Unknown 0:25

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy.

Unknown 0:26

Hello and today on the Email Marketing Show we're talking about the big Gmail apocalypse of 2023. With a big dramatic and avoid you did darling. I was lovely. Thank you darling. Thank

Unknown 0:37

you darling. Anyway, before it all comes to an end, we might as well make as much money with email as we possibly can. So we've put together something for you that is totally free for you to download and use to start getting better results because if you want more sales from your emails, you need to get more people clicking on the links if you're in your emails, so that's why we've put together 12 creative ways that you can get more clicks from every email that you send in a new download that we are calling click tricks. It's yours totally free. As a listener of this podcast, all you have to do is go to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks, follow the little instructions. You'll be able to download it in just a few minutes from now.

Unknown 1:06

He is still waiting for a receipt from the fast food restaurants.

Unknown 1:11

It's comedy ever disrupt the devil and his check luggage is bright red it's psychological mind reader Kennedy

Unknown 1:20

okay, what's happening with your with your receipts?

Unknown 1:21

So you know, when you go into the fast food restaurants now they're trying to remove customer service. They give you those machines, giant iPads that you can order. Oh, yes, yes, those are just really annoyed. They never seen it makes like a good internet burnings. And then when it's supposed to spit out the receipt with your order and then I'm still trying to figure it out

Unknown 1:52

I will tell you a little bit this morning so Simon Cola, but we'll go with red.

Unknown 1:55

Yeah, well it said red when I ordered it, shall we say that? Shall we say that? Yeah, the reason it's bright red. I was when I was doing a lot of cruise ship gigs with my with my show. Obviously he was travelling a lot and so I was I wanted to be strategic. I didn't just randomly go out and read luggage, although it was in the Samsonite sale at the time. So that was a double whammy. As you remember. This was like 1011 11 years ago, 11 years ago. I remember that. I ended up in Trinidad, and I ended up there but my luggage didn't and they said oh come to the luggage room. And I was like that'd be a nice little room. And you go into this huge hall this massive like basketball court size room with all of the lost luggage of the world. I think it was huge and this place and this I stand on this platform is that like step at these little steps about eight steps high and I'm looking over, like Everything the light touches, you know, it's like it's kind of like that is ours. And and then like, can you see yours? And I'm like, Well, no, actually I can't. And they were like, well, well, how do you know from here? And I said, Well, all of this look at here is just like dingy black and grey. Mine's bright red. I'm able to see it from here. So that's the reason I have bright coloured luggage so I can spot it.

Unknown 3:03

If you remember a few weeks ago when we went to a hotel concierge to pick up our luggage and we gave the guy the little luggage tags and he went off to go and find it and it was about three inches from our feet. And he was walking all the way

Unknown 3:14

through 101 and we're gonna read one there and

Unknown 3:18

how long do we give him before we go actually we're looking at it's next month it's

Unknown 3:20

negative. I've taken the system sucks just point you don't look at hello. Every week on this show. We show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We talk about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make you more sales online. Making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every Wednesday. Make sure you hit subscribe button on the podcast player.

Unknown 3:45

Now unsurprisingly, one of the technical NYAS is doing it again. One of the big companies is making a change, a technical change which is on the surface of it going to be the death of email marketing again. So it's gonna cause all sorts of email marketing chaos on the surface of it. And this seems to be happening more and more. I think it's gonna happen more and more frequently. I think it's gonna be more and more of these sort of bombshells get dropped. And this time, it's definitely it's suddenly Google's turn so coming well it's a policy it's in place right now. If I just did it. You've been doing tonnes of research into this a policy that is in place right now, but will effectively be enforced from the first of December 2020.

Unknown 4:19

That's right. I mean, basically, the policy that we're talking about is Gmail rolled out into their new terms in their latest terms update. I think it was in July, saying that any Gmail account, which has not been logged into for two years, at any time, any two year period will then be deleted will then be completely abolished. And I want to just talk about what that means for a second. Because that does it for some people. We all use Gmail in different ways of using Gmail. Right? And so you might be thinking, Okay, wow, all those people who just never logged into their Gmail account are going to have their accounts deleted. And I could talk about all that means via email marketing, but the impact of that might not be as big as you think, because logged in doesn't just mean going into their Gmail account. It might be having logged into their Google Calendar account. It could be that Google Drive, it could be an app, which links to it and is automatically doing stuff. So basically, if it's dormant, if nothing's happening, and so the reason that they're doing this is because they must have hundreds of 1000s if not millions, probably millions, right millions of accounts that people once created. For, you know, that project that we're working on a business idea, they had a thing that we're doing. And then they just they're just people didn't check them anymore. People aren't using them anymore. I'm sure over the years I've created several of these accounts for different businesses ideas, and I think that startups that have had, and so Google that's taken up a lot of space on Google servers, not just with the emails themselves, but think about all the stuff that comes with emails, all the attachments, all the images, a major part of Google's inventory is Google Photos. I didn't know this until this bit of research, but Google Photos, again, huge pieces of data, huge amounts of service has been taken up. Only rightfully. I mean, you and I would do the same would go well, they haven't looked at it for two years. But when you move house, and when I moved from the flat from the apartment into this house, that was not enough. We were like, shall we keep this like Well, I haven't looked at it for four years. Do I really want it like it's nice, but I don't want Google I just cleaning shop a little bit because obviously the world is getting into a place where we need to be all more efficient and and renting that space out for free to people on the internet is expensive, and they're cutting costs and I'm sure it's gonna say from absolute fortune.

Unknown 6:26

Yeah, who'd have thought that giving people gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of free storage on the internet but that's, you know, you can sign up for it within minutes with no idea or anything like that was gonna come back and bite them on the last one.

Unknown 6:36

I mean, it would have thought that'll be on the first meeting. What What if not, don't worry about that, John.

Unknown 6:42

So this is this is really important. So let's talk about why this is an issue. One of the things we talk about a lot with sort of email deliverability and that kind of thing on the show. And inside of our programmes and when we're speaking and stuff is all about the fact that actually the technical side of email deliverability is not all that important. It's not weighted all that heavily when it comes to most of us day to day, if you've got a list of millions of people, maybe this is different, but for most of us, we've got a few 100 1000s 10s of 1000s or a couple 100,000 subscribers, really the majority of the leverage that you've got when it comes to improving your email deliverability comes down to engagement management, making sure that you're not emailing people who are dud accounts and making sure you're not emailing people who haven't opened engage with your emails in some time. And that's getting tighter and tighter and tighter. We had a call with a friend of ours who's a deliverability expert, just talking about just how tight this is getting know how much more careful we're going to have to start to be and so we're sort of analysing all of that stuff right now, but what that means is that we already know, from previous episodes, that when people you know, people change their email addresses, you know, as often as every year, you know, a big percentage of people, that kind of thing. And so if we're now getting to the point where we've got people who haven't used an account for a couple of years, and now Gmail are gonna start deleting those accounts, those emails that you send to those accounts are now going to start hard bouncing in other words, your email platform is going to send the email out, it's literally going to hit a stone wall, and it's going to bounce back again. And when it bounces back again, that's really bad for your sender reputation. And because if you don't, you're not paying attention to it and you don't know that those people those accounts don't exist anymore. You're gonna keep emailing this stuff. For luxury, my platform will let you before it stops altogether, and which will take very long and it's all very, very bad for your sender reputation, which makes all of this much more difficult to do. So.

Unknown 8:12

But I want to talk about the good side of this, by the way, well, that's not necessarily good, but the the indifferent side of this, which is the people who were already not checking their email inboxes that Gmail accounts for two years weren't opening and clicking your emails anyway. So all that's going to happen is rather than it's just like, kind of bad for you reputation, it's pretty bad reputation anyway, as a sender because these people weren't clicking and engaging. What's gonna happen is it's gonna be a much stronger identifier, a much stronger message coming back to your to your domain reputation, saying hey, that not only that, not only is that person not clicking and engaging, but that doesn't exist anymore. You've sent it against a brick wall, which doesn't exist. So remember, this is not affecting the number of people you're actually truly reaching. Your true reach is no different. All that's happening is you're gonna see the people who actually don't even exist anymore in a much more firm and solid way. Those people already weren't engaging, right? That's what you got to remember. Like before, it was like they just weren't listening. Now, it's like they're not there anymore. That's the difference and in terms of getting your message through, there is no difference there. So what are we actually do to actually work against this and fix it so that we're prepared? Well, the good news is, if you've been in any of our programmes, if you've listened the show for a while, you'll know about our engagement monitoring method, and we're going to briefly to talk over it again now but we will also link you over to to the episodes where we've talked about in much more detail but basically, if someone has not clicked a link, clicked a link not opened or clicked a link in the last 60 days, right? Then we're going to put them through a reengagement or a subscriber revival campaign, right. And then that takes a 14 days, LOL sequence that we give our students takes 14 days, if after that they haven't reengaged. If they haven't clicked a link, we're then going to stop sending them emails, we're going to remove the tag that puts old take them out that segment, whatever it is you want to do, we're going to stop sending that person emails. The other thing that we're going to do is we're in the first 14 days of someone subscribing to our email list. We're really going to be looking at them closely, right? Because again, if the person signing up with a really old Gmail account, they actually never even check in. They haven't checked for two years. If they don't engage and click a link enter your emails. The first 14 days we're not even going to put them into a revival sequence. We're not even gonna give them a second chance. They're just gone for day 15 If they haven't had to link gone, and two really important things. One, this is not based on open rate. This is not based on people opening your emails because that data is incorrect and inconsistent as we keep saying depending on the device, the browser, the email client, the email service, what what spam protection and and firewalls and stuff like that they've gotten their system like so many variables can show that emails are being opened when they're not on not being opened when they have been so we're not basing any of this stuff on opens, but we aren't doing it based on clicks. Okay, so if they don't click within 60 days at any point, we're going to put them into that lol our revival reengagement sequence. That's what we're going to do and that means we can't fall foul of this two year thing like 600 Something days, we're not gonna, we're not gonna we're not gonna get anywhere close to that 60 days, it's going to be taken care of so that natural list hygiene that we want you to have so that you're having the best engagement, you're having the best deliverability to your audience. That's going to naturally take care of it. Like every other flip and change that's come around. This is not working anymore. Guess what? It doesn't matter if you use our protocol for engaging management, that next change that came around that also did not affect you, our students. This current change is going around, guess what? Anybody who's already got this set up, doesn't even need to worry about it. It's already taken care of. We're making zero changes in our business in the light of what Gmail is announcement is we don't have to our students don't have to you listeners who haven't been at this already don't have to. It's already you're already way ahead of the curve because of this really good engagement monitoring protocol

and the reason why this is happening is that it's easy to look at it without without the context of this. And without the rationale of what we've talked through on this episode. It's easy to look at this as oh my god, Gmail are trying to make this email marketing thing difficult. They're trying to make this hard for us to do they're not they're just trying to make it better. And so are we. And so this is really where things are different. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make email marketing better for the people who are sending emails, us and you, I'm trying to make it better for the people who are receiving emails and Gmail only want the same thing. It's a little bit like, you know, when Facebook changed the ads policies, and people say, Oh, my God ads is getting difficult now. Well, it's what they're trying to do is they're trying to make a better experience for their users. Why would they do that? Because they want their users to stay on the platform. Why would they do that? Well, because when they do that, more and better people will advertise and so what all they're trying to do is create a really good customer experience or user experience. And the same thing applies for Gmail and the email platforms. All they're trying to do is make sure that people like using that email platform more. That doesn't mean they don't want anyone sending emails into it. That would be redundant. They're happy for people to send emails into it. They just want it to be done in the right way and sent to the right people and that's what you should want as well. It's definitely what we want. So these people

are going the same direction. We're doing exactly the same thing, don't we?

Yeah, exactly. People who are moaning and whining about these these updates saying and they're making it more difficult. That's because they're doing email marketing, the lazy way. They're not doing you know, they're just building a list of people and bashing them over the heads regardless of who those people are and what they're doing, or they're doing these are dirty tactics, which is what we are trying to stamp out.

Totally, totally. So that's the latest update from Gmail. That's how it does or doesn't affect you, and what you should be going and doing about it. But do try and keep you massively up to date on the cusp of what's going on here on the Email Marketing Show. And of course, like we said, the big thing here is to be monitoring those clicks. The big thing we need to really drive home here, the rubber thing is not enough people are putting links in their emails. They go well, no one's clicked for a week and they go, Okay, how many links how many of those emails you send? How many emails have you sent? One? Okay, did it have anything to click on it? Well, no, not really. Guess what you haven't given people the opportunity to click so increase frequency and making sure there is something you want to have people click is critical for this engagement monitoring. The problem with all of this, of course, is if you show up with an email that says hi and come and check this out, and just like the link that says click here with blue in blue underlined, people very quickly, get ad blindness to that they become they stopped seeing that they just stopped reading at the points before it because they're not always gonna just say click here because that's what it's always said. So one of the things we always try and do is think of interesting, quirky novel attention grabbing ways of dressing up the links that are in those emails to make sure people can't get that link blindness to maybe it'll go oh, I'm gonna try and click that I am gonna go and click that. And you should definitely do that as well. And that's the exact reason we put together that resource that you mentioned at the top of the episode, Rob, if you want to go grab it. It's called click tricks. And it's about interesting ways of dressing up the links in your emails to make sure more people are clicking, more people are engaging and you keeping that deliverability monitoring really, really high. You can go get it's free for you as a listener of the show. By going to email marketing heroes.com/tricks Email Marketing heroes.com/tricks And now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. What have you got?

This one is first name so you merge in the First Name, First Name and Goliath. So if you were receiving this email and your name is David that was a good example. That was really the first example is Karen this one would be Karen and Goliath. So first name and Goliath I think it's always really interesting. You can take any sort of traditional story or something that's well known a film name maybe but the more traditional the story, the better. You know, so like, it could be like, you know, Karen's Ark, that old biblical catalogue, you find yourself any story that people have first off and, and swap out something for something that's relevant to them like their first name or something like that. Roberts, Cooper. Well,

your Roberts Creek,

Roberts Creek Yeah, yeah, yeah, not Robert shit. That's the difference. I've got that

shit. Anyway, I think that's quite enough of this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week you so much for listen to the whole show this week. We're gonna be back next week in another episode, so make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player was