Create, Automate & Scale

Break Through E-Marketing Barriers and Scale Your Coaching Business

• Sophie Riley • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Are your email campaigns getting the cold shoulder from inboxes? Buckle up, because we're about to transform your approach to email marketing! With Google and Yahoo tightening the reins on sender requirements, starting February 1st, 2024, you cannot afford to miss this rundown. We're peeling back the layers of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, turning these acronyms from daunting to doable. Whether DNS records make you dizzy or you're a seasoned pro, I'm here to guarantee that by the end of our chat, you'll be navigating the new email landscape like a champ. Our goal? Keeping your emails front and center in your subscribers' inboxes, while locking down security tighter than Fort Knox.

Now, let's shift gears to turbocharge your entrepreneurial journey! If you've hit a six-figure ceiling, it's time to smash through it with our 'Create, Automate, and Scale' strategies, specifically tailored for coaches and course creators. We're dishing out networking nuggets and automation hacks that'll transform your business into a revenue-generating powerhouse. Forget the grunt work – we're all about efficiency and scalability here. So, hit that subscribe button, check out the show notes for bonus materials, and let's power up your business to levels you've only imagined. Your roadmap to success starts here, no spammy tactics included.

We are working on your Email Marketing Resources, come back in the next 24 hours for step-by-step instructions, checklist, resources and more podcast episode for this series. Let's crush email marketing together.

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Sophie Riley:

Hi and welcome to Create Automate and Scale Podcast. Tune in to this inspirational, straight to the point, relatable content for entrepreneurs to help you mastermind the everyday hassle, give you business tips, networking opportunities, shameless money talks and scaling secrets. I'm Created to support you, to support coaches and course creators just like you, to help you take action, stop trading dollars for hours and explode your business. It's time to hit that fixed figure and beyond, let's go.

Sophie Riley:

Welcome back to Create, automate and Scale Podcast, the show that's all about making your business life easier. I'm your lively host, sophie Riley, and today we're tackling a topic that is changing the email game for Google accounts, as well as Yahoo, in 2024. And we're going to take a behind the scene look of what that means for you. Now, whether you're a business pro or a monpreneur juggling a million things I have been there you have to stay in the loop on what is cooking up in a digital world, especially because this one can have a huge impact on your marketing. So grab your favorite beverage and buckle up, because we're about to explore the wild ride of navigating Google and Yahoo's latest email sender requirements that are taking an effect as of February 1st and that's coming fast. I am here to be your friendly guide through the twist and turn of email marketing and, after three plus weeks of research, extra mimosas and maybe a few swear words Okay, there was a lot I really wanted to give you a place where you have the opportunity to understand, learn and know exactly the steps to take Before you start scrambling into implementing anything. I highly recommend you tune into this entire series that we are going to be rolling out this week. You can catch us here on the podcast while you're on the go, and, for those visual learners, we will be creating some step by step videos, add them to the description and guide you through the authentication process, along with other resources. So be sure to snag all that in the show notes. So let's jump right in and remember. You got this All right.

Sophie Riley:

Let's talk about what's changing in the email marketing world and why does this affect you. Well, as of February 1st, though, I am seeing some of the changes being implemented already. Google and Yahoo are rolling out new guidelines for bulk email senders. Why? To protect against spam. Now Google and Yahoo are putting their foot down and they're demanding bulk senders like us to step up our game. They want us to authenticate, make unsubscribing a breeze and keep our spam game in check. Now, so far, it sounds simple enough, right? Okay? So why are these changes happening? Well, I'm going to quote Gmail on this one. Gmail's AI power defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam fishing and malware from reaching your inboxes and Blocks you're ready for this? Nearly 15 billion on wanting emails every single day. Now Google is about 20 years old and the threats that we face now are definitely more complex and pressing than ever, so our best practices are now mandatory. I feel like we've all seen an increase in spam and our email marketing and our cell phones.

Sophie Riley:

I get text messages and phone calls all the time that are spam. I cannot tell you how many times I'm offered a job that I didn't apply for by text message, by phone numbers that I've never heard of, and every single time I hit reply and say I would really love to know where you got my information. Can you confirm who you're speaking with? I get ghosted. So let's break down the three big requirements. The first one is to authenticate yourself. They require senders to implement stronger email authentication, leveraging industry standards such as SPF, dkim and DIMM Mark. When we authenticate our emails, we're not only making sure that we end in an inbox, but we're also not leaving the door wide open for being hacked, so that's important.

Sophie Riley:

Now I'm just through a bunch of letters at you, so let's break it down. Before I tell you what every single letter means, I want you to know that these steps in authentication simply means that you're going to add some records to your DNS. Now, if that means absolutely nothing for you, I want you to take a deep breath. That's OK, I got you. I am creating some episodes on absolutely everything that you need to know. I will add some videos to show you the bottom line. When you purchase a domain, we would create records to say I want you, I authorize you, to link my website, my domain, to this platform. That's a DNS record. Ok, so no panic, we're going to dive down into what those letters, what being authenticated means. But if you have no idea what a DNS is, a record, don't stress, I got you.

Sophie Riley:

So first there's the SPF. The SPF is a standard email authentication method. It's a protocol that allows the domain owner so let's say so if you're really not see, that's my domain, so I'm the domain owner to specify which servers can send email on their domain's behalf. This means I get to authorize any other servers, which could be the VIP hub, in my case, with MailGun For you. It could be ClickFunnel, it could be Active Campaign, it could be ConvertKit, it could be MailChimp. You get to authorize who gets to send an email on your behalf. It's kind of like making your partner an authorized user for your bank account. They're allowed to send money to and from your account. Spf is similar. You can say which servers are allowed to send an email from your custom email domain in the form of a list, ip or a host name.

Sophie Riley:

Okay, so let's say I'm sending an email. Okay, I want to put that in Sophism. I'm sending an email, so right now my emails come from the VIP hub. So let's say I'm sending an email to Cheryl. Okay, I'm going to click send. The email is going to go into Cheryl server. I'm going to say, hey, I got an email from Sophie, but it came from the VIP hub, so they're looking at the VIP hubs reputation and not Sophie's reputation.

Sophie Riley:

Okay, now when we set up the SPF, we do two things. We one authorized the VIP hub to send that email on our behalf, which means we have to authorize any platform that would send on our behalf. So it does that. But it also now when it says hey, cheryl, I got an email from Sophie. Now Cheryl's service going to look at Sophie's reputation. So instead of writing on the back of our email delivery platform or other platforms, we are going to start, if you don't have that, set up our own reputation. So that's very important to note and I have lots of tips and tricks and things for you to help you build your domain reputation, which we'll talk about this week. So that is the SPF. It's going to help you build your own domain reputation and it's going to authorize platforms such as the VIP hub comfort kit all of those authorized on sending emails on your behalf.

Sophie Riley:

Now the second one is dekem. Dekem means domain keys identified mail, which is a type of email authentication. Now, this one, let's just put it in my own words it just means that your email was not hacked, simple enough. And then the third one is DMARC domain base message authentication, reporting and conformance. Honestly, that is a whole mouthful. And again, I'm just going to put it in my own words here If the SPF and or dekem fails, what would you like it to do?

Sophie Riley:

There's lots of options. So, once we have authenticated ourselves, our SPF is going to help us build our own reputation and authorize other platforms to send on our behalf. Dekem is going to make sure that, once after we press send, nothing was tampered with. And then Mark's going to let us know if anything was tampered with and it's going to create, basically, a ruling as to what the what happens. What does Google or Yahoo does? Or wherever your email is going. What should they do? That was a lot right. At the end of the day, once those are set up, you're going to be set good to go. I'm gonna give you some resources this week to help you track how your domain is doing, your domain reputation, all of that. So do not stress, I have tons of visual coming. It's probably the hardest one to implement because I will say that it's definitely a little bit more techy, but today I just want you to understand it, start to get comfortable with those terms and be ready to implement. That said, I don't want you to start implementing these before doing things like cleaning your list, which these are things that we're gonna talk just a bit later in this episode as to why you need to do these things before setting up your SPF, your DKIM and DICAR.

Sophie Riley:

Okay, now, the second point that we wanna touch on today is all about the unsubscribe option. Google and Yahoo have said that everyone should be able to unsubscribe from unwanted emails without any hassle, and it should take no more than one click. They require senders to support the one click unsubscribe, but also honor the user's request within two days. Now, this is something that is more for your email delivery system. So, for example, if you're in the VIP Hub I got you, but you're gonna start noticing that people can easily unsubscribe. If you go into your inbox and look at, like the first 20 emails like that inbox that you subscribe to everything to Do, you have one that already you should that one inbox and just look at the first five, 10, 20 emails, you're gonna start to see the unsubscribe button that's right beside who is sending the email. That is what we are looking for. I will have an extra episode and some resources on unsubscribe best practices because, even though you have the one click unsubscribe at the top and yes, it needs to be at the top Once you have that, you can still offer more options to your subscribers.

Sophie Riley:

If you're like me, you have a big list. Maybe it's time to offer more options, such as if you only wanna hear from VIP Hub updates, click here. If you only wanna hear about this course that you purchased, click here. If you do not wanna hear about this giant sales sequence that I got going on, click here so that they still stay on your list. But you gave them an extra option. Woo, now the third one. It's going to hurt, are you ready? But we totally got this.

Sophie Riley:

The third one is you need to reduce your spam and maintain a spam complaint rate under 0.3%. Now you're gonna say, sophie, it used to be 0.1. I'm gonna say, you know what. You're right, but they changed the wording. Okay, it used to be you need to have 0.1% spam rate, but they would take in consideration your entire email list. Now they consider you sending mass email, bulk emails to people who have no interest in opening your email also a spam. So it's 0.3% against the list of active subscribers. I'm gonna say that again 0.3% of complaint rate, but it's not against your entire list, it's against the active users on your list. So you know what? Let's unpack that for a quick second.

Sophie Riley:

First, I want you to know and understand that Google and Yahoo are deleting emails by the millions. So it is possible that in the last few emails that you sent, you've had an increase in hard bounce. You need to remove these people from your list and stop trying to email them immediately, because this will affect if you end up in an unbounce okay, it will affect that reputation, okay. So first things first are active subscribers the people that we click send on. We need to make sure that they did not unsubscribe. We need to make sure that they didn't bounce. We need to make sure that the list is clean. Now you may think who cares? They're not going to receive the email anyways. But at the end of the day, google and Yahoo will see this as spam and will see you as a threat which we want to avoid.

Sophie Riley:

And remember you are trying to build a reputation now on your own domain. You're not writing on somebody else's reputation, such as active campaign click funnel. You need to build your own and I don't personally think that sending emails to people that have unsubscribed or bounced or deleted inbox is going to help you build that reputation. So that's the first thing. The second thing is can we unpack the active subscribers? Okay, so I am a list building expert, so to speak. I have built my list really fast. Our list is around the 16,000, but we are going to be cleaning our list and reducing the amount of people that we sent you to. Only people who have opened our emails in the last 30 days. Okay, and that's okay. We are going to dive in into how to check if someone has responded or clicked to our emails. We are going to dive in on the stats that you want to see.

Sophie Riley:

We are going to dive in this week on not only cleaning our list, but can we send a few emails to get that open rate up people excited knowing that there's hot and exciting things coming, to know that to open your next email, can we maybe work on reviving your list Reviving your list before you switch over to building your own domain. We're going to talk about all of that this week, so definitely tune in and make sure that you stay on top of all of the changes. So this week we want to make sure that you are set up, that you know exactly what to do, regardless of if you have a large list, a small list, no reputation, awesome reputation or a bad reputation. We want to make sure that you know how to authenticate your domain. We want to make sure that you know how to check your Google reputation If you're on any blacklist. We want to make sure that you are good to go, no matter where you are into your business, for this switch, this change in email marketing. If you have any questions, just go below the show notes and click on the form Ask us a question. We'll get right back to you If you are excited about this topic. If this was helpful, leave us a review, let us know what you think so we can know exactly what you love and what content we need to publish more on. And cheers Cheers to an amazing 2024 where we take big actions on those big dreams.

Sophie Riley:

Thanks for tuning in to the Create, automate and Scale podcast. We hope you found today's episode to be inspirational, informative and straight to the point. Our goal is to provide you with the relatable content that helps you mastermind the everyday hassle, grow your business and achieve your goals as an entrepreneur. We know how tough it is that it can be to navigate the world of business, which is why we're here to support you with valuable tips, networking opportunities, shameless money talk and scaling secrets. We're dedicated to helping coaches and course creators take action, stop trading dollars for hours and explode their business to hit that six-figure and beyond. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast to stay up to date with the latest episode, and feel free to leave a review or reach out to us with any feedback or questions that you may have. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode of Create, automate and Scale.