631 – Good email hygiene helps your business: Tom talks Reputable Email

Episode 631 – Reputable Email
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 631 of Screw the Commute podcast? Today, we're going to talk about reputable email or reputable email. I don't know which way you like best, but reputable means having a good reputation. Now, if you mess this up, your open rates will tank and your spam complaints will skyrocket, and it'll likely get you kicked off your email service. And unless you're a spammer that doesn't care about your reputation, your income will drop like a rock. All right, so keep that email reputation high. That's what this episode is about. Now, I hope you didn't miss episode 630. That was the fastest product that you can create on Earth. And any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number that was 630 and this is 631. You're probably going to want to listen to this and pass it on to some folks. Now just a quick update on our program to get scholarships for persons with disabilities. One of the people has already started a website to help other people with disabilities. Another is totally revamping their husband's construction website. And a third, who's a schoolteacher, moving right along with her studies and being even more consistent since school's out.

[00:01:49] So if you want to check out, then see some of their videos. And two of the people are blind and they're doing better videos than me. But please check out. We need a second round of financing to keep the program rolling and check out screwthecommute.com/disability and help out with the Go Fund Me campaign if you can. Any little bit helps. And if you're really flush with cash, you could sponsor a person. We want to get to more people in this pilot program and then I want to roll it out big to foundations and corporations after I have proved the concept. All right. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. This e-book will you will thank me for it. I'm guaranteeing you that because it'll save you enormous amounts of time and help you make more money because you'll have more time to spend with prospects and clients, then you will be fighting with your computer. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:03:00] All right. Let's get to the main event today. I'm going to talk about keeping your email reputation in good shape. I've set hundreds of millions.

[00:03:10] That's not an exaggeration of emails with virtually zero complaints and have made many millions of dollars with those emails. Now, in this episode, I'm going to talk about the simple things you can do to make sure your email reputation is stellar, which means more people will open your emails, less people will unsubscribe, and if you have good products and services, you'll undoubtedly make more money. And now I just this now this past sentence mentioned good products and services. So here's the thing. No email reputation is going to save you if you sell junk to people. Okay. Just keep that in mind. All right. Let me give you a couple basics here so you don't get yourself in trouble immediately. Many people will not invest in the proper tools to run their business, and they try to broadcast sales messages using their personal accounts. All right. This is bad for so many reasons. First, is that your shared hosting account for your website that probably also provides your email service will kick you off in no time flat. They will see large amounts of emails going out within a few minutes and literally sirens will go off in in their office telling them to shut you down immediately. They will think that either you're a spammer or you got hacked and your website hosting service is being used as a spam like kick off point. So they're going to shut you down immediately.

[00:04:55] All right. Now, sometimes you can play dumb and apologize because you didn't know. You weren't allowed to send that many emails all at once. And sometimes that'll work, but sometimes they'll just immediately suspend you or ban ban you for spamming. You do not want to be in this situation. The next big mistake people make, and I see it to this day, even with big entities that should know better, they send an email to a big group and put all the email addresses in the CC or that's called the carbon copy part of your email. Oh my God. You have now exposed everyone's email to everyone else on the list. You just killed the privacy of those people. In some cases, if someone accidentally hits reply all to complain about you doing this. Everyone on the list gets that complaint. And if a bunch of people do that, you have a cluster f and you know what F stands for of email going all over the place and everyone is pissed off at you and will most likely never do business with you because you were too stupid to do such a thing. All right. So no, don't do a CC for broadcast emails. All right. Now you say, well, Tom, what about B CC or blind carbon copy? Well, guess what? That's okay for small groups of people. I even do that myself. And in fact, I'm doing it right now with I have an e-book mastermind going and an email mastermind going.

[00:06:39] And in this case, I do use my personal accounts and I send the email in the two line to myself, That's how you do this, and then you copy everyone else in the b cc area, blind carbon copy. But remember this is only for 15 to 20 people or so, so it's no big deal here. Plus the people on the list paid to be on it. So this has no effect at all on hurting my email reputation and they're not going to complain to anybody or nothing. All right. So, so that's fine. Bc is okay for small groups but CC avoided unless it's one or two people that are all in cahoots on your email and not going to complain and they know each other. All right. Now, if you're planning on getting serious about your email marketing, no personal account is going to work. Even with very little success. Let's say you only have 100 people on your list. That's more than enough to get you kicked off personal accounts easily. So either get serious and get the proper tools or don't do it at all until you're ready to invest in the proper tools. All right. But let me talk about free email services for a minute. Here's here's the problem with free email broadcast services. Every spammer that has a union card uses these free services until they get kicked off.

[00:08:09] And then they're just going to spoof or pretend they're at a different IP address and sign up again with the free service and keep spamming people. Well, that means servers around the world that receive email. Recognize that tons of spam is coming from those services, those free services. So they ban all email coming from those free places. So you're lumped in. I mean, no matter how legit you are, you get lumped in with the bad apples and your emails don't get through and your email reputation tanks even more. Right. So don't do that. Don't, don't get sucked into free stuff. Now I'm the first one that will promote free stuff that's great and is good for you and helps you. In fact, there's loads of it. If you download that automated free book, screwthecommute.com/automatefree How to Automate Your Business Book. Yeah, there's great stuff in there, but some things this is not where you scrimp. All right? So so you got to have a real broadcast email service that's paid so the spammers aren't infiltrating it. All right. Now, here's another thing that hurts your email reputation. We're going to talk about duplicates here. And guess what? It affects me. And there's not a darn thing I can do about it. But you can. All right. Let me explain. So I had 150,000 or so subscribers before any of the tools that I now use were even invented.

[00:09:45] Remember, I've been in it since the beginning that 28 and a half years ago when the commercial internet started. I've been doing it ever since then. See, in those early days you could only broadcast to an email address. You couldn't personalize which we call mail merge, where somebody name is popped in or their account number or, you know, all these different mail merge fields you can put in so that when you broadcast to 1000 people, each one has their name in it and their details say that's called mail merge, but that didn't exist in those days. So I have lists that don't even have first names. I've got probably 30,000, maybe not 30,000 more, but 15 to 20000 emails were no first names on them. Now I think now let me think about this. Yeah, I think it's like 16,000 or so that don't have any first names. So I just have to say, dear great speaking subscriber, you know, it's not as personalized, but still those people don't complain and they still accept my emails. They open them and they, you know, so they and they might be buying stuff off of me. So I just don't know who they are. But here's the problem. I have people that buy stuff through my shopping cart are on a list, but they may also be on one or several of those older lists, and I just don't know it.

[00:11:08] What this causes is when I send a broadcast to the shopping cart list and all the other lists, people could get four or five emails that say the exact same thing. These are called duplicates. Now. There's not much I can do about it other than apologize if someone complains about the duplicates and I tell them if it happens again. And actually it is going to happen again next time I send out. To forward them to me and I'll remove them from four or five, four of the five lists that they're on, let's say. Now I don't really get people to mad at me because and here's that term again reputation I've sent out good helpful stuff for now 28 and a half years. So people do cut me some slack, but this doesn't have to happen to you at all. And if you're starting or if you've got all your emails in one place, now we've got something that you don't have to suffer. The problem that I suffer because you don't if you don't have a big reputation built up, people are not going to cut you slack. Let me tell you that. They're going to you're going to get some emails cussing you out and, you know, oh, it's terrible. But anyway, if you're just starting out and you have all your stuff in one place, if you use the proper tools that have and here's the term a de dupe function, de dupe dupe, and that stands for deduplication.

[00:12:38] In other words, if they see you trying to broadcast. And a person is on your list four or five times. They only send that person one email. They don't send all four or five. That's beautiful. And it protects you from sending all these duplicates to one person. And remember that one person has done the most business with you or downloaded your stuff or had the most engagement with you. You don't want to make them mad now, especially if you're selling or have aspirations of selling online. You want all your people in one place, which makes it so much easier to do broadcast than it is for me that I have to send out four or five different lists every time I do a broadcast. So you could be selling things, but also building your list with opt in forms for freebies and newsletters and things like that. And and all these people are in your system. So when you do a broadcast, the dupe function automatically sends one email for that broadcast to a person that may be in your. Geez, I have some people in their 20 or 30 different transactions they've done with me over the years. So. So you don't want to make those people mad. And of course, I have used for more than 20 years and all my students use kickstartcart.com and you can get a 30 day free trial.

[00:14:04] If you get the cart, we give you free, unlimited training for the life of the time you have it. So you do have to pay for it, though. That's why you get all these functions, email functions and news newsletter functions and auto responders. And I mean, it's just a massive selling system, but it's it's got it's got, I'd say, 90% of the features of the super big expensive systems. But you can actually run it yourself. I had some some of these other big systems, some lady coming to me, she had she's paying $4,000 a month for a part time person just to operate the things because it was so complicated. All of my students run the run their own carts because it's a mere mortal can do it. So so kick start cars.com, get the free trial and you'll have all these things and a load more I think. I think Episode ten Screwthecommute.com/10 is all about the things you should have in a shopping cart system. And we emphasize the word system because it incorporates all your emails and your auto responders and your upselling modules and your coupons and all this stuff in one place. Okay, let me get into some more email, reputation things. You must have true subject lines now. True doesn't mean they can't be cutesy and curious. Now, the Zagorin principle you may have heard me talk about numerous times when I talk about copywriting, it builds curiosity in people.

[00:15:38] So it's okay to use that for sure. It's a great thing to use in your subject line as long as you eventually lead people to and then fulfill the curiosity. See, if you don't, they're never going to trust you or open your emails again. You'll be considered what's called a click bait or click baiter, which is bad for your reputation. In other words, you say anything in your subject line to get the click and then promote something else in the email. Nothing will kill your credibility and open rates more than if people get tricked into opening an email with what you promised them in the email was not what was in the subject line. People won't trust you anymore and will most likely unsubscribe or complain. You are spammer. I say you're not only your spammer, you're a liar. So. So make sure your subject line truly relates to the content of the email. And the canned spam act passed years ago also demands that. All right. The next thing you want to do to keep your email reputation high is to use a spam checker before you send out your email. A spam checker looks at your email before you send it out and gives you a spam score. The lower the score, the better. If you get a score of five or above, you shouldn't even bother sending out that email because it will get caught in spam filters everywhere.

[00:17:10] Now service called spam assassin is connected to kick start cars.com. So when you create a broadcast email or auto responder message, it will check the message and tell you what looks like spam so you can fix it and get your spam score down towards zero before you send out the email. There are articles. I mean, yeah, there are articles on Google telling you of thousands of words and phrases that are what are called spam triggers. In other words, these words and phrases get your email caught in spam filters. Well, you know, you're never going to memorize that whole list. And something that looks innocent to you could look like spam to a spam filter that sees a billion emails an hour. So spam assassin, as soon as you write your thing, you hit this button. It gives you the score, tells you what's wrong with your email, you fix it and boom, you're done. So and the value of this is the less spam terms you use in your email, the more emails will get through to the recipients and they won't look like spam because you remove the spam terms from the email. So when people read your emails, your email reputation rises because the text doesn't look like all the other spam emails that they get all the time. Okay. Next thing. Something that will really hurt your email reputation is the term opt out.

[00:18:46] I still to this day hear this all the time from business people. They automatically subscribe a person to an email list and make that person opt out of the list. This is a totally fraudulent and unacceptable email practice. When I tell people this, they counter with Yeah, but they can unsubscribe any time they want. The point is they didn't ask to be on the list in the first place. Which brings up the topic of permission based email marketing. See in the USA and more specifically, the Canned Spam Act and their variations of this in different countries and areas around the world like Canada has its own and the UK has the GDPR. Now you should look up all these, even if you don't meet all their requirements you should at least know about. But all of them require explicit permission to put people on a list, or at least have some kind of relationship with them. For instance, when they buy something. Not only do they have, do they give me their email address? In many cases, I have their mailing address, their street address, their credit card number, their phone number and everything else about them. Now, that's pretty much considered a relationship with them, and I have no trouble emailing them. And of course, in this case, yeah, they can still unsubscribe, but that's not the same as forcing them on a list and making them opt out, which is the problem I just told you about.

[00:20:22] All right. Now, another thing you should know about with regard to being able to use email addresses, you collect manually. In other words, the person didn't sign up online to get your emails. Maybe you do trade shows and collect the email addresses, or maybe you're a pro speaker like I am, and I might collect several hundred emails in one shot. See, a reputable email service is going to demand proof of how you legitimately collected those emails before they allow you to put them in the service. Now, when I stand on stage, I'm almost always recorded and I do a business card drawing, but I get it on tape that I told everyone that they would be put on a list. And if they didn't want to get emails from me, just write no emails on their business card, and I would honor that. And I've never been challenged about it because again, because I have a long reputation. But that's how you would do it from stage. Or you could have little forms that they fill out. If they don't have business cards that tell them that they're going to be on a list, then they can get in the drawing, so forth. Och now another situation at tradeshows you typically see like a fishbowl with business cards in it. All you have to do is put a sign in front of the boat telling them they'll be subscribed and that they can unsubscribe any time, take a picture of it and be ready to send that picture to the abuse team at whatever service you're dealing with.

[00:21:51] Now, it should be, of course, Kickstarter, Cars.com, if you want my help. So do these things and you'll keep high email reputation, which will give you the best chance of selling lots of your great products and services. All right. So if you like help with this and the other million things you've got to do to be successful online, check out my mentor program at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. It's the most most unique, longest running, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. Also, consider my school. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet marketing school in the country, and it'll give either you or young people in your life a real skill in about six months, without being in massive debt from a four year college and out of the workforce for four years and and spending all your money partying. All right. So they'll have a real skill. So check check that out at IMTCVA.org and give me a call. I'm very accessible. Nobody, nobody like me will even talk to you. All right? But I will, because I'm a fanatic about your success. Okey doke. Keep that email reputation high and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.