Subject Line Blank E6 - What small businesses get wrong about email in AI era

We invited Robert Brandl, founder of EmailTooltester.com, to discuss how email marketing software trends are shifting for small businesses in the age of AI. We talked about email deliverability rates, the factors that affect software choices, when email deliverability isn't a platform issue, and much more. 

Find out more about Robert Brandl and Email Detective here: https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/email-detective/ 

Learn how interactive emails work in practice with Stripo’s free “Interactive Email Production” course: https://l.rw.rw/gpboe31dn2 


Subject Line Blank is the podcast by Mailtrap where email is the lens for the 
biggest stories in tech, AI, and digital marketing. New episodes every 
Tuesday.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

How important is deliverability for small businesses? How often is the software the problem? How much here do you recommend small businesses to spend on a tool? What are the biggest mistakes small businesses are doing when choosing a tool? If you are a small or a medium company starting your email marketing strategy, this is the episode for you. We had the pleasure of talking to young veteran Robert Brandle about how to choose an email marketing tool, what are the best practices, and what are the things to avoid. So without further ado, let's go. It's awesome to have you because we're gonna cover a very important part of email marketing, especially for small businesses. So before we get into the email marketing tools themselves, how important is deliverability for small businesses today? And do they really understand what even means? You have the experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Well, um, I see a lot of people talking about deliverability on LinkedIn and social media, and very often it gets confused. Like the deliver the delivery rate gets confused with deliverability, and the difference is fundamental because delivery means you tried to send it somewhere, and deliverability means uh how many what the percentage of emails did actually arrive at Gmail, at Outlook, and all these uh mailbox providers. So there's a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

And and when small business, because I mean that you touch a really important point there about like people not, and I don't mean out of ignorance, it's just you get those concepts confused. So when people say my email is not working, how often the problem is the strategy behind what what's what's what's the thing that they're saying or seeing when they say my email is not working?

SPEAKER_02 2:19

I guess yeah, what they're seeing is uh low open rates, uh little little website traffic, low sales, and then it's uh the the problem is that deliverability issues they are very silent because nobody Gmail is not gonna send you an email and tell you, hey, your emails go to spam, do something about it. Um that's not gonna happen. So it's it's a very silent problem that you don't necessarily notice, and you just see that you have fewer sales, your your email campaigns are are getting less effective and um than you might think. Maybe it's the copy, maybe it's uh the images. I should use better images, maybe it's the subject line, but it could as well be that your emails are just not getting delivered, but that also connects probably to your strategy because deliverability has a lot to do with your style strategy. The question is do your recipients really want your emails, or are they just noise? Like if if your email arrives and nobody opens it, they delete it right away. That's not a good signal for Gmail and for Outlook. They see that well do it. Yeah, they they see that, and then they uh of course they draw their conclusions and think like this email is probably not that relevant. Like next time we send it straight to spam, people don't seem to want this email.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

And like you said, there are a lot of different factors of why deliverability is affected. But based on what you do, which which is you you tested a ridiculous amount of tools to see what works and what doesn't. Um how often is the software the problem instead of the pure strategy or the pure copy?

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Um it can be a problem, the software, but usually it isn't the problem. Um, it used to be more tied like the in the past, the IP reputation was a very important part, um, a very important reason why your email would go to the spam folder. And the IP reputation is tied to your email service provider, usually, unless you're using a dedicated IP address, which most small businesses probably don't because um you usually only use it when you have 100k or more emails per month. So most people they don't use it. But the thing is that um in 2024, Gmail changed their approach and they moved more to a domain reputation um uh approach, basically looking at the sender domain, what kind of reputation you have? So the small business owner, what what kind of reputation does their domain have rather than looking at the IP address that is tied to the to the email tool? So it's it's much more connected to how you how you how you build your brand as an email sender. Are you um do you spam people or do you send emails they genuinely want and open and click in and and even forward maybe reply to? These are all good signals uh that uh Gmail values. And uh if if you don't get these signals, then very quickly your um your domain reputation can tank. And uh yeah, you can accelerate the tanking by doing uh code outreach on the same domain, for example. That's uh often what I see when when they are in big trouble, big trouble as being defined by you can't even get your uh your internal company emails delivered anymore, like your regular regular one-to-one emails, they also go to spam. Usually that means that someone had the great idea of doing cold outreach with your main domain and not even setting up a subdomain to protect the main domain. It can happen, it happens once, and then you probably remember it for for life because restoring that reputation is quite a big job and takes a long time. So uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I remember there was a marketer. Um he was always saying, Your brand is your reputation, and I think that applies to IP uh IP addresses too.

SPEAKER_02 6:51

Your IP address is your reputation, they're on the the domain reputation, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Yeah, so um there are different kinds of uh email marketing tools or or um email marketing software. Um, what are the different types that businesses should be looking at?

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Um lately, what what I can see like in in terms of trends is that there are a lot of email marketing tools that try to do it all. You know, the MailChimp, uh HubSpot, Brevo now more and more. They they try to become your CRM, your email marketing automation solution. They do SMS and like they it's an all-in-one solution. That's that's a clear trend. They build landing pages for you. You can build a website with MailChimp. I don't know if you want to do that, but like uh it's it's interesting what what kind of things, live chat, they they add uh to your email marketing software. So it's if it works well, it's it's very convenient, of course. They can't be the best at everything, that's impossible, but they usually offer good enough solutions, so that that can be interesting for a segment of users or for many users even. Um, other tools, I I guess Mailtrap is one of them. They're they're more focused on on very specific things, and they do these things very well, like transactional emails, uh, and now also marketing emails for Mailtrap. Um it's quite a new solution, but I think it it's very focused and very yeah, um narrow, narrowly focused and and and well done, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

I mean we it took uh it took a learning curve from from development, from testing, from sandboxes in moving into uh marketing. But yeah, I I agree that uh MailTrip is doing very well. Yeah. So um let's let's um let's pick a small business right now, and you need to let them know step by step how are they gonna do this. So when they choose a marketing tool or marketing or an email marketing tool, uh what are the step by step for them to sort of get into it?

SPEAKER_02 9:13

So, what I would uh do first is is to try to narrow down the features that you really need. Of course, if you're only getting started, it's a bit difficult what you might need in the future to know that. But um, yeah, you probably have an idea of whether you're doing e-commerce, do you need e-commerce features? Are you going to do marketing automation a lot? Like, do you need uh workflows that are really sophisticated? Um, because we're talking about very different classes of tools. If you when you need to set up complex marketing workflows, then you want to track the visitors on your website and have that information in your email marketing tool, then uh you you need probably something like Active Campaign, um, which is very good at automating. Um, if you don't need all that and just need something to create nice newsletters and uh and maybe an autoresponder when someone signs up on your website that you send them a welcome email, maybe another email, then uh it's it's way easier than you could work with something like even yeah, mail trap or uh mailalite. Um email octopus is a very simple one that doesn't have all the extra features. Um, yeah, I think that's to begin with, that should be something to consider. The the range of features, as I mentioned, the deliverability is usually not uh dependent on the tool, it's more on your own behavior. So I I don't see big um variations in deliverability unless the sender does something dodgy or not, but that's the tool can't influence that as much. And then of course, pricing is a very important one.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

That that's what I wanted to I wanted to touch pricing before um you get in there because how much here you recommend small businesses to spend on a tool?

SPEAKER_02 11:19

It depends on the subscriber lists and uh how many emails you want to send. But I mean you should budget in at least I would say $30 to $60, $70 per month. Um, if you have around, let's say, three to five thousand uh subscribers, something like that. But then, of course, depending on what you want to do. If you need all these clever automations, then you're probably looking more at a hundred or even more. But um, yeah, I mean, for some small businesses, it might even work with a free plan because some free plans can be pretty powerful, like uh Kit has a very generous free plan. Of course, you have to live with and mail trap as well. You have to live with the little advertisement they put in your newsletters. That's maybe not to everyone's taste to advertise an email marketing platform when they're sending out newsletters, but it's it's a totally legit way to get started if your budget is small. Just use a free email marketing platform. There are plenty of them around. Um, yeah, if if you have a budget, uh you can of course you you uh one distinction I see is whether you want to pay per email sent or per subscriber. That makes a difference because if you don't send a lot of emails, uh usually it's it's a good way to pay per email. There's always uh there's also uh pay as you go plans where you you only pay for what you actually send. Um so for example, Brevo and uh Moosend, they have these plans where you have either pay as you go or you pay per email sent. And then if you send, let's say two up to two times per month, then that's a good solution, usually. Because if you pay per subscriber, usually they give you uh like a flat rate email volume. So you pay for 5,000 subscribers, for example. That's that's basically the most common uh model, pricing model. You pay for your 5,000 subscribers, and then you get almost unlimited emails. So if you send a weekly or even every couple of days, you send an email, then that's very advantageous because they don't charge you for the extra emails that you send, uh, and you only pay for the subscribers that you have. So that's that's a key difference that I would look at. Because a good way to save money there. Yeah, and I see a lot of um uh small businesses they they accumulate email addresses, but often they are inactive and they don't really email them. And then they have these lists of tens of thousands of subscribers, but they don't email all of them, but they still get charged every month for uh all these subscribers, which isn't great. Um, another thing I uh would look at is uh unfair, let's call it unfair billing practices. Some some companies' email marketing tools they charge you for inactive uh email subscribers, so even ones that have opted out or have bounced, which is pretty unfair, I would say, because you can't really do anything with them. The cost to host them is minimal. They're not gonna pay much for keeping these email addresses, but they will charge you as if they were real email addresses and functional ones. So um, yeah, just looking at MailChimp here mainly as the main offender. We all know them. We all know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, MailChimp is very good at um raising the prices uh every half a year or so. So uh it's still for many small businesses, they heard of no other tool than MailChimp. And then the first thing they would do is go to MailChimp.com and sign up for for the free plan, which is basically uh I think you would only get 250 subscribers now for free, so hardly anything. Um, which is yeah, not not the best solution anymore.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Uh let's yeah, no, I I remember back in the day uh when I was in sales, I would use MailChimp. And I I think they were giving like a thousand at least for the free plan.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

And now you just yeah, I think it was something like 2500 for a long time. And then they kept reducing it more and more until there is hardly anything left of the free plan.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

And and and I'm not bad mouthing MailChimp at all, just just so you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

I mean, it's it's you can send newsletters, it's it's they have a decent editor, but I just wouldn't use it. It's a funny side note. Um, I have a MailChimp account, and because we refer customers, I got uh a lot of monkey credits. That's what you get when you refer MailChimp. And I think there's something like uh I could have like a million email credits or something like that. So basically, I think I could use it uh for free for the rest of my own life. Exactly. But we we actually stopped using MailChimp because we it's just not that great of an email tool, and uh yeah, we switched to something else.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Well, I mean, and nowadays with uh with AI and everything influencing email, uh it's it's harder and harder to find a tool that actually works well, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:00

Yeah, I mean it's there are tools that that do their job pretty reasonably, but uh of course it's um the more you work with a tool, uh the yeah, usually the more uh flaws you recognize and and see that I don't like this, and why don't why can't I do this? And uh yeah, I I know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

But now um you you mentioned a few, uh, but I want to try to collect them all. Um, what are the biggest mistakes small businesses are doing when choosing a tool?

SPEAKER_02 17:35

Uh not uh taking into account how many emails they're gonna send or how how often the rhythm of their their email campaigns, um whether it's it's very regular, like once a week, then they should go for a for a pay paying per subscriber, because then you have all the emails included that you want. Um, and if you send less than that, I would uh opt for something like Brevo, where you pay per email, and you have a yeah, you you you can accumulate a lot of subscribers, but only pay if you actually email them. Um, the biggest mistakes, um, of course, yeah, not not checking your deliverability. For that, I would suggest to sign up for uh Google Postmaster Tools. That's basically it's quickly done, it's very easy. And uh the thing is you have to log in from time to time because I don't think they send you any emails if uh your reputation has gone bad. So, just to explain what Google Postmaster Tools is, you uh see the health of your email campaign basically. You see the IP reputation that is going from high to low. Should it go ever go low, then uh you should contact your email service provider because that's something um that is wrong on their end. At least if you're using a shared IP address. If you are in doubt, you use a shared email email IP address pretty uh pretty uh with a higher probability. So uh there is also the domain reputation that you can monitor, and it does this, it gives a nice dashboard where you can see because they introduce these new factors um in 2024 that your authentication has to be on point. So SPF, DKIM, and DMARC they all have to be correct um in order to be delivered if you are a bulk email sender. So a bulk email sender is defined as uh sending 5,000 or more emails per month, if I'm correct, or per day. Um need to look that up, but yeah, it's basically in that range of emails. Uh, but uh either way, you should have authentication set up correctly. It's it's super important, even if you're sending one-to-one emails and your uh email authentication is uh broken, then your emails might land in spam. Um other things that Postmaster Tools does, it checks if your uh newsletters have a list unsubscribe option, which is an easy way to unsubscribe quickly. Um you you can see it if you're a Gmail user and you you have your inbox and you scroll over the emails, then you can directly see an unsubscribe option. That's that.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Um that's that's actually like a like a legal thing uh nowadays, right? Like some countries they demand that you have an unsubscribe.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

I mean, yeah, unsubscribe link. I think most countries really require you to have that. Um the list unsubscribe option is something a bit more special that's more um enforced by by Gmail and Outlook. But I mean, let's be honest, it's kind of the law. If Google demands it and Microsoft, then you you better do it.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

You better do it, yeah. Otherwise, you're not gonna go far.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

Yeah, exactly. And then the other thing that they check is uh whether more than 0.3% of uh recipients click the report spam button, because that's a bad thing. If more than like more than three in a thousand do that, um then you have a problem. They might not like if if you consistently have more than that uh in spam reports, then eventually they won't deliver you anymore to the main inbox. Um, and yeah, you'll go straight straight to the spam folder, usually. So that's uh these three things are very important, and you can monitor them in in Google Postmaster tools. Even maybe some people might say, Oh, my my email marketing tool, it shows me how many people. um complained about spam. But um the problem is that Gmail doesn't report it to the email marketing tools. So the Gmail Gmail spam reports they will never be included in this number. So you need to look it up directly in Postmaster tools. That's why it's so useful.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

That's that's very good tip. I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Yeah and and Gmail being dominant uh completely dominant um I mean you have all the Gmail at gmail.com addresses but then also Google workspace where you don't even see that Gmail is behind it. So uh they are very very dominant. So you better comply with the demands.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

But that's a great tip. That's a good tip that I'm sure not everyone watching uh knew about it. Um I want to move into the wonderful world of um AI, right? Because there are a lot of changes that AI is doing to email marketing itself. I mean we talked uh a little bit in in previous episodes so the question will be how do you feel and how do you see that AI is affecting email marketing right now?

SPEAKER_02 23:10

I mean a bit similar to to how it's affecting website content overall like uh it's very easy to spin up an email copy now uh running it through chat gpt and sending it out and it it's it's very tempting and uh but also dangerous that you you send ai slop to your subscribers that's generally not a good idea people after a while they will notice that it's it's lacking the the the special something the soul um the this email copy so yeah but of course in what we see um in the land of email marketing tools is that they all have the the AI content generators the subject line creators that's all now uh pretty much standard in the uh email marketing tools it can be useful i mean i personally I usually use my ai tool of choice chat gpt or or clot right now and I create the content there and then I move it over into the email marketing tool that's uh because just these tools have all my context usually they know who I am and with the um the the AI solutions that plug in via a via via API into the email marketing tools they usually are not trained on all your content I mean some I'm sure some email marketing tools they they also provide the context to the AI but I don't think uh many do that right now so basically yeah content creation yeah go ahead no no I just wanted to um I wanted to ask you one um it's sort of a hard question but let's go there uh if you have to recommend three tools um to small businesses and you also have to recommend three tools to stay away from what will be your top three and your l your least favorite let's say least favorite three sorry to interrupt but this is the perfect timing to remind you that if you'd like to experiment with interactive emails stripo our integration partner offers a free course called interactive email production it covers practical interactive elements like polls carousels forms and simple gamification mechanics all without coding it's a great starting point for marketers and small companies who want to move beyond study emails you can find the link in the video description now let's go back to the podcast three is a high number um regardless of AI or yeah well uh doesn't need to be three whatever you can come up with I mean um to stay away from uh I think I've made it pretty clear that I'm not the biggest fan of Mail Jim but uh yeah um that's just me um otherwise uh I think constant contact is probably also not that innovative um a Weber they they had their their big time but my feeling is that right now they are not that innovative anymore and they're still charging uh a pretty dollar um so probably from these I would tend to stay away um good ones I tend to recommend are Mailalite Brevo um for e-commerce Omniscent is pretty good it's pretty cost effective um what else do we have active campaign there if you if you're into automations a lot I I don't love all the functionality of active campaign like in terms of usability but it is certainly very very powerful um then if you need uh if you mainly need a CRM that also does email marketing HubSpot is a good solution and um of course transactional emails um mailtrap is is pretty good we use it ourselves by the way for a true tester I'm very um honored I'm I'm not paying you money though it's the free plan that that's okay that's okay we start somewhere yeah that can always change of course yeah so I hope that the list helps it's a pretty good list and I hope people uh people at home they're uh they're writing it down um and I in the beginning I mentioned uh that you are part of um email detective that you lead email detective I didn't explain too much about it but I want you to explain it because I want people to understand where's your knowledge coming from so what is email detective and what does what what do you do with it? So email detective is a Chrome extension I recently launched and since we were touching on the uh topic of deliverability it it is a little assistant for can be a little assistant for deliverability so what it does is um in it works for Gmail and for Outlook the web interfaces and you install the extension and then it will show next to the subject line it will show a little batch that will say send via Mailtrap sent via MailChimp sent via Clavio and then you can uh you instantly see what email marketing service was used to send this email it's uh I'm a geek so I I really wanted to see that and uh to my surprise and and great uh pleasure it uh many other people also are geeks in that sense and they they really enjoy knowing what people are using to send emails so um so you have this little pill or batch there and you can click it and then it gives some extra information so it it it detects if there has been you uh uh email um HTML drag and drop editor has been used something like stripo or bfree um there are a couple of different ones that can be used to to make your emails more fancy then it will detect authentication which ties into the deliverability topic it will check for spf dkim dmark beamy don't ask me to explain all these uh these uh I'm hoping people at home know otherwise we'll have another episode explaining each content but don't worry we have plenty of content it's all related to authentication and to make sure that the email that you send that you are allowed to send the email that you're sending um that you're really the the correct sender and if you're not then they will send you to spam it it's the the quick summary of it all um it will then also show the IP address um that you can use for further analysis that's more interesting for like real deliverability people um it will also notify if if anything is wrong with the email it will add a little warning icon and then you can open the pop up and see what's wrong. Is authentication uh wrongly set up or sometimes it's also the the time to delivery which is an interesting one it's also a factor um that can tell you that something is off like if you send you you schedule your email it gets sent by your email marketing tool but then it takes like three hours to arrive to Gmail and you can read that all from the source code of the email it has a timestamp and if if there's such a big delay it can mean that something is wrong with your email like with your it can be something wrong with your whole email marketing potential potentially that you're you're emailing too much and now they run extra analysis on your emails and and check if people really want them. And uh so if if your emails take a very long time to arrive that's already a little warning sign where you should be careful um that you don't get sent to spam the next time you send it. And um yeah it basically also gives you some stats um what who are the most uh who are the the most popular ESPs email marketing services in your inbox gives a little yeah stats uh interface and uh how many uh what percentage is authenticated proper properly and um for more email marketing geeks there's also a bulk scanner where you can scan 50 emails at once within seconds and then see all the emails authentication status so if if a deliverability consultant wants to quickly see uh what emails fail in the authentication department they can use that bulk scanner to find out and um that that is pretty cool and um just just so you know if you're watching this or you're listening to this um I will definitely add a link in the comments so you can go and check it out because these are all incredibly super useful tools.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

If you're a small business and you're starting with your first email campaign you're gonna need this and you're gonna love understanding what's all of this about I mean it it's also great to just see what what are your competitors using.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

So you subscribe to your competitors newsletter probably you do that anyway and then you will directly see okay they're using Omniscent they the other ones are using clavial and uh then you you get a feeling what what is the range of uh of email marketing tools that you should be looking at in the first place because they hopefully have done their research before and I and like you mentioned you you I know you're a data geek you love all of this stuff um have you seen any special patterns or something that is happening or something that is changing uh throughout the years or something that really caught your attention I mean what what I found a bit shocking is how much uh how many emails Outlook sends to spam like uh it's it's a shocking number of uh overall I have uh based on uh I have a lot of observations via email detective uh in Gmail and it's it's almost 80 000 emails that we have uh data for and overall we have a spam rate of 1.7 percent for Gmail so that's emails that landed in spam and that the email detective user then opened in spam so that suggests that they actually wanted this email um they they yeah expected this email and that's why they opened it and for Outlook this number is closer to 20% I I don't have what I don't have too much like the the Outlook data is still limited because I've only just launched uh the extension for Outlook but it it's way higher and I did some testing myself just subscribing to a lot of newsletters and even when they use double opt-in the uh double opt-in confirmation email that where you need to click the link in also this lands in spam so it's I I kept on preaching I use double opt-in that's good for your deliverability but then if you're an Outlook user and the the double opt-in email lands in spam already and you just miss it then you won't get another email so it's uh I'm yeah I I think I should stop preaching double opt-in to everyone but that's crazy I mean considering that Outlook I mean I still have an old hotmail account right I do get a lot of ads all the time right in my inbox like sometimes I because they look like emails right you click on it and it takes you to a different website and oh yeah that's the other problem yeah but anyway yeah that is a different that that is a different subject but um going back to the small businesses um I think you you you sort of lay down a lot of um things that the people should be looking into it or or avoiding um let's let's do a little sort of one two three for small businesses that they're ready to choose a tool um and sort of set it up what what will be the first or or the tweaks that you will recommend for them to do on their first try I mean they they just signed up to the email marketing tool and they get started. Yeah I mean some email marketing tools they uh have now like a template creation AI thing which is quite nice you you enter your website and then it pulls resources like your your logo colors and all that thing all these things they pull it from your website and and put something together that looks usually okay but then you probably should tweak it that it looks like really custom made and and nice so that that is something that can be helpful. Of course before you send anything and most email marketing software will not allow you to send anything if you have not set up email authentication. That's an important one and there the good news is that most uh email tools they have now an automatic setup for that so you you just from the email tool you log into your hosting company or your domain registrar rather and then they will add the records that are needed for you to to be authenticated correctly so that's uh uh good news then yeah you you just upload your list and basically are ready to go what I of course uh recommend and there are a lot of companies that just just don't do that is uh when you sign up for a newsletter or generally sign up to send a welcome email it's it's it makes such so much sense to have this email because then then the engagement is really the highest when they just signed up but so many companies they just don't send this welcome email where they have the chance to to funnel you in the the the potential customers to funnel them into the most interesting high value uh areas where they can sell the products um it is uh interesting that they don't do that but um highly I highly recommend it and and on onto that same um statement right um how relevant is for the for is is content for deliverability because I I wanted to touch that before we go because um is is content still a big thing is this do you really need to pay attention to how relevant the things that you're writing or you just need to make sure that you contact them every so and so um the content of your emails I would say well well for Outlook it might be uh I don't think many people have cracked the code what is relevant for Outlook. For Gmail I would say content is not that relevant unless it's really super spammy um and it could be really confused with a spam email where you use different font types and all that kind of thing. But generally if you if you're a good sender and you send in a in an appropriate rhythm where you can see that people open your emails and they click it click them and you don't overload them with emails then I think you you should be fine. And yeah I I you if you want to to check your content you could run it through an AI and just ask the AI if there's anything problematic I guess that's what I would would do. But hopefully it's not even necessary that you need to have your content checked by the AI for spamminess exactly exactly just people at home keep it keep it human. Remember you're connecting to human customers or human clients it's just exactly be a person like let an actual person be the the sender of the email not like corporate companies something whatever XYZ uh just put a human behind it and it makes it easier to connect makes it more likely for people to reply to your newsletter which is something that is often overlooked because that's a very strong signal for Gmail and Outlook and all these uh companies uh mailbox providers um then then they will see that you are are engaging with the email and that you really want it and that's that's a good thing. So I would that's the quick deliverability tip try to encourage them to reply to your emails that's the the best way to even get in the main inbox rather than the promotions folder.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

I love it and that's that's the best way to also um close our conversation for this time um like I mentioned I'm gonna add all of the details of email detective so you can get more information about what you're doing. I want to invite you also to subscribe uh notification button and all the things that you have to do to make sure you don't miss an episode of Subject Line Blank. Robert I want to thank you for this conversation it was very very interesting and hopefully we'll have you over again thank you very much Marcus it would be a pleasure to be on your show again and for you at home this is subject line blank we'll see you next time cheers