Matthew Paulson

He is also a partner at GoGo Photo Contest (www.gogophotocontest.com), a company that helps animal welfare groups raise money through donate-to-vote photo contest fundraisers, and USGolfTV (www.usgolftv.com), which is a digital publishing company that produces a regionally syndicated television show and other content for the golf industry.

Matthew’s first book, 40 Rules for Internet Business Success, shared the principles and strategies that he’s used to build a seven figure Internet business (and multiple six figure businesses) from scratch. Matthew’s second book, Email Marketing Demystified, provides a step-by-step guide for any entrepreneur to implement email marketing in their business.

Expert session

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

Result if you follow the steps in Matthew’s session

Enhance your email deliverability for a greater impact

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

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

And you do so they’ll show you, you know, the number of opens the number of clicks, just the basic engagement metrics, and you always want to compare, you know, your most recent email to the previous two, three or four emails of you. I’ve been getting open rates of you know, 15-20% sent. And the next email gets like a 5% open rate, you know, there’s probably something happened there that you need to look into.

So I always like to keep a pretty close track on each email blast like individual performance statistics. And if there’s, there’s a dip, you know, then I know that something might have happened. But there are actually some better tools that you can use that will help you identify specific issues.

There is a piece of software called mail monitor, I think it’s actually a SaaS application. But what they do is they give you a bunch of seed emails, and you’ll just add those to your mailing list. So they’ll have an email address, like hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo, and Cox and Comcast, and basically all of the big email service providers. So they’ll have use and as part of your email blast, a message to all their cdls.

And then if one of your messages shows up in the spam folder, or doesn’t show up at all, they’ll be able to track that and show you for each class like okay, hotmail put it in the spam folder or Gmail, put it in the inbox, Yahoo didn’t do, have heard at all. And you’ll be able to track those things.

And that is just incredibly useful if you’re sending out, you know, a large volume of mail and the prices is as you know, not crazy. So if you’re sending out a lot of email, it’s definitely worth taking a look at.

All right, I think that’s it. Was there something else that?

Yeah, then I guess the third thing is probably to regularly check out some of the blacklist, there’s a tool called multi RBL. You can Google, it’ll come up. But that will check your sending IP address and your domain name against a couple hundred different blacklists. It’s got all of the big one. So if you’re, you know, somebody who’s blacklisted your IP address or your domain name, you’ll be able to figure that out right away and get that taken care of.

All right, brilliant. So with all these, you know, email service providers, how are they deciding whether my messages should be getting into you know, people have opted into my lists, my subscribers into their inboxes how out of this make that decision.

Yeah, so each one is a little bit different. And it has changed over time. Email service providers or everything, recognize that people are just getting way too much email, and that they don’t want all the email that we received. So, you know, 15-20 years ago, as long as we weren’t pushing via anchor or anything like that, you know, the assumption was that your
message would make it to the inbox.

And, you know, that’s no longer the case, you can’t just assume that, you know, any big email service provider is going to treat your messages like, you know, good email, like a personal one on one email. And just assume that it’s gonna make an inbox, you know, the rules of the game have changed.

Your service providers are being more selective about what gets into the inbox, and what gets put into the spam folder of your Gmail into that promotions tab. So you really have to kind of identify, you know, what are these ESP is looking for, and then how can I make sure that my messages meet that criteria.