Ep. 173 – HOW? “We Switched Email Sending Platforms and Our Metrics GOT WORSE!” CAN I Unclog 🚽 ? Make 🍝? Ask Us ANYTHING

Foreign. We are back for Ask Us Anything from Do this, not that. Presented by Marigold.

This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit a question, just go to jschwettleson.com, click podcast and then click Ask us Anything and we get weird stuff in.

So let's do the work question first. We got a question from Sarah from Louisville, Kentucky.

I saw this thing over the other day about Louisville, Kentucky with his dude won $225,000 in a lottery and he's been playing the Same number for 10 years. Never changed. He plays every day and he won $225,000.

And I said to myself, I wonder if this guy even made any money because he's been doing it for 10 years. Like, what's up with that?

And so I of course went on ChatGPT and I said, if you play $5 every day for 10 years and you win 225,000, what do you wind up with? And the guy made over 200 grand, so good for him. What do I know? Maybe I should play the lottery anyway. What's your question, Jay?

We changed our email sending platform. We have a new ESP and all of our metrics are totally different. Is this normal? It's not only normal, but it's completely expected. Okay.

Every time you change platform, things are going to radically change. They'll go up, they'll go down, they'll go sideways. And here's the truth.

No email sending platform on earth, I don't care what it is, big, small, great, terrible, doesn't matter.

Is going to report to you an accurate set of information related to the emails that are getting delivered, the emails that are getting opened, the emails that are getting clicked on. There's just no way for any platform to get it right. There's too many things that happen right.

Deliverability from one platform to the next is different because every platform has different relationships with all the different service providers that are out there.

Every platform uses different sending limits and throttling limits on how many emails they're sending out, how many emails they're sending out per domain.

And in a 30 minute period, an hour period, a 24 hour period, every platform handles bounces differently, soft bounces, hard bounces, and every platform interprets, opens and clicks differently. And also there is no accurate way to really know everybody that has opened or clicked on one of your emails. So you're saying to yourself, oh no.

So what do I do? Do I just give up on marketing? No, you don't give up on marketing.

But what you have to think about your email marketing is, is you must think of yourself as if you are a swimmer or you are a weightlifter or you are a runner. All you want to do is beat your own numbers, beat yourself. What I mean by that is you want to benchmark everything that you do.

You want to take the emails that you send out and put them into buckets. Okay, these are my newsletters, these are my transactional emails, these are my promotional emails, these are, these are my welcome emails.

And then for each one of these buckets of emails, you want to create your own benchmarks. What's my deliverability for my promotional emails? What are my open rates? What are my click through percentages?

All of it broken down by the types of emails that you send out.

And then every time you hit send, you want to see if you could beat yourself the same way a swimmer tries to improve their time when they're doing a 50 meter backstroke. Can you beat yourself? The numbers that matter when you go into a meeting are not. Our average open rate is X and our average click through rate is Y.

Those numbers are meaningless.

The numbers that matter is, okay, this is our quarter over quarter, year over year increase in our open rate, click through rate, all those different things, the increases or decreases is what matters because you are going against yourself and those increases and decreases are going to be correct for the most part, right? So you're going to be able to use those benchmarks to see how you're actually doing in general email marketing.

The metrics that you get are directional and they're not absolute. And by the way, that goes for all sorts of other marketing as well.

If you think your impressions and your clicks and everything you're doing on your display ads is right on, you're totally full of it. It's just not the case.

So by the way, you want one simple hack to check, for example, how many bots and how much garbage click data you have in your email campaigns. Here's what you do. Take an email that you want to send out, send it out at three in the morning, okay?

Send out three in the morning and then isolate out the traffic, how many click throughs you get in the first 30 minutes of that send that you send out and the first 30 minutes of the send that you do at 3 in the morning. I promise you, those are bots. You're not that popular at three in the morning, okay?

And so if you isolate that out and say, oh, my goodness, we had all these companies, let's say Ford Motor Company had 200 clicks at 3 in the morning, you know that you're just getting bot scans from that domain. Okay?

So isolating out the traffic that you see in the first 30 minutes of three in the morning will give you a good baseline on how many bot clicks you actually have on whatever it is that you're sending out. All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold.

Marigold is the email sending platform I use. And I just talked about email sending platforms. Be all different, all over the place.

I'm telling you, I have tried, I would say over 35 different email sending platforms. That is not an exaggeration. And I love Marigold. I use Marigold because to me, they're the absolute best.

If you're a consumer marketer, a business marketer, if you haven't checked them out, you can go to meet marigold.com. they're awesome. And if you want, drop me a DM and I will introduce you to them directly.

To all the awesome people I know there, I've been working with them for four years. Great email sending platform. Okay, let's get on to the ridiculous question. Mike has a question from New York. Okay, Mike, what do you got?

Oh, I'm worried about this one. Here it is. Jay, I'm curious about your basic adult skills. Can you do these things? Okay, here we go. Can I do these things?

I'm pretty sure I won't be able to, but let's see. Can you make pasta on the stove? Yes. That is in my wheelhouse. I can make pasta. Cool. Can you make eggs? Any style counts.

Oh, yeah, I make eggs all the time. So far, I'm crushing it as an adult. This is fantastic. Can you make rice? I don't think so. I've never tried to make rice.

I don't know what goes into making rice. So I'm gonna go with a no. Can you sew a button onto a shirt?

You know, I've tried to sew a button onto a shirt and I, you know, I get it going and then I don't know how to end it. So I'm going to go with a no because I feel like it would fall off. I'm not very good at that. Can you sew a basic hem to a pant? Absolutely not.

Zero percent chance. I have no idea how to even begin to do that. Can you de stain clothing So I mean, if I get a stain on it, first of all, I usually do nothing.

And then my wife says, what are you doing? Go get that off. And then I will pour like as if an entire ocean needs to be poured on the spot.

I'll come back from like the bathroom for at a restaurant, whatever, and I'll pour so much onto it and I'll come back and it will look like I am just wearing a shirt that's a different color. And she'd be like, what happened? I'm like, I tried to get the stain off and it was like. So I don't do it properly. But usually it's okay.

Can you fold a fitted sheet? No. Zero percent chance I try. It's terrible. I don't know how to do that properly. So no. Can you unclog a toilet?

Here's the problem with being able to unclog a toilet. The answer is yes.

But I try to keep that in the down low because when people know that you can unclog a toilet or that you're willing to unclog the toilet, then that becomes your job, right? So when it gets clogged, like oh, get him, he knows how to do it. So I try to keep that download. So don't tell anybody that I can do that. Okay.

And the last one is, can you remember at least two or three phone numbers of people in your family besides for your own phone number? 0% chance. I mean when I was younger, right before you had everything on your phone and memorized, I knew everybody's phone number. I cannot remember.

I don't even know one digit in either of my kids phone numbers. Not a single digit. I don't know if that's normal. It's probably irresponsible. I have never tried to memorize it, but I cannot.

So that's what I got for you. Okay, we've covered a lot of ground today. I have no idea we talked about. But we did. We talked about it. So leave this thing. Review.

You're not going to leave it a review. I say leave it review. You ignore me. You go like I Jay's annoying. I'm not leaving you. But maybe this time you'll leave a review.

It helps with the algorithms, it circulates more people get tortured by everything I talk about. And yeah, that's what's going on. So thanks for being here. You're awesome. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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