S1 E3: Email Hygiene: From Detox to an Inbox that Rocks
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Jeremy: Welcome to today's episode where we are talking about email hygiene. That's right. This is Email Hygiene: From Detox to an Inbox that Rocks. But before we get started, make sure that you tap, click or smash the follow or subscribe button, so that you'll be notified whenever a new episode drops.
Jeremy: What I'm going to talk about for a moment is email hygiene, but do not skip this episode unless your email open rates are like 40, 50, 60%. [00:01:00] This is 100% relevant to the lifeblood of your digital fundraising programs. So you want to listen to this? There's a lot of great information in here. Let's talk about first email as a channel and why it's important . To many, this is the cornerstone of your digital fundraising. Yes. There's many other channels. Social media there's online ads. There's direct mail. We can tie that into fundraising, your website, of course, but in terms of a marketing channel, email is crucial to nonprofits. That's why this episode is really important.
Jeremy: Before we get too deep into email hygiene. I want to tell a story. So I need some music to be queued. in so I can tell you this doom and gloomy story. Okay. It was a night just like tonight. A few years ago. And it was the holiday season. Q4 shoppers were busy, running around. Non-profits were busy trying to generate those year.-end gifts emails were going out. Social media posts were being blasted. [00:02:00] Online ads were going and in full effect.
Jeremy: An email went out from this organization to 85,000 subscribers on their email list. And typically this had been a wonderful email that generated a lot of year-end revenue for this nonprofit.
Jeremy: However, this time things were different. The email did not perform that well at all, there was a fraction, a small fraction of the money that was normally generated that had typically been generated in the past from this nonprofit, we went back and looked at the data and recognize their open rates went from about 25 to 30% to around 4%. We had no idea why. So we had to do some digging. And what we found out was that 80% of the emails that we sent actually went to the spam folders of the subscribers, which means only 20% were actually delivered.
Jeremy: What we ended up finding out was that this organization had [00:03:00] not run any kind of email or data hygiene on their file had just been collecting emails. Over the years and yes, they had a very big email list.
Jeremy: 75, 85,000 emails. So that's great. And that's an email list size that most nonprofits wished they could have. However, in this case, email turned out to be the worst performing channel for this campaign. And this, my friends is why this is such an important topic that I dedicated a whole episode to email hygiene, because I don't want this to happen to you.
Jeremy: And it very likely could happen to you if you don't follow the advice and the steps that I'm going to outline for you . And also, you may have already been a victim of this and not even know it. If you've noticed your open rates, take a huge nose dive, you may be in what I call email jail and email jail is really easy to get into, but very hard to get out of. So that is the preface to this whole discussion today.
Jeremy: Let's talk about understanding, [00:04:00] email, hygiene, email hygiene, the way that I would describe it is making sure that your list is up to date and the people that you're sending email to have interacted with you. And they actually want to hear from you. Plain and simple. That's what it means. From an accuracy standpoint, you want to make sure that your emails are going to email boxes that are still open.
Jeremy: A lot of people provide their work, email addresses. And if those people change jobs or lose their job, then. Yes, that email may still be delivered to that server, but that person is no longer getting the email so they can't open it. Also, you may have emails sitting on your file that maybe they were from an event and they were handwritten and they were incorrect.
Jeremy: So they're just kind of junk emails. In that respect as well. You may have people who give you that third or fourth primary email to them where they want all their junk and sales and promotional emails to go. I know I do that. Like I have an email address if I'm signing up for anything I don't really want to get their emails.
Jeremy: [00:05:00] So I give them the email that I never checked and it goes off into the land of misfit emails. So that could be the case as well. All of these different things are making your list dirtier and dirtier and the technology behind this. It's really veiled so I can't tell you piece by piece what it is, but I can tell you how it works.
Jeremy: Google and Yahoo. They have these algorithms keeping in mind that they're public companies and they also want to provide a good experience for their customers. And if you have a Gmail account, you're a customer of theirs. If you have a Yahoo account, you're a customer of theirs. So you are the customer.
Jeremy: They want you to have a good experience because they want you to continue to use their product. If you're getting a lot of emails in your inbox that are spammy or from lists that you didn't sign up for, or they're just emails that you don't want to receive anymore. And so you're not opening them. Then g-mail looks at that data with that algorithm and they start to place those emails into other folders. To combat this,there's some non-profits that I don't necessarily want to hear from, but I still [00:06:00] open their emails because I still want to get their emails for me, it's research. And I like to see what other nonprofits are doing. So the more you disengage with email senders, the more likely it is that those emails will start to end up in the junk folder or the spam folder. So we've come to a point in time where the email quality is much more important than the email quantity.
Jeremy: And this is important to think about when you're doing email acquisition and I have a whole episode coming up about that. So I'm not going to get too much into it. But the impact of email hygiene on deliverability and campaign success is crucial. If you have dirty emails, the cornerstone of that campaign, if it's email is going to be disastrous. Okay.
Jeremy: Another thing that you may not be aware of, if you're using a service like Brevo or any Blackbaud products, I'm not a hundred percent sure about like MailChimp and constant contact, but they may function similarly. Is, you may be in what are called pooled. IP [00:07:00] addresses, non IP address is like a digital address where something is being sent from.
Jeremy: And if you're working with, for example, Blackbaud, they have different pools of emails. And I believe there's three pools. If I recall correctly. One pool has a really great user score. So the emails that are coming out of this pool are non-profits that have really high reputation scores, really high, open rates.
Jeremy: People want to hear from them. Then there's this kind of middle pool where the email rates are okay. And then there's this third pool, which is a junky pool. And one of the issues with this is that if you're in the junkie pool with a lot of other nonprofits, because you're sharing, it's a pooled address that they use.
Jeremy: And so they're sending. Emails from this shared IP address. So if another nonprofit has a terrible open rate, then that's impacting you and you might be that nonprofit, that it has the terrible open rate and you're impacting other people. It can be hard to move out of these IP address [00:08:00] pools. Ideally, what you want to do is check with your provider and see if you can get a dedicated IP address, which means you're not sharing an IP address with any other organization.
Jeremy: It's your own. And now with this does come great responsibility because if you tank your IP address, which again, this is one of the big factors that Gmail and Yahoo will look at. If you tank that, then it's really hard to get out of email jail. So you want to do, what's called an IP warmup. So let's assume you get your own IP address. IP warmup is basically, you're starting over from scratch and you can check with your email service provider to see if you can get a dedicated IP address and you start small.
Jeremy: And what I have noticed is that there are some platforms such as Brevo that actually have some technology built in to assist with the IP warmup process. But ideally, what you want to do is let's say your list is 20,000 people. You want to send to maybe [00:09:00] 1500 to 2000 people per. Per day until your list is completely set.
Jeremy: And so we're going with smaller amounts. You're not sending it to your whole list on the first email, because that looks spammy to Gmail and Yahoo. So you want to start small. You can even go smaller than that, but you want to start small and you send the same email. This is great for an affirmational email.
Jeremy: Something that's not necessarily tied to a date or a deadline, but you send that same email, but you break up your email list depending on the size of your list, maybe 1000 email addresses, then the next thousand. And again, there are some tools that do automate this for you, but if not, it is a little tedious to do, but you can do this yourself also.
Jeremy: And it's absolutely crucial that you do this for the health of your email program. It's recommended that you do this over the course of 30 days. So you're doing this almost every day for 30 days. I would almost even set up an IP, warm up email series and looking at how many emails you have in your file.
Jeremy: Let's say it's 20,000, you're sending to [00:10:00] 2000 a day. That's 10 days. So maybe you want three different emails series that will go with the span of 30 days. So that you're at least sending something from your email account, every single day. A nd that is one solid way to warm up your IP address.
Jeremy: Now I would recommend that you have this done before calendar year q4, because as October, November, December things get cooking a little more. There are some pretty tight deadlines, especially when you look at like the holidays and giving Tuesday and year end.
Jeremy: So this is something that I might do during a slow time of fundraising, maybe in the summertime. So think about that as an IP warmup. Now, let's talk a little bit about, data hygiene itself, some of the ways that you can also prevent this are with a lot of email tools now. You can select segments and the technology has gotten smarter.
Jeremy: And some programs that will say, do not send the people who have not opened an email from me in the last six months or in the last 12 months. And you can adjust the [00:11:00] filters and this will also help you send it to a list that is more likely to open your emails. Ideally I would send it to whatever my segments are.
Jeremy: And there could be a number of segments that you sent it to, or you may, depending on the size of your email lists. It may be a one size fits all. You send one email to your whole email file. If you're doing that. Okay. I'm not going to say Yay or Nay on that. But what I will say is if you are sending it to everybody or even within a segment, I would suppress anyone who has not open my emails in the past six months, because if you haven't opened my email in the past six months, then you're probably not going to open the email now. And what this will do is you're getting tighter on the quality of the emails that you're sending to. And when you do that, you have a higher open rate and Google will say, oh, the open rate overall is higher.
Jeremy: The reputation of this sender is pretty good because people are actually opening their emails and they're clicking on them. So I'm going to make sure that this stays in the inbox, [00:12:00] adversely, and there's some non-profits that are near and dear to my heart. I guess I just didn't open up or engage with some of the emails. Or it may not have been something I've done, maybe just overall they have a low open score, but I started to notice that their emails were going into my spam folder and that's not what I want, even as a donor, like I still want to get those emails.
Jeremy: So I have to check my spam folder every once in a while and make sure that there's nothing going over there. You can see how this can be detrimental to your email program. You've put all this time and effort into planning and creating and writing. And you're really banking on email to be a part of your program and to do all of that.
Jeremy: And not take care of the hygiene of your email is really setting you up for failure. And you do not want to do that. So when I look at like a best practice, like how often should you do an email cleanse? Actually, even before we get to that, let's talk about ways that you can go about an email cleanse. You can do this yourself.
Jeremy: If you do have the segments available within the email platform that you're using. So if you have the [00:13:00] ability to suppress. Emails that have not opened over a certain period of time, you can do that. You can also use third party tools like Kickbox or ZeroBounce or EmailListVerify these are tools where you can, you can export your email lists, you can upload them into these different platforms and they'll go through your emails and they'll tell you, these are active.
Jeremy: These are inactive. These are suspect. We don't really know what's up with these. And then you can export those lists out and put them back. So they'll practically cleanse your list for you and you can export them based on the good email addresses, the ones that are spammy or bogus. And then there's this pool where they can't necessarily tell if they're good or bad.
Jeremy: And then it will be really a call on you to decide if you want to send to that list. You definitely want to send to your good emails. And when you think about how this can impact the size of your email list, it can be a little disheartening, because that nonprofit that I told the story about that had. [00:14:00] 75 85,000 emails.
Jeremy: Once we did an email cleanse, their lists got knocked down to about 40,000. So their lists was almost cut in half. And that might make you a gasp, if that's your organization and you're like, man, we had 85,000 emails and now we only have 40,000. That might be enough to make your stomach turn a little bit, but I would caution you not to feel that way. Because what that means is like you're cutting the fat.
Jeremy: You don't want people on your email list that do not want to hear from you gone are the days of quantity over quality. Like I know I said that earlier, but I want to stress it to make sure when you look at an email. Any kind of email strategy that you're running, you want to make sure that the emails you acquire are actually people who want to hear from you.
Jeremy: Otherwise you're hurting your email and you're hurting your fundraising longterm, and you're setting your fundraising up for failure. If you do not want to do that. So now on a positive note, Those emails like those 85,000, for example from that client. You can use those still in social media.
Jeremy: [00:15:00] So if that person uses that junk email address that they never opened, but that's also their Facebook email address. We can now target those people with ads on Facebook. So there's still value to those email addresses and I wouldn't just straight up delete those emails forever. Never to be heard from again. But I would put those in a separate folder and it like a dot CSV file.
Jeremy: And if you manage any kind of data the dot CSV, it's like an Excel file, but not. So it puts things into tables in one of the formats. But putting everything into a dot CSV file of your whole email list, you can upload that into Google and to Facebook and most online ad platforms, LinkedIn, and create an audience based on that email list.
Jeremy: And you can also use that email list as a way to do Lookalike audiences. And I'll have another episode more about. Online advertising and audiences, and where I'll dig deep into that. The main thing that I wanted to convey today was just the importance of email [00:16:00] cleansing and integrating this into your routine.
Jeremy: Do you want to do this at least once or twice a year
Jeremy: if you're using an email platform that does not allow you to suppress subscribers that have not opened , over a certain period of time or a specified period of time, it may be worth considering looking at another email provider that does offer that because. For nonprofits, you don't have a lot of extra time. You don't need to be going through this process of exporting lists all the time, analyzing these list, putting lists back in and then sending emails. You need something that's simple and easy. So if your email tool does not do that right now, I would seriously consider looking at a different email provider.
Jeremy: Now success story that I do want to highlight is actually from a client who had to do this with their email open rates were about 3% whenever I started working with them and it was tough, they had a really nice size list of 70,000 emails. And we just were not getting any traction on the emails and they were not performing.
Jeremy: So we actually use a third [00:17:00] party and we cleansed the list. Put them back in, and our emails are now at around 25 to 35%, depending on the email. So this does make a difference. And not only does, is that email open rate important, like that's great for you because that means more people have seen your emails, but it also signals to Google and Yahoo that this is a quality email sender.
Jeremy: So we're going to continue to reward them by putting them in the inbox. All of this boils down to the topic we want to go from Detox to an Inbox that Rocks. And that's what we talked about today. If you have questions about this, you can always reach out to me.
Jeremy: You can reach out to me on social media, on Instagram, @jeremy.haselwood. You can also reach out to me through LinkedIn. So either way, if you have questions, comments, connect with me and I'm happy to break down any topics farther. That's all for today. I want to thank you for tuning in to the Jeremy Haselwood show.
Jeremy: If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe. So you're always up to date when the latest episode drops until next time. Keep following your dreams to find your [00:18:00] purpose.
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