Master The Inbox

How to Improve Email Deliverability Before Black Friday: Insights from Andrew Kordek

• Monica Badiu • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Black Friday is coming soon and there’s a big big issue most course creators have. And that’s deliverability. If your email list is disengaged, then you don’t need better copy, you need to make sure your emails are actually ending up in your subscribers’ inbox. 


Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from this episode

In this episode, Monica Badiu and Andrew Kordek discuss the importance of deliverability for course creators, coaches, and consultants ahead of Black Friday. They define deliverability as the ability for emails to reach the subscriber's inbox, and highlight the need to monitor and improve deliverability throughout the year. They emphasize the importance of click-through rates as a key metric for engagement, especially during the highly competitive Black Friday period. They also discuss the need for proactive list hygiene and segmentation to ensure deliverability. Andrew advises marketers to be patient and proactive in addressing deliverability issues.


Takeaways

  • Deliverability is the ability for emails to reach the subscriber's inbox, and it is crucial for course creators, coaches, and consultants ahead of Black Friday.
  • Monitoring and improving deliverability should be an ongoing process throughout the year, not just during the holiday season.
  • Click-through rates are a key metric for engagement, especially during the highly competitive Black Friday period.
  • Proactive list hygiene and segmentation are essential for maintaining deliverability.
  • Addressing deliverability issues requires patience and a proactive approach.



Meet my guest, Andrew Kordek

Andrew Kordek is a fractional evangelist at iPost, an Email Service Provider built for the modern marketer. Before iPost, Andrew was the Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of Trendline Interactive, one of the world’s largest independent email agencies. He has held client-side positions at Groupon, Sears, and Quest Software, where he was responsible for their entire email programs.

With over 24 years in the email industry, he is a recognized innovator, thought leader, and advocate for responsible email marketing.  He has been rated #5 as one of the most influential email marketers.

Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkordek/ 


Hi. And welcome.
My name is Monica Badiu. I am a marketing consultant turned conversion copywriter and copy coach. I help online course creators and info product businesses sell more through persuasive, non-spammy, no fluff copywriting.

I teach about copywriting, digital marketing, and conversion strategies tested in my businesses and with my clients.


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[00:00:00] Monica: Black Friday is coming soon and there's a big, big issue most course creators have, and that's deliverability. So if your email list is disengaged, then you don't need better copy. You just need to make sure your emails are actually ending up in your subscriber's inbox.

[00:00:23] Monica: Hey, you're listening to Master the Inbox, the podcast where course creators, coaches, and consultants come to learn how to sell with email in a non spammy way. I'm your host. Monica Barrio, a customer centric copywriter, course creator, and fellow entrepreneur. And today, along with my guest, Andrew Kordek, we're going to talk about some of the best ways you can improve your deliverability ahead of Black Friday.

[00:00:47] Monica: Andrew is a fractional evangelist at iPaaS, an email service provider built for the modern mail marketer. With over 24 years in the email industry, he's a recognized innovator, thought leader, and [00:01:00] advocate for responsible email marketing. He has been rated number five as one of the most influential email marketers, and I'm extremely grateful he's my guest today.

[00:01:10] Monica: So hello, Andrew, and welcome to the show.

[00:01:13] Andrew: Thank you very much for having me, Monica. I appreciate it. This is going to be a fun, fun session.

[00:01:19] Monica: I'm excited. Yes. So let's start. And let's start from the beginning. Now, deliverability is a big word. And while everybody has heard of it, most people don't really know what that means, what that is.

[00:01:33] Monica: So can you give us a short intro?

[00:01:36] Andrew: Yeah, that's a, it's a great way to start out. So I think that there is sometimes confusion between the word delivery and deliverability. And in a nutshell, deliverability means your email gets somewhere to the spam folder, to the inbox, to a different folder, whereas delivery, which is often some people would say, I have a 99 [00:02:00] percent delivery rate.

[00:02:01] Andrew: That just means it actually passed and got to the server, right? There was an, a bounce back delivery is not a necessarily a representative of your inbox placement. Okay. Deliverability is, and I've been in this, like I said, for 24 years and deliverability keeps changing. And I remember the days of 15 years ago, right?

[00:02:26] Andrew: The, ability to get in the inbox. Was a little bit easier but now with the concentration of so many different algorithms at the Googles and Microsoft's and the Yahoo's of the world it's a little bit more difficult and they've provided guidelines of how to get there, but oftentimes.

[00:02:45] Andrew: Deliverability is still like this empty hole that people look into and say, how do I navigate the deliverability world? And it's tough. And I'm constantly learning about it as well. [00:03:00]

[00:03:00] Monica: This is one of the reasons I actually wanted you to be part of this season two, because Black Friday is highly competitive, especially in the inbox.

[00:03:12] Monica: So deliverability is something that I talk about with my clients, but they look at me and they're like, why do you care? You're a copywriter. I'm like if, you're not gonna, if your list isn't engaged if the, chance is for you to actually. Being seen there in your inbox instead of triggering spam filters and all of that.

[00:03:36] Monica: You don't need to hire a copywriter. You need to do something else.

[00:03:40] Andrew: Yeah. Actually a lot of people can monitor to see if they're having any deliverability issues on their own. It just takes a little bit of patience, also a little bit of learning, right? And so I think one of the things. That I'm asked, maybe you're asked too, is right, is what can I tell if I'm having deliverability [00:04:00] issues?

[00:04:01] Andrew: It's simple and I think about deliverability is like When you write emails or when you create emails or when you create campaigns, you have to be as diligent in monitoring deliverability as you do everything else. In your business, a big way to tell if you're having deliverability issues is actually really simple.

[00:04:23] Andrew: It takes a little bit of practice, takes a little bit of time. But oftentimes people wait and aren't proactive. They're just reactive Oh my gosh, we've hit a block list or Oh my gosh, we're seeing huge numbers decline in Gmail or Yahoo. The best way to monitor to tell if you're having deliverability issues is take your top five, maybe even your top 10 domains that you send to.

[00:04:51] Andrew: And track on a monthly basis or every couple of weeks, especially if you're a heavy mailer and say, are our engagement rates [00:05:00] going down? Are they staying the same or are they going up clearly if they're going down? And what I mean by engagement is you're looking at a variety of different things, but mostly you're looking at clicks, right?

[00:05:11] Andrew: Opens subjective, right? But if you're looking at clicks over a period of time and you notice a decline. In those clicks, then you might be having some sort of deliverability issue. The second thing is to monitor the IP addresses that you're sending out. There's lots of free tools out there to monitor and say, how is my reputation?

[00:05:35] Andrew: When I enter in my IP address going in my hitting blacklists, are these blacklists worth noting? And it's like regularly. Brushing your teeth, right? You have to do it quite often, right? To make sure that things are going smoothly. There's lots of opportunity and there's lots of people who've written about how to tell if you're having deliverability issues, but it really starts [00:06:00] with you.

[00:06:00] Andrew: It starts with you, the email marketer or the marketer itself to really have a good handle and to consistently look for things that could potentially be deliverability issues.

[00:06:13] Monica: I love that you mentioned the click through rate is one of the KPIs to keep track of, because most people are just stuck at the level of open rates and they're like, oh, my open rates are so done, are so low.

[00:06:25] Monica: What can I do to get more people to open my emails? Yeah. But if they don't click those emails, oh that's very good.

[00:06:35] Andrew: You could use open rate as a directional metric, meaning you can say what's this versus that. But ultimately, especially if you're a retailer, whether you're selling socks or whether you're selling ovens or shoes you need to look more so at the click through rates to get a better sense of, oh, maybe I have a problem here.

[00:06:57] Andrew: Maybe I don't.

[00:06:59] Monica: Oh yeah. [00:07:00] And. Actually getting the click is super important for Black Friday, because we're talking about a highly competitive time when if you want people to buy from your email list, they have to click something in that email and they need to do it now rather than three days later.

[00:07:18] Monica: So I'm actually curious from the. point of view of deliverability, one being improving it ahead of Black Friday and then keeping it in at a positive level after Black Friday. What do you think is different? How is it impactful to, Whatever happens on a regular day to day basis. Yeah,

[00:07:42] Andrew: And that's a great question.

[00:07:43] Andrew: And I think what we need to do is, first of all, take a step back. There have been lots of changes over the last two years. Specifically we've heard of this thing called Yahoo goal. We're now Yahoo and Gmail are requiring, have sets forth some [00:08:00] requirements. You need to have authentication in place, including DMARC.

[00:08:04] Andrew: You need to keep your spam complaint rates under a certain amount. This is not just a thing leading up to Black Friday or after Black Friday. This is a consistent throughout the year. Of monitoring and building your reputation and maintaining your reputation. So it really starts with what are you sending?

[00:08:26] Andrew: Who are you sending to? But most importantly is the engine. And what I mean by the engine to make an analogy is the engine of authentication. The engine of making sure your complaint rates are under a certain amount, making sure your lists are clean. That keeps the engine running, changing the oil in your car, right?

[00:08:48] Andrew: You're going to want to maintain that throughout the year leading up to it. It's not as if as of November 1st or October 15th, you need to start worrying about your reputation [00:09:00] and build it up. You should have. That consistency building up throughout the year so that when Black Friday rolls around, there really is no issue.

[00:09:10] Andrew: You're more interested in the performance of the email or the performance of the website or the discounts or the sales or whatever you're going to have, right? And you're not really necessarily focused. Oh my gosh, am I going to get into the inbox because I have a deliverability issue or a potential deliverability issue.

[00:09:30] Andrew: You've changed the oil, you've rotated the tires in your car throughout the year to make sure that you've got a really solid, reliable oil. Performing program, and we can dive into a little bit more of this, depending upon the questions that you

[00:09:45] Monica: may have. So what I'm hearing is re clean up and reengagement once or twice a year, and ideally an ongoing evergreen automated process that kind of does the reengagement [00:10:00] and cleanup for you while you're doing other elements of your business.

[00:10:05] Monica: Now, I brought this up because a lot of people, sorry I'll just finish this, a lot of people they're so scared about sending the Black Friday emails because they think increasing the frequency of emails in a short time period is bad. And making those emails salesy is actually going to impact the health and reputation of their domain over a short period of time.

[00:10:32] Monica: So I'm curious, what are your thoughts about that?

[00:10:35] Andrew: So you should be scared in sending an email on Black Friday if you actually haven't prepared for it. Let me give you an example. Oftentimes people during the holiday season leading up to Black Friday or after Black Friday or during the holiday season increase their frequency and send sometimes to lists or to [00:11:00] contacts or subscribers that they haven't sent to in a while for the hope that person's going to buy again.

[00:11:06] Andrew: This is where segmentation really works out. And I'm going to throw something out there for everybody is to say, if you've been sending regular emails to contacts, right? And they're buyers, right? They've bought before in the past. They've engaged with your emails leading up to that. You don't necessarily.

[00:11:27] Andrew: Don't necessarily have to send them a deluge or a ton of email leading up to Black Friday on Black Friday and post Black Friday. Because they're going to buy anyway, right? Or they're supposedly going to buy anyway with a little bit of a nudge. Sending 2, emails in a day Black Friday or Cyber Monday or whatever may not make sense to them and you also run the risk of Alienating them and maybe wanting to unsubscribe.

[00:11:56] Andrew: Now, the opposite of that could be true as well. You [00:12:00] could actually message leading up to Black Friday to say, hey, Mr or Mrs subscriber, you're going to get emails from us on Friday. Black Friday at this time, we're doing it as a result because we want you as a customer. We want you to purchase here's an opportunity for you, please don't unsubscribe or give them a schedule of what you're looking to do.

[00:12:25] Andrew: Let them know upfront. That right, rather than if you don't want to segment and then you've at least pre warned people that is coming right, especially if you can say I'm going to send an email at 9 a. m. or 2 p. m. or at 6 p. m. or all of those times, just look out in your inbox. For that, but when you use this word, but because if you are adding new subscribers to your list that you haven't sent to in quite some time, or that [00:13:00] maybe they purchased last year, haven't really engaged.

[00:13:03] Andrew: This is the time now, or at least especially in October coming up is to hygiene your list. Go to a list vendor or a vendor and I'll have, I'll just three, there's tons of them out there. There's Webula. There's kickbox. There's at data. There's a ton of other sort of reputable vendors. They can not only hygiene your list, not tell you whether or not the email is valid, but hygiene your list and identify that there are other things.

[00:13:32] Andrew: Clean your lists, right? Make sure it's your, you're sending to a legitimate email address, not something that is going to. Come back, or that is a hidden spam address that will get you in trouble, or maybe they've turned and that email address is no longer valid. There's a huge difference between hygiene in your emails and just making sure that they're verified, right?

[00:13:58] Andrew: Huge, difference. [00:14:00] So to recap, that is leading up to it. Do your due diligence. Don't just come up with some great whiz bang campaign and expect that everything is going to be fine. Pre warn or segment, but most importantly, clean your list of people that you haven't sent to. And I think the other thing that a lot of people tend to.

[00:14:23] Andrew: Kind of freak out a little bit, right? Because it's really important. It's important for the brand, right? That they perform well on Black Friday. This is your chance to train, your program to do extremely well. Look, we just had the Olympics this past summer, right? And the guy that ran the marathon Didn't show up and just be like, I'm going to run the marathon or a swimmer they didn't just jump in the pool and did it.

[00:14:51] Andrew: They prepared, they trained, they did the things in order to get to the Olympics and then they either performed or didn't perform. And that's how you [00:15:00] should equate your email program is train it and do the things right. In addition to what you're going to do in terms of deals or sales or the site or whatever.

[00:15:11] Andrew: And that's where I think marketers tend to trip up.

[00:15:15] Monica: I love that you mentioned that because this is the reason I've opened season two to other pros because right now we're recording and it's August. This is probably going to go out in late September, but this is true. You have to think ahead.

[00:15:33] Monica: You have to plan ahead. And I've been saying this, like I've been talking about Black Friday since early August and people look at me like I'm crazy because obviously they're enjoying their holidays. And here I am saying, Q4 is coming and Black Friday is going to be here sooner than later.

[00:15:51] Monica: And it's not as easy as it used to be. So if you really want to have a profitable Black Friday campaign, start preparing [00:16:00] ahead of time. Sometimes that actually begins in September. For my clients, it's actually beginning in August because I want them to think really hard about what they're doing for Black Friday and identify all the, opportunities and all the vulnerabilities in their funnels, in their email list.

[00:16:19] Monica: So I'm so happy that you mentioned that. And you're not the first guest to say it. So this is going to be like the motto of the whole season. Start preparing your Black Friday ahead of time.

[00:16:31] Andrew: Totally.

[00:16:34] Monica: Let's say I do my checkup and I do have an issue with deliverability. Now let's say this goes out in September.

[00:16:45] Monica: We have two more months before November. What is the lowest hanging fruit? For someone who is struggling with deliverability right now.

[00:16:56] Andrew: It goes a couple of different things. First of all, the easiest thing is to hire a [00:17:00] deliverability specialist, right? To say, what do we do? You may or may not have the budget for that and that's okay.

[00:17:07] Andrew: But what you can do if you don't have the budget for that is if you're struggling to get into the inbox, ask yourself. What has changed or are we doing differently than we did six months ago or three months ago? Look, there's so many free tools out there, everybody. You can go check your reputation with the Gmail postmaster.

[00:17:27] Andrew: You can go look to see if you're on block lists. You can go look to say, how has my reputation been on whether I share my IP or whether I have a dedicated IP. And then ask yourself, what is it? That's the single most important thing to get in the inbox. Are we sending to old contacts? Are we sending to unengaged contacts?

[00:17:52] Andrew: Can we dial that back? It's I, look at it is, I don't know if you cook Monica. I kind of cook. [00:18:00] But think about it like making a recipe of a new dish. Sometimes it requires a little bit more salt. Sometimes it requires a little bit more butter. Sometimes it requires a little bit more thing to make it good, to make it better.

[00:18:13] Andrew: And this is where you guys as marketers need to say, what am I doing differently? How can I change? And sometimes you might have to cut back. Sometimes you might have to cut out some subscribers. Sometimes you might have to say, I'm going to contact the Gmail postmaster, or I'm on a block list that is preventing me from getting into the inbox, right?

[00:18:37] Andrew: Regularly. And these block lists, at least the big ones, the major ones have methodologies or processes to say, yeah, you're on it. Everyone gets on it. Here's the process you need to go through in order to get off of it. Most legitimate block lists, most legitimate issues that happen can [00:19:00] be solved by yourself, but it takes a little bit of work.

[00:19:02] Andrew: And remember what I said at the beginning, right? If you're low hanging, you're low hanging fruit should always be, should always know that my top 10 domains that I sent to are clean and having great reputation throughout the last few months. So if you start anything today is take a look back to say, what's the benchmark for my click through rates or yes, maybe your open rates with these sorts of things.

[00:19:29] Andrew: So if you're struggling to get in, then you've noticed, Oh my gosh, something happened on September 11th or September 15th where my reputation went down and now I need to go back. Maybe it was something in my creative that had a link that was a bad link that links out to something. Maybe someone, a group of people said, Oh we're unsubscribing or reporting spam complaints to this.

[00:19:55] Andrew: And it was part of a new list that you got through a sweepstakes or through [00:20:00] different things. It's like a fine recipe, right? Sometimes it could be even the most hidden thing and it's not necessarily the most important thing to make it better. And so you need to dig a little bit deeper.

[00:20:12] Andrew: But again, if you have the budget, hire somebody that can help you. And if you don't, you have to do it on your own. That help.

[00:20:21] Monica: Yes, that was very good. Cause listening to you, I realized I've been involved in many. We call them re engagement campaigns, right? Yeah. And if you go with the approach of one size fits all, and you go for very specific things, and the results are still coming back, and they're not good, you're like, what the hell is going on?

[00:20:47] Monica: And in three specific cases, three issues with deliverability, the reason behind each of the situations was different. So the approach to recover the list was [00:21:00] different or took longer. And I'm very grateful that you mentioned that because I don't think people understand how serious this is. And sometimes it's just a matter of yes, like broken links, or I know something that looks weird to your audience, and they simply mark you as spam.

[00:21:19] Monica: Other times, it's The quality of the audience, like where it's coming from.

[00:21:25] Andrew: I'll give you a perfectly good real world example. Several years ago, I was working with a client and they had an excellent Yahoo reputation. They were getting clicks. They were getting high engagements. And then all of a sudden, one day, like literally it tanked in half.

[00:21:45] Andrew: Then the next week it tanked again. And for the life of us, we're like, did something change in your email program? Did you change the creative? Did you change providers? What happened where it was an [00:22:00] issue? We dug into it, took several days. We actually found out that their IT department changed something up on their side, which eliminated DKIM, one of the authentication protocols, didn't tell the email team that this happened so they can go through their motions to update everything.

[00:22:22] Andrew: And guess what? Yahoo was like, we're not going to let this slide. And even though you had perfect reputation before that, it was because of this change. That sort of screwed everything up. Now we were able to rectify it within a week or two. So we had to dig in deep and this is the problem sometimes as we, as email marketers, whether you're a copywriter or strategist like myself, right?

[00:22:51] Andrew: Is that sometimes you feel like you have to dig a 10 foot hole and look around. And everything, it may not be something that you're doing, [00:23:00] maybe something that somebody else. Did. And that's an important aspect because guess what? You can have the greatest black Friday sale in the whole wide world, but if you're not going to get into the inbox, guess who's responsible for it?

[00:23:12] Andrew: You are. You are responsible for it because you are in charge of your deliverability and that is sometimes frustrating, but the goals keep moving around the field, right? For, you to do this. And so sometimes even the best deliverability expert in the world. We'll spend time just identifying what potentially went wrong.

[00:23:37] Andrew: And then trying to fix it.

[00:23:39] Monica: But that's normal since this is not like a one size fits all. Wow. This was very insightful, Andrew. And. I'm hoping that this conversation helps to take the focus away from the idea that deliverability is all about the open rate and the subject lines [00:24:00] and the focus being on copy and more on the elements, the strategic elements behind it with a little bit of tech elements as well, like techy stuff as well.

[00:24:12] Andrew: Yeah. One final point that I want to make. And this is what you guys. Out there have to deal with. And if there's one thing that I think people need to take away from all of this is it does take time. If you get into a deliverability issue, if you're block listed, you can't just pick up the phone and be like, Hey, Google Postmaster, get me out of your spam box or Yahoo.

[00:24:35] Andrew: It takes time. And sometimes it takes a lot longer than you want it to take. So have patience. That's the one thing around deliverability is even the best deliverability expert in the world. Does not have a direct line to immediately snap the fingers, change things. So that's why it is like taking care of your [00:25:00] program before you have to be reactive because when you become reactive, that time, is money.

[00:25:06] Andrew: That time is frustrating. That time that you have to wait for something to happen is the worst feeling in the world. I've been there. I've done that with clients and even the programs that I used to run is that sometimes you just need to take a step back, take a breather and know that it's not going to be solved.

[00:25:25] Andrew: In a, split instant, because we are all, programmed as marketers to say I send out an email and I get instantaneous opens and clicks and revenue and whatever. But when it comes to deliverability, that's not how things work. So take one thing away is be proactive. Like we just talked about rather than reactive.

[00:25:47] Monica: Thank you, Andrew. I assume that would be like the one thing you wished more people knew about deliverability, correct?

[00:25:54] Andrew: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:25:56] Monica: Awesome. On that note, if people want to [00:26:00] learn more from you, where can they find you?

[00:26:03] Andrew: Look, me up on LinkedIn, link in with me, send me a note, happy to help more than happy.

[00:26:09] Andrew: I wanted to thank you for inviting me to this. I wanted to thank iPost who sponsors me. If you're interested, just let us know. But look, if you can't find me on LinkedIn, there's another problem, but I'm active on LinkedIn. And that's really the best place to get a hold of me.

[00:26:28] Monica: I agree. I learned a lot from Andrew's posts, so go follow him or connect with him.

[00:26:33] Monica: Thank you, Andrew, so much.

[00:26:36] Andrew: Thank you, Monica. I appreciate it.

[00:26:38] Monica: You've listened to Master the Inbox, and in this season of the podcast, we're focusing on strategies to help course creators, coaches, and consultants run successful Black Friday campaigns. If you found this episode useful, then please help us spread the word.

[00:26:53] Monica: Share, and subscribe wherever you're [00:27:00] listening.