More ranting... kind of.

Hello again friend!

As you can imagine, I send a lot of email. Plus I have my finger on the pulse of email considering I manage both Groundhogg and MailHawk. And I just feel compelled to share my own experience of the nitty gritty reality of email because no one else is.

On search and socials it's all, "8 subject lines for better open rates," and, "use this template to improve engagement by 30%." Giving business owners the wrong ideas about audience building and engagement.

Expert email marketers (sometimes myself included), and many email marketing platforms, will tell you it's all plug and play. To their credit, some of it can be.

But the truth is...

EMAIL IS F🙊CKING HARD!

In part two of my Email is hard series I want to talk about good sending habits vs. bad sending habits. 

People don't know what they don't know. But, what you don't know can hurt you, and your business/sender reputation. 

Part 2.

Marketers. Ruin. Everything.

~My dad, probably.

Marketers are hackers, in a loose sense. Leave it to a marketer to find any loophole or exploit to deliver their messages to potential customers.

There is constant tension between marketers and inboxes. Inboxes have implemented many policies in recent years to reduce the effectiveness of marketers and enhance consumer privacy, as well as the overall inbox experience. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and Google's new Bulk Sender Guidelines are just two examples. 

Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple, all hate marketers.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true. They hate spammers. In the eyes of inboxes there is a very thin, very gray line between being a marketer and a spammer.

You're not a spammer, are you?

I'm sure you, and most business owners asking the same question would answer with a resounding NO.

But, thinking back, I've been accused of spamming once or twice by disgruntled recipients. I'm sure you have to. Why did that happen?

So, indulge me for a moment and answer a few quick questions...

• When is the last time you removed inactive contacts from your email list?
• Do you segment your messages to specific contacts, or just blast everyone?
• Do you continuously obtain explicit opt-in consent from your list?
• Are your messages personalized, like hyper-personalized?
• Are you only sending offers and deals, or do you send value?
• Is the majority of email sent to leads or to customers?

With your answers in mind, lets discover if you are a good sender, or if you've got some bad habits.

🎶 Don't you, forget about me!

We spend a lot of money and a lot of effort to get someone's information. We write lead magnets, run ads, and go to conferences. Naturally, when we finally get someone's info we want to hang onto it and attempt to monetize it for as long as possible.

But what happens when we hang onto someone's data for too long?

I've seen an increase in deliverability issues from clients recently in our support queue, and all of them are for a similar reason. 

Legacy businesses that have been collecting emails for 15+ years, but have never sent emails regularly, upload their lists to Groundhogg for the first time and send a broadcast to everyone on that list.

Then... crickets.

Or worse, blacklisted or booted from their sending service.

So what happened? Let's break it down.

1) Your list is stale. 🍞

Most of the email addresses on that list might be several years old with no activity. That is a long time. People switch jobs, they change emails, they move around, they disconnect from the grid, and they die.

Stale emails can actually become spam traps over time. Extreme caution is recommended.

Testing the validity of an email address by sending an email is no longer a valid method to test the health of your list, we'll talk about better methods later.

2) Your email is unexpected.

Without regular communication, most people will forget who you are. Anything they don't recognize is usually marked as spam. When you get marked as spam imboxes will count that towards your sender reputation and oops, now you're in the dog house.

3) Your content is irrelevant.

Again, anything longer than 6 months is a long time. People's situations change. Your service, knowledge, and offer may no longer be relevant to the people you're emailing. You'll either be left on read, or worse, marked as spam.

This is highly applicable to B2C and B2B businesses.

Take your list and only use information that's been collected or interacted with in a meaningful way within the last year.

So, what do you do with everyone else?

Don't email them. What you can do instead is upload the list to Facebook and Google Ads for remarketing. They will come back if they need your services. Otherwise, let them go.

At Groundhogg we regularly purge contacts every month that have not engaged with our emails or site within the last 12 months. We take their info and upload it to Facebook and Google for remarketing, and stop emailing them. You should do the same.

🫸That's way too much email...

The urge to send an email to our whole list, every time we have something to share, is very strong.

I have this urge, and I have to hold myself back. I wanted to send this email to everyone, but not everyone wants it. (They should though 🤷)

I'm confident that what we send, and what you send, has value. And our thinking is that if people just saw it, they'd appreciate it.

The truth is, only some people will appreciate it. Not all email is valuable to everybody, even if you implemented all the recommendations from Email is hard: Part 1.

If we send people too much of what they don't appreciate, they will unsubscribe or mark as spam, even if some of what we send they do appreciate.

All or nothing email marketing is not applicable to our current email consumption habits.

The solution? Provide preferences. Allow your contacts to select which emails they want to receive.

An education business might send a few types of emails.

They might send...

• Deals, promotions and offers.
• Notices about changes to courses.
• Tips, tricks, and other high-value education.

Each of those should be opt-in or opt-out on the preferences screen. That way a contact who might not want to receive promotions, while staying in touch with your high-value content, can.

You can take it a step further and ask contacts how often they want to recieve emails from you. If they say never, respect that, and don't send them anything. If they were going to buy and value your content they wouldn't have said never.

Factor in the desired email frequency into your email scheduling. You subscribers will appreciate it.

🫵 You don't know me!
You don't know what I've been through!

How well do you know your subscribers? You might think you know them pretty well, but do you really?

If you're a very niche business, you can make some fairly educated guesses. For example, if you run a debt consolidation service, incoming leads probably have debt issues.

But having a general idea only gets you so far. Because within the main theme, there are many sub-themes that matter for messaging.

Staying with debt, they could be a little in debt, less than $10K, or they could be a lot in debt. The debt could be low-interest or could be high-interest credit-card debt. Ouch!

Knowing those things matters for the education and messaging you send them. If you send irrelevant content to the wrong person you will not get great results, and will probably be marked as spam.

Staying up to date with the person's journey is also essential. If you're emailing leads about debt consolidation it might be worth asking, "Do you still need help with your debt?"

You should be constantly asking questions and recording their responses so that you can keep your messaging relevant.

Aside: There should be an easy way to opt-out too. If they don't need help or they solved their problem elsewhere, there is no sense in wasting resources on leads that don't need your help. Simply export their info and use it for re-marketing.

The more data about a person's situation, the more targeted relevant messaging you can send them. This is called hyper-personalization.

You must start thinking about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

☕ Coffee's for closers!

Take a look at your email metrics for the past 3 months and see what percentage of email sent was specifically sales-oriented, and how much was value-oriented.

I know that there can be overlap, but try and divide it into just the two categories. Discounts and offers are not high-value even if your product /service offers high-value.

Was the majority sales, or value? If the vast majority of your emails were sales what does that do?

When your sales emails outweigh your value, it trains your subscribers that your emails are always trying to sell something. When you've trained your subscribers that you're only interested in their money, they will typically ignore you in the inbox even when you occasionally send value.

In my opinion, your outgoing value emails should outweigh your sales, by a lot. This is of course very hard to do because writing high-value emails is hard to do, as we've already established.

But, if the vast majority of your outgoing emails are high-value content, that trains your subscribers to expect high-value content! That way when you send the occasional sales email it's not ignored or met with disdain.

If you're around 50/50 value/sales, you're doing better than most. I would try to strive for 70/30. 

I could have written 12 decent sales emails with offers in the time it took me to write this one section of this email. But anything worth doing is never easy.

Besides, helping is, and will always be, the best sales tool.

😫 But, but, but, that sounds hard!!!!

Because it is hard. Sending good email and being a good sender who is practicing good sending habits takes more effort than being a bad sender.

But, the results are worth it.

Your subscribers will appreciate you more. Your email will be more effective. You'll get better engagement, you'll improve your sender reputation. There are many, many upsides.

So, before you send that 75% discount email to your entire list hoping that something sticks ask yourself this question.

• Do my subscribers want this email?
• Is it relevant to their current situation?
• When's the last time I provided true value?

Make adjustments, send better email.

Adrian Tobey
Founder, Groundhogg Inc.