So What? Google PostMaster Tools

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

You can watch on Facebook Live or YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!

In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on Google PostMaster Tools for your email marketing. We walk through the core features, what parts of your email you have control over, and best practices for your email marketing. Catch the replay here:

So What? Google Postmaster Tools

Watch this video on YouTube

In this episode you’ll learn:

What Google PostMaster Tools are and why it matters
How to use the 7 main features
What actions to take to improve your scores

Upcoming Episodes:

Lessons Learned from a Year of Weekly Livestreams – 9/16/2021

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:25
Well, hey, Happy Thursday again, welcome to so wet the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie joined by Chris and John. This week we’re talking about Google postmaster tools. And so this is a continuation of a conversation we had on the live stream last week about email marketing metrics. And we started to dig into the more technical side around Google postmaster tools. So today, we’re gonna be talking about what it is, why it matters, why you should care why these are things you should know about. We’ll be talking about how to use the seven main features of Google postmaster tools, and what actions to take to improve your score. So if you do a lot of email marketing, this show is for you. So Chris, Google postmaster tools, what is it? And why does it matter? And why don’t more people know about it?

Christopher Penn 1:12
I don’t know why people don’t know about it. That’s that’s if you’re familiar with what’s now called Search Console, used to be called Webmaster Tools. And there’s a tool for SEO professionals to be able to sort of see what Google sees when it comes to your website. Well, in the email marketing world, Google also created postmaster tools, which is, again, for email marketers, to sort of see what Google sees and provide some context for it. Now, if you look at your email database, and there are absolutely no Gmail addresses of any kind, and you know for sure that none of your your prospects are using G Suite, Google’s hosted environment, then this may not be as relevant to you. But if you’ve got clients who use G Suite, Trust Insights, for example, we use G Suite for our corporate email, it’s powered by Google Mail. Or if you’ve got Gmail addresses in your database, then you probably want to know if your emails are getting to those folks. And if it what your reputation is, because if you’re kind of on Google’s naughty list, you’re probably on some other naughty lists, in terms of email behavior.

Katie Robbert 2:27
What do you mean by you know, the quote unquote, naughty list by like sending spam emails or not conforming to Google’s rules, or all of the above

Christopher Penn 2:37
all the above. And that’s actually what the seven major features of postmaster tools do is they give you Google’s point of view about your email marketing infrastructure, and your behavior. And then say, whether you’re doing good things, you’re doing bad things, if you’re doing bad things, obviously, try to do less of them, and do the things that are expected of you. So let’s actually go ahead and show what this thing looks like. It’s it’s much less appealing looking than Search Console search console has gotten a lot of love over the years. postmaster tools is very much sort of vintage 2012.

John Wall 3:15
How about before you dive into that, too? Is this your first stop for deliverability? Questions? I mean, if somebody is concerned about what they’ve got going on with email, is this the easiest and first place to start?

Christopher Penn 3:26
Oh, no, um, I would check something like MX toolbox first to see you know, what your reputation is broadly now, for Trust Insights. And especially for me from my own personal newsletter, Gmail and Google addresses comprise close to 70% of the database, right. So it’s a big deal for us to make sure that we’re working well with Gmail. If that’s not the case for you, then I would say something more generic. So let’s go actually, you can see MX toolbox here. And this is a free set of tools. And in MX toolbox, one of the things you can do is to sort of say like, tell me what’s going on? What’s the health of my email on my on a blacklists, things like that? That would be I would say, my first stop just to see like, Am I doing something wrong? So let’s go put in Trust insights.ai here, and I posted on email health here.

I get a whole bunch of ads. It’ll give you like, war errors, warnings and things that you passed on. So in this case, I don’t see anything major wrong here. There’s no red. There’s no red indicator. So I’d say we’re probably in reasonably good condition. Then we go to postmaster tools. So there’s, again there’s seven major components to this application. The first one is spam rate. The seven major items are listed helpfully on this little menu. This one’s really simple. Anytime you send an email to somebody, and in Gmail, they hit that report a spam button. This tells you how often that’s happening for all the emails you send. The goal is, well, there’s three thresholds. You are you want to undo 1%, right, that’s sort of the gold standard, you can stay under 1% you’re doing because there’s always going to be that one person who’s just like too lazy to find the unsubscribe, like, and there’s gonna hit market spam.

John Wall 5:32
Well, that’s right next to the archive button to totally ridiculous, ya

Katie Robbert 5:35
know, to be fair, I hit the report is spam, when I’m getting emails from people I didn’t subscribe to in the first place, which means that they probably bought my email from a list or scraped it from a website. So that to me, I marked those as spam. So I’m that person who loves the record a spam button. It’s, it’s second to my first favorite thing, which is saying no.

Christopher Penn 5:59
saying no, it’s just saying no differently. So under 1% Is this the safe zone, like the call of the greens on between one and 5% is the yellow zone like if you’re if you’re reporting spam rates are, you know, between one to 5%, there are going to be some, it means your list is probably not as clean as it should be. And you may want to, you know, do some cleaning of it. And then above 5%, is the red zone, that’s where you’re going to end up on blacklists, Google may stop delivering your mail entirely. And so you definitely don’t want to see that. So we’re looking at the last four months here for TrustInsights.ai, we send out a weekly newsletter. And so you can see for the most part we are at or close to zero, the highest we ever got was point 4%. So we’re in good shape. So this is stop number one. postmaster tools.

Katie Robbert 6:51
I think it really goes back to what is your email marketing strategy, where you getting those lists of people? Are there people who you have, you know, given them the opportunity to opt in? Or are they list of people that you’ve bought from somewhere else? So they’ve never heard of your company and can’t figure out why they’re on your list. So as a side note, I actually did try to unsubscribe from an email that I didn’t sign up for over the weekend. And I clicked on subscribe. And then it brought me to a screen and said, Are you sure? And I had a yes button and a no button? Guess which button didn’t work? the Yes button didn’t work. So I had to, I kept clicking No. And it would be like, thank you for subscribing to our email. And it’s just this continued so that I finally did report them as spam. And I emailed them back and said, You need to fix this, because you’re going to keep getting reported as spam, because I never signed up for you.

Christopher Penn 7:46
Yep. Yeah. So this one’s easy to control, right? Obviously, make sure that you don’t put people on your lists that they asked to be there. And again, those numbers, you know, the zero to one is good. one to five is not so good above five is in danger territory. So that’s number one. Second thing is IP reputation. So every server that sends email has to has an IP address of some kind. And what we’re looking at here for Trust Insights is, you know, we are operating on a, our email marketing software runs on a virtual machine hosted by a company called liner. When other tenants are sending out mail from, you know, coming from the same IP address, and we kind of all it’s like, you know, good neighborhood, bad neighborhood kind of thing, you’re Driving through the neighborhood, it’s like, oh, suddenly, I think I’m going to lock my car doors. Kind of the same idea with with servers, the IP address of the server, are there people on there who are sending out all kinds of email to shouldn’t be, if it’s just your server, like you bought a dedicated IP address, it’s just as nice as a reflection of just your behavior. But for companies like us where we have we rent space on a much larger installation, you can see here that in August, are actually the place we’re renting from is gentrified, or somebody’s

John Wall 9:08
gentrification email.

Christopher Penn 9:12
And now, we can see here that our IP or IP reputation where we’re sending from has gotten better. This is one of the factors that goes into where Google Places your email. So in Gmail, now, for a lot of folks who have turned on this for different places your email can be can be in that primary inbox, which is where you want to be, it can be in like the promotions tab, which is not as good because it’s all as it can get, you know, sort of third parties falling into the sort of the updates tab, or the second worst place is the spam bucket, the scramble where nobody ever sees it. They’ll most workplaces course, it just never gets there in the first place. So your IP reputation is one of those factors that goes into it. Now we don’t have as much control over this, other than if you’re going to do In a lot of email marketing, you buy a dedicated IP address for wherever it is that you’re sending your emails from.

Katie Robbert 10:06
But it sounds like especially smaller businesses, you’re going to go the route of renting versus buying, because it’s just probably more cost effective and easier to manage, quite frankly, especially if you’re, if that’s not your jam, you’re not into managing IP servers and whatnot, which most of us aren’t except for you, Chris. So you don’t have control over who your neighbors are. Can you find out who they are? Or does that depend on the service?

Christopher Penn 10:33
You can sometimes buy that next year, I believe there’s a tool in MX toolbox for some of those diagnostic to see like, what what else is on this IP address. But, yep, so you can put it in your mail server. And look, it can look to see like what’s going on on that server in general. But one of the things that is tough to do is we have a marketing automation server. But that is not where the email comes from. Our email goes through Amazon’s email service. So it’s actually coming from Amazon servers. So this is actually a reflection of whatever shard we’re on at Amazon, not even the server that we that we are stuff is on. So from that perspective, you really don’t know all you know, is that whatever instance we’re on at Amazon is working better.

John Wall 11:22
How about this is one of those things where I’ve had situations where you get ranked very poorly. And if you just call support and say, Hey, throw me on a different IP address, I’ve had them move me before. But is that something that you want to do? Or is that create other long term problems?

Christopher Penn 11:38
Oh, you can’t do that. Like, if you’re in the the sort of the the blood red, you know, everything’s on fire. And yeah, it can’t hurt like, it’s not going to get worse. Okay. So that’s IP reputation. The next is domain reputation. Domain reputation is essentially an assessment of you of everything you’re sending your email out from. So in this case, Trust Insights, we our reputation has been high for, you know, as long as you can see a data and this is where you can have some real interesting conversations with, with your, your IT team, with your sales team, with your PR team, because every email that goes out from your domain, gets looked at this way. So a long time ago, Katie, I think this might have even been before you joined the team at the old company, a new person to join one of the PR teams from a different agency. And I was I was in charge of the marketing automation doing all this stuff with postmaster tools. And itself has to start getting notification after notification like, hey, you’ve been blacklist to be blacklisted your reputation segment, what’s going on? I went to find out one of the this new person on the PR team pulled the entire media database from gore con all 70,000 reporters and mass blasted their clients pitched it every one of them the entire planet from you know, like the card magazine of Malaysia to the New York Times. And of course, nobody wanted that. And it impacted the entire company’s domain name. So this is this is one that is under your control. But you got to know who’s doing what at your company, because other people, you know, there’s a new sales guys like yeah, I’m gonna last the database. Oh, don’t do that.

Katie Robbert 13:24
So that. So the consequence of that is the person, you know, sent out a mass email, and then everybody reported it as spam.

Christopher Penn 13:35
Yep, report spam said they want this complained, whatever the you know, and it harms everybody.

Katie Robbert 13:43
That that was indeed before my time. But I feel like I’ve heard that story before.

Christopher Penn 13:50
Yep. So this is measuring the behavior of your domain, your organization. So there’s, there’s a couple things that are best practices, especially if you’re a larger organization, one of the best practices is that your email marketing goes out on a separate domain than your corporate email. So for example, we’d have Trust insights.ai, we might have Trust Insights, marketing.com. And we’d have all of our email marketing go through that that way, important things like accounts payable, notification stuff go out and they get received as you’re not endangering all your operations. We’re not big enough to justify that yet. But certainly, if you’ve got mission critical emails that have to get out, you may want to split off that domain.

Katie Robbert 14:35
One of the old companies that I worked at had huge deliverability issues, because of the name of the company. And so it’s something to factor in so the name of the company was completely, you know, innocent, but unfortunately, they spelled it with two x’s in a row. And so the domain coming through with two x’s was then flagged as inappropriate comment content, spam content, adult content. And that was one of the challenges that the company forever had with getting email through to places like the FDA, and pharmaceutical companies because it kept getting caught in that filter. And so the domain reputation, and the deliverability was actually really poor. But because it wasn’t a it heavy technical knowledge company at the time, they didn’t know what the problem was, other than the emails kept getting flagged as inappropriate content. Yep. Oh, well, well, so be careful of the name of the company that you choose, right?

John Wall 15:40
We won’t have Trust Insights, pills casino.com up and running anytime soon,

Katie Robbert 15:44
probably not.

Christopher Penn 15:48
The fourth is the feedback loop. So feedback loop, some internet service providers and things, some pieces of software actually will allow services like Google to talk directly to them. So that if somebody hits unsubscribing, an email, it’s automatically processed, and you don’t have to do anything whatsoever. You’ll even see this. in Gmail, if you’re in Gmail, sometimes they’ll be in the market spam button will move and they’ll be a new one called unsubscribe. And for those companies that have that more advanced feature, this is the feedback loop where Google will say, Hey, here’s how often the feedback was being engaged. It’s another measure of people essentially saying I don’t want this. But because the company has gone through the effort of, you know, turning on this protocol and integrating it, it’s less likely that someone will report you as spam. They’ll hit the unsubscribe button instead that Gmail provides and get taken off the list that way. We don’t have a setup.

Katie Robbert 16:49
No, I know we don’t. But I guess it’s I mean, it seems logical, it sounds like you would rather have people unsubscribed and mark you as spam. Exactly. That’s the goal is if you’re reaching a bunch of people who don’t want to hear from you, you want to make sure that it’s easy for them to unsubscribe, versus what I do, which is okay, this unsubscribe is frustrating. Now, your spam.

Christopher Penn 17:14
Exactly. So like, if you were to look, for example, in the TrustInsights.ai newsletter, you would be able to see, let’s go ahead and switch over to this. Right here. There’s, there’s we put a pretty clearly hey, here’s the email just subscribed here. Here’s the big old link to do it. And of course, you know, because people do look at the bottom, we have another one at the bottom. So we’ve tried to make our best effort. In my own personal email newsletter, we go for absolutely hilarious. And we put this in and say like, if you can’t find the unsubscribe button, you need medical attention because something’s not right with with your ability to see. But the short version is making things as easy as possible. I subscribe cuts down on this sort of thing.

Katie Robbert 17:55
It’s an it’s a topic for another day. But there’s certainly some sort of insecurity and psychology that goes into why companies make it so difficult for people to unsubscribe, I personally, you can unsubscribe from us all day long, because it means that we’re not wasting your time trying to convince you that we are the right company for you. I would rather have people who want to be here versus people that were just like, please stay, please stay, please stay like I, if you don’t want to be here, then great. Let’s make it super easy for you to unsubscribe so that that way, you can just go along your merry way. And we can find more people who are actually interested in the stuff that we are talking about. Exactly, right.

Christopher Penn 18:38
Okay, so that’s feedback with the fifth is authentication. So authentication is using these different deliverability protocols D, Kim demark, and SPF, and whether they’re set up correctly. And we actually had an issue, I was looking at what as I was getting ready for the show today, we had an issue in one of our SPF records. So I actually had to go in and fix that earlier. It’s not reflected here yet, but it will be reflected in future shows. These are three protocols that essentially say, when we send email, we are who we say we are, when you get an email from Trust Insights, it really is from us and it’s not being sent on behalf by some other third parties, or some nefarious middle person. It really is. Us and so you need to have these three protocols set up. Now this is done in your domain name service records, your domain name record, so wherever it is your DNS is hosted, you and your IT team would need to implement these protocols. The easiest way to check to see if they’re set up correctly, there’s a number of different services that you can see them MX toolbox has some I really like the one from D marcian. So I’m gonna put Trust Insights in here.

And all this does is it goes through it looks are Our records and says, Hey, it looks like you’ve Congratulations, you set up everything correctly. Right? So there when I did this earlier, there was actually some things that were not correct. But I needed to go in and fix. So now it’s showing that these things all look good. But I do mind cast, for example, the folks over at mind cast have a really good tool as well. And they all do pretty much the same thing. They say, Did you set up your records in a way that machines can correctly read them? So no problems detected? And then not too long? And then there’s the got the relevant things. Now? You can you can see sometimes what happens when you do it wrong? Let’s see if I, if my domain is not super great, but you had some issues earlier? No, that’s, that’s, that’s fine. Let’s try marketing over coffee.

Katie Robbert 20:50
I was gonna say you can probably try mine, because I’m sure that that’s not set up at all.

Christopher Penn 20:55
Yeah, well, so in this one. In this case, he had saying there’s there is no, there’s those records. So one of the takeaways for John and i would be okay, we probably need to go and set that up so that when the marketing over coffee newsletter goes out, people actually get it. So that’s what this this authentication tab in the postmaster tools does. It tells you? Did you set these things up correctly? Yes or no?

Katie Robbert 21:19
I love how these live streams always make John’s To Do List even longer. A week, John, okay, here’s the five things you need to go do now.

John Wall 21:28
I’m like, Oh, yeah, oh, that’s broken, hey, I have to get a shirt or a scoreboard or something.

Christopher Penn 21:43
This is totally under your control. But you’ll have to work with it. If you’re not a marketing technologist, if you are marketing technologists, then you probably already know what to do here. I very strongly recommend that folks use some sort of proxying DNS service companies like CloudFlare, for example, are really, really good. And they have a free plan. so that it’s easier to maintain these things. Because I’ve had happened in the past where someone I managed, made a change to a client’s DNS record. And it broke the DNS record, but the a record which is the record, so the clients website, and their whole, IT infrastructure has came to a grinding halt. And because they had set the time to live to 72 hours, but customers entire infrastructure was down for three days, as a total, don’t do that.

Katie Robbert 22:42
Yeah, we went a million 100 million years ago, when I worked at a different company, the engineers would give us codes to update DNS and route records, in order to be able to see things on staging and you know, different environments. And I always, it always, like, made my gut clench, because I was like, you’re asking the wrong people to, you know, monkey around with these records, because they would give them over to like, you know, senior managers who could barely get the printer to work, you know, and that wasn’t their fault. It’s just they weren’t the technical people. And so yeah, I think that the big takeaway is like, Don’t monkey around with your DNS records, find someone who knows what they’re doing.

Christopher Penn 23:34
Exactly, to give you an idea of what that looks like. So this is the CloudFlare interface. So for you can see there’s our demark record, there’s a BMI record. This is the SPF record. So you would have to go in here and create this record. And there are tools or wizards that can help you with sort of assemble this, but you still need to understand how DNS works so that you get it correct because again, if you do it incorrectly or delete the wrong thing, you’re going to have a really, really long day. Okay, so after authentication, the next is encryption. So encryption in this case refers to when you your mail servers are communicating with Google servers, is that transmission encrypted is protected from attack. This is one of the cases where unless you own all of your IT infrastructure, there’s a good chance that there’s a vendor in place here that’s doing this. And for us, because we’re getting we’re using Amazon as our gateway. So Amazon service connected Google service there, it’s everything’s 100% encrypted. So you can see here we have 100%, inbound TLS rate, so we are in good shape here. If, for example, we decided we were going to build our own server, our own mail server. We would now have to manage this part because Amazon would no longer be doing that. And so we have to get our certificates in Now do all the authentication stuff in the backend. So this is this is very it specific, but it’s also specific to the vendor that you’re using. If you see anything other than 100%, on this screen change vendors, because this is sort of like table minimum stuff. If your email service provider is not sending out encrypted email traffic, they’re not a very good provider.

Katie Robbert 25:24
Is it? Are there just are there just a few players out there? So like, when I think of, you know, people who offer this obviously Amazon or, you know, are they do they have i, this will come out a little jacket, but do they have the market share of the offering that kind of a service? Or are there other players? Like do you bait? Are you basically, do you only sign up for Amazon? Are there other players out there who do similar things?

Christopher Penn 25:54
Oh, there’s dozens. So MailChimp, Constant Contact Hubspot Marketo, all the the, you know, the the marketing technology companies that we all know, all have back end mail infrastructure of some kind, they all have, you know, some of them do, for example, MailChimp, ‘s transactional email service manual, does go through Amazon on the back end, but for their marketing stuff, they have their own server farms. So there’s dozens of email providers out there.

Katie Robbert 26:21
Gotcha. It’s, as you know, I’m sort of thinking it of it through the lens of let’s say, I were just me running just Katie robear, calm and I wanted to set up, you know, an email newsletter, obviously, I know the basics of like, I should probably get people to subscribe to it, I should probably find a place to run it like a sub stack or you know, whatever. But then from there, my understanding of how it all works is kind of limited. So I’m relying on these vendors to know all of these other things and make sure that my email is protected, provided I’m not doing anything stupid, like sending out a bunch of spammy emails.

Christopher Penn 27:03
That’s right. And it gets complicated when you move, try and start sending from your own domains. Like if you use substack, like I use substack, for my daily pandemic newsletter, add it to lunchtime pandemic dot substack. Calm so it’s a substack.com domain. So all of this is their problem. Right? Okay. It’s a substack.com email, they get to deal with it, the moment I upgrade, and they’ll pay for that service, and now it’s coming from, you know, pandemic newsletter dot Christopher penn.com. Now, it’s my problem to make sure that you know, the all these this stuff is set up. So that line really depends on on the provider remote, most marketing automation packages, like call Hubspot, or whatever, when you do the setup, and the onboarding, there is a section where they say, Hey, we need you to, you know, get with the IT team and do DNS stuff. And we’ll configure it to make it all send quickly. But it doesn’t always happen. Or it doesn’t always happen correctly. So one of the things that this is one of the reasons why this tool is so important, because it gives you the ability to see from Google’s perspective, hey, did we set our stuff up correctly or not?

Katie Robbert 28:13
So even if I set up my newsletter through substack, I’m not picking on them. It’s just the one that comes top of mind. I can still use a tool like this to run diagnostics to see Okay, why isn’t my email going through? And then bring that back to my provider and say, Hey, this is what I saw. Can you help me understand this? Or can you fix exactly,

Christopher Penn 28:34
okay, exactly, they’d like for only 1999.

Katie Robbert 28:37
But that’s super helpful. Because I know a lot of you know, newsletters that are just starting our small businesses and, you know, solo printers, and it’s, it can be overwhelming the amount of things that you feel like you need to understand in order to get your business off the ground. And so knowing that these other vendors are supposed to be taking care of it is helpful. But also knowing that you can do your own set of diagnostics to bring back to them is also super helpful.

Christopher Penn 29:08
Exactly. That will last a piece in here is delivery errors, deliver errors, is really simple, really easy. It basically says, hey, these are emails that you’re sending us that are bad, like you sent us email, you know, set email to people who don’t exist, or things like that. And again, you want to see is what is here, errors, very, very, very low errors. Same rules apply is basically spam. Under 1%. You’re in good condition, one to 5% and not so much. And about 5% you’re probably not going to get allowed to deliver the email that Gmail at all because Google server is going to say, well, you’re sending us a lot of crap. You’re probably just a spam bot.

Katie Robbert 29:49
So this is this is not the people who come back to you and say hey, I’ve unsubscribed five times removed me from your database. These This is on you because you haven’t cleaned up your list of people who’ve moved jobs and that email address doesn’t exist anymore. So it really drives home the point of, you know, at least once a quarter more frequently, if possible, clean up your, you know, email list to remove all of those emails that are just bouncing, don’t keep trying to send to them.

Christopher Penn 30:23
Exactly right. You know, you look at in there and say, you know, Katie Robbert gmail.com, but it’s with four B’s, you know, and a silent cue somewhere like, Okay, so that’s going to bounce, Google’s gonna say that you’re sending to somebody who doesn’t exist. And that’s what’s going to show up here. And yeah, bad emails are the bane of every marketer. They are the bane every marketing technology platform, every marketing automation platform, and you’ve got to keep it clean. And there’s, there’s a few different ways to do this. Depending on your email service provider, some of them will process bounces automatically, they’ll say, okay, anything that bounces, we’re going to take it out, there are cleaning services, we use one called million verifier. And you upload your whole list and it does checks and says, okay, you know, these addresses are showing a balance already. So don’t take them out of your database, because you shouldn’t send email to them. And then, obviously, your when you get messages in your inbox, like when we send out the Trust Insights newsletter, I get the replies to your newsletter, TrustInsights.ai, when you get that message says, you know, Katie robear no longer works at this company, you know, the autoresponder it’s like, okay, you’re manually take that out of the list.

Katie Robbert 31:34
So it sounds like there’s, you know, in terms of takeaways, there’s a few things that you, as the person running, the email should be doing all the time. One is don’t send spammy emails. Probably number one, too, is, you know, make sure you’re getting ahead of the bounced emails and keep your list clean. And the third one is basically if someone unsubscribes, then make sure you’re removing them as well. And keep an eye on how many times you’re being marked as spam. So obviously, that doesn’t cover all the things. But you know, it sounds to me in terms of priority and the things that you have control over. Those are the things those are the some of the best practices that you want to make sure you’re doing on a regular basis.

Christopher Penn 32:23
That’s exactly right. Make sure your list is clean, make sure everyone is on it is that you know, black, she wants to be there. And then you know, when you go through these, these different options, some of these things, you know, spam rate is pretty much is somewhat under your control, I don’t want people to listen shouldn’t beat it, IP and domain IP reputation that’s in it things so you’re gonna need some help with that domain reputation. That’s a company wide thing. Make sure people aren’t misbehaving feedback loop. Is it thing authentications an ITN DNS thing. encryption is probably a vendor thing. And delivery errors are your responsibility as a marketer. So yeah, there’s, there’s different areas of responsibility. But in each of these things, there’s something that you can do to improve your your overall scores from Google’s perspective.

Katie Robbert 33:11
I think too, don’t be afraid to let people unsubscribe from your list. If they don’t want to be there, then don’t waste that mental real estate trying to get them to stay.

Christopher Penn 33:19
Yep, exactly. And make give them other options. So for example, there’s with the analytics for marketers slack group, you go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, you can, you can go in and do see some updates and things there. We post the company newsletter on our website. So if you don’t want the email, as long as you can remember to show up on Wednesdays, we’ll typically try and post the newsletter. If there’s a text messaging list of some kind, you can notify people that way. So give people lots of different ways to get content based on the way they want, that works best for them. Don’t insist that has to be through, you know, just through email, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter as long as they’re reading your stuff.

Katie Robbert 34:01
That’s true. And if they don’t want to, you don’t need them.

Christopher Penn 34:04
Exactly. And so that’s postmaster tools. Again, there’s a lot of stuff with this is where you’re really talking about true marketing technology, where marketing and it are joined at the hip. And what both parties do has an impact on the overall outcome. So you can’t go it alone. You shouldn’t go it alone. If you want to, you know, make things as easy as possible, buy a six pack of beers, go down to it on Friday afternoon, say hey, you know, I’m just checking down some things you guys want to go walk me through what we have in place and stuff if you have an IT department and if you don’t if you’re a smaller business, work with your vendors work with the companies are providing the services and you know, do some of the checks, yeah, checking your own postmaster tools. And if you see things that don’t look right, like Katie was saying, don’t be afraid to ask those vendors that you are paying money for to help you out.

Katie Robbert 35:00
That’s it, make sure that you can utilize that contact us in support. Because that’s what it’s there for. And if they don’t know there’s a problem, they’re not going to spend there. A lot of vendors don’t proactively just go ahead and fix things unless you raise your hand and say, this is a problem. So be that annoying person. If you’re paying for something, make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Christopher Penn 35:19
And if they don’t fix it, it’s time to change vendors.

Katie Robbert 35:22
Hmm. So John, how long is your to do list these days?

John Wall 35:27
Yeah, well, the good news is I do have the marketing over coffee list uses a different domain for email. So that’s cool. I’ll check the other domain and see how screwed up that one is. But as of right now, there’s nothing new from today on the list. Let’s save that for next week.

Katie Robbert 35:43
Um, so exciting news. A little bit of a preview next week, is our one year anniversary show. And so one year ago, next Thursday, we actually started doing this live stream. And so if you have questions that you want us to cover just questions about doing a weekly live stream. You know, if you want to find out whatever happened to that air conditioner that my husband threw out of the window during the first recording of the live stream? Those are all questions that we are happy to answer. It is now become the joke of it’s the one year anniversary of my husband, you know, tossing appliances out the window when I’m trying to get work done.

John Wall 36:25
I’m looking over at my own air conditioner thinking oh, I better not touch that.

Katie Robbert 36:31
Just don’t don’t touch it while you’re trying to show Yes. Toss it out the window after.

Christopher Penn 36:42
All right, folks, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Upcoming Episodes:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter

Pin It on Pinterest