Full Transcript

[00:00:09] Jay Schwedelson: Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. Marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. WEEK are back for do this, Not That podcast presented by Marigold, and we have a repeat guest. You know that the guest is awesome when we ask them to come back on, and that is the case here. Who do we got? We got Brian Minick, who's the chief operating officer at XeroBounce, which is the absolute leader in the marketplace as it relates to email validation, data improvement, data hygiene. And we asked Brian to come back because one topic we've never talked about in the show, okay, is spam traps. What exactly are they? Does everybody have to deal with them? How do you get rid of them? Because people kinda talk about them vaguely, but we're gonna break it down in real simple terms here. And Brian is the smartest guy I know on this topic. So, Brian, welcome back to the show, man.

[00:01:23] Brian Minick: Thanks, Jay. Pleasure to be back here, and and thanks. It's a very sensitive topic, to be very honest with you. I mean, I hear people freak out about the term. Like, it's it's mysterious. Right? Because it as simple as the name actually is, it's very descriptive of what exactly it is. But how do they get created? Where do they come from? How do you get them off? What do you do with these things? What kind of problems do they cause? There's a lot of, like, you know, ripple effects of these type of things, and they they tend to haunt you because they can kinda just bury themselves in your list. It's kinda I look at them as, like, the bugs in the wall. You know? Like, where the hell did that thing come from? You know? Like, where'd that come from? No. Not bad bugs. I don't have any experience with those What’s. K. Don't do that.

[00:02:03] Jay Schwedelson: So Alright. Let me ask you a question, though. So we're gonna open this up. People listening might be a business to business marketer. They might be a consumer marketer. They might have a huge list. They might have a small list. They may be marketing people in the education space or in the health space. All of it. First question is, does spam traps and trying to deal with spam traps and possibly having them in your databases, is this an everybody problem?

[00:02:28] Brian Minick: Absolutely. So there's it's on business domains and it's all over, by the way, riddled throughout all these kind of consumer emails. And for me, a consumer email is these Yahoos, AOLs, Gmail accounts, Outlooks, whatever it might be, just the generally free provided accounts out there. They're riddled. And so the way that they kind of work on the business side is generally they're created from scratch. That's called the pristine spam trap. If anyone wants to go look that Up. And that is intended to be a trap. THIS is, it was built by day one. This is a spam trap. This is a email address. If you send to it, you're blacklisted immediately. No question. Let me

[00:03:04] Jay Schwedelson: jump in there, though. I need to understand what that means. So Yeah. Let's first define What’s is the word spam trap mean? What does Us mean? Like, what does it mean if you send an email to a quote, unquote spam trap?

[00:03:16] Brian Minick: So if you send an email to a spam trap, you get thrown into this blacklist. And imagine it as you're on the you're on the you THIS the you hit the club. Right? You hit the guard gate at the community. You're trying to get in, and they're like, nah. You're not coming in here, bud. No matter what you do, there's no approval you're gonna go get. You need to go call the president of the club. That's the only way you're getting it. It's the same exact thing. As soon as you do anything of that nature and you hit this mailbox that's a spam trap, you're gonna be thrown into a blacklist, which is going to basically kick you off their mailing platforms and no messages will get delivered because you shouldn't have ever emailed that email in the first place. So that's really what a spam trap is. It's it's really that quick gotcha. Right? It's why did you mail this email? You should have never received it. It's not signed up. And to be fair, they're not malicious about it. They don't go hit your forms with these emails. They don't go submit them or sign up or pay make a payment. So there's no real natural way that you should be receiving these emails. But what THIS happens is is they're coming from any of these Us data sources, scrapers on the web. So these web these emails are published on websites, and you could actually Google them and find them. But the point is those index those sites are not made to be scraping data off of. They're set up as traps. It's a speed trap. Think of it that way. Right? Like, you're not supposed to be ANYTHING. So the cops waiting for you to speed, you know, and and THIS you with the the laser. It's the same exact concept. You shouldn't be scraping data. You shouldn't be buying lists. So guess where all the spam traps live or on those ANYTHING?

[00:04:48] Jay Schwedelson: So okay. Some people out there are like, well, I probably have no spam traps on my list because I never bought data, but let me change everyone's, perspective on that. Maybe you have salespeople. They're just going out there and grabbing some data from who knows where, putting into your system. You don't even know they're doing it. They're adding them onto forms. Maybe you have really horrible, competition and people in your life, and they're going on your forms purposely ANYTHING to put garbage into your database. Would you say it is more the norm or the exception for someone to have a spam trap on their file if they're not cleaning it and validating and doing these certain steps?

[00:05:25] Brian Minick: If if your salespeople are commingling the data, I can guarantee you it's pretty much there. Salespeople are the the kind of the biggest offenders in in marketing for email, by the way. So they they cause the most problems. They ingest the most amount of data that comes from god knows where, and they're the the ones that create all the problems, and then it's the marketing team to really have to deal with it, by the way. They just keep, oh, that didn't work. Let's send more email. And they just kind of explode the problem. And so what I've found very interesting is when I work with marketing and they don't know what sales is doing, and then I talk to sales teams, like, do your marketing team know what you're doing over here? And they're always the answer is always no. And it's it mind boggles me. And it's if if anything, if you're listening, you're in sales, please talk to marketing because they're probably scratching their head ANYTHING to figure out what's going on. And vice versa, if you're in marketing, you need to understand what sales is doing, and and is it on your domain and affecting it? So it's really important.

[00:06:19] Jay Schwedelson: So why why does a why do spam traps exist? What does it mean? So you you you email to a spam trap. Uh-oh. Mhmm. And now What’s happens? You go on a blacklist. What does it mean to go on a blacklist? Why do they even exist?

[00:06:34] Brian Minick: So they exist to catch those people that are kind of not following good practices. That is the that is the design. And so there's THIS the secondary kind of, spam trap is called the recycled spam trap. That is generally found on the Yahoos, Gmails, AOLs, What’s. And they're taking those abandoned accounts. So, Jay, I'm sure you have one, an AOL account from, you know, whatever. Let's not date ourselves here. But an AOL account from back in the day, let's call it, that you haven't logged into in probably thirty years or twenty years, whatever it might be, they may have taken that account and flipped it into a spam trap because maybe you were using it THIS, maybe you were submitting it, but now it's not active. You haven't been mailing from it. You don't log into it. You don't click. You don't do anything. And so when they turn it into recycled, what it's doing is catching the people that don't pay attention to good email practices, which is sorry, guys. If someone hasn't opened your email in three years and you're still mailing them, what are you doing? Those can be turned into spam traps. And so that's kind of the concept. They wanna keep senders on their toes and they wanna make sure that content going through the ecosystem is relevant, hitting active people, and that people want it. That's always what it comes down to. And engagement and behavior is really the signals behind that.

[00:07:48] Jay Schwedelson: So alright. Is it now it's no longer, you have a window of time. I'm not gonna email to anybody that hasn't engaged in something in, you know, twelve months, eighteen months, two years, whatever. And I'm doing that because I wanna improve my metrics and this, that, or whatever. Really, you wanna be doing that. You wanna have that window of time because if you let it just go as long as possible, you just always email to everybody in your database, you are rolling the dice that you're gonna be hitting spam traps. Is that fair?

[00:08:18] Brian Minick: Absolutely. So it's not just about that that that quantity side, which is always seems to be the top of mind item for a lot of people in marketing. It's quantity, quantity, quantity. You have to look at recency. Recency has to be a component to some of these things. And especially in consumer email, by the Jay, a lot of people just make these things up and then they banded them. I mean, they're they're sick of the spam. Nope. I'm done. How many personal email accounts do you have, Jay, outside of work? Right? A lot. I have seven. Yeah. And they have a Us, every single one of them. And I'm not scared to leave one behind when I'm like, well, this got out of control. See you. You know, the Apple Apple stuff as well, how they're kind of allowing you to kind of private label each one and and do all THIS, have more control. So that that's really what it's about. And consumers want that. They wanna be able to have a little bit more control of the email that's coming to them. So you have to follow good practices and engagement is one of them. Why would you email them if they haven't done anything with you in a year, two years?

[00:09:16] Jay Schwedelson: Alright. So we now know what a spam trap is. We know that they can appear on any business database. They can appear on any consumer database. And if you it doesn't matter the size of your database either. I know look. You're at Xero Brian. You run the show at Xero Balance. Great service. No offense to you when I say this. There's a lot of services out there that are not as good of zero at XeroBounce, of course, as as you are, about doing all the validation and all that removal of all this stuff. But there happens to be a lot of companies that do it. And the reason I say that is, in order to play the email game right, is it table stakes now that you should, be using a a service like a XeroBounce? If not, XeroBounce, another one. And how often at the bare minimum should you be using a service like this to remove and eliminate spam traps as best you can?

[00:10:10] Brian Minick: Yeah. So on THIS on the spam traps specifically, it's really gonna all depend upon your data sources, where you get that from, and how you kind of acquire it. But if if you are on the sales side or you have sales teams that are affecting you and What’s blending into your data as a marketer, you need to be that needs to be happening every time that data data ingestion process comes in. That's immediate. You wanna catch that stuff. Now if it's just, Jay, I've had an email list and I'm I'm doing all the right things. I'm I'm checking all the right boxes. Right? And I'm conscious of all this. If you're sending to businesses, I would be checking every six months. It Jay be to a year. Now if we're only talking about spam traps, there's so many other issues. That's a different topic. Spam traps Us, they're not exactly popping up here on on business domains kind of all the time on recycling in a sense. Now the consumer emails, those are turning and turning into recycled spam traps quite often. I would do no less than six months there as well because of that recency factor. There's a trigger. I believe that trigger with Google is two years. They've made those emails. I don't know if you have any of those abandoned accounts, Jay, but I've gotten them. And they're like, Jay. Because you put your recovery email in there. So they send to the recovery. Hey. You haven't logged in. We're gonna deactivate this account. Once that deactivation period happens, they have two choices. Release it out into the public, make it available for someone to acquire again, or create the trap. And so what do they do with it? Of course, no one's gonna know here in the front of the house. But, back of the house, they're definitely paying attention to this stuff.

[00:11:40] Jay Schwedelson: Alright. So if I'm listening to this thing, what I got out of that is if I don't have a window of time that I stop saying to people, THIS bare minimum's gotta be two years. I mean, probably should be one year. But if it's longer than twenty four months, you're playing with fire Yeah. Business and consumer, and you should be using some sort of a service, every six months to really make sure not just for spam traps. That's only one of many things you should be removing, but, be looking for that. And, that way oh, the other big one THIS, let's say you're considering switching platforms. You're moving from one CRM or one ESP, one email sending platform to another. Is it a good idea when you are pulling your data out of one system and then putting it into another THIS at that moment in time, is that a good idea to run it through a Us, a validation service to give yourself the best possible chance to start out of the gate strong?

[00:12:33] Brian Minick: Yeah. That is the critical time to do it because think about this and and ask you'd have to ask yourself if you haven't done this for yourself already. Why am I moving ESPs? Generally speaking, it's platform or sorry, you know, features or it's gonna be results. Right? There's really not great re price. Sure. Could might be another one. But but features and and results and results are also dictated by your list and dictated by your behaviors. And so if you're looking to now go, alright. I'm on ESP a. I'm going to ESP b, and you want a different result, you also should clean that data up and make sure you start fresh because you're getting a new IP address, by the way, which could be good or bad. Hopefully, good. If you know your research, you go dig into that one, see what's going on there. But that's the time where you have the opportunity to kinda hit a little bit of a reset button and make sure you're starting out out of the gate properly. Also, that's when the ESPs are really paying attention to you to determine what type of sender you are and what they wanna do with you. So, there's a lot of people behind the scenes on these big platforms, by the way, big or small. The smaller ones sometimes carry even more. They have switches, and do not let anyone fool you. They will pull that switch on you. And what that switch means is that, is this a great sender? Are they gonna help my whole company? Yes. Put them into a category of an IP address or sending infrastructure that's powerful, that's strong, that creates good signals, and it's helping the whole company, by the way. So this is why they would do it. And then, you know, inversely, is this a sender that causes lots of problems on my infrastructure? They get a lot of spam complaints. They hit spam traps. I have to deal with these ISPs. That's the switch they'll pull down on you, and they'll put you into a lower quality pool of infrastructure. And by the way, you have no clue this is all happening. It's happening, though. Just be aware of this. And they're judging you because they they don't wanna turn your money away. Some cases, they will, and they'll kick you off if it's that bad. But they also if you're kinda bad, you're not great. They'll put you into that lower tier because they don't wanna lose the revenue, but they also kinda don't care about your results anymore. They kinda give up on you and they say, WEEK, let's put them with everyone else like this. It's really important. You don't wanna fall into that kinda bottom bucket, and every ESP is gonna do this.

[00:14:52] Jay Schwedelson: That's amazing. That's super valuable. And I I think people are sleeping on all of this, and they're just hoping for the best. So they think they put the word free in the subject line, and that's all of their problems. I mean, it's ridiculous. Alright. So before we wrap up here, now everybody's gotta hear about why ZeroBounce is awesome, how to follow you, how to get involved with ZeroBounce. Tell everybody everything. Let's hear it.

[00:15:12] Brian Minick: Let's do it. So firstly, please connect with me on LinkedIn, Brian Minnick. I'm the COO of ZeroBounce. Very accessible, and I love the conversations. I get THIS most amazing conversations through LinkedIn. Please message me there. Secondly, if you wanna come to ZeroBounce, check it out. Don't drop your mic on you, and go ahead and you can sign up for a free account. You get free credits. You can test everything out and get a good idea of what the service will do. If you have any of these major tools, integrate with them. Breathe with your systems. So as things are churning, we'll churn them out with you. That's something you definitely wanna do and hook up to sign up forms. Intake forms are huge. We're catching typos like I've never seen before, and the amount of data and traffic that's coming with bad data should be caught, and you can catch it with these users in real time. So let's get that stuff cleaned up for you. We wanna make your email succeed. That is the point.

[00:16:00] Jay Schwedelson: Listen. Everybody should really go and connect with Brian on, LinkedIn. He's one of the few normal people that I've met in the world of email that understands all the technical stuff. He's not like this giant nerd that can't have a conversation. So, like, straight up, you wanna connect with THIS, and I'm a huge fan of ZeroBounce. Brian, thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

[00:16:21] Brian Minick: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

[00:16:22] Jay Schwedelson: Good to see you again. Alright, man. Take it easy. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketer. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you could hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stewart, and me.guruevents.com. Check it out.

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