Avoid the SPAM Folder: Make Sure People Get Your Emails!

Email is still the top way to talk with customers, outside of talking in person or by phone. Email deliverability expert Adrian Savage and I talked about engagement, spam traps, SPF, DKIM, the big three email service providers, email health score data, and more. And we outlined the top two ways you can keep your email out of the SPAM folder. Take a look and find out about:

? Authentication – DKIM and SPF

? Email engagement – what exactly does it mean + how can you increase and measure?

? What steps you should take next

Cindy:

Welcome, everybody. I’m glad you are here. And today, we are looking at two of so many ways to avoid the spam folder, and I’m here with the most excellent Adrian Savage. Hey Adrian. How are you?

Adrian:

Oh, I’m great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Cindy:

So glad you’re here. All right. So if you’re using email in your business, and really who isn’t, this is the place to be because we are looking at ways to make sure people get your emails and you avoid the spam folder. And so, as promised, we’re going to dig into two excellent topics, and we have some bonus information for you at the end as well. So if that sounds good, stay with us for the next 20-ish minutes or so. And Adrian, the other day, you were just telling me about someone you were working with, who was working so hard on their business, and they were calling you to say their emails are in the spam folder, and you got into authentication with them as I remember.

Adrian:

Yep, absolutely. The thing with authentication is it’s a little bit techie, but the good news is you only have to set it up once; once you’ve got it set up, then as long as you don’t change your email platform, you can sit back and relax, but authentication is really, really important. So I’ll explain a little bit around what it is and how it works quickly and then kind of a little bit around how people can actually set it up. Okay. You’re going to mute. I don’t know.

Cindy:

That sounds good. I’m glad you’re going to do that because authentication sounds difficult. And like you said, once you set it up once you’re good to go.

Adrian:

Now the good news is, even though I’m a geek, I’ve taken my anti-geek pills, so I’ll try and keep it nice and simple. And the thing you’ll remember here is email is all about reputation, but you can only protect your reputation if you’re proving that the emails that you send have genuinely come from you because, let’s face it, if you’re using Keap or ActiveCampaign or any of these other email platforms, you can choose to send an email from whatever email address you want, whether or not you can legitimately do that.

Adrian:

You could pretend to send something from whitehouse.gov if you wanted to. But because they have done something with their authentication those emails might not get through. But what we need to do is we need to tell the world that the emails that we’re sending out are legitimately from us and that we have given whatever platform we’re using permission to send emails on our behalf.

Adrian:

So I’m going to mention two acronyms. And this is the only time I’m going to get into a little bit of technobabble hopefully. But it’s worth making a note of these because this is what you need to go away and make sure that you’ve got set up. So the first acronym that I’m going to mention is DKIM is spelled D-K-I-M, and it stands for Domain Keys Identified Mail.

Adrian:

Now, what this is, is this is a way of digitally signing every single email that you send out. And if you put this digital signature on all the emails that you send out, and then you publish a special key in your domain, then that will allow the mailbox providers that you’re sending your mails to. They will be able to compare the public key with the private key in your email and lots of clever stuff like that. And they will be able to say, “Hey, this email genuinely came from Cindy because she’s already set up her authentication.”

Adrian:

So that is how DKIM works. And what you have to do is every single email platform that you send from, you need to go into it, and you need to set up authentication using DKIM. So if you’re using Keap or if you’re using ActiveCampaign or any other email marketing automation platform, you need to go into that and you need to go into the email settings and find some kind of option that says email authentication where it might even say DKIM.

Adrian:

If you’re using ActiveCampaign, be very careful because their default is, it says, let ActiveCampaign manage my authentication for me. Now that’s actually a bit of a lie because they’re not managing authentication for you. They’re just not managing it at all. So you need to make sure that you switch on the, I want to manage my own authentication, and that will then allow you to set up DKIM. If you’re using Keap, it’s a bit simple just go to the email settings. I think it’s marketing settings, and then it’s email authentication and other platforms like MailChimp or whatever, they’ve got a similar thing.

Adrian:

So make sure that whatever platform you’re using, you need to go set it up there, and it’ll give you a very specific string of garbage looking texts that you’ve got then go and publish inside your domain. If you’re not sure how to do that, then get an expert. I’m looking at one on Zoom there. Her name is Cindy. She can help you with that stuff and make sure that you get it right.

Adrian:

If you fault up DKIM, it’s not the end of the world, because it’s just the same as not having it. In a minute, I’m going to talk about something elsewhere you have to be a bit more careful, but for DKIM, if you get it wrong, it’s not the end of the world because it just means you’re not signing your emails still. You can’t stop emails going through by messing this up. So have a go yourself, maybe if you need some help, get in touch with Cindy. And she can help with that as well. And if Cindy needs help and she knows the other people that can get involved as well, if necessary.

Cindy:

You can help too. I think that Adrian and we’re putting your contact information here. If you ever have anything tricky around authentication, just go right to Adrian as well. And I can also connect you with him because one of the things that you just talked about is ActiveCampaign not really managing the DKIM and authentication. And we had that experience with someone we work with, and they had a list of I think it was five or 10,000 and they were emailing people inviting them to some of their online sessions on webinars and exactly that. They were having trouble getting some of their emails received by their B2B, by their business companies they were working with. And it all went back to ActiveCampaign saying, “No, we got this.” And it’s like, “Well, actually, no.” And so we had to go in and work on that.

Adrian:

Yeah. Absolutely. I think ActiveCampaign should be a little clearer how they label that because it does kind of lull you into a false sense of security. On the other hand, they’re better than ConvertKit who say you shouldn’t set DKIM up unless you’ve got a list of 10,000 or something. And I respectfully disagree with them. It doesn’t matter if your list is only got 50 people on it or 10 people or 10 million, whatever size list you’ve got, you should set up DKM, you should set up email authentication.

Adrian:

And that’s something a lot of people forget about is that they can also set up authentication inside Google Workplace or G Suite as it was. You can set up inside Microsoft 365, the platform you use to send your individual emails can also have authentication set up. If you’re using some kind of helpless software like Zendesk or Help Scout or something like that, maybe you can do it there as well.

Adrian:

So don’t only look at your email marketing platform look at any other platform you send emails. So that’s DKIM in a nutshell. I’ll very quickly cover the other authentication, which is SPF. That’s the other acronym. And that stands for sender policy framework. Now, this is the one where you do need to pay attention because if you mess this one up, you can actually make it more likely that your emails are going to go to spam.

Adrian:

So be very careful when you do this one. And with DKIM, you had to set up every single platform individually with SPF is as simple as publishing one record in your domain. But that one record says, I trust these platforms to send email on my behalf. So supposing you’re using ActiveCampaign and G Suite and Zendesk, then your SPF record would need to say, I trust ActiveCampaign, G suite and Zendesk.

Adrian:

You mustn’t have two SPF records. If you have two, that’s as bad as having none. So make sure you only have one and make sure you list all the different platforms you’re using. And you’ve got to check it very carefully to make sure that it’s right because any mistakes in that then it might actually mean that your emails are more likely to go to the spam folder.

Adrian:

So if you get it right, you’re going to do yourself a big favor, get it wrong, and things might go a little bit wrong. So what I would recommend is there’s various platforms out there from memory. I think MXToolBox can do it. And there’s another website called DMARCAN and they’ve got, what’s called an SPF checker. So if you just do a Google search for SPF checker, and then it will ask you for your domain, you type your domain in, and it will tell you whether your SPF record is set up correctly.

Adrian:

Now it can’t read your mind. It won’t tell you that you’ve forgotten to put one of your platforms in there, but at least it can tell you that it is syntactically correct. So it’s worth it, if you’ve already got it set up, go to one of these sites and check it. If you haven’t got it set up, then fix that and then check that to make sure. And again, Cindy can help with that. I can help with that, but again, SPF matters a lot, particularly if you’ve got a lot of people in using Microsoft as the mailbox provider. So if a lot of your audience use just Hotmail or outlook.com or Microsoft 365, Microsoft is very hot on SPF, Google, they care a bit less about that, but Microsoft, if your SPF record isn’t right, then it’s a lot more likely that your emails and goats go to spam. And that’s pretty much the two main parts of authentication.

Adrian:

There’s a third method called DMARC, that if you want to go into the advanced side of things, you can look at that, but that isn’t going to make as much of a difference. So I’m not going to go into the detail on that today. The main thing I’d say is, if you haven’t done anything yet, then focus on DKIM first and foremost, get that done, then get SPF done. Make sure everything’s okay with that. If you want to go the whole hog then yeah, look at DMARC, but that’s less. It makes it less of an impact. The main thing is to get your signing set up with DKIM and then the authentication with SPF. And that’s pretty much it, I think, if you’ve got any questions around that, Cindy or anything we need to look at on this before we move on?

Cindy:

Well, Hey, I just wanted to mention to you that we will have a checklist and some info at the end here for you that you can take and apply. And so some of the things that Adrian’s talking about around DKIM and SPF are in there, and also in the Facebook group, we’ll throw some of the links in there, like the MXToolBox and stuff that are free tools that you can grab. And so we’ll provide all of those things to you as well.

Adrian:

Awesome. Okay. That sounds good.

Cindy:

So the second big thing Adrian, that we were talking about is engagement, which what the heck does that mean? And how can I really apply that in my life?

Adrian:

Okay. So engagement is the holy grail of email deliverability. This is the thing that you need to pay most attention to if you want to maximize your chances of reaching the inbox and avoiding the spam folder. And this is how the world has changed so much, because if you wind the clock back five years ago, it was nice and easy. You just built as big a list as you could. And then you just mailed the hell out of them, and you kept mailing them until they either buy they die or they unsubscribe. And in kind of 2015, then you could actually run quite a nice business with that. But things have changed over the last two or three years, maybe even four years now, Google set the trend here and then the other big mailbox providers like Microsoft and Yahoo, they were playing catch up and where we got to was it’s now all about whether you’re sending emails to the people that want to receive them or not.

Adrian:

So this is the really important thing. What we’re saying here is if you’re sending emails to people that are no longer reading them, then you’re pretty much shooting yourself in the foot because what Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and the other big mailbox providers want is they want to see that you’re sending emails to the people that are actually opening them, reading them and taking action from them.

Adrian:

So what that means is, is no longer a case of having a massive email list. We’ve reached the time now where small is beautiful. It’s very much about quality it’s not about quantity anymore because we only want to be sending emails to people that have recently opened something from us. Because the challenge that we’ve got is that we can’t see exactly what people are doing the same way that we can’t see whether the email even makes it into the spam folder.

Adrian:

Once Keap or ActiveCampaign or whatever else tells us that email has been accepted for delivery, then it could go anywhere. It’s like when the mailman posts the letter through the letterbox, you don’t know if there’s a dog waiting on the other side to take the letter away and chew it up. And the same is true with email. We can’t be certain what’s happened. It might go into the spam folder, might go to promotions. It might go to the junk folder. It might go to the inbox. It could go in so many places, but we don’t know. The only way we know that something positive has happened is if someone opens it and most of the time, then that indication that the email was opened will be shown to you whether you’re using Keap, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp or whatever.

Adrian:

So what we need to do is we need to encourage people to engage with us. We need to make sure we’re sending out really good content, good quality content. And then if someone signs up to your email list, make sure that you’re encouraging them to open your emails right from the get-go. You need to train them to rescue your emails from the spam folder because that is probably the strongest type of engagement there is.

Adrian:

The worst thing that can happen is if someone leaves your email in the spam folder. So you need to train people to actually find them and rescue them. And then once you’ve got that, then it’s all about continuing to send emails to the people that are reading them. If someone hasn’t opened a single email from you for 30 days, then that’s already demonstrating that they’re starting to lose interest. They probably have already, if it reaches 90 days, three months, then it’s pretty pointless to send emails to people after that point. I would recommend you stop by the 90th day at the very latest. And in some cases now, then it’s more like 30 days.

Adrian:

And here’s why. We’ve got data from Microsoft now they treat a contact as unengaged within 15 days. So that’s only just over two weeks. So if you’re sending emails to people using Hotmail or Microsoft 365, and you’re sending emails three months after they last opened something, Microsoft are going to see you as one of the bad guys because you’re sending emails to people that haven’t engaged for ages. So that’s why this 30-day figure is so important. And 90 days really, really is the cutoff. And you need to make sure you can either do it manually in the platforms, or you can use the tools that I’ve created to help you to identify which contacts have engaged with the most recently and focused on sending to those.

Adrian:

Because here’s the thing. If you only focus on the engaged contacts, your open rate is going to go up. Statistically speaking, the people with the greatest chance of opening your email are the ones that have opened something recently. So if you mail to your entire list, you might be getting a 10 or 15% open rate. If you’ve got a really good list, you might do better than that. But working with the clients that I have over the years, what I’ve typically seen is if you start to dial things back. So you’re only managing the people that have opened in the last 90 days, you should be getting a 30% or higher open rate. If you dial that back further and only mail the people that opened in the last 30 days, you should be getting a 40% or higher open rate.

Adrian:

Now, if you email every single day, you might find those rates go a little bit lower. And I’m a big fan of mailing as often as possible, as long as it’s high quality content, only to the people that are reading our emails. Because if you do that, then you’ve got a much greater chance of that 40% open rate. It will be a different 40% every time. And what I found when I sent emails for an entire month, every single day, by the end of that month, 75% of my list had read at least one of my emails.

Adrian:

So it really is worth sending as frequently as you can, once a month is no longer going to cut it. You need to be mailing at least weekly. And anyone who says you have nothing to say, there’s always something you can share. That just means you’ve got to tell 50 little stories one per week, and everyone’s got a story in them somewhere.

Adrian:

So get the content out there and then make sure that you’re only sending it to the right people, but here’s why it matters so much. If Google sees your open rate go from 20% to 40%, they’re going to start to think that you’re sending out better content than you were. It’s as simple as that and the higher they see the open rate, the more they’re going to like you, assuming you’ve got your authentication set up, the more your reputation will improve and the better your reputation, the more likely the next emails you send are going to land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

Adrian:

So it’s becomes what I call a virtuous circle. The better you manage your engagement, the better the chances. The next emails are going to hit the inbox. And imagine if you’re spending $5,000 a month on Facebook ads, if you’re not managing your engagement, and you’ve got a poor reputation, you might only be hitting 40% of those people who are clicking through on your ads and signing up. If you’ve got everything set up properly, then you can achieve 80% engagement from new contacts signing up to your list. Which means you can actually double the return on investment on your ad spend just by getting all of this buttoned up.

Adrian:

So it really, really matters that you manage your engagement as well as possible. And the most common objection I hear is what about that person from nine months ago who suddenly reengages and buys something. If I stop mailing after 90 days, I’m going to miss those people. And that’s a fair comment.

Cindy:

That’s a fair comment. Because in this group, we have lots of people who have long buying cycles. I know just about everybody on here. I can see who everybody is, and there’s people here who will tell us, “Hey, we’ve got people who take two years and three years to buy. What should we do?” I know what I think, but what do you think about that?

Adrian:

So here’s the thing. If they’re still interested, they will still open an email once every two or three months. They must do because otherwise that the nice thing about sending lots of emails is that you will turn off the people that don’t like you. And I guess there’s going to be the occasional person that wants to buy your stuff that doesn’t like your emails, but you can’t please everybody all the time, but on the whole, then I would just make sure you’re still sending that content out because you need to keep people warm because let’s face it. We’ve all got competitors. And if you stop sending the emails out and someone else keeps mailing them, then guess what? They’re more likely to go to them.

Cindy:

That’s true. That’s true.

Adrian:

That’s why we need to keep mailing them. But then the other side of it as well then is I’ve run the numbers. We already said that you’re going to get a 40% open rate if you mail to those people who engage in the last month, and that’s going to drop to about 30%, if you may alter the 90 day people. If you only mailed to the people engaged between 30 and 90 days ago is probably a 10% open rate. If you only mail to the people who have engaged in 90 days or longer, it’s a three or a four or maybe a 5% open rates.

Adrian:

And if you send out a bunch of emails where effectively it’s that open rate, then you’re probably 10% less likely to hit the inbox for your engaged people. So by continuing to get people that haven’t engaged for months and months and months, then yeah, a couple of those might wake up, smell the coffee and buy something. But you’re likely losing the warm leads that you’ve got that have been opening your emails all the time because statistically, you’re going to be more likely to hit the spam folder.

Adrian:

So that’s why it’s so important. It doesn’t mean that you should never mail those people, but maybe once in a blue moon, you maybe give them another chance to wake up and reengage with you. But statistically, if someone reaches 90 days and they haven’t opened anything, you’ve probably lost them. So that’s the time if you know get on the phone and send them a text message, direct mail. Maybe a last chance email saying, “Hey, just to want to hear from me, click here. If not, I’m going to unsubscribe you, but that’s about as far as it goes.” And if you do all of those things, I can promise you that your email performance will be transformed.

Cindy:

And I think one of the huge takeaways here, Adrian, is that obviously we have a lot of folks who are into math and engineers right here on the call. And they’re saying, well, of course, if I email fewer people my open rate goes up. Well, yes, of course. But why that matters is the big three email providers look at the percentage and make decisions based on that.

Adrian:

Exactly. It’s this virtuous circle. And I’ll be honest. We are gaming the system here. We are artificially increasing our open rates. There’ll be no more people opening on day one. But if we keep that open rate high, our reputation goes through the roof and then our future emails are more likely to hit the inbox. And the future emails we send are more likely to reach more people. So it’s one of these where effectively, yes, we’re gaming the system right now, but long-term the real number of people will also see more. But it is a leap of faith. You do have to change the way you think about this stuff.

Adrian:

And if you don’t believe me, run some tests, break your email into three lists, zero to 30 day engagement, 30 to 90, 90 plus, and send the same email to each of those groups. See what open rate is. And I can guarantee you that that 90 plus group of people is going to be a minuscule open rate, unless there’s something really crazy. And if you get more than 10% of that group, please get in touch because I’d love to know what’s going on.

Cindy:

That’s so good.

Adrian:

On the whole, then that’s no, this is the reason that you’re sending to all those people that aren’t opening. That’s, what’s hurting you.

Cindy:

So Adrian, we do have quite a few questions and if I can just ask everybody, can I take one minute and share something with you? And then we’ll come back to Q&A. And so for my one minute, I just want to share with you that the tool that Adrian and I both use primarily for email marketing and marketing automation is Keap and Keap is great because you owe it to yourself not to keep using an Excel sheet and sticky notes and doing all your business email, just in whatever email client you have. My friend Frank said it was the… I love this. He said, “It’s the cheapest employee I ever had.” And Keap they they’re so awesome. They gave me a deal. And so I want to share it with you guys, and Fallon is going to put the link in the chat.

Cindy:

And so for 50 bucks you can get in and check it out and try it. And you would get our top five campaigns that Fallon and I use with clients every day and an hour set up time with us just to check it out. So you owe it to yourself and your business to do that. And I just wanted to share that with you and pass that kind of cool offer along and Keap even gave us a special little URL. I think it’s like buykeap.com, Cindy Z and Fallon’s got it in the chat for you. So we can wrap on that and come back to, to the QA, if that’s okay.

Adrian:

Can I just add a little public service announcement in beyond that as well, Cindy?

Because I’ve worked with a lot of email platforms over the years, and one of the reasons that I still recommend Keap wherever I can is because they have one of the most advanced ways of handling email deliverability. Because this is something that Keap do that’s, I’m not aware of any other platform that does it to this level now, is they actually automatically send the emails from different servers depending on how recently that’s engaged.

Cindy:

Yes. I love that.

Adrian:

If you’re managing your engagement properly, all the emails you send out or come from Keaps best servers with the best chance of hitting the inbox. The reason that I’m not as keen on ActiveCampaign is they send all the emails out from one server and there’s no distinctions. That means you have to work a lot harder and you’re in a shared boat with other people that aren’t necessarily managing things as well as you are. The way that Keap works, they really reward you for managing your engagement in a way that no one else that I’m aware of yet does.

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Adrian:

So that’s a very good reason to use Keap because they have an extremely sophisticated way of maximizing the chances that you’re going to get into the inbox. So as well as all the things that you can do, but there are still things that the email platform has to do as well. And I just want to that out and recognize that it makes a big difference.

Cindy:

Well said, well said, thank you, Adrian. All right, let’s go-to questions. We have quite a few, so, Oh my gosh. One of them got a question. Is there any reason to do both DKIM and SPF?

Adrian:

Yes. Always do both. Simple as that. Start with DKIM. But as soon as you got that sorted, move straight onto SPF because they both help in different ways. And if you only do one of those, you’re only doing half the job.

Cindy:

Okay. Another question is, I don’t know the first thing about SPF and DKIM. We use G Suite at work. My tech team set it up, and now I have to manage everything. I’m not sure where to start. So maybe that maybe you’ve already answered that, but I’m just reading through the question.

Adrian:

I mean, if you can then just ask for help, that’s the quickest way to do it. If not there are step-by-step guides. I think Keap have got a guide of how to set it up. I think ActiveCampaign have got something similar. So you can go out there and find it. If you want to get fixed quickly, then if you’re a client of Cindy’s definitely go to Cindy. If you’re not a client Cindy’s then go to Cindy or we can help as well.

Cindy:

Yeah. Adrian’s the bomb for sure. And actually Devin who’s on here as well. And that was everything about it. Hey Devin. All right. I get a good open rate of 20% and click rate is slightly less, but then I don’t hear from them. What do I do? Should I ring them? Great question.

Adrian:

Great question. So, first off, I’m willing to bet you can improve the open rates. It depends on if you’re not managing your engagement already then that’s the starting point. If you’re not hearing from them, then I guess it depends. Is that because they’re not reading the email, or is it because there’s just something that’s not quite right for them?

Adrian:

So I would say, firstly, make sure you’re managing your engagements and see if you can get that open rate up. But if you’ve got their phone numbers, then yes, there are hot leads. I mean, I wouldn’t waste time on ringing every single person on your list, but if you’ve qualified someone sufficiently, if they’ve engaged with enough emails, they’ve opened enough click-through or whatever, then absolutely the chances of making any kind of sale are so many times greater by telephone than email.

Adrian:

Email is great for getting that introduction out there. But it’s never going to be the way to make the most number of sales, or if you’re selling a $7 thing, then you do that by email every day. But if it’s hundreds or thousands of dollars, then you need to have a conversation quite likely. So email is a great way of gauging their interest, particularly if you’re putting particular things for them to click on. And if they’re clicking a link to find out more, that shows they’re interested, and then you can get your platform to tell you, “Hey, this person clicked on this link.” And then if you’ve got their phone number, ringing them up, that’s a no-brainer.

Cindy:

Yeah. I’m so glad you said that because with all the clients we work with, I mean, the way I imagine this is that email is running in parallel with the things we do to serve our clients and sell and be in touch and build our know-like and trust. So emails running and in parallel, I’m still trying to be everywhere to them. I’m at a Tradeshow. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Facebook. I’m doing this thing right now with you. Like whatever the thing is.

Cindy:

And so I wake up in the morning and fire up my CRM. I look at Keap and I see who’s engaged. So I can see who’s opened or clicked or whatever and then decide, okay, who do we want to I’m paying and just follow up with and check. And we look on our team we work as a team to do that and everybody can do that. Even if you just take 10 minutes out of your day to do that, you can Terry pick the people who you want to, “Oh, I’m going to reach out to these three people or these 30 people today.” So I think it has to work in parallel with all the other marketing things and sales things that we’re doing.

Adrian:

Yeah. Even though I love email, it is not the only game in town. It will get you so far, and you can do loads with it. But you’ve got to make sure you’re covering all the bases. Simple.

Cindy:

Nice, nice. Well said. We do have a few more questions, and we’re going to do our best to reach everybody and get to all the questions I know we’re going a little over, but I’m glad we have tons of questions. So feel free to stay with us for a few more minutes while we go through. And if we miss your question, we will circle back to you.

Adrian:

There’s next?

Cindy:

When a user gives explicit permission from an external form, say Gravity Form, why do we have to go through a confirmation again? I suppose that depends on the email platform a lot of contacts don’t check their email to confirm. So what’s a workaround. Yeah. Great question.

Adrian:

So I guess that depends on how you’ve got Gravity Forms connected up because I mean, I’m going to speak most to keep an ActiveCampaign users here because if it’s a different platform, then let me know. But the way that the majority of email platforms work now, they don’t make that much of a differentiation between whether one of their own web forms are filled out or whether gravity forms or whatever was connected up externally. And in theory, it shouldn’t be a confirmation. If it’s a different platform than they might be set up differently. I know that back in the battle days, AWeber was a perfect example of a platform where you had to jump through 27 hoops. if you didn’t have to send out another confirmation email and it can be a problem because people don’t always click on these confirmation emails.

Adrian:

But in most cases, you should be able to actually set it up so that you don’t have to do that. So I know with ActiveCampaign, as an example, you can go into the list settings and you can turn off email confirmation. With Keap than unless you’ve actually set up email confirmation, then it doesn’t happen. So what I would say is that just make sure that you’ve got whatever settings you can set up so that it doesn’t have that confirmation. If the contacts aren’t checking their email to confirm, then you’ve got a problem anyway.

Adrian:

So what I say is on whatever acknowledgement page you’ve got inside Gravity Forms, they’re going to have to click a button to say submit or give me my stuff or whatever. So on that next bit of information, they see the thank you page or whatever. This is going back to what I said earlier. It’s about training people to go and find that email from you straight away. It might be in the spam, so rescue it, but they’ve got to learn to click on that email. You’ve got to train them if they haven’t realized that maybe you’re not being clear enough in the instructions on that form saying, “Hey, you’ve just submitted this, go and find this email now and click the link.” So that’s the other workaround… That’s all I can really offer on that.

Cindy:

That’s a good one. That’s a good one. And so here’s a tricky one. And working with B2B, I work with us as well. Some people have corporate domains and emails are supposedly being delivered, but there’s an issue with the corporate email filters blocking the emails. And I hear about this one because again, there’s three big email providers and Microsoft is the one that I always get to play with on this.

Adrian:

Microsoft. But there is a much more greater evil in play here. And that is these corporate email providers. So it could be banking, financial services, all kinds of corporate places. Their IT department will purchase some kind of third-party spam filter. It could be Barracuda, Cloudmark, Proofpoint’s, Symantec. There’s lots of them out there. And they all hate marketing platforms. It’s not unique to Keap or ActiveCampaign or MailChimp. They pretty much block marketing emails from all of the providers.

Adrian:

Unfortunately, this is not the fault of your marketing automation platform. This is the fault of some very paranoid power-hungry IT administrators that work all these corporates. And the difficult answer is there is no easy way to work around this. If it’s a big client where there’s lots of people that you’re trying to reach, then you might have to go and have a conversation with their IT manager and say, “Hey, can you put a rule in place to allow emails from ActiveCampaign or Keap or MailChimp or whatever.

Adrian:

And they might say, no, because they don’t want to let it all through. They might only want to let yours through. And there’s normally a way of doing it, but it depends on how helpful they are or not. Now, if this is something that is really, really crucial then if you’re using Keap then I have got a little software solution called WeDeliver looking kind of reroute the emails via third party that might not be blocked but I don’t go and sell this to people because it’s actually, it takes a bit of setting up, is extra money and it’s extra complexity. But if it solves your problem and it generates enough dollars in return, it might be worth it.

Adrian:

But more often than not, you’ll find that the number of people affected is small enough that it’s not worth it. But if you’re working with corporates and that’s 80% of your list and you just not getting anything through, then unfortunately, you might have to look at either something like that or having lots of conversations with people because it is a nightmare. I’ve worked with so many people where it’s down to the paranoia of IT managers who don’t understand that actually marketing emails have a purpose.

Adrian:

It’s like the receptionist in the doctor’s office. They always want to protect the doctor from all the patients and the IT managers are like this. They’re trying to protect all their coworkers from marketing emailS but sometimes they need to get through. So it’s a tough one. But people wrongly blame The email marketing provider is not there for, unfortunately, it just becomes very difficult.

Cindy:

And I want to say on that one, if you’ve got a specific issue, feel free to reach out to Adrian directly on that, because you can get in a conversation with him. So his info is here on the chat. And I would recommend that. I will say that one B2B client that we were working with, we still work with them, had this issue heavily, and yes, we had some issues, and yes, we did WeDeliver.

Cindy:

I will say that when we started looking at the content in the emails and engagement, things that I learned from Adrian, like the placement of the text needs to be to the left, not in the center and changing wording. We didn’t even plan to get into this on the session. Maybe we’ll have another session on the content but changing the wording from… We used to always put click here to sign up. Now we say join us or reserve your spot and change the wording completely change the game with this client. And we’ve seen an increase in getting into the inbox and engagement and stuff like that. So we really work on the content to help the engagement.

Adrian:

Yeah, very much so. And just quickly circling back to Lisa’s question about Gravity Forms, you said it was Keep. So in theory, it should be possible to make it so no confirmation is needed. So that’s something that since Cindy you can help with that or I can if necessary as well. So I just wanted to circle back to that comment.

Cindy:

Absolutely. Now, Adrian, you’ve got a checklist. Can you give us the URL for that? RACE Checklist PDF from Adrian We have a slide, I think also with the information on it. Adrian, do you want to put that up for everybody?

Adrian:

Can I just answer one final question?

Cindy:

Absolutely.

Adrian:

Because the question that I have just spotted. And Dez asks, how do the… And this is actually, this is dear to my heart at the moment. How do the platform discern between the recipient opening the email and their corporate security scanner opening it for verification. Now, this is a real hot potato at the moment because the world is starting to get a bit more paranoid. And I’m seeing this a lot.

Adrian:

So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, imagine you’re sending an email to one of these corporates, and they’ve got something like Barracuda there. Now, the way that email opens our tracks is they put a little hidden image in the email. And the way that clicks attract is because they actually rewrite the link. So instead of going straight to where you’re sending them, they’re going via your email platform.

Adrian:

So if you’re sending an email from Keep, all of the links get changed to something.keap, links.com. Now the problem is some of the anti-spam filters are now starting to scan those, and they’re starting to follow the links and open the images. So it looks like the person has opened the email and clicked every link in the email even though they haven’t. And it is difficult. Now I know I’ve spoken to the guys that keep about this a lot because it is a big problem and they’re putting as much artificial intelligence as they can into this to try and detect it. Because obviously in theory, it’s going to be within a few seconds that email has been sent, and everything’s going to trigger all at the same time.

Adrian:

And I’ve noticed that they are actually kind of discounting some of these false positives, but they haven’t got it quite right yet because sometimes I know there’s some people on my list where it looks like they have opened every email and clicks on every link to it. So they’re not catching it quiet. And sometimes I have to go in and use a little bit of good old brainpower to work out that actually, maybe this one, isn’t a genuine click and things like that.

Adrian:

So if you spot cases where it’s happening a lot, I’d say raise a support ticket with your email platform because they probably need the feedback. They need to get better at it. And they’re quite keen to, but unfortunately, it is a bit of a necessary evil. Again, you can have a conversation with the recipients IT manager and say, “Hey, stop doing this. You don’t need to.” But they’ll probably going to go and do it anyway, unfortunately.

Adrian:

The good news is it’s still a fraction of your email list in most cases. But again, if you’ve got 80%, then you’re going to find that’s going to be happening quite a lot. So it does become a little bit of a problem in those cases. And the only way around that may be to just find it that a slightly more clever way of tracking those links and maybe checking. I mean, getting into the geek side for a minute, you can probably look at what the user agent is on the actual link when something follows it. And if it came from Chrome, then obviously it’s genuine. If it came from some kind of spider robot, then you’d want to just discard it. So there are ways of having a go at beating it. But it’s a bit of a tough one.

Adrian:

But I think we’ll call it quits there because otherwise we could talk about this stuff forever, and I know people need to get off. So let’s talk about the checklist.

Cindy:

Yes. The checklist. This is free you guys. This is awesome. RACE Checklist PDF from Adrian

Adrian:

The checklist is something that I wrote last year after I spoke at the Icon conference because people were asking me what you’ve shared is great, but I can’t remember half of what you’ve said. So that inspired me to put the most important things into the checklist that you can see the link there too. Totally free. No opt-in needed. You can just click that, download it, and then digest it at your leisure.

And my free email deliverability checking tool is here.

Adrian:

One step at a time, remember, there’s a lot of stuff here, and your head might be going, boom right now. And you go into overwhelm, but just remember there’s only one way to eat an elephant one bite at a time. So just pick off one thing at a time. Don’t try and do it all in one go because you’ll go crazy. There was this thing is even if someone takes my health check on deliverability dashboard and gets a hundred%, and there’s a few people doing that now, even then, there’s still things that you can do better.