EP. 8- Landing in the Spam Folder? This Could Be Why… w/ Brian Minick from ZeroBounce l Expert Quick Tips

Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers.

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We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday.

I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this, not that.

All right, fired up for this episode of do this, not that.

We got Brian Minick, the COO of Zero Balance.

Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jay.

Glad to be here today.

Thanks for, for having me.

This is going to be fun.

I think it's going to be fun.

Let me tell everybody a little bit about Brian real quick and then we'll hear his story.

So as I mentioned, Brian is the COO of Zero Bounce, which is really one of the industry leaders in data improvement and validation.

In the email space specifically.

They are, they're crushing it.

But enough about me talking about Brian.

What's your origin story?

How did Brian Minick become Brian Minick?

Yeah, so I actually started dabbling in kind of tech and computers at a very young age.

I was under the age of 10.

I actually don't remember how old I was, but I know I was probably not supposed to be doing what I was doing.

So I was over here programming, messing around with different things, found ways to get music, online, dating myself here a little bit, but took that and started to really be like, wow, there's something here, I'm into this stuff.

And, and so I started taking that, I started building websites.

From websites, I learned a bunch of systems, I learned integrations, I learned how things start talking to each other through, you know, APIs and whatnot.

And then started moving into a marketing more into marketing companies, understanding more of kind of the needs of marketing and what's happening there.

Married that with my website experience and started to continuously improve and have, you know, kind of found a really nice spot here at Zero Bounce where I brought a lot of this together to help our support and sales team kind of operate very smoothly.

So I, I'm very technical but I totally understand how to present things in a non technical way so that it's easy for people to understand.

And so I've been leading our sales and support team here at Zero Bounce, but no, you know, know every nut and bolt of what's happening and also behind in the technical Side.

So very kind of interesting spot.

And I've been told I'm a unique person with a very development background, but very, you know, customer and friendly face to talk to.

So a little refreshing is what I keep hearing from, from other folks here in the tech side.

Basically what I just heard is people tell me I'm a giant nerd, but I don't act like a giant nerd.

So, I mean, yeah, that's a good one.

I am not gonna lie though, Jay.

I do prefer the word geek over nerd, but that's just me.

You know, without getting technical on the.

Definition, when you get off the phone or whatever we're on here, I'll just say, oh, yeah, Brian was a big nerd, and I'll laugh at you.

But if you want me to call you a geek today, I will.

Okay, let's jump into this.

We're gonna do some rapid tips about email data improvement, validation, hygiene.

These are all big words.

So before we go into any of these tips, can you or someone who's clueless, which would be me, can you explain what is email validation?

Sure.

Email validation is the software as a service, and what it's doing is we are actually electronically connecting to the mailbox to see if it exists in the mail server.

We make a call just like you're sending an actual email.

What we're doing is actually very similar to what's happening when people send mail.

If you've ever sent mail to a bad email address that no longer exists, you get that bounce back message.

And so we're able to take it all the way to the point of sending a message, but we don't send a message.

And we're able to determine if that email address would have accepted a piece of mail or not.

Now that's just one simple way to look at it.

We have many complicated algorithms, but that's the most simplistic way to look at it.

And what it's doing is it's making sure that it helps reduce any bounce rates.

Helps reduce.

There's many different factors we can help with, but when we reduce your bounce rate and also a complaint rate, which we have a feature for, something like that, it helps improve your sending reputation, which is incredibly important for your inboxing and deliverability.

So we're all about quality, not quantity.

We want you to have the best emails in your list that are deliverable and therefore brings your sending reputation up and keeps you out of the spam box.

Because as we all know, it's not a very good place to be.

No.

No, it's not.

So regardless of how big of a sender you are, you might have an email list that has 300 people on it.

You might have an email list that has 5 million people on it.

You know, there's a whole spectrum of size of businesses that are sending and all that.

Good.

Every marketer who sends email, regardless of size of list, should every marketer validate their email address file?

Yes.

Why?

Absolutely.

So here's why.

Because the quantity of your.

The size of your database doesn't really matter in this space of statistics.

So if we're sending email and you know, you have a bounce rate of 15% because that's the bad data you have on your list, that doesn't matter if you're sending that on 100 contacts or 1,000 contacts or, you know, the more you send, the worse it could get, but it's still detrimental on the smaller side as well.

So, yes, it's very important.

We actually did a whole decay report.

We spent a lot of time, we went through and kind of looked to see, like, what's happening in this space of email.

Because, Jay, I don't know about you, but I've heard my whole life email's going away.

And only thing I see is it's continuously exploding on a positive side and gaining more traction.

And so what we're seeing is more clever ways of people masking emails, much more churned on the emails, especially in the business world.

So size is not actually the issue here.

It is more about the quality.

And what you want to make sure you have is quality emails on your database, especially if it's your unique point of contact or your source of truth.

That's your identifier for your contact is an email address.

It's really important you have a good one there.

So is it not good enough?

Let's say I'm making this up.

I got a list of 100,000 people, I send it out, get 95% deliverable, and I got 5,000 people that bounce, and they just remove the people that bounce.

And I keep on my merry way.

Is it not good enough to just send the people that don't bounce, or do you have to go that extra step and go through a validation service?

So I would recommend before you ever sent that 100,000, that you, you went ahead and validated.

That would have given you, you know, a 99.9% deliverability rate or whatever that would have gotten you.

So I would have highly recommended it there so you wouldn't have gotten in trouble with any of those balances that did take place in the first time, which, which does actually happen a lot.

So ESPs right now are incredibly sensitive to bounce rates because of the amount of data that's just floating around out here in the universe.

And people know you can get your hands on it.

So to directly answer your question, yes, even if it bounced, what we're seeing on a decay report is 23% of data is churning, especially in the B2B space.

So if you're emailing businesses, 23% of that data is churning every single year.

I've seen higher in the 40% range and I've seen lower.

If you're on the consumer side, you might have a little bit lower of churn because those Gmails, AOLs, they're sticking around a little bit longer than the business domains.

But yes, because what's happening is the ESPs are also secretly moving people to lower reputation servers behind the scenes based on what your activity is doing.

So if you have a high bounce rate or had a bounce rate they're not happy with, they want to protect their infrastructure.

And so they'll actually shift you into a kind of lower quality sending reputation environment, which you don't want to be on that.

I mean, when you can get on the perfectly paved road, would you rather be on that or the one that's been under construction for five years, but they run the same path.

What do you want to take?

So you definitely want to make sure you have a great sending reputation and you maintain that sending reputation.

It's very important.

So when we talk about validation, zero bounce is a leader in the space.

There's no doubt.

But, and this is not to say you shouldn't reach out to Brian and he's awesome, but there's literally a hundred companies that or more that do email validation.

And what the reason I say that is when we talk about that company should be doing this.

If you're not going to do with zero bounce, you should do it with somebody.

Okay.

Because it's really important.

But to Brian's point, what you said, I think it's important that it's something you do before you send.

It's something that you're doing maybe at an ongoing thing to make sure that you are not damaging your sending infrastructure and sending reputation.

How often should somebody be validating their email list?

I would recommend at least once every six months.

If you've never done it, which I have, tons of people come to us, they're like, brian, I've had this list.

It's 13 years old.

It's great.

There's no issues with it.

I'm like, yeah, okay.

So you know, they run it through and see all the issues with it.

But for people who are also trying to be on the proactive side, there's other benefits to validation besides just reactive.

There's proactive.

So the proactive side is hook it up to a signup form, hook it up to your checkout form and validate the email field in real time before they even submit the data.

We're catching typos, we're catching disposable emails which are ones that are known to like self implode after 10 minutes, 24 hours.

They're, they just get past your gates and also kind of the known complainers.

So these are people who are known to mark you as spam.

And if we can get those, at least identify it for you.

You might want to reconsider your strategy on how you're going to email your entire ecosystem of customers.

And so that's kind of one of my tips is around segmentation.

Know your audience, send the right message to these people.

But classifying those people is important and we can help with some of that stuff.

And a good validation service should be able to do that if they just tell you thumbs up, thumbs down.

My opinion, it's not nearly enough for you to take good granular decisions on what this person actually should be getting receiving from you.

Yeah, and you know, I think in general people need to understand about validation is you're not doing it because hey, I'm just supposed to do it.

I know I don't want to email the people that aren't there.

If you don't do it, really bad things can happen.

Your sending reputation goes down and down and down.

The likelihood of you going into the junk folder and spam folder just goes up and up and up.

And this is at the root of deliverability problems with email.

But you know, when you talk about segmentation, I want to carve out one segment.

So we all have an unengaged, a non engaged portion of our database.

Right.

There'll be a big chunk of people, usually it's the majority of database, but have not opened or clicked on one of your messages in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, whatnot.

Do you recommend taking people off your list after a certain period of time that have not engaged or should they stay on there, you know, forever?

So we have this as well.

Right.

I have a ton of customers.

We're coming up here on over 300,000 customers on our platform.

So I know I have all the use cases that I think most businesses are also dealing with and you probably have larger or smaller scale.

What we do is after a certain amount of time, I believe that timeframe is about a year to a year and a half, we send like a breakup message and we say like, hey, what happened?

My content team has the right wording for it.

So I don't want to butcher what they do because they do a great job.

But we send a breakup letter like click here to tell us you're still interested or we're going to remove you off the list here and these type of things.

And so eventually we will do that.

And if they become too stagnant, they're not helping you.

So they're not helping you with your open rates, they're not helping you with your click through rates.

And the only thing they're just, they're actually watering down those statistics.

So if, if you remember earlier I was saying a lot of this is a percentage game, when you get rid of those stale things, then the rest of the statistics come up, right?

So if I have a hundred thousand people and 50,000 are static, they've never opened, they're not clicking, they're not doing anything.

When you remove those now, your percentage of open rates, you know, instantly doubles.

And I'm not saying this so that you can write that cute report and give it to your marketing manager and say look what I did, I'm amazing.

It's the effect of that that the mail servers see of like wow, this guy sent to 10,000 Gmail accounts.

8,000 opened, this is a good sender, right?

6,000 clicked.

It's much different than saying 30,000 were sent to and only 5,000 opened.

So it's a percentage gain too that the mail server sees you and kind of rates you and ranks you and scores you based on that.

So if you can get those statistics higher, you definitely want to make some attempts at that.

So let me ask you this along those lines because I've heard a lot of major marketers actually do this, but they don't talk about it.

They will take their non engaged, they'll take people who have an opener click, let's say in 12 months they'll put them on the side, right?

They'll do what you just said, which is they will send to their engaged database because they know by sending to the people that most often open and click, it's going to improve their sending reputation and overall kind of ability to stay in the inbox.

And then Every so often, every three months, every four months, they'll grab the non engaged, they'll shove them in there with the engaged people now that their reputation is higher and they'll do a send like once every three or four months.

Basically piggybacking off of the good reputation you've just built.

So they're not gone forever, but they only get to slide in.

It's like sliding into somebody's DMs.

You slide in to take advantage of the roller coaster ride as it's going up.

Is that, is that okay to do?

I think that's perfect to do.

And really a good strategy because also it might be the messaging you're sending them.

Maybe we release this whole new feature, right?

So I look at it from like zero bounce.

We have customers that have asked for something or we're not doing it yet.

And then if I have like this splash announcement, I would absolutely attempt to get that in front of unengaged people as well.

Now me, I might break that up into two sends.

I engage send and then wait and then send it to that second group after the fact.

Because I have this great reputation for this piece of mail that I've sent.

So that's another way to look at it.

That's going to eventually burn you out.

That's a loser for sure.

All right, let me ask you this one other question and then we'll get to some fun stuff.

I think one of the problems that everybody has on the planet is, and I could be wrong, but everybody thinks that all their email should go to the inbox, that nothing is ever going to go to junk or everything's going to go to spam something, you know, they don't think it's ever should go there.

And they see something go to junk or spam, they're like, oh my God, everything is terrible.

Can you help to manage the expectations of all of humanity?

This is a big responsibility you're about to have.

Is it possible to have 100% deliverability into the inbox?

Is it possible?

Sure, if you have one email and it's yours.

So I mean, is it possible?

Yes, with maybe small size, that is possible.

You have a very small list, these type of things when you're talking about massive scale.

Here's the thing though, Jay, it's, it's manageable and you can monitor this.

There's tools out there, we have some, and there's other great ones out there where you can send seeds to different providers and understand where it's going.

I think that's probably the most important part.

If people start to think about it that way, like, let's check the boxes here.

We had an issue.

Our newsletter signup form got blasted by Yahoo Spam bots.

Bots came in and submitted all these Yahoo accounts.

Everyone started marking us as spam.

We lost reputation on Yahoo.

This is normal stuff.

This can happen to anybody.

We were like, oh, crap.

So we had to go in, we had to start sending some more known people.

They started engaging and we actually could see in our postmaster tools the engagement go from the reputation, go from medium reputation back up to high reputation.

So yes, it is absolutely possible to fix things.

But what I don't think people are doing enough and doing a good job on is actually checking.

They're just assuming.

And the first send that you do, guys, that's always going to inbox, by the way.

For most people who don't know this because they want to give you benefit of the doubt and then they'll pull you out.

But if you check on your first end and you're like, no, I'm good, we're good.

And it's been three years, you should really be doing this on a monthly basis and monitoring your reputation.

That'll also give you an indicator.

Yeah, I think it's funny in the email marketing world, some people look at their tracking like, okay, I had.

My deliverability rate was 99% and my open rate was this.

My click rate was this.

But they never say what's my inboxing rate?

They talk about deliverability, but deliverability is to the mailbox level and it's not.

That doesn't mean you got to the inbox.

So really going deeper and saying, okay, did I get to the inbox?

And utilizing tools that allow you to do that.

As a marketer, you should know your deliverability, your inboxing rate, your open rate, your click through rate, your response rate, all of that, it all matters.

All right, let's jump into some chaos.

This is the portion do this, not that that we call, since you didn't ask.

So we talk about stuff that has nothing to do with marketing or business or whatever.

So let's see.

Brian, what is your, what is your deal?

I feel like I read somewhere that you're like a car dude.

Is that right?

Or something like that.

So, yes.

And as I've gotten older, I found it much more challenging to deal with this.

So I have kids, so now I have car seats.

So, yes, I mean, I had a, you know, some.

Some high horsepower cars.

I've always loved the racetrack.

I know you're local here, and I'm very sad to see our Palm beach racetrack has been officially retired.

It's childhood memories in that place.

But yeah, I love drag racing, so not so much on the side of like F1.

That stuff's cool.

I want to drive one, but I don't necessarily try to build them.

I mean, you have the same haircut as Vin Diesel, but, like, do you, like, go out and find other dudes who like to race and be like, let's meet up on this road.

There's no cops.

20 years ago?

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Probably on streets you definitely know as well.

Actually back behind FAU on a college around here.

Used to do it where no one even knew it existed, but not anymore.

There's too many laws around it, too much risk.

I have kids.

I've had to grow up a little bit.

So.

Yeah.

But deep down, love it.

All my friends, same thing.

Wow.

So you were fast and furious before it existed before.

I actually remember seeing it the first one on premiere day because I was excited for it.

Now I'm just like, this is ridiculous.

So now when you're in the car, I think it's fantastic that you're like a drag racer from back in the day.

Now you're in the car and you got car seats in your car.

Are you like driving like the speed limit and like two hands on the wheel, 10 and 2.

And like, you're that guy.

So I'm the guy that drops the kids off of daycare at the speed limit and then flips it to sport mode and, you know, blowing down the highway.

So, yeah, I'm that guy.

But never with my kids.

Only me.

I'm only willing to risk me.

No one else now.

So Brian and I live in the same geographic area and right near us there's this go kart, a place you can go go karting.

I feel like you probably go go karting.

They're too slow.

It's the truth.

They're way too slow.

So there's actually an extreme cardine that goes about 50 miles an hour.

A little more south here in around Fort Lauderdale Davie area, and done that a few times.

That's fun.

I want to lose control.

If I can't lose control on A go kart.

It's not fun.

Wow.

Extreme carding.

Who knew?

Not me.

I drive.

Me and my wife get into a thing sometimes because I am the slowest driver in the world.

I never have road rage.

I don't care.

So the question that I always think about is, and I know the answer for you, I think.

I think there's two kinds of people in the world.

People that either get honked at or people that honk.

So I am someone that gets honked at.

Like I would say at least once every couple of days.

Are you someone that gets honked at or you're the person person honking the horn?

I actually, I think I'm neither.

I think I'm the guy that just is.

Like things are going on in my head, but I'm not the guy to go blow the horn at everybody.

Only if you're actually in the way.

You're doing something bad, but like the red light, you know, it turns green.

I'm not that guy.

I'll give you the.

The courtesy honk after a few seconds.

But now I'm not the guy.

I don't want to be obnoxious.

My goal is not to be obnoxious.

See, I don't even know if I believe.

I feel like somewhere in our.

In our world here, you've probably honked at me.

And that's fine.

I accept that.

It's okay.

Very possible.

Well, this has been great, Brian.

I appreciate you being here.

Listen, everyone follow Brian on LinkedIn.

He's a great follow Brian Minick.

Also Zero Bounce.

Great, great service.

My company uses Zero Bounce.

I strongly recommend you checking them out.

Brian, thanks for being here.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Jay.

I appreciate you having me on.

You did it.

You made it to the end.

Nice.

But the party's not over.

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