In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson welcomes Beth O'Malley, a renowned email marketing expert, to discuss email auditing and best practices.

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IMPORTANT: The VIP Waitlist for the Certified Guru email certification program is closing very soon! Secure your spot by signing up now at www.CertifiedGURU.com.

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Best Moments:

(04:03) Starting points for auditing an email program

(06:50) Proving the value of strategic email marketing to management

(10:54) Common mistakes companies make in email marketing

(13:20) The importance of understanding email technology basics

(16:08) Cost savings through purging old contacts from email platforms

(19:01) Introduction of the Certified Guru email certification program

(21:38) How to connect with Beth O'Malley and Astral Digital

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Guest Bio:

Beth O'Malley is the founder of Astral Digital, a company specializing in helping businesses reshape their email marketing strategies. She is a highly respected email expert, winning the 2023 Email Marketer of the Year award and being named one of the top 24 marketers in 2024 by Girls in Marketing. With over a decade of experience in marketing, Beth has become a leading voice in email strategy and optimization.

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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, presented by Marigold. And we have an awesome guest. We have a friend of mine. We have somebody I, I respect in a big way. And we're going to be talking about email today.

So before I let her explain who she is, let me tell you who we got. We got Beth o' Malley. Now, who's Beth o' Malley? She is a very well known email expert. She's the founder of something called Astral Digital. Okay.

Maybe she won an Oscar and I don't even know about it, but she's incredible. And we're going to talk about email auditing today, how to audit your email program. So, Beth, I want to welcome you to the show.

Thanks, Jay. That was a really great introduction. I've never had that before, so thank you. Yeah. So I love email. Massive email nerd, just like you.

But yeah, thank you for having me today.

So I just wanted on record that Beth just called me a nerd. So there you go. But no, it's all true.

So before we get into how to set up an email audit for your company and what you're doing, give us the quick rundown. How did Beth wind up an email nerd, as you say?

Yeah, we call it nerds over here in the uk. Email nerds. But we can call it guru. We're definitely email gurus.

So I started in marketing over 10 years ago and I had an apprenticeship in marketing. And that was the first time I ever had to send an email. And it was like, send an email to this list. And it was 30,000 people.

And that was the first time I'd ever stepped foot into email marketing. And I didn't really understand because I was really confused maybe me why was sending an email.

And it Was like a mass email of like, everything the business does, we'll just send it to the whole. The whole database. And I remember thinking, like, why are we doing that?

Like, we wouldn't, we wouldn't do that with some of the stuff that we're doing. We did a lot of direct mail back then as well. So we never, ever, ever send anything out to that many people. That's where that sparked my interest.

I went on a hunt of trying to find out what email was, the role of email, why people were doing it like this. And it just. I found out I was really great at it as well. So I started leading email in a lot of the organizations I work for. And that was it.

The snowball happened. Next thing you know, I was going into businesses telling them everything they're doing wrong about their emails and training marketers.

And now I'm here doing, with my own business, being able to do that on a massive level now. So, yeah, it just. My curiosity got the better of me, I think, with email. So, yeah, I love that.

I love that story. And you genuinely want to help people with their email program. I mean, it emanates from you in every way.

So I want everyone here to get some of that help. So, okay, someone's listening. They're like, well, I don't even know if I'm doing my email right or my email program stinks.

I'm a business marketer, consumer marketer. I'm listening to Beth. She talks about email audits. Where do you start? How do you do this? What should people be doing to audit their email programs?

I think I always say to people, when you start, when you're like. And you literally feel like that you're. I mean, most marketers I talk to, whether you work B2B, B2C, you're doing it alongside something else.

You're usually managing everything. So I feel like as marketers, we're on that wheel of just churning, churning, churning stuff out. An email often gets lumped on your plate.

You just do what. What everyone's always done has handed that over to you. That's what you're doing. And the best place to start is to actually get your.

Get yourself thinking about how you see email.

So the role of email, how you approach it, what you think about it, and when it comes to the consumer or the business that you're marketing to, what's that thought process? Because, you know, we can talk about, we'll talk about in a minute.

You know, actually auditing your campaigns, all of your elements in your campaigns. But I think mindset and approach is probably one of the most important things that's often neglected. So think about how you see it.

Do you see it as a copywriting task? Do you see it as a. I'm just going to push this out to get sales. How do you actually think about email?

And then that kind of rolls into how the business sees email. So for me, I always say the three pillars of email marketing is your data, your strategy, and your systems.

And within that strategy is your leadership team and how the business sees email.

And more often than not, you get leaders or managers in the business that see email as a broadcast channel, a sales channel, and they know it's really strong. They know it's our, our biggest channel, our strongest channel. It's the one we go to every time we need to say something. But they see it as volume.

So in their mind, it's like email equals sales. And if only it was that easy and that simple. And that's usually funneled down into the marketing team.

So the first obstacle you're going to face when you want to audit your emails is actually, does the business allow you to have a more strategic approach? Are they going to allow you to change the way you do things? Because often than not, you create a brilliant strategy.

You'll audit all your emails and you'll probably want to transform it. And then you'll get blocked, like straight away, you'll get blocked by leadership teams, management.

And I've seen it happen before with marketers getting penalized for sending less emails to smaller lists because they are trying to have a new approach. So that's probably the best place to start is with your mindset and the approach and the business's mindset and approach as well.

So let me ask a question, because I totally could feel that that management is not as close to kind of the way to get the most out of email. And their view is more is better, more sending is better, more numbers are better, bigger lists are better.

Doesn't matter if people aren't opening and clicking, just keep sending. Is there a way to prove otherwise? How do you win the day to almost be able to have the ownership of the program?

So that way people that aren't really involved with it aren't dictating what you're doing.

So reporting is massive. I think one of the things at the end of the day, leaders, they want to see numbers, they want to see, well, what's the bottom line that's happened?

Reporting is really important. I'm not just saying report on clicks, opens. Actually take a person, take a subscriber, take your average subscriber, personify them into groups.

So, like, who is coming into the business in your lists? Is it clients? Is it people that have signed up to a lead magnet or popped in?

They want a promo code and really understand who they are and then report on that. So follow their journeys. You know, how long until, how many emails you have to send, until they start dropping off, until their metrics go.

And if you track that over time and you can start to see the volume of emails and the poor practices versus the results and actually we're losing people or we can see that we're abusing email slightly, that's a good way to start conversations, but that's a big job. A better, maybe a, A better approach that might make them listen as well is the cost of inaction.

So get yourself educated on email and really understand as a marketer that email has changed.

There is so many different rules and practices and so much information out there that actually businesses that I speak to, the only time that the leaders suddenly go, oh my gosh, we need to invest in email, we really need to sit down and talk about this is when we do an audit and we literally show them you are ruining your reputation. You are really harming your subscribers.

And actually, over time, we can see that your unsubscribes are getting higher, your engagement is getting lower. And a good metric is if you're driving people to your website, like, as you have a look at that, what are people doing? Where are they coming from?

And is that dropping? And you'll start to see that people start listening when it comes to money, like if there's no return or it started to dip.

But that's a really, it's a really hard conversation to have. And I don't think people want to have it because an email transformation is really tough.

People would rather just carry on doing the same thing because it's easier, right? Like, it's just easier to go. We'll just keep getting more people in. We'll send more emails, we'll get, we'll get more results. It's.

It's easier that way.

So. So I stopped you in your tracks. We said number one. Did we just hit number two? What was number two?

Yeah, so I guess number two is, I think, educating the business. And like, get yourself in those team meetings, get yourself in those places to talk about email.

Because it's not just email marketing, it's email within a business. You know, the email function has so many different functions. You probably got people sending surveys out, sales teams sending emails out.

And actually email and marketing is kind of everywhere. It all comes into one.

Because you can't just as an email marketer or as a marketer, send email marketing and not think about the other communications that somebody could possibly be getting. It's all got to, to sync and it's all got to be consistent.

So have the conversations internally, even send out some surveys, like find out how people perceive the marketing function of email. Like what do the leaders think? What do your colleagues think?

Your product teams, development teams, because they're often saying, can you send an email? Can you, we need some more sales, can you, can you send an email?

And once you understand that that will help you drive change because you need to know what people think first and the approach, because that's where you'll first get stuck when you want to transform email.

So, so let me ask you this, this is off script, but is there, you've been, you've audited a lot of companies emails.

Is there like an extremely common thing that you see that most companies are screwing up or are not doing or like, you know, they're not authenticating their email or they're not doing this, or is there just some basic thing like, I can't believe everybody makes the same mistake.

Yeah, I mean, how long have you got? But the main kind of like two that pops into my head is it's one, it's the, the approach. So it's the we, we don't really know what we're doing.

So we're just, we're going to keep sending more and more because marketing have got pressure on their shoulders of getting the numbers in and leads and sales. So it's kind of that like we'll scoop it together and we'll put everybody in because it could be relevant.

Because it's this mindset of we'll send to everyone about this because it might be relevant for them and oh my gosh, we can't miss them out. Like it could be relevant, so we'll do it. And it's like, people can't give me a straight answer if you know it's relevant to that pot or not.

They're like, yeah, but it could be. And I'm like, you need to know, you should know that it is. You should know that about your audience. So that's the first thing.

It's that mindset of like, we'll send it just in case to everyone because we just want to make sure we get you Know, we make sure we get everybody in there. And that's extremely common. Like, I don't think I've ever audited an account or a business where that's not happened.

And secondly, probably getting a bit more granular with accessibility and design in email.

That's often something I see that businesses get and marketers get very wrong because they often will either design things themselves and not have a full understanding about email design principles and actually what it looks like in the inbox and how people behave when they read, when they engage with emails. And they also just don't know anything about accessibility. So that ultimately just doesn't even cross their mind.

And then they read something and then they think, oh, okay, we'll pop that in, we'll add some alt text to an image. But they don't know why they're doing it. So it often comes back to that, like the knowledge, the purpose of email.

People are doing things without, without a plan, without a strategy, and they don't know why they're doing it. They just copy whoever's shown them how to do it and they just, they don't optimize, they don't adapt.

You know, you said something earlier and you just touched on it again, which I think is really important for people doing email marketing. So you said there's email and there's email marketing. Now I view myself as someone who does email marketing.

I don't view myself as somebody that just does email. And the reason I say that is I am not an expert in email deliverability at all. Okay. There are people that specialize in that.

I think that there's a big misconception that, oh, email marketers do all of this stuff, right? When it's a very, very. Email technology is very different than email marketing.

But I think what you're saying in terms of knowledge is email sending out email is not incredibly overwhelmingly complex that you can understand on a basic level. And neither is email technology. The different platforms, different things. I believe.

I'm curious what you believe that if you are going to be put in charge of email marketing in your organization, it is not hard.

It does not take a lot of time to get a baseline understanding of email deliverability, email authentication, email sending platforms, because you need to be able to understand at a basic level if you're going to be responsible for it, and you probably are responsible for it. Is that something that you think people should prioritize? Is that real? Am I full of it? What do you think?

I think it's definitely. I agree, it's something that everybody should prioritize.

That's looking after email or leading on it or at least, you know, if you're the one sending out the emails, have the knowledge with the businesses I've worked with, with marketers, when you talk about email authentication, I mean, it's definitely growing, but there's still a level of what is that? Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Our IT team will look after that and it's fine. And your IT team might look after that.

But actually you need to understand it, otherwise you at risk. Because everything, as you said, everything you do with email, it comes back to that.

If you haven't got the technology and the back end sorted and the deliverability, it's just going to fall flat on its face. It's, it's, it's kind of a bit of a waste of time.

So it's definitely something that marketers are becoming in tune to and they're hearing it, they're seeing it. There's. But, you know, there's been a lot this year that's obviously come out and a lot of noise on social media.

There's a lot of webinars and content out there about it. So they are hearing it and listening it, but understanding it. And the marketers, I mean, I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds this year.

They often go, oh, I wouldn't have a clue where to start with that. Or I get it, I know what I'm doing, but I think it's set up, I don't know. And that's quite worrying because obviously that's really important.

Yeah. And it's total garbage. Doesn't take that long to get a baseline understanding of this stuff. It's just honestly, people being lazy, in my opinion.

So I want one last tip about something I'm curious about before we actually share something that people will be super excited about, I would imagine. When you audit email programs, you're also taking a look at the platforms that they're using.

And I'm not here to endorse or say any platform is bad or whatever, but then you also talked about old contacts and stuff. Is it real that a lot of companies are holding on to old contacts sitting in their platforms?

And the way these platforms structure the pricing in terms of what they're paying for is based on the volume of contacts that are sitting in the platform? Like, is there a cost savings there in terms of an email audit that companies don't realize by purging out some of these dead weight?

Definitely.

So part of the audit I always do systems, strategies, data as like your, your kind of core and your mindset and all of that and then obviously all your little components. But the, the system and this and the data bit is really important. So often and not. And I, I can probably bet money on this.

If I go into a business and I look at their account and they say, oh, we've got a hundred thousand subscribers. They love to tell, think, oh my gosh, we've done so well, we've grown this massive list.

And I automatically say, well, we can get rid of 20,000, we can get rid of 20% of that. I promise you, I will put money on it, you can have your money back. And we'll do this data audit.

So we will look at data relevancy, we'll look at data accuracy, quality, completeness and we will look at actually, are these people the quality that we want? Like, how old are they, what are they doing in there?

And often than not, the list is all we've got on them is first name, last name, email address, that's it. We might just have that or a job title. And we don't know. The last time they ever engaged with email was two, three years ago.

And oh yeah, I think they downloaded a white paper or they came to a webinar and I'm like, but okay, so what, what's the impact if we delete them? And they can't give me an answer, but they don't want to do it.

We stopped paying for them because, and if they really struggled to do it, they were so worried, what if they don't see that email? And I said, look, if we look at the, their journey, they haven't seen an email. You know, we can, we can say they haven't seen an email for two years.

It's not going to be that one email you magically send tomorrow that they're going to see. I mean, that might happen, you know, 1% of the time.

But yeah, businesses are probably paying for a lot of contacts they're not going to use for the wrong contacts as well.

Like poor quality, poor relevancy, because people just like to grow their lists as big as possible because they don't know how to be strategic with email marketing. So they just spray and pray, as I like to call it.

You know, if you have an ego about the size of Your database, you have a major problem that you need to work on.

And if you have a KPI or some sort of metric about the size of your database and that's how you're being measured in your performance, you need to call that out and say that's total garbage because it's ridiculous. All right, let's get to something that's not ridiculous. Okay.

I reached out to Beth a little while ago, months ago, maybe like a year ago at this point now, and I said to Beth, I go, you're the only human being on earth I want to do something with.

And I reached out to Beth and I said, I want to create with you, with my Guru Media Hub team, the world's greatest, largest, most comprehensive 100% free email certification for everybody called certified Guru. And Beth, tell everybody where we're at. What are we doing? What is happening? What is Certified Guru?

Guru is the only place you're going to go to. You. We're not looking to create somebody that does email full time. I mean, you're more than welcome to.

But we are looking to create and we've created a certification that gives you everything you need to know, everything you won't find on Google as well.

So we're talking like mindset email as a career, getting more budget, all the way down to learning about accessibility in email, how to structure your emails, how to build a strategy that actually works for all industries. Because it's all about the user, it's all about the audience.

And you will become a certified guru, you'll become an email specialist, and you hold that badge for a year and you'll be able to show and demonstrate that you've got the knowledge, the skills and also the mindset and the approach to take that into your business and say, we need to change, you know, here's why. But also have the knowledge to be able to stop sending mass emails to everybody just because you think you should. So it's really exciting.

It's got blogs, content, downloadables, webinars, videos, any, any way that you learn. We've got something for you in there.

And it's, it's brilliant, I can say that because, you know, I helped create it, but it is, it's absolutely amazing. It's a lot of people's knowledge and a lot of knowledge all in there. And it's regularly updated as well. So it is, it is very exciting.

And it's a hundred percent free. There is no way you can pay for any of it. Right? There's tests at the end, there's all this stuff. And Beth oversees this program.

She is the lead of Certified Guru.

Now, if you want to get involved with Certified Guru, you want to become an email specialist, get that badge put on your LinkedIn, get your certificate, go to certifiedguru.com and get on our wait list right now. Because we're only going to open up the ability to get these certifications twice a year.

We're building our wait list starting literally today, announcing it on this podcast. Go there, sign up for that, and then as soon as it opens up, you'll be able to do that.

But beyond Certified Guru, that's certifiedguru.com Beth how does everyone get involved with Astral Digital? How do they follow you? Where do they find you? Because you are awesome. Awesome.

Thank you. Well, I'm so excited. Definitely go and sign up for that.

Like there's, there's a, there's not an unlimited slot, so get on that so you can find me LinkedIn. Beth O' Malley. If you Google Queen of CRM, Astral Digital will pop up. But LinkedIn is my place. I love LinkedIn.

I post lots of different tips, resources, content, everything you need to know about email and CRM. It's all on my LinkedIn. So drop me a follow, drop me a hello.

I would love to chat to you and I'd love to see you on the, on the certification as well, because we will be. I'll be there, I'll be involved.

I'll be able to watch your progress, see how you're getting on and obviously bring any feedback and bring it to the table. I'd love to get to know you.

Amazing. All right, certifiedguru.com, there's going to be limited slots. Go check it out. Beth, thanks for being here. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks. Jay, you did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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