetheless, it sends a message back to the server tells the server that that image was loaded. 

Alyssa: 

And you assume the person opened the email for listeners out there who want to understand what that is. 

Alyssa: 

I as an Apple user who uses the Apple email client have turned off external images loading on purpose. 

Alyssa: 

So I think we all experienced some of this Anyway, having said that I am worried and you both can answer this that the stuff that we just covered which was cleaning your list now becomes and one of the urgency, urgent things that I have and why I’m cleaning my list every single week right now, up until this fall event, that could be a non event. 

Alyssa: 

So it’s not gonna hurt anything that we’re doing this or that the listeners, I encourage you to clean your list as a listen melissa have said, but I would probably do it more urgently now is because I want my list when that hits to be as clean as possible based on this extra metric that we were getting. 

Alyssa: 

Isn’t that gonna isn’t it gonna make it? 

Alyssa: 

Let’s just assume that they do say everything’s open. 

Alyssa: 

Well now that metrics out the window, like no one’s going to believe it, How are we going to our engagement quote unquote is going to happen. 

Alyssa: 

Have to happen to clean our list on click links. 

Alyssa: 

But we all know that click links even as targeted as you could be. 

Alyssa: 

You’re still seeing in the most part single digits. 

Alyssa: 

I mean is that fair to say at least from across the industry. 

Alyssa: 

So what’s the advice putting you on the spot? 

Alyssa: 

How are we going to clean our email us? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, it’s so scary. 

Alyssa: 

I know this is my number one, like biggest fear around all of it. 

Alyssa: 

And like you said, I’m not surprised it’s happening like I get the privacy concerns but also as a deliver ability person, I’m like oh my goodness, this is going to get crazy. 

Alyssa: 

So I would recommend like you just said clean your list before september. 

Alyssa: 

Really good. 

Alyssa: 

But then after september there are a couple of things I would recommend. 

Alyssa: 

First this is something we, and I’m sure a lot of other email service providers are exploring like helping customers do, but until then I would consider embedding some sort of little like heart or a thumbs up or something within your email so that people can like your emails or those up their email, your emails so that can kind of act like an open no one has to, you know, read your article or do whatever you’re asking them to do, but maybe they’ll like your email. 

Alyssa: 

So giving people more opportunities to click in that way. 

Alyssa: 

One thing I have to give credit to one of my colleagues from a previous job. 

Alyssa: 

She’s amazing. 

Alyssa: 

Her name is Alison Guti she’s another deliver ability person. 

Alyssa: 

Her idea for people with like newsletters Really text heavy emails is don’t include as much text as you would in your message. 

Alyssa: 

Have a read more button, another sneaky way to get somewhere clicks. 

Alyssa: 

So in general kind of evaluate your email, see how can I get more clicks less. 

Alyssa: 

You know people I would say look through your message and see can people get everything they need to just by opening because if not if so you want to try and get them to another page to be able to do what they need to do then when it comes to actually cleaning your list this is going to be the scariest part. 

Alyssa: 

So I would still obviously clean the people who are not opening the non apple users who are unengaged but then you’re going to have a chunk of people who look like they’re opening but they’re not but you can’t tell who they are But if they stay on your list and they’re not opening it could hurt your deliver ability. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s a little scary. 

Brandon: 

So I would say send an opt in confirmation email every maybe 3-6 months for anyone who hasn’t clicked purchased any of those other things you’re wanting and you know make it one of those. 

Brandon: 

Do you still want to receive my emails type of emails but before then really target them. 

Brandon: 

Like send them emails with links to click see if they can show you a sign of life. 

Brandon: 

But if you get to your final straw with them, I would send them that final. 

Brandon: 

Do you still wanna be on my list? 

Brandon: 

Click this button. 

Brandon: 

But one piece of I guess light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing. 

Brandon: 

A silver lining is that I heard someone else say this in a slack group somewhere. 

Brandon: 

If someone has added their email address to an Apple device that in itself is sort of a positive sign that at least it’s a real email address. 

Brandon: 

It’s not like a spam trap which we have a whole episode on that. 

Brandon: 

If you need to know what that is because someone going and adding their email address onto the apple mail client on their device in general. At least it’s a real human. 

Brandon: 

It’s going to be less risky in that regard. So that is a positive sign if you do keep these people on your list because it looks like they’re opening. 

Brandon: 

I wouldn’t recommend doing that. But it could be worse I guess is what I’m saying and I don’t even think I have anything to add to that. 

Brandon: 

I was so worried. No one’s okay. No, it was great. I mean we’ve obviously been having this conversation, I can burkett internally about ways we can help customers. You know, we are concerned about it and we want to make sure that we provide as much information to people as as we find out what’s going on and yeah, I mean unless it was the one who thought of the like and the heart and I was like that is the best idea. I mean let’s I don’t know, I don’t know how people feel about social media. 

Brandon: 

Like it’s definitely two different camps, but if we can kind of use what we know from social media and email, I mean that’s that could work. So it’s a it’s a great idea. 

Brandon: 

Do you think that the and I guess we don’t know, do you think they’re going to try to to filter the clear pixel or do you think that if we embedded another picture? 

Alyssa: 

I was thinking when you said, I wasn’t thinking like, but I think that’s genius. 

Alyssa: 

But also it could be just a heart icon or is Apple going to likely, you know, is it going to be any image that draws? 

Alyssa: 

They’re just gonna say, I’m trying to figure out if they’re, if they’re looking for the clear pixel or they’re just going to basically say you’re not going to track anybody by what loaded effectively. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, I think they are going to not allow you to track anything but also kind of the view I’ve told people is, I wouldn’t if Apple is saying, you know, we’re going to make these privacy changes and someone has opted into that privacy change. 

Alyssa: 

I wouldn’t try and add another pixel they don’t know about if they’re saying they don’t want to be tracked. 

Alyssa: 

So the heart, you know, it will work for you as long as you’re having them click it and that’s how you’re recording, clicks are still good. 

Alyssa: 

So get all the clicks you can. 

Alyssa: 

I think, I think it’s a good idea. 

Alyssa: 

I don’t want to harp on it, but it’s a, it’s a for any listeners out there. 

Alyssa: 

If you’re wondering why we’re spending so much time and have some anxiety around it is I think the apple Mail client owns over 65% of the current market. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I don’t remember the exact metric but it’s definitely over there 3%. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s high. 

Brandon: 

So we’re not all is not lost. 

Brandon: 

Uh there are Google people out there and they are looking in their browser so focus on clicks and make people collect. 

Alyssa: 

# four is secure. 

Alyssa: 

Your sign up forms and you don’t utilize double opt in. 

Alyssa: 

What does that mean? 

Brandon: 

Do you wanna go first Melissa switch things up? 

Alyssa: 

Sure. 

Alyssa: 

So we kind of touched on this a little bit but it’s just important to make sure that when you do have forms that you’re using to collect email addresses kind of like I mentioned previously to you, you want a valid email address that provides value to you as a center and so using a double opt in is going to protect you and your forms and you’re going to try to prevent list bombing from happening and prevent bots from adding invalid addresses or addresses that belong to real people who don’t want to be on your list because that is extremely detrimental to you as a senator. 

Alyssa: 

We don’t want to see that. 

Brandon: 

And yeah, I mean it does depend this isn’t, I think this kind of used to be like the Holy Grail rule, you know, make sure you use double opt in and like Alyssa said earlier, we have really good protection on our forms. 

Brandon: 

And I think if you’re now, I don’t even want to talk about cleaning your list anymore. 

Brandon: 

If you’re cleaning your list, if you’re paying attention to the sign ups that are coming in from your forms, it’s not the end all be all, but it’s definitely going in my mind like I don’t personally have an email list and if I did I would feel so much better knowing that I had a double opt in there just protecting my list and knowing that I was sending two people who genuinely wanted to be on my list. 

Brandon: 

I think that’s a question that’s hard for a lot of centers they’ll say I have a double often and I have a lot of unconfirmed subscribers and this is always a tough one because I don’t want to be harsh and say, well maybe they don’t want to be on your list actually, but it’s true, it can happen sometimes you sign up for something and you change your mind or it gets buried in your emails. 

Brandon: 

You know, we always say there’s there’s a human on the other side of the email address and doesn’t happen automatically. There’s been times where I’ve gone in a week later and I’ve confirmed my subscription to someone’s email list. So you really you’re protecting yourself from invalid or bad addresses and you’re you’re keeping a quality list by using a double opt in. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, that’s perfect. I would say for those people who are you know concerned about using double opt in and you know they look at their list and they see a bunch of unconfirmed subscribers so people sign up for their list but they never click to confirm their option. 

Brandon: 

Usually there are three different reasons that happens. So one is the person didn’t actually sign up, they don’t know who you are. Their email address got added by a but in that case double opt in is protecting you and that’s wonderful. So you want to keep it on second is now I’m creating what I was gonna say but I know for sure when I was going to say is second if you go through your list of unconfirmed subscribers and you actually you see that they’re opening the messages but they didn’t click to confirm. 

Brandon: 

One thing we have found is that some people will try and make their confirmation email look so nice and be so custom they actually overdo it. 

Brandon: 

Their confirmation email is also you know a download of a pdf and subject line says here’s your free pdf and the button that’s confirming their often says download the pdf. 

Brandon: 

We found a lot of times people wanted that email, they want to be on your list but they’re busy and they’re thinking oh I’ll download that pdf later then they forget or something. They didn’t know they had to click that button to stay on your list. So I would say if you’re sending an option confirmation email whenever you send it make sure that button is really clear and people know if I want to be on this list that I just signed up for. I have to click this button to keep receiving emails but you see that one all the time. Yes we do actually more than you would think. 

Brandon: 

Yes, I can’t remember the third reason I was going to say. But I would say those are yeah I’m sure it will. Something. 

Brandon: 

Well my company so the I think that’s good advice. 

Alyssa: 

I think we can as copy you know there’s email and there’s all the technical stuff and then there’s this whole other art of writing copy and email which is a whole separate thing but sometimes you know who’s really good at it. 

Alyssa: 

Not like he needs a plug but Neil Patel is really good at at the shortest emails on the planet and he just tells you what it what it isn’t. 

Alyssa: 

I think sometimes we just need to say if you want to be on my list, click this link or you won’t be on my list. 

Alyssa: 

Exactly. 

Alyssa: 

People like transparency. 

Alyssa: 

They do. 

Alyssa: 

It doesn’t always feel the most creative and I can be the first one to say like I definitely like to make things a little bit more snappy but it’s really true. 

Alyssa: 

I see countless incentive emails and people will use that as like their initial email like the welcome email instead of using that as the often confirmation. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s another piece of advice that you try to give people is that you do need to make sure that you’re making that button obvious and then send a sequence or something automated after the fact I think that I think that’s a good piece of ice and just keep it simple. 

Alyssa: 

We’re gonna move on to number five. 

Alyssa: 

Did we lose Alyssa? 

Brandon: 

I think I’m here. 

Brandon: 

I don’t know how your camera disappeared. 

Brandon: 

My zoom. 

Brandon: 

Just kind of freaked out for a second but I think I’m back. 

Alyssa: 

Maybe think you’re back but your camera is definitely not. 

Alyssa: 

That’s so weird. 

Brandon: 

Well I can hear you. 

Alyssa: 

All right well well look at the black screen for now. 

Brandon: 

Yeah the number five is what is number five that we’re doing. 

Alyssa: 

Pay attention to sending frequency and don’t send too often or too little. 

Alyssa: 

There we are. 

Alyssa: 

Your back and back just in time. 

Alyssa: 

I thought you were getting a UPS package I wish at the door. 

Alyssa: 

I’m here. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I can jump into this one. 

Alyssa: 

So I know this is one melissa and I see all the time is people write to us and they say, oh no, my open rates are dropping, something’s happening, I need help. 

Brandon: 

You know, all my messages are going to stand or whatever. 

Alyssa: 

But once we really start to dig in, we see messages are going to the inbox, everything looks okay. 

Brandon: 

What else could be going on? And sometimes we’ll just pick some subscribers on their list at random and look at their history and we’re like, oh you’re sending people to emails a day or three Males there every day you’re sending an email and in those cases the subscriber is so burned out. 

Brandon: 

They see you in their inbox multiple times a day or every single day and they just un engage. 

Brandon: 

A lot of people don’t actually click that unsubscribe button, they just keep you in their inbox unready and it’s going to hurt your deliver ability, but they probably still like are interested and they’re just waiting to get an email from you. 

Brandon: 

That is what they want to receive. So that’s one thing I would say pay really close attention to is how often are you sending emails because as melissa has said so many times there are people and humans at the other end of the message and they’re busy and you want to treat their inbox with respect and not send them more messages than makes sense for whatever your strategy is and your business is. 

Brandon: 

And then we also see issues around not sending frequently enough. 

Brandon: 

That’s not usually as much of an issue. But just make sure you send at least once a month to keep your sender reputation up because it’s sort of like a so we say this all the time kind of like a credit for kind of situation where if you don’t have any credit, you are seen as a risk. 

Brandon: 

And it’s the same thing if you’re not sending enough email, if you take months off at a time, mailbox providers sort of forget who you are and then whenever you do send your email, they’re going to treat you with more suspicion. 

Brandon: 

So it’s important to send enough but not too much. 

Brandon: 

I think, you know, if you use convert tags and segmenting is great. But oftentimes when you aren’t checking in on those individual subscribers, you won’t realize that they’re part of five tags and six segments and they are being sent. Even if your intention is not for that to happen, it is happening and that’s why they’re receiving three meals a day. I just helped a customer with this this week and the frequency was just like borderline too much. But it was because they were being added to like multiple automation ins via multiple tags. And so they’re like, oh that’s great, I can fix that but it’s kind of, it happens I think as you start to build things out, so it is important to pay attention to that as you have those subscribers especially who are like a little newer because they’re just getting into your content and you don’t want to overload them with things. 

Brandon: 

I had another point. 

Brandon: 

I don’t know what’s happening. I had another point too and I can’t remember what it was. 

Brandon: 

I’ll fill in. I’ll ask a question and you’ll both remember. Probably. So how do you know melissa you said? 

Alyssa: 

Oh I checked in. 

Alyssa: 

I know that the emails are going into the inbox, which I assume is likely google type language. 

Alyssa: 

How do you check that? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, that’s a great question. So what melissa and I do because you know, we’re helping so many different types of centers with this sort of issue and where you’re diagnosing and figuring out what’s going on. So I would say our first step is that we send ourselves a test email from the customer’s account. 

Brandon: 

We have tests gmail accounts, yahoo accounts. Hotmail accounts and first we see what that’s looking like because it’s a real email address that we’re monitoring and yeah, we can get a good idea um a lot of times it’s going to go to the inbox. But for some customers having issues, we do see like, oh I want to stand in gmail, we can pull the message headers, which is a whole other technical thing, but we can also, usually there’s a banner at the top of the message that tells a little bit about why I went to spam. 

Brandon: 

But then beyond that, we also will do deliver ability audits for customers who need it or are pro plan customers happy to do one for you if you would like one. 

Brandon: 

And essentially as an inbox placement test using what’s called seedless addresses, their email addresses that don’t belong to real people, they’re sort of automated email addresses and we will import those into your account. 

Brandon: 

Send it, send an email to that list specifically delete them from your account. 

Brandon: 

And then those email addresses will populate data for us and say whether the message went to their inbox or spam folder and that has tons of different mailbox providers within that seedless test. So that’s a great way for us to gauge whether messages are going to the inbox or spam folder on a more general level, there is always stand filtering on an individual level too. 

Brandon: 

So for example, your messages could be in general hitting the inbox at gmail but you might have one gmail subscriber who never opens your messages. 

Alyssa: 

So gmail is sending your message to their spam folder. 

Brandon: 

So that’s a little bit different and more about individual subscriber engagement rather than like overall your deliver ability and your reputation. 

Brandon: 

Yeah. 

Brandon: 

Subscriber filtering also like even if you’re engaged. But you have certain filters set up on your in your own individual email account. People sometimes don’t even realize they have certain filters set up and that can cause issues for everybody because no one knows how to fix that. Except for the person with the email address. 

Brandon: 

Well, yes, I want that. 

Alyssa: 

I don’t even know I could get that. So, so we’ll put that as a follow up and anybody who’s a converted person I guess on the pro plan you get that. It sounds like if you request it, which is a huge service and for any listeners who are using another email provider or don’t want to do that. 

Alyssa: 

I haven’t had a customer support, so to speak or customer experience, people help you. 

Alyssa: 

You can do it on your own because you could sign up your own emails and and test it. 

Alyssa: 

And I encourage everybody listening to do that. So I think that’s great advice and I’m looking forward to hearing that report of which I will report back to listeners on how our email list is doing because I’m I’m curious are ever since we’ve been cleaning in our open rates have gone significantly. 

Alyssa: 

It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re running better copy shorter emails are you know, sort of isolate what that is. 

Alyssa: 

Let’s go to number six. 

Alyssa: 

What is # 6? 

Alyssa: 

You have Alyssa? 

Alyssa: 

Yeah. 

Alyssa: 

So number six is to send consistent, high quality emails with clear call to actions and I’m sure sounds easier said than done like we all want to do that. But this is mostly speaking to maybe the senators who are sending super super promotional emails and they’re sort of treating email as a way to like last something out and hope to get something back. 

Brandon: 

Like I’m just going to send this out. 

Brandon: 

I don’t really have a huge big plan, but I linked my product there and I hope someone buys it instead of thinking of it that way. Try and think about what value can you deliver to subscribers every time you send an email it should be something that subscribers will either learn from, benefit from. 

Brandon: 

Maybe there’s a discount code. 

Brandon: 

You know, there’s lots of different ways to deliver value to your subscribers, but try and make sure all of your emails are consistently high quality and they have clear call to actions. I think a great example of this that a lot of creators are doing now are like newsletters. 

Brandon: 

So for example, we help tim Ferriss a lot he’s a convert customer and I love getting his emails like they’re consistent. 

Brandon: 

The five bullet friday. 

Brandon: 

It comes every friday friday and he has the quote. 

Brandon: 

It’s very, you know what to expect. 

Alyssa: 

Yes, that is amazing. 

Brandon: 

I think any center, no matter what you do can adopt that sort of strategy of being extremely consistent. People know when they’re going to get your email, they know what the layout is going to be, they know what to expect and it’s always good. Like it’s never a disappointment. I would say. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I can say from looking at hundreds of accounts every single day, the people who have figured out the centers who have figured out how to send like exactly an example. You know, every friday they would say typically have higher open rates than people who send randomly and then to add kind of along to the consistent, high quality. I would also say targeting certain parts of your audience and making sure that they have subscriber, what is the word I’m trying to think of? I just totally blanked preferences. Subscriber preferences so that they can choose the kind of content that they want to see because not everyone’s going to want to receive the same thing, especially if you have a really large list. So that kind of goes back to like segmenting and tagging like I talked about earlier, but I think that’s actually the people who are doing it well are also really utilizing that and making sure that people have options and that they’re receiving the content that they want to see. 

Brandon: 

So you both see tens of millions, hundreds of millions probably of emails and and statistics. 

Brandon: 

Is there really a best day in time to send emails or is it that you’re more consistent than people expected? 

Alyssa: 

Good question. 

Alyssa: 

I would melissa. 

Alyssa: 

Do you want to go first? 

Alyssa: 

No, I figured I wanted to make sure that at least we have an honor. 

Alyssa: 

We have, we have honest experts like, okay, I’ll go because I’ve looked into this, you know, on the convert side, like I can tell you, I think thursday mornings are the highest open rate time. 

Alyssa: 

If you’re looking at all of the opens that happen on the market. 

Brandon: 

But I would say that doesn’t mean every center should go send thursday mornings. 

Brandon: 

If we all do that. 

Alyssa: 

It’s not going to be the highest one anymore because everyone is going to be slammed on thursday mornings. 

Brandon: 

But I would say for every individual cinder, there is the best time. 

Brandon: 

So I would do testing to figure out what that is for you. 

Brandon: 

So for example, it depends on what your audience is. 

Brandon: 

Like if you are sending to a lot of business email addresses and a lot of people are reading your emails at work like a monday morning maybe before they get into the office, but right. You know, around them, maybe like six or seven a.m. Might be perfect. They get to their desk on monday, they have coffee and they’re going through their inbox and they’re going to see your email. But I know for myself, if I’m talking about my gmail email address, not my work address, my personal one. So all the people sending me kind of promotional emails. I don’t read my email while at work. I really don’t look at it that much monday through friday, you’re probably going to have better luck with me on the weekends, so it depends on your audience. 

Brandon: 

And I would say everyone should do their own testing, figure out which email gets them the highest open rate and then once you find your sweet spot, use it consistently and I think that consistency will help even more. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s kind of unfortunate because there are a lot of questions that people ask and I feel like my answer a lot of times as well, what it’s your audience, it depends on your audience, but it really does, it helps to pay attention to metrics and figure out what people are doing. 

Brandon: 

I think that oftentimes we like to kind of glaze over certain metrics because we’re paying attention to other things and there’s a lot of important information that people can gain from paying attention to some of those metrics and testing, like Melissa said, like it’s a good thing to try new things out, but once you find the right thing, just stick to it. 

Brandon: 

I think a lot of people try to find like innovative new, what can we do differently, but that doesn’t always mean better or, you know, working more efficiently than other people. So I definitely think testing and finding what works is the best piece of advice. 

Brandon: 

I think it’s great advice and and high level my takeaway is that you got to do the work, you gotta understand. 

Alyssa: 

I mean we all look, we’re human. I mean we we would like the magic button, but if we all do it on thursday morning and I won’t mention who I was talking to a podcaster who has a really well known podcast. And I asked him, I was like, hey, what What are you releasing your podcast and you said 4:30 on east coast time. 

Alyssa: 

And then I did the research and I’m like, well I don’t we’re all in sort of the same segment. 

Alyssa: 

I don’t want to release it 4 30 because he’s releasing at 4 30. 

Alyssa: 

I want to release at 5 30. 

Alyssa: 

And then I tested it and I actually been testing every single day of the week so far. I thought Sundays was going to be a winner. It’s not for me, saturday’s actually you’re good. But I’ve I’ve sent it on monday. Like you both have or listen, you you mentioned like maybe that’s a good time and I bomb like, You know, I’m at like 7%. 

Alyssa: 

I mean I’m a total loser. 

Alyssa: 

And then I got it. 

Alyssa: 

But then I got to do this resend so do your research out there on your email list and you got to do work. Like this stuff is hard, it’s not build an email list. 

Alyssa: 

Hit send and make money. Although there might be some marketers out there which we won’t name any names of who say that, but you got to do the work. So let’s we’re at all. Are we at number seven already? 

Alyssa: 

I think. So they are, we’re back to where we started. 

Brandon: 

So melissa, what is number seven? 

Alyssa: 

Clean your list regularly and until fall, especially now I’m just getting up cleaning your list is I always talk about it. 

Brandon: 

I mean there’s the technical side of things with your sender reputation which we’ve talked about and I always like to dive into the marketing side of things, which is who are you trying to attract or do you have subscribers that are valuable or are they people just sitting on your list who are unengaged because those people aren’t going to turnover into purchasers most likely. 

Brandon: 

And I think we have so many examples that convert it that have been used in the past and creator highlights or whatever. And there are people with smaller lists who have done extremely well for themselves because they are so in tune with what their audience wants. Again, I say this all the time too. 

Brandon: 

But I look at tons of accounts and accounts that have really large subscriber list and they’re open rates there click engagement. 

Brandon: 

It’s not anything compared to people with and not always obviously, but there are accounts like this who aren’t even getting close to what accounts with 5000 subscribers have and those people are doing really well because they are leveling up every time their list grows, but they’re so focused on providing value to those people and cleaning their list to make sure that they always have engaged subscribers. 

Brandon: 

They’re doing so well. And so I’ve always said try not to focus on the number of people on your list, but the quality of your list because there is a value to each subscriber. 

Brandon: 

Yeah. And I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this on our podcast. This is some secret advice, but And you know, this won’t work for everyone. 

Brandon: 

And I wish I remember who it was. One of our customers have the most creative approach to this. I was like, man, that is so smart that they like cap their newsletter and I think like 15,000 subscribers and then they have a wait list after that. But if you don’t engage, if you don’t like open and click regularly, you’re kicked out and people from the waitlist get in. So it’s sort of like this secret like club newsletter club, but it’s like you have to engage if you want to stay on the list. 

Brandon: 

So you can always, you know, repackage engagement that way and to make it more exciting. But yes, just like you said, analysts cleaning your list, it can be painful. I think the more frequently you do it, the less painful it is. 

Brandon: 

I have one person in particular, I will not name that has a list of over a million that started to run into issues because they had never clean their list and it was so sad. There opens were dropping like crazy and when you have gone that long without cleaning your list and it’s over a million big number painful. 

Brandon: 

It’s so painful because you have to start cleaning out hundreds of thousands of people at once. And it, it was sad and it’s sad for me hearing it. 

Brandon: 

Yes, it’s terrible. 

Brandon: 

So we did get creative with them in case I’m saying this out loud and you’re in that situation. 

Alyssa: 

We didn’t remove everyone at once because that would have just been too hard to do. We just excluded anyone who is cold for a long time. 

Brandon: 

There open rate started to go up and up and up and now they’re higher than ever And we’re very slowly starting to re engage all of those people, but they’re in very small trunks like 20,000 to 50,000 at a time starting to send them some emails, see if they’ll become engaged again and then finally sending them that, you know, do you want to stay on my list email and if they don’t click, they’re gone. 

Brandon: 

But we’re doing it in smaller groups and giving them a chance to become reengaged. 

Brandon: 

I have two questions actually totally stole my because we must have listen, I don’t know, I forget who who I was listening to or read about the cap and I am actually thinking about, so our email list for the podcast is like I said about 18,200 after you both do this deliver ability magic thing assessment. 

Alyssa: 

I’m actually thinking about capping a 10,000 or it could be 11,000 or 12,000. 

Alyssa: 

But whoever my people are, whoever my people are like, well I don’t know what that is, but whoever the people are on the list that are, I think in convert kit there’s five stars or five levels. 

Alyssa: 

I guess it would be, it would be the, I would keep the first three stars or the first three levels, which is I think up to six months or three months I forget. 

Alyssa: 

I think it’s six months, six months and that’s actually a little long for me. 

Alyssa: 

So maybe I could be convinced to go to one and two and basically just say That’s it because I’d rather have a 10,000 person email list with an 85% open rate then. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah. 

Brandon: 

Or you know, I, I used to have 100,000 person email list and it was cool. 

Alyssa: 

Like it’s good bragging rights. 

Alyssa: 

But you know, at the end of day, how much money are we making? 

Alyssa: 

And or how many downloads or how many purpose driven things are we getting? 

Alyssa: 

So that was the first thing. 

Brandon: 

And then what was the second thing? 

Alyssa: 

Oh man? 

Alyssa: 

Oh no, it was so good. 

Alyssa: 

Uh we’re not cleaning your list. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, I know. 

Alyssa: 

Gosh, Maybe, you know, I’m not on caffeine anymore. 

Alyssa: 

So maybe that’s Oh, but I’m on a vegetable diet which is really tuned my mom like I’m so sharp. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s been crazy. 

Alyssa: 

It’s been weird. 

Brandon: 

All right. 

Alyssa: 

Do you have a podcast about this? 

Brandon: 

Because I want to listen to it. 

Alyssa: 

Well, here’s the thing. 

Alyssa: 

We’re actually this, I haven’t even said this but yet I haven’t even told listeners but we’re renaming our podcast and the reason is, is because I totally screwed up. 

Alyssa: 

Well a few things one is built a business success Secrets is a cool name. 

Alyssa: 

It’s super long. 

Brandon: 

It was actually inspired by a newsletter by Mark McCormack who had a newsletter, a print newsletter called Success Secrets. 

Alyssa: 

He’s the founder. 

Alyssa: 

I don’t know if you follow sports management or even actor management. 

Alyssa: 

I am G jerry Maguire was so Mark McCormick founded that company and I used to get this print newsletter and that’s what inspired me. 

Alyssa: 

But I’m not going to name who, who this is right there is an online marketer who is very good. 

Alyssa: 

His name starts with an R. 

Alyssa: 

But he has started a revolution. 

Alyssa: 

I’m calling it of everybody doing fill in the blank secrets and I just feel like it’s gotten cheap. 

Alyssa: 

So our new name is going to be edge and uh oh and the tagline is, and I like I totally screwed this up. 

Alyssa: 

I’m telling you right now. 

Alyssa: 

I, I called it was, it’s built a business success. 

Alyssa: 

He creates mind body business straight talk for entrepreneurs. 

Alyssa: 

Well you should never market like that. 

Alyssa: 

That’s what it is, not what you get and what we get, what you get is what I really want people to be is happier, healthier and richer. 

Alyssa: 

I like it subscribed. 

Alyssa: 

You said, tell me about the diet thing I do. 

Alyssa: 

I talk about that stuff, but our marketing has been absolutely horrible to convey that you could do that. 

Brandon: 

So yes, Well I will give you, I’ll tell you when I do that. 

Alyssa: 

I’m actually measuring the results. 

Alyssa: 

Well you’ve got two people signing up. 

Alyssa: 

Well you both look like you’re doing well on diet and you have a glow about you. 

Alyssa: 

So I don’t think lighting the lighting, you don’t have any problems with that. 

Alyssa: 

Let’s talk about. 

Alyssa: 

Is there anything, well, I’m excited from reading a bunch of stuff would convert kate. 

Brandon: 

You both probably know more than me what is exciting. 

Alyssa: 

Well, what’s exciting, what’s exciting for working that converted? 

Alyssa: 

But what features are coming out? 

Alyssa: 

You’ve acquired a company, there’s some cool stuff going on in the music creator space, but there’s some school stuff that I saw Nathan talking about that’s going to be functions and features within convert kit that you’re going to be able to do other stuff. 

Alyssa: 

Can you, can you reveal or hint of what some stuff might be. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, for sure. 

Brandon: 

There’s so many, I was going through some before this podcast and like I can’t just list out a million things. 

Alyssa: 

So I think when it comes to email, since we’re talking about that two things that are already released that are very helpful. 

Alyssa: 

One is email, video and email. 

Alyssa: 

Um you can do email. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s gonna be awesome. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, it’s out. 

Alyssa: 

What do you mean? 

Brandon: 

It’s out, It’s out. 

Brandon: 

Where is it within the editor? 

Alyssa: 

I’m looking at our knowledge Based article now you can click to add a video and like while you’re editing your email and then you can add it through either a youtube link of EMEA linguist to or you can upload a video from your computer. 

Brandon: 

And what happens is you can choose to show like a gift Preview of the video that loops. 

Alyssa: 

It’s a 15 2nd clip from your video. 

Brandon: 

So there are only a handful of mailbox providers that will actually like play video in line within the email. 

Alyssa: 

But for the others who are your um, no, that’s great. 

Brandon: 

Apple mail, Thunderbird outlook dot com are the three we have listed that are like the most so google is not doing it yet. 

Brandon: 

No. 

Brandon: 

So what would it would look like for a Google user though? 

Brandon: 

It will still look awesome. 

Alyssa: 

It’ll look like a video player and it’s going to be a gift, a 15 2nd gift playing and they just need to click and then it’ll open up to the video. 

Brandon: 

But it does look really nice still and very appealing and makes you want to click that video which can be helpful for for our encouraging clicks. 

Brandon: 

So I think it’s going to I think this is huge. 

Alyssa: 

I mean, I could just be a total nerd and yeah, that’s fine. 

Brandon: 

We’ll talk about it all the time and I think this is a complete game changer. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s huge. 

Brandon: 

Yeah. 

Alyssa: 

So if video is any part of your strategy, put that video in the email, like Melissa said, that’s perfect for trying to get some click, some engagement outside of just opens and that’ll be a great way to deliver value within your email that you haven’t been able to do yet and you don’t have to write Yeah, 400 words in your email and figure out how to do all this copy. 

Alyssa: 

You could just record yourself. 

Alyssa: 

I couldn’t be more excited. 

Brandon: 

Yeah, I think that’s such a great strategy that I haven’t even thought about yet. 

Alyssa: 

It’s just like making some personal videos, sending them in the email. 

Brandon: 

It’s such a nice touch and can just make your readers feel even closer to you. 

Brandon: 

Just wonderful. 

Alyssa: 

Was that helpful in the video that I sent both of you before the podcast? 

Alyssa: 

Yes, it was like, it was great. 

Alyssa: 

I loved it. 

Alyssa: 

Yes. 

Brandon: 

So like that. 

Brandon: 

I just made that up. 

Alyssa: 

But I’ve been doing it. 

Brandon: 

But because people are always shocked when they get on the on on our podcast and we’re already recording. 

Brandon: 

They’re like, what, what I’m like, yeah, now we’re recording as soon as you get on well we can’t do that. 

Alyssa: 

No, we’re doing it. 

Alyssa: 

Uh it’s actually happening. 

Alyssa: 

You know the, the that’s awesome. And I didn’t know that it was out. I read a few weeks or maybe it was months. It feels like with this, I don’t know, Covid sort of weirded out your time for sure. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, it’s crazy. 

Alyssa: 

So that’s an awesome one. 

Brandon: 

And I don’t even know if anybody else has it out there because I don’t used, we use convicted as our main list. 

Alyssa: 

We use some other ones because they’re free and they’re not, we don’t require as much of heavy lifting. 

Alyssa: 

But anyway, what’s another one? Do you have another one? 

Alyssa: 

So for sticking to email? This one isn’t maybe as exciting, but I think it’s definitely necessary as preview text for your email. 

Brandon: 

So for example, if you’re a Gmail user, you can, I’m sure picture this. You know, you see the subject line of an email and then under that you typically see some text that’s kind of previewing the content of the email. So it used to be that by default using convert kit that preview text would just be whatever the first sentence of your email was, which wasn’t always the best strategy. 

Brandon: 

So now you can actually customize just your preview text for that view. 

Brandon: 

But, once you open up the email, you see the body of the email, you don’t see the preview text. So that’s a great way to sort of have a teaser of your content. You can make it say like you’re going to want to open this dot dot dot, you know, things like that. But then once you open the email, it’s your actual content. 

Brandon: 

One thing I will add to that for any listeners who are using kid or thinking about using converted after this great conversation. 

Alyssa: 

And look, the market has, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger uses converted tim Ferriss uses convert kit, I think Neil might kneel uses converted. 

Alyssa: 

I mean, a lot of the stuff public, so we’re not we’re not doing anything that’s secret. These people have said it one way or the other or you can see it in the bottom of the list because whoever managing their list didn’t take off the branding, but which is true, right? The one thing to say the previous thing is cool. 

Alyssa: 

However, you absolutely have to hit that advanced little square or not, it’s a triangle or because I’ve this is, you know, it’s amazing that people still have my emails. 

Alyssa: 

I forgot to change it. 

Alyssa: 

I’ve been sending the same preview text of like, four campaign because I didn’t you know, that’s not open by default, that little thing. 

Alyssa: 

So, anybody listening on that last screen before you hit go, you’ve got to open up that advanced tab too, to just double check that you’ve written the right think because that could hurt you because it could look like your resending the same email, that’s great feedback. 

Alyssa: 

I was gonna say, I already wrote it down. 

Brandon: 

Thank you for telling us. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah. 

Alyssa: 

And it’s not, I’m not not going to convert because everything else is really awesome. 

Alyssa: 

Just anybody who uses that, you want to make sure that you remembered. 

Alyssa: 

It’s sort of like doing a podcast and not hitting record, which I may or may not have done in. 

Brandon: 

So sad. 

Alyssa: 

You have no. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, well you both do have an idea how saturday isn’t it? It’s like so sickening to yours. I’m like, you’re like, that was awesome. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, I don’t think we’ve had that exact from, but we had an issue where the audio just like cut out. It was like really messed up. So we had to re report. And it was so sad because we didn’t know in the moment, like we were like, oh, something’s wrong and we were like, oh, we’re just going to keep going, it’s probably fine. It wasn’t fine. 

Brandon: 

Oh, I listened to that episode and he said, yeah, we did this before. 

Alyssa: 

We got to do redo this. 

Brandon: 

And then, and then yeah, it’s a really sad moment. It’s even sadder when you hit send on an email campaign, it’s any other features coming from convert kit. 

Alyssa: 

I just wanted to touch on because I don’t think a lot of people know this, that we have a commerce functionality that I think has some of the lowest fees I’ve ever seen. 

Brandon: 

So um if you’re someone who has like a paid newsletter, I know we have a page that compares our fee structure to for example sub stack and it is an actual insane difference, especially as you get larger and larger, but you essentially can use convert kit commerce to have a paid newsletter paid, you can sell just, you know, one time digital downloads, any sort of digital item, you can sell services. 

Alyssa: 

My dad has like a small business and I was helping him set up like recurring payments for his customers. 

Brandon: 

He does in person services so you can use that for so many things and it’s the quickest thing, easiest thing to set up and start collecting money really quickly we just released a pay what you want feature to, which I think can be a cool feature. 

Brandon: 

So if you have some sort of pdf, let’s say you want to make a fun meal plan based on this veggie diet, you’ve been doing, you could say, you know, pay what you want, You can set a minimum of like $5 if you want. 

Brandon: 

But that is a fun way to just allow your users to choose the price. 

Brandon: 

But it’s a really, I love our commerce features and it’s a fun way to creators have always made money through email marketing, which is great. 

Brandon: 

Like it’s really great to create a new way for creators to earn a living, which is our whole mission and the reason why Melissa and I love our job so much is really because of the meaning behind it. 

Brandon: 

Yes, I think that’s uh awesome. 

Brandon: 

And those are three upcoming things. You know, I’ve seen the commerce, it’s up at the top on the right hand side I believe, and it looks really simple to set up. 

Alyssa: 

I think Nathan actually just sold a newsletter through it that I and you see you hear that dog wanting, can you hear your dog? 

Alyssa: 

That’s not a puppy either. 

Brandon: 

That’s a full grown dog acting like a baby. 

Alyssa: 

But can you, do you integrate with your, with stripe or whoever payment processor that you’re using? 

Brandon: 

Yeah, it’s stripe that we integrate with. 

Alyssa: 

Yeah, that’s awesome. 

Brandon: 

Well this has been, is there anything else you want to leave our listeners when we covered a ton and I’m really grateful because this is a loaded episode that you could listen to and really get a jump start on what’s happening? 

Alyssa: 

Well, there is one other thing, how can people get a hold of both of you? 

Alyssa: 

What’s the best place to go to your podcast? 

Alyssa: 

Yes, so we have two seasons out now of the delivery ability to find podcast. 

Alyssa: 

Season one is pretty much basics of email delivery ability. 

Alyssa: 

So really how to reach them box, Stay out of the stand Boulder and season two gets into more a mixture of deliver ability. 

Alyssa: 

Also marketing, you know how to grow your email list using twitter and things like that. 

Brandon: 

So more strategy based. 

Alyssa: 

If you have any questions for us, if you are a customer who wants us to do one of those audits for you or anything else, if you want to get a hold of us, you can go to convert kit dot com slash deliver ability. I know that’s an annoying word to have to type out, but there is a contact form there that goes straight to us, so feel free to reach out to us and it’s a real form because that, well I think I double tap both of you in the sense that I went to the community, which is awesome. 

Brandon: 

Really good community. 

Brandon: 

But you answered from that form, maybe somebody emailed you and said, hey there’s this nutbag, trying to know it went straight to me. 

Alyssa: 

Uh yeah, thanks. 

Alyssa: 

You both are taking time out of your busy schedule to come on here and share just incredible tips for people convert kit and melissa melissa. 

Brandon: 

Thanks so much. 

Alyssa: 

Thank you. 

Alyssa: 

This is so high. 

Alyssa: 

Thanks for being generous with your time and joining us for this episode of the edge before you go, a quick question, are you the type of person who wants to get 100% out of your time talent and ideas. 

Brandon: 

If so you’ll love our monthly edge newsletter. 

Alyssa: 

It’s a monthly playbook about the inner game of building a successful business. 

Alyssa: 

In each newsletter we pull back the curtain on our business and show you exactly what’s happening. The real numbers, real conversion rates, lessons learned from failed and successful strategies and How we’re investing the money we make from our business to outperform the general stock market. 

Alyssa: 

We lay out what we’re doing to get 75% conversion rates on our product pages. 

Alyssa: 

How we’re optimizing our facebook instagram and other paid ads to get our leads under $3.87. The results from our email A. B. Tests, results from strategies. I test to get more done in less time that allows me to ride my bike 100 plus miles a week workout, spend time with the vet and still successfully run our business. 

Alyssa: 

Hi I’m investing the money we make from our business that has led a retirement account to average 20% over the last 10 years. The exact stocks, E. T. F. C. Cryptocurrencies and other investments were buying each and every month and tons of other actionable information. 

Alyssa: 

Imagine the time and money you’ll save by having this holy grail of business intelligence. You can take all of it apply it to your life as an entrepreneur to avoid costly mistakes and be happier, healthier. Ian richer as a fellow entrepreneur who’s aiming for nothing short of success. You owe it to yourself to subscribe. Check out the special offer with bonuses for you. As a listener at Edge newsletter dot com. 

Alyssa: 

Again, that’s e g e newsletter dot com

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