Brendan Dubbels

Brendan Dubbels is the Lead postmaster & deliverability expert at ONTRAPORT – specializes in conversion and inbox placement strategy. Serial entrepreneur with unique insight in the do’s and don’t in email marketing due to analyzing and overseeing the sending of over 3 billion emails / year.

Brendan is obsessive about all things inbox: whether it is taking advantage of Gmail’s tabbed inbox, avoiding SPAM traps, maintaining a clean IP reputation, or setting up the perfect list re-engagement campaign.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Brendan’s success

Tools and steps on how to avoid the spam folder and get your emails prioritized

Result if you follow the steps in Brendan’s session

Getting your readers to open your emails, how to talk to your list, how to go from clients to selling to your list

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So, first step, if you already got a business, you’ve already got a list and you’re mailing, you’ve got marketing programs out there, what you need to do is establish, do I have a problem or not? Right? So that way, you can get that baseline and you can make sure the strategies are making sense and are going to work for you.

So first things first, I suggest running a quick speed test. So you can do that through a company called return path, or 250. Okay, that’s 250. Okay. And both of these companies can provide you with what’s called a C test. And the C test is essentially a list of a bunch of inboxes at the major providers.

So let’s say they have 50 inboxes at Gmail and 50. Well, Comcast and all those so then what they do is they give you the list and you can take it and send a copy. Your next broadcast to this list, right? So it has all your links, all your brand new, all your verbiage. It’s got your email reputation in there.

And then they automatically check each inbox with a script. And that script reports back and it says, Oh, those 50 inboxes. At Gmail, we only got that email, but you sent us in 30 of them, or whatever. And then they say, Okay, well, to scale, we know then that your placement with Gmail right now is at 60%. Because they can scale it up and they can apply those numbers to your actual sense.

So then you have your baseline steps, okay, so you want to make sure you write those down. And when you do that broadcast, see what type of open rates engagement you get next time to fix the problem, right?

So 60% is pretty dang low. You can do some things like making sure you’re only sending to your most engaged prospects. Making sure that you’re getting rid of all people who haven’t opened or clicked. And there’s a few reasons for that with Gmail, I’m sure you know, there’s a promotions folder and primary folder as well as the spam box.

And if you’re sending to a bunch of people who aren’t engaging with you, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up in promotions or spam.

So my general rule of thumb, depending on your sales cycle, is you stop sending your people who haven’t engaged with you in six months or longer.

Now, if you have a longer sales cycle, you might want to make that a little bit longer. That’s my general rule of thumb.

What that’s gonna do, Gmail, oh, well, a big group of the people that get these messages from this person, really like they open it, this is valuable content. And so then they’ll start to deliver your message at a higher rate.

So that’ll help you really increase your placement with Gmail with most of the other DSPs if you were to see that you have a problem from a C test. You can actually reach out to them via what’s called a postmaster contact form.

Or you can hit up your friendly neighborhood postmaster, most DSP should allow you to contact them. For example, if you’re not for customer, my team and I are always available to speak to customers and help them resolve any issues they may be having. And so that’s a good place to start establishing whether there’s a problem.