SPI 817: Is Anyone Getting Your Emails? with MV Braverman

SPI 817: Is Anyone Getting Your Emails? with MV Braverman

MV Braverman: For my emails, I put an invitation to unsubscribe at the top. The important thing to understand is that unsubscribe is a neutral signal to mailbox providers. Google’s not going to count against you or for you if someone unsubscribes, but they really don’t want someone to mark it as spam. Even though you might be like, but they liked me! They want my emails! I want them! They might buy something! No. Let them go, and wish them well, and move on.

Pat Flynn: All right, we’re going to get a little technical today, but I don’t want that to scare you because what you are about to learn might actually help you in more ways than you realize. And we’re talking about email and not setting up your email and how to send good emails, but wanting to make sure that our emails that we send out through our email service providers actually end up in people’s inboxes, because there’s a lot happening that we don’t know.

And there’s some simple things that we can take care of to ensure we’re actually sending emails and they’re being received. And I’m not just talking about spam folders, although that is the case. There’s a lot more under the hood here. There’s a lot that might be clogging the pipes of your email to recipient workflow, and we want to unclog those pipes.

And today we’re going to be working with an SPI Pro member, in fact, who has helped a lot of people out and is going to help us out today. That is MV Braverman. And they have a, I mean, it’s going to be technical. I’m letting you know, but this might be one to send to somebody on your team or to relisten to, or she’s got a guide that can help you with some of the more simple things, and we’ll give you the links and all those things at the end.

But for right now, Listen in. This is MV Braverman from InboxWelcome.com. Here we go.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he owns ten skateboards and doesn’t ride any of them because they’re on display. Pat Flynn!

Pat Flynn: MV Braverman, thank you so much for coming on the SPI podcast today. Thank you.

MV Braverman: Thank you so much for having me. I am honored to be here. I’ve been behind the scenes and now I’m on the stage. Very cool.

Pat Flynn: You’re on the stage for sure. And you’ve been in the community inside of SPI Pro for a while and been very helpful there.

And I’ve talked a lot about email and this is a topic that’s very near and dear to me. However, you are deep within it so much so that we’re going to be talking a lot about deliverability and some of the stuff that has changed recently that we all need to know about, especially if we’re doing online business.

And of course you consult with people, people hire you, but I want to get out a lot of good information for everybody who is investing your time to listen today. However, how did you get into email deliverability? Tell us a little bit how you got to what it is that you’re doing today. Where did this all begin?

MV Braverman: I’ve been in tech support my kind of whole career. And when I went out on my own, I started doing WordPress support. I noticed a lot of designers were abandoning, you know, they’re delivering the site, but then people are like, okay, now what? And I transitioned into more of like a tech help desk for solopreneurs.

In early 2023, I got my first deliverability client who reached out to me saying, you know, I go and speak at conferences and people come to me asking for proposals. I send the proposals, but it goes into spam.. And so that was kind of my first taste of deliverability. I’ve helped people with email marketing before.

But it was more of a setup situation. And so I dove really deep and of course, you know, later in the year, Google and Yahoo came out with their big announcement that no one noticed for a while. That’s the story in a nutshell.

Pat Flynn: That’s the story. So fairly new and recent as far as the focus on deliverability, but I’m curious why that intrigued you more than perhaps other support type of questions.

What is it about deliverability that, It’s seemingly so important that we all need to know about.

MV Braverman: Because it’s one of those what you don’t know can hurt you things. People don’t really understand what deliverability is. And to clarify it a little bit, delivery is what you see in your like MailChimp or ConvertKit dashboard saying, you know, 98 percent of your emails were delivered.

So that just means their server said, this mailbox exists. I’ll take this email. Deliverability is what happens afterward. Where does this email end up? Does this person ever even see it? And that’s not an easy question to answer. And I love questions that are difficult to answer. So I think that’s what brought me to it.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. So for everybody out there, I want to catch you up on sort of what the changes have been. I think a lot of us who are listening have been doing email. We understand it. We’ve set up ConvertKit or other ESPs, email service providers, to send emails for us. And we get the, like you said, the open rates, the click through rates, those sorts of things.

But there’s a lot of things that we’re not seeing. And this change from Google and Yahoo, what was it exactly? And what do we need to now know because of that?

MV Braverman: In October of 2023, Google and Yahoo jointly announced new requirements for all email senders, and there were some additional specific requirements for what they called bulk senders, which is people sending more emails.

That was a whole thing. People were very confused and my Google put a number on it. They said if you send 5000 emails a day to Gmail customers, so what if you send 4990? Are you still a bulk sender? Yes, you are. It’s not an exact number and Yahoo wouldn’t put a number on it. So there were a lot of questions, but to sum, the way that they summarize it and the way that I summarize it is what they required is you should authenticate your emails, which there’s a lot of technical requirements for that.

You should make it easy to unsubscribe. And that’s the one click requirement that, again, people are still confused by. And send emails that people want. Which was basically, they will really start enforcing very strict spam controls. With the advent of ChatGPT, the number of spam emails has exploded. And so Google and Yahoo and every other email service provider is frantically trying to get a handle on it as well as they can.

Pat Flynn: That makes sense. People are using ChatGPT to now write those emails or other tools, Claude, what have you. And because it’s so much easier to In a waywrite these emails, people are sending them out a lot more often and it isn’t exactly what people want. So let’s start with that last one in mind, emails that people want.

How do we solve that problem or how do we measure for that? What are you recommending we do? How are they even measuring that to begin with?

MV Braverman: And this is another one of those things where what you don’t know can hurt you. So, for example, in ConvertKit and in MailChimp or whatever, you might see X people said that this was an abuse email.

They labeled it as spam. The thing is, is that that’s only data from providers like Yahoo or some others, Google does not send this data to any email service provider. And over 50 percent of an average business to consumer email list is Gmail emails. So you don’t know what’s, what Gmail account holders are saying and what they’re reporting, only Google knows.

The answer to that is you need to set up Google Postmaster Tools and look into that.

Pat Flynn: Google Postmaster Tools. What is that exactly?

MV Braverman: That’s Google’s internal dashboard where they tell you essentially what Google thinks of your emails. They will tell you, are they authenticated? They will tell you how many people complained.

They will tell you a few other things.

Pat Flynn: So this is similar to Google Webmaster Tools for a website, but it’s Google Postmaster Tools for email. Great. And that, I know, is helpful because you can actually see the individual emails that are being sent out and the exact complaints that are happening. And what do those complaints look like?

Is it just somebody marking spam? How granular can you understand exactly what’s happening, what’s going on so that you can make informed decisions on future emails.

MV Braverman: It will only be if someone marked it as spam. You actually don’t know if it’s really going into spam. And that’s another thing that is confusing because sometimes people are like, Oh, I’m getting fewer, you know, autoresponder emails.

I’m getting other things are going well. That’s because your emails are going into spam and no one’s actually seeing them. And that’s not reported in the postmaster tools. That’s another reason why, you know, deliverability people are going to be in deliverability for a long time is because a lot of this is just kind of the bottom of the iceberg.

You really don’t see it.

Pat Flynn: That’s really wild. And especially if, and many of our businesses do rely on email to communicate. It’s still said to be one of the, if not the best way to still interact one on one with people, especially if there’s announcements or sales or marketing going on. However, of course, if you are ending up in spam or you are receiving a higher spam score than you’d want, then, like you said, there’s going to be stuff that you don’t know that’s happening, that’s depleting the sales that you could ultimately get. So it’s definitely worth investing at least some time to discover what it is that’s going on here. I know you have a website in some places where perhaps you share some of this stuff.

Yes, people can obviously hire you for help, but where can people go to, or should they go to In addition to obviously listening to the rest of this podcast episode to learn more about this kind of stuff. Do you have any resources of your own or perhaps even other resources where people can dive a little bit deeper into this?

MV Braverman: As a solopreneur, I am a great believer in helping people DIY it as much as possible. So I’ve created a DIY guide to setting up email authentication properly. I am seeing so many, so many setups that are not done right.

And I am creating more resources for people to understand things themselves. Now, that being said, it’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of data. One thing I saw when I was a WordPress support is, the designers would have this checklist of the things that they deliver, and they would set up Google Analytics.

The thing is, that no one ever looked at the Google Analytics. The only people who benefited from Google Analytics being set up was Google. They were very happy to get the data. And the important thing is, keep looking at these metrics, keep looking at these reports. We’ll talk a little more about the new authentication requirements, I imagine, but probably people have heard the word DMARC, the acronym.

It is a sea of acronyms. So the R in DMARC stands for reporting. And You get reports and insights that you wouldn’t see any other way. So all of my authentication clients, I’ve set them up with the reporting and I ask them, Do you look at these reports? And all of them said no. I appreciate the honesty, but they are missing out on a lot of insights.

Pat Flynn: I mean, that’s Not just for email, but a lot of things we should be keeping track of that we don’t, and we kind of just coast, and it’s really important to look at the data. I know a lot of people who start businesses aren’t in it for that reason. We want to do the art or the creative part or just be a creator.

But in order to reach more people, you kind of have to do some of this stuff, which is why I’m glad that you are here today to talk about the email side of it for us business owners who have our businesses directly tied to email. So we talked a lot on the surface, a little bit about emails that people want. Before we move on, we’re kind of moving backwards, I do want to talk about unsubscribes in a minute, but in general, what can we do to create emails that people do want? So outside of the technical stuff, do you have any tips for a creator who is writing emails to ensure or at least increase the likelihood that their audience will open and enjoy those emails.

What would that be?

MV Braverman: Absolutely. One thing that I really recommend is people think of it in terms of an entire kind of customer journey from subscription and onward. So front load that relationship. I have been subscribed to so many lists where I just get sent their newsletter. One first email I recently received was a part two.

Pat Flynn: Oh gosh. Oh gosh.

MV Braverman: And, and so I was like, who is this? What is going on? So think about, what is the experience? So they put in, they gave you their email address. They clicked, give me your thing. What happens next? It’s a lot like a one on one relationship in real life, right? If you, if I meet you in person, and then I reach out to you shortly after, you’re gonna remember me.

But if I reach out to you a week or a month later, you can be like, who is this? And why are they emailing me? So, in some ways, in a lot of ways, it really helps to just think, how would you do this in real life? You would introduce yourself, say a little bit about them, you would ask a little bit about them, you know, invite them to reply, that does help your deliverability.

Ask them some questions, don’t just push out things at them. And kind of slowly introduce yourself and your offers to them.

Pat Flynn: I like that. Obviously, the answer depends on every different audience and every niche. It’s a little bit different if a person subscribes because they’re expecting something and you were very upfront with the fact that there’s going to be an offer, then you obviously don’t want to wait.

But of course, if they’re signing up for a newsletter and they’re bombarded with coupons and sales and part four of something that they’re just getting involved with, then it’s not going to feel great at all. So I really love that analogy of just what would you do in real life? I think that’s an amazing way to sort of frame it.

And of course, I would imagine that looking at the data that we are normally used to seeing like open rates and click throughs, trying to continually improve those over time and iterate on them and split tests and stuff will just, that stuff will stack to a point where yes, we are hopefully sending emails that our audience does respond to and does enjoy.

So, Just keep that in mind, everybody. There’s a lot of things that we all know we should do, and sometimes we’re not doing them, but there’s also some stuff that, especially based on the data that can inform those decisions as well. How often are you recommending a regular person who’s just like, they know the email’s important, but they’re not wanting to be in there 24 7 a day.

What would be a good cadence for just checking up on things, making sure things are good, and sort of up to date and maintained?

MV Braverman: Some of it depends how they send their emails. A non profit sending a monthly newsletter is very different from someone sending emails every day. I would say no less than once a month.

And it’s, most of the time it’s probably okay if it’s once a month.

Pat Flynn: Fantastic. Let’s move on to the second thing you had mentioned earlier as far as the three things that have changed. Really changed metrics. Now that we need to understand the unsubscribes and making that easy. I think it’s obvious why that’s important because we don’t want to have to go through hoops in order to be able to unsubscribe, which I know is the most annoying thing in the world.

So I love how these companies are at least trying to protect the consumer in all of this, but it does make it a little bit more difficult for us, the creators who have groups of consumers or audiences to understand, okay, well, how do we do this properly. So from my understanding with tools like ConvertKit, there is already at the bottom of every email, when you say, or send a broadcast, an unsubscribe button, is that enough, or what should we be looking out for?

Is there other things we can do to comply?

MV Braverman: In this case, there is actually a specific underlying technical requirement that ConvertKit and others have implemented. And so that’s the, you know, in your Gmail and in other things, you’re going to see that unsubscribe button when opening. Like, if I opened your newsletter, it will give me an easy unsubscribe button.

I would not click on it. I enjoy getting your emails.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

MV Braverman: But I actually would go further. And I would, for my emails, I put an invitation to unsubscribe at the top. Not in the sense of go away, but in the sense of if this email is no longer serving you, or if you’re in a different place with your business or life, please unsubscribe.

The important thing to understand is that unsubscribe is a neutral signal to mailbox providers. So Google’s not going to count against you or for you if someone unsubscribes. But they really don’t want someone to mark it as spam. And so if you make it harder to unsubscribe, if you make it difficult to find where this unsubscribe link is, they are much more likely to mark it as spam, and that’s going to really count against you.

And another thing I see sometimes, which is actually technically against the law, is requiring someone to sign in to unsubscribe. So, don’t make it hard, even though you might be like, But they liked me! They want my emails! I, I want them! They might buy something! No. Let them go, and wish them well, and move on.

You will get a lot more subscribers who are thrilled to hear from you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, they might come back later, especially if you create something that they are then interested in or you know, maybe they just needed to leave and take a break. A lot of us prune our email list every once in a while and then go back to the ones that really mattered, so they’re not lost forever, however, like we were talking about earlier, creating emails that people want will obviously help with the unsubscribes. And we’re not going to dive into it too much, but we’ve talked a lot here on the podcast about the psychology of seeing those unsubscribers go up. It can be very disheartening sometimes to know that you sent an email and people are like, I don’t want this anymore.

The way that I have worked around that mentally is, It’s a good thing. We don’t want our list to be full of people who just aren’t getting value anymore. And oftentimes for every person who doesn’t get value, there are many, many more who come on that do. And I don’t want to waste a person’s time. And also I would imagine cleans up the list and has those numbers like open rates and click through rates ultimately go up.

And you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I would assume that it also helps ultimately with deliverability and spam scores and those kinds of things. Is that true?

MV Braverman: Again? Yeah. If someone wants to go, if it’s not an unsubscribe, it’s a spam complaint. The nice thing about these new requirements from Google is that they actually nudge you towards unsubscribing first if you click spam report a spam button. It’ll say do you want to unsubscribe? Did you really mean to unsubscribe? They probably don’t understand this but I know there are people who use a spam report as a delete this email signal so again an unsubscribe is a neutral signal. And yes, you get to see it in your dashboard.

A spam report is not a neutral signal, and you don’t get to see it in the dashboard. And the other thing about unsubscribes is, guess what? If someone’s unsubscribing, that means that the email landed in their inbox. It did not go into spam.

Pat Flynn: That’s a good point. That is a great point. Is it worth asking questions to the person who unsubscribed?

Like, why did you unsubscribe? Tell us more. What can we do to do better next time? I know that sometimes when I unsubscribe from different email lists, on one hand, I understand why they’re asking, but on the other hand, I’m like, just let me go. I, I’m done with you yet. You’re still here. What are your thoughts on the surveys that happen after a person unsubscribes?

MV Braverman: Very few people fill them out. And you’re right. At that point, they’re just, I’m done with you. So my question to turn that around is how would you catch this before they’re ready to leave? Engage your audience and ask them before then. Why do you stay? What do you like about this? And again, invite them to unsubscribe if it’s not serving them.

Maybe they’re leaving for a one year dream, you know, vacation around the world. We don’t know what’s going on in their lives.

Pat Flynn: It’s so true.

MV Braverman: And they might be back after that year. Energized and ready.

Pat Flynn: That is so true. I appreciate the perspective here, MV, on, on all of this.

Let’s finish up with the authentication. This, I feel like, is the most complicated, most new for people. What does this actually mean? You had mentioned a acronym DMARC. This is all going to go over a lot of people’s heads. So I’m curious to know how we best might be able to help people who are listening, who are like, okay, this is a little too technical, bring it down to layman’s terms and what are the most important things here?

So where do we start with this part of it?

MV Braverman: So the important thing to know First of all, if you have a pretty small list, you know, maybe like a thousand or two thousand or fewer people you don’t actually need to worry about this your email service provider already puts their own digital signature on your email I give the metaphor of you know, imagine if your email was a package.

And there’s some acronyms that apply. So DKIM is, for example, like a tape to seal your box and to show that the contents haven’t been tampered with. Now, ideally, if you’re a bulk sender, you’re going to put your own branded tape on it. But by default, ConvertKit or Mailchimp are going to put theirs. And that’s okay.

Google doesn’t mind. If you’re only sending a few emails, they are totally cool with it. So I would rather, if you are a sender with a small list, leave things as they are. Because trying to do things halfway will actually make them worse. So even if, you know, ConvertKit or MailChimp are nudging you to do all of that setup, if you can, don’t do it.

It is working. It’s not ideal, but it is working and kind of keep it on the back burner.

Pat Flynn: So it wouldn’t increase your deliverability by doing it. It’s mainly a protection for consumers receiving emails from people who send large amounts of emails. That’s what that really is for.

MV Braverman: Well, at the lowest level, it is protection from spammers who don’t put any sort of authentication on their emails.

And at the higher level, the ideal that we want to go for is that you put your branding on everything. We want to know that it’s you and that it’s your domain sending it. And that grows your sender reputation in Google’s and Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s and other people’s eyes. If you’re a small sender, you are essentially borrowing ConvertKit or MailChimp good reputation.

So you kind of share it. It’s sort of, you know, the saying you are the the average of the five people you spend time with. You are seen as kind of the average of the other people who send from the same IP address or from the same ESP. But that’s okay, because ConvertKit and MailChimp do take these things very seriously.

Pat Flynn: That makes sense. And we would want them to, or else if somebody else is using ConvertKit to spam and run their spam business, then all of our businesses would then be affected too. And of course I know the team at ConvertKit and they have teams of people who specifically are on board to ensure that things are of the highest quality and people are sending correct emails and you know, they’re educating as well.

I know there’s other email service providers who shall not be named that maybe don’t go as far as they should. And I’ve heard of some friends of mine who have used some of those email service providers who have then seen a lot of their emails being throttled because of something they think they did when it’s actually somebody else using the same servers or using the same company.

So that’s reassuring for those of us who are on ConvertKit. And of course, I’m a big fan and an advisor to the company as well. And we recommend it here at SPI, too. So I’m happy to hear that. When you say, and again, let’s maybe think about the larger creators out there who are sending more bulk emails.

Hopefully, yes, emails that people want to read and yes, with an easy way to unsubscribe. But how do we put our brand on this? What that doesn’t mean, like put your brand name in the email. There’s some technical things that need to happen. What is the easiest way to.

MV Braverman: Well, you could read my DIY guide. It’s a step by step process.

The important thing to understand is that SPF and DKIM and all of those things, you want to Set them up for every single email channel. So if you use Google Workspace for your everyday one-on-one emails, you need to get those authenticated too. One thing I’ve noticed is WordPress contact forms. You also need to authenticate those emails because otherwise they will end up in spam a lot.

So before you implement DMARC, which is the requirement for these bulk senders, you have to make sure that everything else is set up first. That is the most important thing to understand. ConvertKit and all of those other providers have set up what they say is our easy automated ways to set up to comply with the requirements.

The problem is, what they do is they only make their own email stream compliant. But it knocks out everything else, and it makes it not be compliant. It can get a little confusing. So basically, with with your default, you know, Google Workspace, Gmail puts their stamp on it.

With ConvertKit, ConvertKit puts their stamp on it. With WordPress, WordPress put their stamp on it. And that’s okay. I But once you start saying, I have to do this authentication, and you start putting your own stamps on things, you have to put your own stamp on everything. It’s all or nothing, and it’s really important that you do all, and not just some.

Pat Flynn: This guide that you had mentioned. Where can people grab that real quick because I’m sure people are itching just to at least look at that to see what the steps Are where can people go and get that?

MV Braverman: It’s a DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com

Pat Flynn: Still one more time. DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com

Perfect. And then Inbox Welcome, of course, is sort of the main site, so people can go there and check out what you have to offer and if they want to work more closely with you.

You also have another website, MV Braverman, which has more stuff around what it is that you do beyond email, which people can explore there too, but DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com. There we go.

MV Braverman: And even if you’ve already set things up, the guy will actually tell you how to test everything.

Pat Flynn: Amazing.

MV Braverman: So it’s a good double check.

Pat Flynn: That sounds super handy. Actually. Now I want to make sure I have everything set up properly. I think we do, but now I need to check. You had mentioned reporting coming into this equation in some way. Can you expand on that?

MV Braverman: Sure, it is quite a big iceberg. So with DMARC reports, you get essentially, you send your emails and then Microsoft or Google or other providers will send a daily report saying, here’s how we perceived your email is passed in a line.

And again, this is kind of a little complex. So basically, our checks passed, your email was good, or you didn’t set this up right.

Pat Flynn: Does it check every individual email that you send out?

MV Braverman: Mm hmm. It checks every individual email, but you get an, what’s called an aggregate report.

Pat Flynn: I see. Okay. Is that from Google Postmaster Tools that tells us these things?

MV Braverman: Ideally, you would work with a DMARC report parser. So these reports are sent in a format called XML. They’re actually very hard to read by a human. So ideally use a service that will parse it for you and make nice dashboard and make it look really pretty. I offer that as part of my Sender Reputation Monitoring Service.

That’s one of the things I look at. There’s lots of companies who are doing it now. Of course, it’s really exploded. Some are free, most are paid, but ideally you would look at this. The other thing that you find out with these DMARC reports, and this mainly is It’s more for larger companies. You’re going to find out if there’s rogue email streams.

If someone set up a form or if someone set up a completely different email service provider, you’re going to find out about it because they’re not going to be authenticated. And so this is the only way that you might know, Oh, my WordPress contact forms aren’t authenticated. They’re going into spam.

Pat Flynn: Right. Not so much somebody has hacked you per se, but just, you still have holes to plug in, in your system.

MV Braverman: I actually, I did a podcast with a fellow SPI Pro member not too long ago. And it turned out that her previous VA set up a separate ConvertKit account that had a separate welcome sequence that was emailing people.

Pat Flynn: Oh my gosh.

MV Braverman: And we would not have known that without having seen the DMARC reports, because that second account did not have authentication set up.

Pat Flynn: That’s wild. Okay, so definitely something that we, we want to do. And so people will go and get, again, DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com. People aren’t going to know exactly what it all means, but like, what, what does that process entail to get something authenticated, what is all involved with that? Like, we have to, do we have to put code on our website and then get something verified? Similar to when you add trackers for ad campaigns on a website, is that kind of how this thing works? Or do you have to fill out an application? Do you have to share like your license with the government, like what else is required to, to make that happen?

MV Braverman: I usually do not set up website trackers. One way to set up those is through changing your DNS settings. So if you have done the Google verification or other verifications and change those DNS settings, then it will be a very similar process.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Okay, that helps a lot. So if you, for example, get a domain and you want your hosted website to point to a different domain, you got to change the sort of address and kind of the back end stuff through your hosting provider. So that’s, where that is happening with email authentication as well. And I’m sure you put in your thing and you get this large string of characters and you got to drop that into the DNS and it’s like, okay, let’s just follow it step by step.

So I’m very appreciative that we don’t have to go into that and you can just go to the guide and we’ll put all the links in the show notes and everything. I would say, you know, as we finish up here and being, this is a great sort of 101 on a lot of this stuff. What is the biggest mistake that people make?

They hear this podcast, they implement this, but then just kind of go back to life as it used to be, what’s the most important thing that we can continue to do to make sure that our emails over time, stay In the right section of a person’s inbox.

MV Braverman: First and foremost is remember that this is a human and one on one experience.

Tech just accelerates things. If you send crappy emails, same way as, you know, you meet a new person and you try to sell them something and you jump on them immediately, they’re gonna back away from you slowly. It’s the same way. And especially, you know, email, you don’t really see it. See the person. So take it slow, build the relationship.

When I do deliverability audits, I look at the tech, which is the underlying infrastructure. I look at the content, which is, are you just sending one giant image? Is it readable and mobile? Is it dark mode friendly? A lot of other things. And then the third aspect is the relationship, you know, are you encouraging interaction or do you have a no reply from address?

How are you acting with your subscribers? Then the other thing, of course, is, you know, that just front load that relationship, build it slowly, build it carefully. And then the one thing I strongly recommend to people, and I’m going to ask you this question not to put you on a spot pad, but when’s the last time that you subscribed to your email list?

Pat Flynn: I am subscribed to the email list. I mean, I’m seeing the emails every time we send out a newsletter. And when we did that was two years ago when the Unstuck newsletter began, because I always do that. I always want to make sure that the emails are coming through, they’re looking proper. And when we did that, we did pay attention to how people were on boarded, but it’s been a couple years, so I’m curious to see what it might be like, and I think that is a great recommendation. Subscribe to your own email list and ask yourself, like, put yourself in the shoes of your subscriber. How are they feeling? If you’ve never met them before, are you talking to them in a way that introduces you and proves that you have something worth of value to continually open these emails for over time, like those kinds of things?

I think that’s that’s an amazing piece of advice.

MV Braverman: And you might be surprised, you might know, find out things are broken, or something’s not working quite right. So, yeah, I strongly recommend just, and the same thing, you know, go to your website regularly. Look at your, your public facing things regularly. Is the subscription form still working?

Yeah, what is that welcome sequence like? You want to use a different email address, which can be like a throwaway email address, or, or there’s a lot of other hacks. Don’t put in your regular email address. But yeah, that’s, that’s my one big recommendation is just see what it’s like. And then the third thing is, like, respect your metrics, like, look at them, look at them regularly, because again, what you don’t know can hurt you.

And some of the things you might not know can hurt you, can hurt you. I’m not sure if that’s completely relevant, but I’ll tell you a little story is, when I originally set up this domain, I ended up on a block list, which is basically a list of spammers. And I did not know that I ended up on the block list.

I hadn’t set up a monitoring for that domain yet. I posted a link to my blog on LinkedIn, and it was marked as a malicious link. Because LinkedIn was taking the information from this block list and labeling my links as malicious. So I set up a new domain. And that’s one thing to be careful of is if you’re rebranding or setting up a new domain.

In the first 30 days of this domain’s existence, block lists are very, very, very, very cautious, because that’s a spammer tactic. Set up a new domain, start spamming. So you are very likely to end up on a block list. And I was not mindful of that. I set up a blog on that new site, and I shared a link on LinkedIn.

And that link to the blog post was labeled by LinkedIn as malicious. Because that domain was on an email block list. Now, I am not a spammer. Obviously, I am very careful of that. So I actually went and appealed it. It was promptly removed. But I would not have known that. If I hadn’t checked that link.

There’s a lot of things that can hurt you that you might not know about. And I’m not saying this, you know, to make someone paranoid. Like, keep an eye on your metrics. Start with those, you know, open rates and click rates. I know some email list owners don’t even look at those. Get a comprehensive report.

You know, at least get a snapshot. Here’s what’s going on with your list. You should do the same thing, ideally, with your website. It’s, and then take action when you need to. But the most important thing is just be aware of what’s going on with your, with very important parts of your business. And email is, I view email as kind of the glue between the different parts.

You know, I buy courses. I join memberships. I forget about the courses. I forget about the memberships. But when they say, hey, there’s this really interesting discussion that’s going on in SPI Pro this week. And they send me an email about it. I remember about the membership and I go check out this very interesting discussion.

So treat your email list with great care. It is one of your most important business assets. And as a caveat to that, back it up regularly. Things can happen.

Pat Flynn: What do you mean by back it up exactly? Like download the list just in case?

MV Braverman: Yeah. Export your list of subscribers just in case.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. Envy. Thank you so much for this and the plethora of information hopefully doesn’t scare people off too much, but I hope it is something that is in a way, motivating for people to know that, Hey, there are things that may be happening under the hood that I don’t know that I can unclog, for example, or a way for people to get ahead on things as their business continues to grow. And we don’t want this to be scary for you, but this information is definitely.

Very, very important and not talked about very often. So thank you for stepping into this space and showing up and for helping out and for the guide as well, DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com. MV Braverman, thank you so much for today. I appreciate you. And I look forward to seeing you inside a pro very soon.

MV Braverman: Thank you so much for having me.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Like I said earlier, a little technical, but if you’re still here, that means, you know, the value of this. And if you want to get that guide that MV was talking about, go to DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com. And of course you can always go to our website to check out the links and the show notes and the resources and everything there.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/session817. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session817. Thank you, MV. Thank you for listening through. Again, that’s DIYGuide.InboxWelcome.com. And don’t do this. Don’t let it go by, right? With all the new email rules coming out, it’s really important. It’s one of those things that I know you don’t want to do, but it’s at least one of those things that you can just take care of once and make sure it’s all good.

So thank you. Cheers. Take care, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Peace.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!