In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson welcomes Guy Hanson, Vice President of Customer Engagement at Validity, to discuss email deliverability, best practices, and industry insights.

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Best Moments:

(01:36) Guy's journey into the email marketing industry

(05:27) Difference between email delivery and deliverability

(11:37) The rise of "snooze" email delivery options

(16:57) Best practices for email send times

(22:19) Guy's podcast "Email After Hours" and other resources

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Guest Bio:

Guy Hanson is the Vice President of Customer Engagement at Validity and a recognized email and data industry expert. With a background in digital printing at Xerox, Guy transitioned into email marketing at the turn of the millennium. He spent nearly a decade at Return Path before joining Validity, where he continues to be a thought leader in email deliverability and best practices. Guy hosts the podcast "Email After Hours" and is a frequent speaker and contributor in the email marketing space.

Don't forget to check out Guy's podcast, Email After Hours!

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Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins.

And pitfalls to avoid.

Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that. And today we have an incredible guest. Not even like a regular guest. An incredible guest. He's one of my favorite people in the marketing world.

So who do we got? We got Guy Hansen. Now, you probably know Guy, but if you don't know Guy, let me tell you who he is first.

He's the vice president of Customer Engagement at Validity. But more than that, he is an email and data industry giant.

He is widely regarded as one of the most influential and knowledgeable people in the world of email, especially. And if you don't know, by the way, Validity, they're also a giant.

They help tens of thousands of organizations around the world, and you probably have used some of their tools like Everest or Demand Tools or Bright Verify, or mailcharts. They are like it in the email world especially.

And so we got Guy here today, and we're going to talk about some email deliverability and some tactics and some tips and some stuff. So, Guy, welcome to the podcast.

I'm just so stoked to be here, and I honestly think that's probably one of the best intros I've ever had. You rock.

I will go with you wherever you want. And whenever you meet somebody, I'll just do that intro. Don't be awkward or anything. Well, all right.

Before we get into kind of, I can't wait to pick your brain on certain stuff, I want to know, how did Guy become Guy?

Well, you know, I mean, if you mean biologically, can we save that conversation for another day?

Yeah.

But if you mean email, it was highly opportunistic. I mean, my background was digital printing. I worked for Xerox for a number of years. And round about the, you know, the.

The start of the new millennium, we found a lot of our print customers were starting to hear about email marketing. New marketing channel. And the conversation they kept coming to us with was, hey, we're hearing about email marketing.

We want to do it, but we don't know how you guys work with our data. Help us do email. And so we very opportunistically built a rudimentary sending platform and started sending email campaigns for our print Customers.

And for the first couple of years, man, we flew by the seat of our pads, but we knew just a little bit more than our customers and it was enough. That was how it started.

That's crazy. So then what did you pivot?

Because I know you got involved with Return Path, which was acquired by validity, and that was one of the real leaders in the space. So how did you then jump to becoming, know, Captain Deliverability and all this stuff?

Oh, man.

So, you know, those early years, I was effectively in the agency space and that was a great university for anyone in email marketing because it meant you worked with a load of different brands, different sectors, B2B, B2C, marketing and transactional. You learned everything. And the relationship with Return Path was they expanded internationally.

You know, I didn't go out and buy myself a new sports car or leave my wife or anything stupid like that, but it was a time to sort of, you know, reevaluate my career and think, you know, is it time to sort of go and try something different? And then the question was, well, with whom?

And, you know, because I'd worked with them and because I admired them, chatted to a few folk at Return Path, said, hey, is there a role for a guy like me? And they said, yeah, absolutely. So I jumped ship and joined them and ran their international consulting team for the best part of 10 years.

Well, and we're all better for it because I will tell you, and I'm about to offend a lot of people in the world of, of email especially, you're like a super normal, cool guy to talk to and hang out with.

And sometimes when you come, people that are like, really in the weeds on deliverability and stuff, you're like, okay, well, that's great information, but you scare me a little bit. And you're like a regular human being, which is so uncommon. So thank you for being like a normal dude. That's great.

That's cool. I'll take it as a compliment, I think.

Absolutely. So listen, I have you here and I am not an email deliverability expert by any stretch.

So I want to use this opportunity to pick your brain on behalf of the audience. So I got a couple questions here that, that are a little bit all over the place, but I'm going to jump right into it.

So here's a question, my first question for you because I always screw this up. Email delivery and email deliverability, is that the same thing or are those two different things?

Certainly in our world it's two different things and I think it's often a conversation we have to have when we're speaking with folk that haven't worked with us before because I think a lot of email senders are familiar with the deliverability reporting that they get in their ESP reporting suite and it'll go, hey, you know, you're getting 99% deliverability and that's cool except that it's really just ascent versus bounce metric. You know, you send a million emails and you know, 990,000 of them are accepted and 10,000 aren't.

Therefore, you know, your ESP reporting says you're getting 99% which is nice. You know, it looks good on your management reporting.

But it misses a key question because there's still another step in the delivery process is what happens next? You know, when Gmail and Microsoft and Yahoo process those emails, where do they put them?

And you know, you're hoping that they're going to put them in your, in your customers inboxes because that's where they're going to see them and engage with them and hopefully you know, click through and go on and buy your products. But that's not always the case. You know, a reasonably significant tranche of them end up in spam or junk and it's generally false positive decisions.

You know, those same Gmails and Microsoft's, their filters have looked at these emails and they've seen enough aspects in those emails that make them look a bit spammy and they don't put them in the inbox. And you know, the global average is roundabout.

You know, for legitimate permission based email programs, global averages about 85% goes to inbox and 15% doesn't. And so that's our definition of deliverability. And we use sort of deliverability and inbox placement interchangeably.

And I think it's important because you know, you see some good stats, you know, when you're thinking in terms of. Right, you know, what's the average revenue per email, you know, that you send for your program.

And I've seen some numbers published by some of the ESPs. Klaviyo. I reckon the US benchmark at the moment is about 11 cents per message.

So again, you know, if you're sending a million emails and you know, 150,000 of those are going to spam or junk at 11 cents an email, that's a big opportunity cost. And you know, that's how we talk about deliverability in box placement as opposed to delivery, which is just sent minus bounced.

Okay, that's super helpful to me. And you said something in there and I want to kind of just touch on it for a second.

So you said on average 85% when you send out your campaign, we'll go to the inbox, maybe 15% will go to junk or spam or whatever.

If you send out a campaign, you're a marketer, you're out there, business marketer, consumer marketer, whatever, and you send out an email and all of a sudden you see a handful of messages that you send go to the junk folder, spam folder, but you haven't really changed anything dramatic or whatever. Is it a management of expectations that some of your email, no matter how good of a sender that you are, will go to the junk or spam folder?

Or should none of your email, if you do it all right, should none of your email should ever go to the junker spam folder?

If you're a best practices sender, you should be getting as close to 100% inbox placement as makes no difference.

But it's interesting because, you know, in our role we do talk, you know, to the people who actually do the deliverability and the filtering at Microsoft and Yahoo and Gmail, and they all say the same thing. You know, it's kind of listen, you know, we don't have it in for email marketers.

In fact, we quite like email marketing, you know, because when it's done well, it brings our customers into their inboxes, they spend time there, they see the ads that we're serving, which is how we monetize, everyone wins.

So, you know, it's not, it's not like the big mailbox providers have a downer on email marketing, but their first loyalty is to their customers and protecting their customers from all the spam and the malpractice and the fraud and all the bad stuff which is out in the world. Most of the filtering and the security processes that those mailbox providers have in place is to protect their customers from the bad stuff.

And generally, if a sender's emails, legitimate emails, end up in spam or junk, it's because they've run foul. It's a false positive identification. But there's something about those emails that makes them look like the bad stuff.

And you know, all the postmasters say the same thing to us. You know, tell your customers, if you don't want to end up in spam, don't look like a spammer.

And you know, that comes down to content, but it, you know, it also comes down to the way you treat your customers, because if you send enough crappy emails that they don't want to receive and they're voting with their spam cognac, with their spam report buttons, all of that feedback goes back to the mailbox providers as well. And if they see a spike in those spam complaints, they take that as a negative signal. It's like, hey, those emails aren't so hot.

So the more than average recipients are telling us we don't want them. That filters into the spam placement decisions as well.

Right? So don't look like a jerk. And then people won't get rid of you because maybe they'll still want to hang out with you. So that's cool. I dig all that.

So let me ask you something, because I've been seeing the rise, speaking of kind of respecting the inbox, respecting the, the relationship you have and with the individual, I've personally felt a rise in this idea of snooze email delivery options. And I'm curious, do you all have any recommendations about this whole snooze thing? Can you explain to everybody what is the snooze thing?

What's your take on all that?

Yeah, so I'm a big fan, and I think it sort of plays back to what we were just talking in terms of, you know, don't look like a jerk.

And part of don't look like a jerk is give your email recipients a bit of choice, you know, sort of, you know, respect, you know, the sort of permutations of what they want to receive from you. And snooze emails.

I mean, this probably dates back to the COVID pandemic, I think, you know, it was when we first started to see them, and there was a recognition that, you know, there's events on the marketing calendar which, while most of us look forward to them, not everyone does.

You know, Valentine's Day, you know, great if you're in love, but, you know, if you've just had a breakup or even a bereavement, maybe you're not in the mood to celebrate Valentine's Day. And you're certainly not in the mood to receive a whole load of emails reminding you about Valentine's Day. Same with Mother's Day and Father's Day.

And so I think, you know, brands started to cotton onto this, and it was a good idea.

And, you know, you see Those emails going, you know, hey, Jay, Mother's Day is coming up, but if you don't want to receive any Mother's Day messages this year, that's cool, just let us know. And they temporarily mute the emails that you're sending to you until after Mother's Day and then they start again, which is a nice touch.

And I've seen a really nice piece of research.

I think it was Oracle that published it and they were looking at some of the programs that they work with that offer this snooze functionality, the ability to temporarily switch off the emails. And they found that the programs that used them saw a more than 80% reduction in OPT out rates. So that's mega.

I think it's obviously a balancing act for a sender, but it's listening.

A short term loss of a subscriber's attention is far compensated for by that long term retention because if you didn't give them that option, maybe they'd just leave your program permanently. And I know we've done some DMA research and into the sort of lifetime value of an email address and it's like 40 or $50.

So you know, in terms of money that they're likely to spend with you in time that they're on your list.

So, you know, every single one of those you save by persuading them not to opt out because you've given them another choice is, you know, that's money in the bank.

But I think the only downside with snooze is almost its popularity because, you know, you think about your own inbox now when you come up to one of those big events like Valentine's or Mother's Day, and you know, now you're getting like a shed load of these messages. It's like 60 different brands going, hey Jay, Valentine's Day is coming up. Do you want to opt out?

And yeah, the whole principle of snooze was if you didn't want to celebrate Valentine's Day, not to stuff it down your throat. And now you've got 60 brands reminding you that Valentine's Day is coming up, which perhaps isn't that great.

So I think we're starting to see the beginnings of what's loosely called a thoughtful marketing movement. Is there a better way of doing that?

And the basic premise is, you know, maybe think about providing those options as part of a preference center rather than a blizzard of emails and, you know, sort of encouraging brands to, you know, perhaps define some of those big marketing events. You know, Father's Day.

I Believe there's even a grandparents day and you know, give your subscriber the opportunity to switch those message streams on or off once one and done and never have to receive the ones that they that might be sort of emotionally distressing again. That's my thoughts on snooze.

Well, first of all, that was a great breakdown and you're so right. It's like any marketing tactic or, I don't know, I don't know if it's a marketing tactic really more of a preference.

But once everybody's doing it, it doesn't work nearly as well. The value's not nearly as high. So it's great right now because it's still a really small fraction.

You know, it's the same principle as, you know, for a while, you know, sort of send time optimization was the next big thing.

And yeah, most of the email service providers had technology to calculate, you know, when each recipient was most likely to open their emails and send it to them then. But the only problem is of course that everybody does that.

And so, you know, having figured out that I like to read my emails at 8 o' clock in the morning, I get this like deluge of emails at 8 o'clock in the morning.

And it probably, you know, sort of slightly self defeating in terms of its effectiveness because I'm certainly not going to look at them all at the same time.

That is so true. And it's almost like this confirmation bias.

It's like all of a sudden it's just creating this tidal wave that you can't handle anymore because you did this one thing. And I get newsletters now, I get like 20 all at the same time. I'm like, this doesn't work, I can't read them all. This is crazy.

All right, well speaking of that, let's pivot on that exact topic.

So the right time to send email, I would say the overwhelming majority of people listening right now just by default when they're going to send out their email campaign. Okay, they're sending it out at 8am, 11am, 2pm, it's always on the hour. Is that okay to do? Is there any downside to that? Is there a better way?

You know, that's a pretty prescient question and no, it's probably not a great idea.

And a couple of months ago the guys from Microsoft came to join my webinar and yeah, we figured out the usual talking points and then they said, guy, there's one more thing we'd really like to talk to your customers about. I said, yeah, that's cool.

And they brought this graph and this graph was basically a 24 hour breakdown of all, all the inbound volume that Microsoft and Outlook.com processes. And I kid you not, you know, it's like one of those pictures of waves that you drew when you're like a kid in your first year of school.

Spike, drop, spike, drop. And every single one of those spikes is the top of hour and then the drops are in between.

And I know Yahoo has told me they've put some numbers against it. About 70% of the hourly volume they process is in the first 10 minutes of the hour.

And a significant chunk of that is in the first minute of the hour.

And even if you like this really big organization like a Gmail or a Microsoft or Yahoo, it still has consequences because it creates processing overheads and it creates issues for Mail Store and it creates issues for delivery throughput and for client syncing. And the message from the Microsoft guys was a very simple one.

Can you please bulk senders when you've got your big sends, not schedule them for the top of the hour, schedule them for 10 before or 15 afterward or even actually like a really random number. Because I talk about the big spikes, but if you look closely at this graph, there's little spikes on each quarter hour as well.

So get outside of that. And you know, they were saying, listen, you know, you will benefit. You know, senders, you will benefit. You'll benefit in two ways.

You know, the one is you're not going to be competing for scarce processing resource.

So the likelihood of your emails getting throttled or deferred or being placed in spam and junk or getting blocked or rejected, you know, all diminish, you know, because you're not competing for that scarce delivery resource. But also, you know, same point I was making about send time optimization.

You know, you're going to be sending your emails at a slightly different time.

You know, your chances of getting iShare in the inbox increase because they're not all dropping into, you know, the recipient's inbox at exactly the same time. Top of our. So there you go.

I mean, it just seems like such a obvious common sense recommendation, but sometimes you just need, you know, that person to point it out to you and say, hey, please just, you know, modify your behavior just a tad, just a couple of minutes.

Well, the best part about email marketing is that so many things that you can change, cost you nothing, take almost no time and can actually have a significant impact on your performance. So it's like any Marketer can change that and see an improvement. I love that.

Sorry, before we, before we wrap up here, I have a random question for you.

In your regular life, you know, because you were a Xerox guy and you involve all this data stuff and you're an email guy, and people probably think that you're like, super technical dude. So do people call you up like, hey, guy, my WI fi is not working or my TV's not working?

Do they just assume that you are like, you know, this person that could fix all things technology related? And is that in your wheelhouse? Should I be calling you up, like, when everything's going down in my house.

All the bloody time? It's like, hey, you know, you work in tech. You must be a technical guy.

You know, it's like, you know, it's like my mom and, you know, her mom, you know, hey, we know this person in London. You guys must have, you know, bumped into each other. No, not really. It does happen.

I mean, for me personally, I guess it's okay because, you know, at an earlier stage in my career, you know, I would roll up my sleeves, I would write code, I would play with data, I would configure servers. So, you know, been there, done that, got the T shirt, got the data under my fingernails.

And, you know, while I don't do that much of that anymore, although I'm still an A spreadsheet whiz. Did you know it was like Microsoft Excel's 40th birthday this week? There you go. Happy birthday, Excel.

But, you know, so I don't do as much of that anymore.

I'm probably more of a data storyteller these days and, you know, sort of translating data into good ideas in terms of what you can actually do with that data. But that was my background, and I guess it's stood me in good stead right throughout my career.

Listen, everybody heard it here first.

If you have a problem with your TV at home, I want you to DM Guy, and he will walk you through the steps to resolve any TV problems that you have in your house. Because he's ready. He's ready to solve all these issues and more.

Now, listen, before we wrap up, I want you to know that Guy Guy has one of my favorite podcasts that he does called Email After Hours. We're going to put the link in the show notes.

But I am telling you, if you want to go deep on the world of email and really get into it, Guy's podcast is the podcast to listen to. And he's an incredible follow on LinkedIn. You got to connect with him there, Guy. Where else? How else should people get involved in your world here?

Hey, listen, I mean, we do the webinar series as well. State of email that goes out once a month, third Wednesday of every month.

So come and join us for that next episode is going to be with Marcel Becker from Yahoo. Giving do's and don'ts for the upcoming Black Friday season. That's going to be a good one.

You've given us a great shout out there for email after hours. We drop two episodes every month. You can find the full catalog on them on our senderscore.org website. And hey, find me on LinkedIn.

Keep the conversation going. And anything you'd like to rip on that we've talked about today or even didn't talk about today. Love to hear from you guys. So ping me.

Let's get connected.

Amazing. All right, we're going to put this all in the show notes. I encourage everyone to check it all out. And Guy, thanks for being here, man.

This has been so great. I love it.

Every time we get together, I think the only thing we got to improve on is we got to do it in person at some stage so we can have a beer together.

I'm ready. Sign me up. All right, soon. Thanks again. Take care.

Awesome. See ya.

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