Do you know how many of the email addresses on your list are invalid? What happens when your subscribers mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing? How can you improve your sender reputation and your email deliverability? And did you know that you're losing approximately 22% of your subscribers every single year? 

We discuss this (and more!) with Brian Minick from ZeroBounce. And we guarantee you - you want to know what Brian has to say here. So listen or read on, and you can thank us later! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:12) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks. 

(3:10) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. 

(4:58) Did Brian really jump from the side of a cruise ship?

(6:20) What is email validation and why do you want to do it?

(9:44) Why deliverability rates aren't accurate.

(11:43) The truth about disposable email addresses.

(16:08) How to deal with typos.

(19:50) Other reasons why email addresses aren't valid.

(24:33) How to build an email list based on quality and not quantity.

(26:47) Make informed business decisions with ZeroBounce.

(31:40) Subject line of the week.

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What is email validation and why do you want to do it? 

Having validated over 18 billion email addresses over the years to check if emails to those addresses are deliverable, ZeroBounce did some research back in 2022. And they found that, on average, about 22% of email lists are decaying year on year. This means that next year you won't be able to deliver 22% of the emails you delivered this year.

And part of the reason why is because of job shifts and email addresses getting shut down or abandoned. But there's more, and we're going to go into details with Brian a little later. But for now, let's let that number sink in - it's a terrifying statistic! Sure, if you have more personal accounts on your email list (rather than business ones), you're looking at a slightly slower decay. But that number could be higher if you're B2B. Brian confirmed that ZeroBounce (who are B2B) are seeing their own database reduce by 32% every year!

If you've been following our work for a while, you'll know that our approach to email marketing is based on building a list over time and nurturing those people. We make offers from the start, but not everyone will buy straight away - some people can take a couple of years before they become customers. And if these people aren't even going to be on your list next year, you definitely want to sell to them quickly! You want to turn them into paying customers to keep them in your world. Because when they become customers, they're more likely to get in touch and let you know if they changed their email address, for example.

But let's get into more detail... 

Why deliverability rates aren't accurate

When your emails aren't getting delivered, you might see your bounce rate increase. However, Email Service Providers (ESPs) don't do a great job of explaining why that is. ZeroBounce, in their analysis, focuses on deliverability. When your emails are delivered, it means they've landed in someone's inbox. ESPs, on the other hand, will consider an email as delivered when it's left their system and has gone somewhere. In reality, it could be in someone's spam folder (blocked by a spam filter) or the Promotions folder. All it means is that the email has been sent.

The reason why ESPs report on 'sent' rather than 'delivered' is that they can't tell the difference! But also, this way, they show you a great-looking number. What you really want to know though, is whether your emails end up in the subscriber's actual inbox. 

But what are some of the other reasons for email list decay? 

The truth about disposable email addresses 

A lot of websites out there let people create disposable email addresses - these are valid email addresses that give you access to an inbox and allow you to send and receive emails. People typically use them to get past gated content that requires an email address (like a lead magnet or a coupon) but without using their real email address. These are anonymous.

But once the person has grabbed the piece of content they wanted, they leave that website, and they're gone. That email address is no longer a marketable contact. So if you send emails to that address, they'll either bounce or go unread. It's a completely useless contact because it's just like a 'burner email address' with a one-time use. 

The good news for us marketers is that disposable email addresses can be detected. So, as a business, you can make some decisions. If you're a charity that accepts donations from anonymous people, then this use case works for you. It’s a valid and safe scenario for accepting disposable email addresses onto your list. But otherwise, if the emails are bouncing, and you're never getting engagement, you're building a list of vapour!

From a marketer’s point of view, these email addresses are a waste of space because these people won't ever buy anything from you. Plus, because the emails aren't being received, disposable email addresses are hurting your deliverability and reputation as a sender. And in the long run, this affects your ability to reach the people with legitimate email addresses who want to receive your marketing and buy from you. So it's important that you know this technology exists, and you take measures to rule these people out. 

How to deal with typos

Another issue that affects the decay of your email list is... typos. These are incredibly common. And a lot of people accidentally type the wrong username or domain when filling in opt-in forms. Simple errors can be detected and corrected, but that's not always possible. 

ZeroBounce has technology that allows the user (in real-time) to detect the error and have the chance to correct it. When a potential typo is identified, the user is presented with an additional screen where a suggestion is made about the correct email address. The user can then confirm and proceed or deny and correct the typo. This is a seamless experience that works with a message that appears on the screen on the page that immediately follows the sign-in form. 

And this is great news for us email marketers! It means we're not sending emails to the wrong address. And in turn, that means the emails won't bounce and hurt your deliverability. 

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Other reasons why email addresses aren't valid

Other issues affecting list decay are spam traps and 'complainers' or 'abusers'. These are people who mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing. And when that happens, it negatively impacts your reputation in terms of how the email servers perceive you as a sender. If enough people are marking you as spam, you’ll potentially end up being blacklisted, and the rest of your emails might go straight into people’s spam folders.

This is because email providers take feedback from their customers. And if a lot of users consider you spam, the email servers make decisions about your domain, your IP address, etc. Their job is to put content in front of their users that they actually want. So if enough people are considering you spam, they won't want to send your content to others.

Of course, as an email marketer, you can't predict this behaviour - you don't know that specific subscribers will decide to mark you as spam rather than using the unsubscribe link you provide at the bottom of your emails. So what can you do? First thing first, make sure your unsubscribe links are clear and visible - don't hide them!

But also, don't consider unsubscribes as something negative. The truth is when someone unsubscribes from your list, they're opening the email and clicking on a link. This is considered engagement, and it helps you build a good sender reputation. 

ZeroBounce can detect 'complainers'

Because ZeroBounce works with a lot of sending partners, they receive data feeds that allow them to detect 'complainers' who tend to mark emails as spam rather than unsubscribe. They have a record of 5 million 'complainers', so if someone is known to ZeroBounce (and you're one of their clients) they're able to give you a heads up before you even accept someone like that on your list. 

Once you have access to data and statistics (and know, for example, that a certain email address is associated with someone who's 10 or more times more likely to report you as spam), you can decide whether to accept specific email addresses or not. Unfortunately, these are the types of issues that you can't deal with on your own as a business - you need the data. And ZeroBounce has access to it!

How to build an email list based on quality and not quantity

So if you already have an email list, how do you find out how many of those email addresses are problematic? Brian explains it’s about quality and not quantity. Quantity is easy – anyone can add email addresses to their lists. But you want to focus on quality instead. Whatever the size of your list, what matters is that certain rates (such as bounce rates or complaint rates) stay low. It's a percentage game - stats matter for you and for the ESPs. 

If you've acquired your email list over time, ZeroBounce can analyse your entire email list to give you an idea of how many email addresses are undeliverable or risky. Once you get past this step, you can clean it, upload it, or send it through the ESP (depending on which one you’re using, ZeroBounce might have an integration with them) and let them run the analysis. It's a quick and easy job for ZeroBounce - they take about 45 minutes to run the data on a list of 100k email addresses and can give you information on each one. That allows you to effectively validate your list.  

Make informed business decisions with ZeroBounce

Historically, ZeroBounce finds that 57% of people's email addresses are considered valid and safe to send. That leaves 43% of addresses that aren’t necessarily ‘bad’, but they need looking into in order to understand why the report highlighted them. If certain categories of email addresses are coming up for you, you have some important business decisions to make.

If you have invalid email addresses, for example, you'll want to get rid of them. Because you really don't want those people in your CRM or ESP, especially if you're paying per contact! And with regards to other categories of 'bad' email addresses, you can benefit from the experience of ZeroBounce - they'll help you make decisions specific to your business. 

If you’re still in the early days of your list-building activity, knowing about the quality of your contacts will help you build a good sender reputation from the start. Because at the end of the day, your subject line, your content, or your offer can be great, but if your emails don't get delivered, no one will see them! 

So if you're a podcast listener and want to give ZeroBounce a test drive, Brian is offering 1,000 FREE validations. And if your list is smaller than that, even better! Now's the best time to be proactive and start looking at your data because doing the cleanup at a later date is going to be a lot harder. So check it out! 

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “trapped in the airport.” The email was about our 36-hour journey home from Austin back in June. We drew a parallel between the intricacies of marking sure people don’t slip through the cracks in the airport and ensuring subscribers haven't slipped through the cracks of your email automation.

It’s a curiosity-driven hook that leads from the storytelling in the subject line, which also starts with a lowercase - and that's curiosity-invoking in itself. It comes across as if the email was potentially rushed because you are (indeed) “trapped in an airport”. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

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Warning: 6 Lies Your Email Marketing Platform Is Telling You.

The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to stop landing in the spam folder and improving your email deliverability) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:13

Hey it's Rob I'm Kennedy,

Unknown 0:14

hello today on the Email Marketing Show. We're talking to Brian minich from zero bounce about email subscriber decay sounds horrifying, and it probably is

Unknown 0:23

that a tongue twister and you nailed it. Now before we get in.

Unknown 0:31

Seeing the number of sales that you can make from the email list you've already gotten one of the quickest shortcuts to that is increasing the number of clicks that you get from every email that you send. And that means that you need to make your email links look different, your call to action, wrap them up a little bit. So we've put together a free resource called click tricks, which has 12 really creative ways to get more clicks from every link in every email that you've ever said, starting from the very next email that you send, and you can get

Unknown 0:49

that totally for free as a listener to this podcast, just head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks. Love it. He has a book on

Unknown 0:56

Unknown 1:11

Okay, this book that's on your

Unknown 1:12

test, tell us about did you buy it for yourself? Because you thought it was quite comical. Did somebody give it to you as a gift? I mean, you're showing it to me. It was a gift. It was it was and it's legitimate. It's not even a joke. It's legitimately a Risk Management Guide for

Unknown 1:23

stage and hypnotherapy. hypnotists. And so it happens to be on my desk. And

Unknown 1:28

just in case you're feeling a bit too lively. It does give a shout out to Bobby's up the sleeve here. It struck me as a great example of how to title a book creatively. Sounds.

Unknown 1:42

You've always been quite lucky with the jetlag. Thing Haven't you? But I remember

Unknown 1:44

when we were in Orlando a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago you were you were feeling it? Yeah, it was when I got back made like I want it was I've got a system you so you get on the plane and then you act and behave exactly as if you are in the place you go into it's like you've already adjusted to either one times if it's gonna be bedtime where you go when you get on the plane. If you go to bed, well, could I help get to sleep on that blue plane home?

Unknown 2:04

So I was just knackered for like a week and I was like, Damn this thing. So yeah, it

Unknown 2:08

sucked. You definitely got step one right step one get on the plane. You nailed that from there went completely Shit. Hello. Every week on the show. We show you how to make more sales and earn more money. From your email subscribers. We talk about email marketing strategy, psychology tactics, and show what's working right now to make more sales online making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday, make sure you hit subscribe

Unknown 2:33

on your podcast player hit subscribe do it now stop delivering do it. We'd also love to have you take a little screenshot or selfie as you're listening to this episode, stick it on social media and tag us

Unknown 2:41

at Rob and Kennedy. We'd love to know which episodes are floating your boat and this one definitely will. Your job as a person to an email marketing for your business is to convert as many people on your email list into customers but it's literally impossible to do that if your emails are not actually get them delivered into the inbox. And we can't take this delivery thing for granted. We do have to do some work on it. We can't put all of the responsibility for that on our email marketing platform like jumping from one platform to the next hoping that you're gonna get better delivery. You have to take some of the responsibility here. And it's all comes down to the data quality, the quality of the data that you've got in your email platform. That's what is the difference

Unknown 3:14

between the old emails landing in the email inbox and just not at all. In fact, zero bounce in that email list of decay report sounds exciting found that almost 23% of the average email list goes bad every year that's almost a quarter

Unknown 3:26

Unknown 4:38

off the head of the United States Marine? One of those three things is true. I think you've made up the second and the third one.

Unknown 4:45

I think Brian will leaped up from the side

Unknown 4:47

of a cruise ship at some point in some massive adventure. Brian which one of those three things this trip actually is not jumping off a cruise ship. I don't have the coordinates for that one. So I want to tell you that more of sticking some tape on my leg and doing a little fishing trip. Here and was

Unknown 5:01

able to do that. So yes, a little stupid but ended up in the hospital with a roll of tape on me since we were talking recently about people who end up in hospital with with odd things going on around them.

Unknown 5:11

And that's why I thought Kennedy might have made that one up. But no, that one's true. I will never mind. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I want to get straight into it because we were talking before and I was looking at one of the reports that you guys put together over a zero bounce about you analysed a whole bunch of emails and you fat Well, basically the stats on how many real legitimate good deliverable addresses shocked me to my core so I want to share that shock with our listeners today. Do you want to just briefly

Unknown 5:39

Unknown 6:31

or what will not get into today, some of the other types of email addresses that just exist that people really aren't too aware of. Okay, so So that's 22% year on year, decaying for a bunch of reasons that we're going to unpack here one of which is people change jobs and therefore you know, Brian, actually whatever email address that might not exist next year because somebody could have moved on. So that's that's just one of the many reasons that again, I'm sure we'll get into his heart this conversation. And you know, what, the first thing that that really hammered home for me is people who their approach to email marketing is not like ours in their approach is I'm going to build a list and over time, I'm going to nurture those people, and over time, I'm going to sell them stuff, and maybe it'll take a year or two for those people to buy something but actually, in reality in a year from now, 22% of that list may not even be there anymore. Which means that further pushes the argument for sell quickly turn into customers quickly keep those people around. Because, you know, if they're a customer, they're more likely to come to you and say hey, listen, I'm changing email address, I need to swap over to this email and that kind of thing. So 22% is a terrifying statistic just and it's gonna get worse. I know just in terms of the number of people who are naturally dropping off the edge of your list,

Unknown 7:25

like the, like waves crashing against the rock and slowly making the making the land smaller and smaller. Yeah, I would also just say that's an average. And so if you have a consumer based list, you need more personal emails, you know, the free email type accounts, which which many people will have that'll dictate a tiny bit slower than the business emails. And so we're b2b, we sell the businesses and we're seeing just so you guys are aware 32% of our own customer database is turning every year due to decay on the email address or the domain. So it's a massive number, but females will last a little bit longer. As you guys probably know, you probably have emails that are much longer there.

Unknown 7:55

And so anybody who's listening, where's the business emails are turning based on many variants. She'll so when when this when this was happening, one of the things that people will notice is your your bounce rate might be going up. You might be seeing a lot of emails bouncing and you go into that report, and then it goes, this email bounce. It was a hard bounce. It was a soft bounce.

Unknown 8:14

It was it was a baby hit. It's almost like Goldilocks and the Three bounces. Isn't it? Yeah, and I hate to knock the ESPs here, but they do such a crappy job of really telling you what this means. And so, you know, for us, we focus on deliverability, which means inbox and ESPs focus on delivered which means poof, gone from my system and went somewhere. I call

Unknown 8:34

it lala land that could be spam folder that could be blocked by spam filter or it

Unknown 8:37

could be inbox or promotions. You just really don't know what they really mean. Sent don't know they don't mean delivered. They mean sent right? Yes. And the reason they do that is number one, they can't tell. And number two, it's a very great looking number, right? It's generally you know, assuming all things are good, your list is good. You know you have 99.7% delivered. That's a great number. But it's coming in the inbox

Unknown 8:56

that's that's what actually matters is how many are in the inbox. And so hard bounces are preventable and soft bounces are not a waste of money is like a basic now what I love about this now we've scared the shit out of everybody. Well, the good news is that to fix vase if you're getting a bunch of bounces or a bunch of non deliverable or whatever, at the moment, the good news is we don't have to uproot from our existing email marketing platform. We'd love to do any of that stuff. Because the solution to all of this is something that we can control. It's not like we have to try and convince our email system to please make it better and we tell them to do it like rubbing a magic lamp. There's a load of stuff that we can do, but we can before we get into what we actually have to do. Let's talk about some reasons this happens. And I'm really interested to talk about, I want to talk about typos. And I want to talk about disposable email addresses because disposable email addresses we'll get onto that one first. I think obvious things that are rising there's lots of apps now including Apple, who are now allowing people to create disposable email addresses. Will you just talk just give us a brief sort of a broad view of what what we're what we're talking about

Unknown 9:58

here and we say disposable emails. And then of course give us some hints and tips on what the hell we can do about it. That sounds like nothing. Yeah, so So the apple programme is an interesting one. I have one that's way worse, which is actually much more common that people aren't really even noticing. But there's websites you can go to, and I hate to plug them so I'm not going to do it. But people can use a quick Google search here. And you can go to a website type disposable email, or Google and you will get a website that gives you a valid email address that has a inbox that can send and received people are using these for two reasons. Number one, they're using it to get past your gated content, your gated coupon, any of your gates that requires an email address, maybe they want that quick newsletter white paper and they don't want to give you their real info. And it's also being used, it's more of an anonymous type email address. That's that's that's a good way to look at it. Whereas the apple is actually controllable and it does filter to a real inbox somewhere else. So Apple's more of a forwarding programme, these disposables once they leave that website. So they pick up past your gate, they took your white paper, whatever that example might be that your use case and they closed that page that had access to that email address. It is gone. You're never got there. It's not a marketable contact. And so you're sending that email to something that will either bounce or never be read. And you're going to continuously send emails to them. And it's a completely useless, I like to call burner email addresses because that's

sometimes one time use and that's it and you'd pass it and throw it away. And you know, people do that 1000s of times I could hear people's brains in the background who've maybe been online for a while saying oh is this is a case for bringing back double opt in, you know, people who used to be like our first ever email provider was Aweber. That was the original the OG of email marketing platforms and our niche was AWeber and you had to have double opt in case it doesn't know what to opt in. It's basically meant back in the day someone joins your email list put your name and email address in and then before they get your email list, they had to go to their inbox and click Shetty ugly link to confirm that they were a

real human being and only then when they're on your email list. So is this a case of bringing back double opt in it bypasses that because they can receive the email so they'll put that email address into your signup form. You'll send them an email and they can click it from this disposable email account. So the whole point of it is most of them we can detect so that we're very good at this we can detect those type of emails and as a business or whoever you are, you can make some decisions. So we have lots of websites that are accept donations, for example, and they want to accept donations essentially from anonymous people. That's a great use case of a valid and safe scenario and I'm okay with that. But it's the other ones that are more concerned about which is the email marketers who are not aware this type of technology exists where they're sending to and then they're bouncing

or they're never getting engagement and they're just building a list of vapour is really all they're doing. Yeah, I probably this is a useful thing I guess because these people are from from a marketers point of view. They are a waste of space they are joining your list with no intention of ever buying anything, they just want the coupon or they just want the freebie or they just want you know, they don't want to buy more stuff they want to become like they wanna become a really good valued customer. They want to just quickly either buy something or then get out or not buy something at all and just get the lead magnet or register for the webinar or wherever it's gonna be. So the good news the good news is that what we're not suggesting you try and do is to save these people and change it and but just know that they exist so that you can rule them out and good. You know what there's going to be that many people join my list each year who are using disposable email addresses that are a waste of space that are gonna buy anything anyway, but I do need to know about them. Because obviously as we always talk about emailing a bunch of dead email addresses and causing problems is going to make it more difficult to get delivered to the people who do want to receive your stuff. So it is important

that we deal with this. Let's talk about the second one then which is of course typos and email addresses. Yeah, so incredibly common. I don't know if anybody has done this on your show, but I finally did it on my iPhone where I tap the Add symbol twice and my email pre populates because of how many times so I auto corrected my own email. It's kind of hacked. It's amazing, by the way, but how many times have I typo in my real email on a real order? And then I'm like, Where the hell is my receipt? What the hell's my shipping? Where's my tracking what's going on here? And so we are also seeing a tonne of email addresses coming in with typos on the domain. A lot of people are using our API on signup forms and registrations, checkout process, whatever it might be. And we're detecting that typo from the start and actually suggesting the fix if we can see it. So gmail.com aol.com these types of things are detectable and you can fix and correct it. And if you are missing out on that, especially if you're a company that caters a lot to the mobile side. We see a tonne of this on the mobile side and this is very common. We're all fat finger in it. I'm a big guy. I have fat fingers too. And so we have to get in front of this stuff. And you can detect it and fix it that the value of that can be significant. And we are seeing a lot of people we have some mobile apps very, very popular mobile apps that hooked us up on their signup forms or the registration to get past their gate. And they've implemented that and I've seen a significant increase in just to call the actual status was 11% detection rate that we caught and fixed and sort of blocking them and then fixing the typo and then

allowing them through and confirming this all with them. It's massive. I mean, if we're talking big scale that can that's a big deal. It is and let me just ask how that works and practical sort of user experience way so I'm there with my massive fingers and I'm signing up for someone's lead magnet and I type in gee you know, Kennedy's hair is great@gmail.com. I hit submit, is that what happens now for me as a user, is that user interface thing

that's happening through you or through zero bounce, or is that secretly happening? Just collecting what's happening? Yeah, so the technology will detect that that's a potential typo, and it will so we'll check to see if it's a real email because perhaps it's an actual real one. Sure, we'll check. If that's not then we go back and say, Hey, this is an actual typo. We'll send that back through our through our technology. And we've seen great implementation use cases we'll say, hey, the email you submitted isn't we can't connect. Did you mean to

type this and they'll present the fix and people can hit like yes or

they'll just pre populate the email.

And that's an immediate next page after submitting the form. That's less than two seconds from hitting submit. Wow. What a service though, like think about actually about how much customer service that's going to prevent from like you say people going, I bought that failure a big scammer because you haven't sent the login details your dirty rotten scammer, and actually, it's because they can't type which happens in all of us. To all of us. On the very next page, you'll go like, Oh, it looks like that. You might have got this wrong. Here's what we think you might have typed might have meant to have types. Is this correct? They say yes, they say no. So you're not even like secretly in the background, having to guess and like potentially end up emailing somebody the wrong domain or something. That is really interesting. When we can say yes, then we can say no, and then now they're on your list. That's That's awesome.

I mean, we found as a business, it's always, it's always our fault in the customer support desk that they didn't receive their login until we dig a bit deeper. Occasionally it is, but most of the time, it's something like gmail.com or Aya or any of the others. So we've talked about disposals and titles, are there any other massive ones that are obviously people moving on changing, you know, they don't work there anymore. Are there any others? The big ones that sort

of really stand out that people probably don't even know until they're listening to this episode, are currently decaying away inside the list? Yeah, there's two that I think are definitely worthy, especially if no one you know if you don't have a lot of experience in this space, and it's okay, they're very easy to understand. The two would be spam traps. And also complainers or abusers is what we call them depends on kind of how you look at the term but let's not we're complainers because it's kind of It sounds pretty straightforward. complainers are people that are known to mark you as spam, or will mark you as spam instead of unsubscribing. So want to be clear on this. If you are marked as spam, instead of that same person clicking unsubscribe, it is really, really, really negatively impacting your sending reputation, and how the mail servers are perceiving you as a sender. And so if enough people are marking you as spam, you'll actually get thrown potentially into a blacklist or the rest of your email that you're sending will move into the spam folder. So what's happening is these mail providers are taking feedback basically from their customers. And so if you're sending to a whole bunch of Gmail accounts, and many of them are hitting you with spam, what's happening is Gmail is making decisions about you. As a sender, it's making decisions on your domain, your IP address, your ESP, that you're sending them all of this, and they will start to move you into bad buckets, which is basically the spam folder. And so all these people, if you go to your spam box, and they keep sending you these emails, it's because they're way ahead of them. They're a bad sender and people marking them as spam. So they're you know, Gmail job, and I'm sorry, just like his Gmail, because so many people are aware of and it's great technology. Their job is to put content in front of you that you actually want. Yep. If we simplify things, that's their job. And so if all the people in their network are moving things to spam, then why would they ever want to send that piece of mail to your inbox or put it on top right and send you that push notification that you got this email? So we're making a lot of decisions about that. And so what we've been able to do is we've to help with this because it's an unpredictable event, right? You don't really know if that's the case. And especially if you're a good sender and you're using an unsubscribe link, you actually would prefer somebody unsubscribes the mark to spam

just so you guys are aware of Yeah, so never bury that link and make it too hard to unsubscribe. You want someone on strike. Oh, that's one of my pet peeves, by the way. Like we just have a little rant about that. When somebody there's somebody still teaching this bullshit, which is put a gazillion carriage returns at the bottom of your emails to push the ego scrabbling down. If your emails are so bad that you have to hide the unsubscribe link. Unsubscribe is not the problem. The content of your friggin

emails is the problem. Rant over Brian, you may resume thank you for joining my therapy session. It's very true though. And so actually just for even more fun news here and unsubscribe is considered engagement. And it's my favourite piece of engagement but it's considered a click okay, and so the mail servers go Oh, not only did they open they clicked, it's actually building sending reputation, which is what you want. That is your actual golden goose here and your golden ticket is inbox. That's that is how you're gonna make your money and how you're gonna get your ROI. So what we've been able to do is we've worked with a lot of sending partners and we received data feeds in. We've actually detected just last year over 5 million kind of have these complainers and so will actually give you a heads up before you ever send an email to them if they are known. And we're doing this based on statistics and nothing just guessing here 10 or more times they've marked emails as spam when they could have unsubscribed. And so we will actually detect that for you as well and tell you if that is the type of email address that you have. Just so you know what to do with it. And so again, they're valid emails, they can accept mail, but you want to be a little careful, especially if you're not kind of getting emails in the correct way. Especially if you guys anyone's purchasing data, which I

do not recommend. You want to watch out for these two categories here. This is the abusers and the spam traps. What's interesting about this is like a lot of things this is one of those things you just can't as a business owner do on your own. So you can't say I'm gonna take this into my own hands I'm gonna go off it just doesn't make any sense to try and figure out how to solve this by yourself. But because you get to tap into that effectively the network that I'm just gonna call it you guys have a lot of data pools and sources and tracking the fact that you've got, you know, 18 billion email addresses and counting that have been attempted to validate some of which validated some of which invalidated. That means that anyone who wants to work with zero balance can then benefit from all of that stuff, all of the historical stuff. You've done everything you're doing every day, if somebody's sort of looking at this and thinking okay, great. So I've got my list off 100 1000 10,000 100,000 whatever number of subscribers. There's two bits to this. I guess there is oh my god, what can I do? I've built my list so far and I've never looked at this I need to do something to like, clean it to begin with. And then obviously managing it ongoing, you know, month by month, year on year, how do I deal with that as a thing? So let's talk about those two bits. I guess. We've already hinted at the idea that people would deal with it as people opt in, but if you've got a list of 100,000 people, it's effectively too late for them. Now they're on your list. You've got to do something

with them. And you think I need to find out how many of these people are problematic. What's the first steps to do that? Practically? Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm gonna just start the whole kind of thought here with my biggest goal for everyone today in the listeners is to always be thinking about quality and not quantity. And so quantity is quantity so easy guys. Anyone can add emails, we can all just add and get bad emails and put them on a list, you want to focus on the quality. So if you have whatever the list size that you have, it really does not matter because it's a percentage game for the ESPs as well. And so size does not matter. It's percent that matter. So you want bounce rates under 2%. You want complaint rates, which are the abusers people marking your spam under point 1%. So every one out of 1000 is considered acceptable. But if you have a list and you've never done anything with it, you acquired it over time you built it doesn't matter how long ago it was. I would recommend bringing it into zero balance we will do first off we can do a completely free analysis of the entire list for you and give you an idea of what's undeliverable or risky. Once you get past this step, you actually want to clean it, you can just upload it or send it through the ESP depending on which one you're using. We might have an integration with it, but you want to move it in let us run the analysis and for context of time, so anyone's like, oh, man, I don't have time to do this. If you had 100,000 emails gonna take us 45 minutes to get you back every single thing on there on all of those email addresses. So you can't give me the excuse that you don't have enough time to do this can run in the background, and you can go ahead and get it done with tonnes of people automate their API, but that's for another topic. So you want to go through you want to evaluate the list, you want to see how much of that is considered valid. So historically, for us, we're seeing 57% of people's email addresses are considered valid and

safe to send. We're seeing that on our platform as a general statistic. So that leaves 43%

right what this is the number that scares the shit out at Brian. Yeah, so 43% That doesn't mean they're all bad. I just want to be I want to be clear on that. I'm not saying 57% of your list is good and the rest is bad. What I'm saying is that the other 43% you need to actually take a look at and you need to see what it is why is it there? What are the categories we're coming up with and take some business decisions to weed out some of the bad ones. I can guarantee you you will have invalid emails, meaning they are a complete waste of everything. And I love to talk about this because people talk about ROI, where's the ROI? Why save this contact in your CRM, your ESP, every one of these systems, these contacts are trickling down and you guys are paying per contact in a general majority of the time these software's are charging per contact. So why are you still in contact that quite honestly is useless. So you want to get those out. And then you can start going through the grey area and our team can help if you have a specific case because every every business is a little bit different. But there's stuff on there that you guys want to make sure you're not sending to or at least be aware of what you're saying too. And it probably again, I could go a whole topic so I'm not going to but segmentation can play a huge role in the performance of your campaign. So 100,000 emails, if 57% just use our statistics are good. You could send the campaign 57,000 emails to just the valid and hit send and then go back and break down the last piece and see what makes sense to send to and start kind of on the riskier side lower mitigate your risk, but you didn't affect all that other great stuff. And so you know, I have a tonne of ideas here and it can get complicated.

I don't want to get any sort of complications here but you want to take a look. You got to see what's going on with your list and every list was different. I love it. I love it. I think just now for everybody just thinking about you know, what are the what are the things we can go and do and that is go and take a look at your list. Take a look at you know put it into something like zero bounce and how they analyse and show you what the risk is. And what's really nice is if you're early in the list building and this particular business you're in right now, it's a good thing to get right from now. So you're building that reputation we always think of like your sender reputation and your deliverability like we think about it almost like a credit score like you want to get it right now. So you get into the habit of making a brilliant going forward. So wherever you are this this is such amazing thing. And really considering those types of emails really considering those those those complainers those oh, these people and disposable email addresses massively massively important to think about these technical elements of getting our emails live because the end of the day as we keep saying, doesn't matter how good the subject line is. Doesn't matter how good the email content is. It doesn't matter how good your call to action is. Doesn't matter how good your offer is. The emails not even being damn well seen. Because you've ended up being blacklisted and you're in some some other inbox other than in the primary inbox which is which would suck amazing. This has been such an interesting conversation by thank you so much for coming along and taking time to chat with us. If people want to find out more about zero bounce and about you guys and and maybe get started looking at doing

this stuff. What's the best thing for them to do? Where's the best place to go I guess to get get more information. Yeah, sure. So anyone who wants to kind of give a you can give it a test drive or you're welcome to check out the website at zero bounce.net. If you tell somebody on our team or their support or someone else that you are coming from from the podcast, we'll give you 1000 Free validations and that's you know, full service. This is not anything watered down and you get an idea of what's going on, especially if you're small, and that's maybe even larger than your total list. It is the best time to start right now. I promise you. It's much it's a lot uglier trying to get out of this mess than it is to stay out of this kind of zone in the first place.

So be proactive here the reactive ones are trust me they're having they're having a lot of headaches getting out of here. I love it. So zero bounce.net to go and get 1000 email addresses validated. Check through. Yep, love it. Absolutely amazing.

Thanks for joining us on the show. Wow, this has been such a good conversation. Absolutely love this, Rob. This this whole thing really inspires me is the stuff that 10 years ago I was terrified of the idea of but now

it's such an inherent baked in part of everything that we want to do for maximising deliverability so it's it's so for anybody who's listening, thinking, Oh, I'm already doing some of the stuff that we talked about already with engagement monitoring. We have our lol reengagement revival campaign. This is the next piece this is this sits in the background technologists it's in the background, allowing this to be automatically easier. Honestly, it saves you reputation for being getting damaged in the first place. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rob, we're gonna go into this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. What do you got for us this week? This one is trapped in the airport. It was about our 36 hour journey home from Austin. Back in June. And yeah, email drew a parallel between the intricacies of making sure people don't manage to slip through the cracks in the airport and how complicated that is, and making sure people have slipped through the cracks of your email automations and stuff but obviously always pulling out

some sort of interesting curiosity driven hook from the story telling that in the subject line, publisher I absolutely love it. You also started off with a lowercase t so you you even sort of stirred a bit more of a palindrome by not starting with an uppercase letter. You had it as an uppercase a lowercase which I thought was that again another curiosity evoking thing like Did he it look like you'd sort of quickly sort of Dash Yeah, it looks more rushed. Like as if you are trapped in an airport. Yeah, exactly. There you go. That's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week, a huge thank you fraud to Brian from zero bounds for joining us on the show and this amazing really, really interesting discussion this week. Getting a bit more technical with you a bit more advanced, but I think it's been absolutely great discussion. And thank you for listening to the whole show this week. Make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player, because we'll be back again next week with another episode. Next email marketing Wednesday. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next week bye.

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