#154. How Inboxbooster Fixed Y Combinator’s Email Spam Problem | Podcast

Vira: 0:40

Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak, and Today I’m joined by a very special guest, by Nicolas Toper from Inbox Booster. We’ll talk about this platform in a bit, but I’m really happy that we were able to bring Nicolas to this podcast because he knows a thing or two about deliverability. And basically this episode today will be our last episode in the sequence of podcasts about deliverability. And today we will be talking about like how to get out of spam folder, what brings you to spam at the first place. And I think it’s a perfect episode to bring this tool because they’ve been like a big game changer in the world of email deliverability. And from like unraveling the inner working of spam filters to unraveling email authentication and stuff like that, this episode will be packed full with invaluable insights. So Nicolas, we’re very happy to have you here today on our podcast. Say hi, please.

Nicolas: 1:48

Hi. Thank you very much for having me.

Vira: 1:50

Yeah, I’m excited. I’m sure we’re going to have a lot of juicy stuff today. But before we go there, let’s play a little this or that kind of game, like quick blitz Q&A just to get to know you better. Okay?

Nicolas: 2:04

Sure.

Vira: 2:04

Yeah, let’s do this. Okay. Netflix or YouTube?

Nicolas: 2:08

YouTube.

Vira: 2:09

East Coast or West Coast?

Nicolas: 2:12

West Coast.

Vira: 2:13

Online shopping or offline shopping?

Nicolas: 2:17

Online shopping, definitely.

Vira: 2:19

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. Plain text emails or visually designed emails, like very elaborate designs?

Nicolas: 2:28

Oh, that’s a good question. That’s a good question. Let me think about that. Plain text emails.

Vira: 2:34

Interesting. We’ll talk about it in a bit. Okay. Single opt-in or double opt-in?

Nicolas: 2:41

Single opt-in.

Vira: 2:43

Single opt-in. That’s interesting.

Nicolas: 2:45

Yeah, it’s a little bit controversial, I know, but we can talk about it.

Vira: 2:49

Very interesting. Okay, we’ll talk about it today. Okay, Nicolas, so if there was a song playing every time you entered a room, like your personal theme song, what would it be?

Nicolas: 3:01

Ooh, that’s, I’ve never thought about it actually. It’s a good question because I keep changing songs, but I’ll kind of like have a song on repeat for like 2 days straight and then I change. It’s a good question. Huh.

Vira: 3:21

What’s been on your list lately?

Nicolas: 3:24

So that’s exactly what I was thinking. Right now I’m listening to a group called Hot Chip, but I’m listening to them on Spotify on their main, on their just as a playlist. So I don’t even know the name of the song they’re using. Cool.

Vira: 3:37

Okay, good. Well, let’s talk about deliverability then. I mean, I do have like a ton of different deliverability questions to you. But let’s start from the basics. Tell us about your tool, what it does, and how Inbox Booster can help businesses overcome this like big challenge of deliverability and big challenge of their emails being delivered into the spam folder.

Nicolas: 4:04

So, all right, so the problem you’re mentioning is email getting sent to spam. The problem senders have is that they don’t know why it turns spam. So, they just know they’re in spam.

Vira: 4:17

Right.

Nicolas: 4:17

Then, they can research it online. There are lots of people saying, oh, you need to do this or that or something else, or pray to Google God that it will work. So, we’re trying to shed some light into that and explain exactly why you’re in spam and what to do to get out. Because once you exactly know what it is, then you know what to fix. Sometimes, so the way it’s working, and I’ve given you the link that everybody can test for free, You can see the— you can check it. You’re going to send 2 emails from test emails, and we’re going to look at what the spam filter is going to tell you. First, are you in spam or not? And then, we’re going to analyze the answer. We’re going to send a lot of test emails from what you’ve sent us to understand why you’re in spam.

Vira: 5:06

Okay.

Nicolas: 5:06

So, you can be in spam because you can have DNS problems, but we’re actually going to see what Google or Outlook is seeing, and we’re going to tell you Outlook is saying you’re in spam telling you you’re in spam because, for instance, your DMARC is badly set up. And then, we’re also going to analyze your content, and we’re going to say, okay, Outlook has put you— Gmail has put you in spam because of that word, or— but that’s not kind of a set of rules. We’re really going to query the spammers. We’re going to send an email without the specific word to make sure that it just checks if you’re back in inbox, or it’s because of your domain reputation, or— and we’re able to really pinpoint the problem. Then we’re giving you a guide to fix it. For instance, if it’s a word, then we’re going to give you, to tell you those words are putting you in spam.

Vira: 5:51

Interesting. Yeah. And you mentioned this link, you guys, we will share this link in the description box. So just like scroll down. I think it’s inboxbooster.com/backtoinbox, but we’ll, we’ll link it in the description box. So again, basically all you need to do to check why your emails are ended up in spam folder is to, again, send the preview email from your ESP, from your email marketing platform to the emails that are linked on that page, right?

Nicolas: 6:27

Correct. And also we’re telling you if you’re in promotion. And same reason, you can analyze the reason why you’re in promotion.

Vira: 6:34

Okay. So basically you will cover not just folder, but promotion as well, because in the industry, there is this like entire talk about whether or not it’s a bad thing to be in promotion? Because I mean, a lot of people saying that promotion is not a big deal. It’s like it’s still being delivered to your inbox. Spam is what the issue is. But me as a business owner, I definitely want my emails to be like on top of their main folder in the inbox. So what’s your take on that?

Nicolas: 7:06

So there’s 2 things. The first one is we tell you why you’re in promotion. And then, you know, if you decide if you want to do something about it or not. For instance, if you’re sending a welcome email or a signup confirmation, you absolutely— or an invoice— you absolutely don’t want to be in promotion. For some emails, it kind of makes sense to be in promotion. Is the user— so my take is it depends. So if you’re sending a certain type of email that, say, for instance, like the user is going to look at it when they’re going to skim through their mailbox, this is a promotion. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. But on the other hand, if you’re sending a specific email and you absolutely want the user to read it, it’s— yeah, you don’t want to impromptu. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword in the sense that sending an email that’s in primary inbox, that’s email marketing, will annoy users. So you need to be careful into what you’re sending. We actually fixed an email impromptu for Y Combinator. Their emails were in spam.

Vira: 8:01

Interesting.

Nicolas: 8:02

Their emails were in spam impromptu, and there is And we moved it back to the inbox and to primary inbox and they had actual reasons to be in promotions and they actually increased their click-through by 35% on Gmail by moving back to primary inbox and it’s a newsletter. So now if you’re selling travel, then you don’t necessarily need to be— it’s not necessarily a big deal to be in promotion. It really depends, but you need to experiment. You’ll have Your mileage may vary. And there is another thing that’s important is spam filters, especially on Google, they have 2 layers. They have a global layer, like everybody, for instance, to end spam, everybody’s going to be— all of your emails are going to be in spam. There is a second layer, which is more individual layer. So some users will see your email in spam, some users will see them in promotion, some users will see in primary inbox. It depends on the actually specific user.

Vira: 9:02

I see.

Nicolas: 9:03

So say that I put all my newsletters in spam, Gmail will move all the future newsletters I’m going to receive in spam. Now, that being said, what we know is when you’re in promotion, it’s usually a combination of promotion plus spam. When you’re in inbox, it’s a combination of inbox plus promotion. So depending on what you’re sending, you probably want to be in inbox because nobody’s really— but you probably need to review what you’re sending. But again, Another example is say you’re sending travel offers, like last-minute travel offers. This is typically something that’s good for promotion because when the recipient will check their promotion folder, that’s when they’re actually going to be receptive to buying this kind of product. Now, if you have a last-minute offer, buy now or it’s going to disappear, if you’re in promotion, they’re never going to read it unless too late.

Vira: 9:59

Wow. That’s interesting.

Nicolas: 10:01

I actually had this problem yesterday because I like to buy books and there was an offer from an online shop that was selling books, but they had only 600 of them and they were signed books that I wanted to buy. They were in my confirmation folder. I checked them when I had time and all of them were gone. So I was actually pretty upset that this email wasn’t confirmed.

Vira: 10:25

Interesting. Well, now you can approach them and prospect them with an offer to fix that issue.

Nicolas: 10:32

Yeah.

Vira: 10:32

That’s interesting that you mentioned that, say, if email from a specific brand is ending up in a promotion folder or a spam folder for me, it doesn’t mean that this exact email will end up in the spam folder or promotion folder for, say, you or for any other user. I didn’t realize that there are sort of like 2 layers, just like you said, the 2 layers of that sort of like structure. But what are some factors that basically make different platforms decide where to put this email, in what folder, in inbox, promo, or spam folder? What are some common factors?

Nicolas: 11:45

Before I go there, actually, I can tell you an anecdote from one of our clients. They were sending, they had transactional emails and they had newsletter emails. And they were okay for their newsletter email to be in promotion, but not okay for their transactional email to be in promotion. So what we did is we just separated the domain. So we used a subdomain for transactional and another one for their marketing email. And that actually allowed the spam filter to learn and to figure out something. And what happened is the newsletters were in promotion and the new transactional emails were actually in inbox.

Vira: 12:20

Interesting.

Nicolas: 12:21

Primary inbox. So what they did, and that answers your previous question and the new one, is They separated the domain so the spam filter could learn and send the actual content that they deemed in inbox, which actually is what they wanted. So that’s what you want to do is you need to have a strategy around that. And one of your strategies is you want to be in inbox for everything, which can work or not. It depends what you’re sending. But in this case, you’ll have to rewrite your copy. And now to decide what’s in— so the idea of spam filters are quite simple. So I’ll start explaining the key concept, and then I’ll dig into the specifics of this promotion versus spam versus inbox. The idea is they’re trying to— so spammers have 2 problems. The first one is they need to remove all security-risky emails. Okay, so phishing, Viagra, credit fraud, all those type of emails. The second thing is they’re trying to maximize— they want to maximize pay-to-view. So, they want you as— they want the recipient to actually engage with the email and spend as much time as possible on Gmail or on Outlook. So, they’re going to remove everything that’s not wanted. So, they’re trying to guess. So, the way they do to guess, the way they guess if somebody, if an email is wanted or not, they’re going to see how people engage with it, how people use it. And now they can, using AI, they can actually analyze the content of the email to figure out the common theme and so on. But the key idea is if, say, you send an email to a new email, a new domain to 100 people, say that 5 of them unsubscribe and 2 of them mark your email as spam, they know that it’s unlikely an unwanted email. So the rest, everything else will go to spam.

Vira: 14:07

Mm-hmm.

Nicolas: 14:08

Now say that everybody’s actually interacting with your email, answering back to you saying, oh, that’s awesome, I want more of that, then they will assume it’s a wanted email. So that’s roughly how that works. So there are a lot of specificities around that and we can go through that. But the core idea is you send email who are wanted. And the problem marketers have, and that’s why you need deliverability people, is this is at odds. There is a conflict of interest between marketers and deliverability people.

Vira: 14:38

Mm-hmm.

Nicolas: 14:38

Deliverability people and Trendfilter wants to send email that are actually— they won’t send any email. That’s why there is no problem. And marketers would like to send an email to everybody. Right. So how do you kind of reconcile? How do you balance this? And this balance is really personal to each company. It’s very business specific. And it depends on what you’re sending. It depends on how often and whom you’re sending to.

Vira: 15:03

Yeah.

Nicolas: 15:03

And you need to experiment to figure it out.

Vira: 15:05

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And honestly, I think this is like one of the biggest mistakes that I’m seeing anyways, when clients first come to us and start working with us is that they try to like bombard their entire entire list with a message and then their metrics go down, their engagement go down, their unsubscribe rates skyrocket, their bounce rate is higher than average, which sends basically like a bad signal to that platform. That’s for sure. So that’s definitely like a bad practice to bombard everyone with the same message because you want to essentially deliver that very message that your customer wants to read from you, right? So they engage with it. So they engage with it. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicolas: 15:48

And the problem— so, there’s 2 problems. And now, to the specific factors, if you’re doing that and you actually do nothing, this will somewhat work. It might not scale, but it will work. If you’re just sending email, people want. And the more you’re going to steer away from that, the harder it will be. And there is a point where you need to be careful and you need to deploy the correct DNS setup and all that, but it will still work. And you talked about single opt-in versus double opt-in. And this is another example. If you’re sending email to people who want to receive them, in a way, spam filters will be fine. But you need to predict that this person is going to want to receive it. Or even if you don’t have the opt-in, if you’re sending correct emails, it might It will work, but the problem is it’s very hard to do it. And because the thresholds of bad emails are set very low, you actually— it’s almost impossible to do that. But if you’re able to do it, then it would be fine. So that’s what salespeople are trying to do with what they call cold outreach. And if they know who they’re selling to, usually it’s working. So it’s really about sending the right email to people who care. That’s really about it.

Vira: 17:06

So basically, so basically what you’re saying, if for example, I have like an e-commerce business and I have this like welcome sequence and it’s a new business and I want to send this welcome message to whoever opt-ins into the list through like a pop-up form. So you say that the better way to do it would be through a single opt-in because people kind of expect message from me, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Nicolas: 17:34

If they do, and it’s actually, if you’re selling things, And it’s actually, it did more than, if they signed up, yeah, you can sign up to your e-commerce website. It means they actually, they’re okay to receive email from you. Otherwise they wouldn’t have given you their email address.

Vira: 17:48

Hmm, interesting, interesting.

Nicolas: 17:50

So now if you send them an email per day, they’re not going to like it very much. But if you’re careful and you, depending what you’re selling, again, if you’re selling like a last-minute offer, they will want that. If you’re selling something, I don’t know, like a surfboard or something like that, a newsletter once per month, and welcome email is acceptable, but it depends also on, it’s really who you’re selling to. Like for instance, developers, they hate receiving emails. If you prospect them, they’re not going to be very happy. But if you talk to marketers, they like being sold to, so they like receiving those kind of emails. So it really depends, it’s very, very specific.

Vira: 18:30

I see, I see.

Nicolas: 18:31

So, and you need to balance it out. Now, this part is actually hard and you need to, and as a business owner, you know better than me who you need to cook who your customers are. So, you know what you can do or not. I understand that much better than you. What we do is we’re going to tell you if you’re in spam, which is not that easy to figure out actually. And 2, I’m going to go back on that. And 2, we’re going to tell you why. And for instance, we’re going to tell you you’re in spam because the people you’re emailing to don’t like your email. That’s kind of what we call domain reputation. We’re going to tell you that. Or you’re in spam Because the email you’re sending actually has words that other people had used to spam. So you need to change them, remove those words, and you will not be in spam. And the problem is it’s very hard as a business owner when you’re in spam, it’s very hard to figure out why. And that’s kind of what we’re telling you. And once you know that, then you can fix it.

Vira: 19:27

Right. Yeah. This, when email content is spam-like, it’s a very popular reason why emails are actually ending up in that promo or spam folder. So maybe you were using spammy keywords in your copy or in your subject lines or preview text, or maybe some of the language have been classified as too manipulative or too pushy or maybe too salesy. So that unfortunately happens as well. What other thing that people don’t realize that it’s really affecting their deliverability, that’s just something I’ve noticed, is that sometimes brands they just forget to include that unsubscribe link. And they basically violate spam laws. And that missing unsubscribe link, that’s an issue that I’ve been seeing in the past. Now it’s less common, but in the past I saw it a lot. And yeah, I think it’s when you don’t have it, I think you’re violating spam laws and it might mark you as a So potentially harmful.

Nicolas: 20:37

So that’s correct. And the way it’s working is because when you’re going to be— when you don’t have a subscription link, your metrics that the ISPs are tracking, so like Gmail and Outlook, are going to be through the roof. So for bad emails, because people will mark your email more as spam while you give them a way to opt out. Like basically people are usually okay to receive email. They’re just not okay to be harassed by mail, right? Depending on the market. So if you’re respectful of your customer’s time, usually it’s fine. And being respectful is providing them a way to opt out so they don’t have to hear too much of your email. And they can, if they don’t want to, they have a way to not receive your email. So for instance, sometimes people actually unfollow our emails a lot. So you have to say, hey, I have this product to sell you if you’re doing cold outreach. And then you’re going to have 2 follow-ups. And the thing is, if they’re not interested, they’re actually going to be pissed off, sorry for the word, about the follow-ups. So you need to be mindful here. And if you know what you’re doing, then, but if you’re careful, then it’s fine. The problem this ecosystem has, and that’s really what our product is trying to fix, is if you’re in spam, you have no way to get out of spam right now, or it’s very complicated and you need to hire consultants, you need to fix it. And it’s very— so if you’re a big company, you actually have money to do that. But if you’re a small business owner, you don’t have money to do that. And you also want to do it yourself. That’s what we’re trying to provide. That’s what we’re providing. We’re giving you a way to do it for yourself and a way to understand also. So you kind of have kind of in video game and not your life, so you can try again and figure out the right balance. Because right now people are very careful about not upsetting this balance, which is working. And that’s what we’re fixing. So we’re telling you, okay, this is fixable, this is how you do it. But now you need to be respectful. So if you do that, for instance, your reputation Has taken the hit because you’ve sent emails to people who don’t want to receive them, for instance, without— by removing the subscription link.

Vira: 22:39

I see.

Nicolas: 22:39

We’re gonna tell you how to get back to inbox, which is easy, but you can do it just a couple of times until you’re really blocked.

Vira: 23:34

How does Inbox Booster identify those like elements in email that trigger the spam filter? And how do you determine like the root cause of the problem?

Nicolas: 23:44

So the way we do it is we’ve built a system to send— so earlier today I said it’s actually not that easy to know if you’re in spam The problem of not being in spam because of this 2-layer system, like this individual and this global system, which just means that if you’re using test email, after a couple of times, the spam filter will understand that you want to receive those emails because you’re actually engaging with them. And so you need to rotate those test addresses often. So you need to change them. And this is what we’re doing for you automatically. And because we track that, we’re able to provide it with only 2 test addresses So because of that, actually, it’s fairly simple to do, and it’s very cheap for us to provide, so we can give it away, which is what we’re doing. And the second thing is now, once we have the testing capability, then we can actually send a lot of test emails to query the spam filter to really understand why you’re in spam. So for instance, to test the reputation, what we’re doing is we’re using our sending domain, and we’re sending your email with our DKIM, our sending infrastructure, and we’re checking if you’re in spam. That’s really interesting. If you’re not in spam, then we assume that it’s a domain reputation problem. And so, we’ve built all those kind of tooling to do it, which is something you can do, consultants will do, but basically, we’re giving it away and we ask you to pay at the end whatever you want if you feel that it was useful for you. So, everybody can do it and consultants still can work because really what we’re doing is we’re automating kind of the tedious part of the work and we’re giving it— we’re giving access to everybody, but we’re not telling you because we don’t know, right? I want to tell you why you’re— it’s like what type of email was the wrong one you sent. We have to look into it or a consultant can do it, but we can tell you, yeah, you sent the wrong email, so here is what you need to get out. So, and here is how you need to do the case of content. It’s very different. So it’s the same system. So we’re going to send a lot of test emails to figure it out. But in a lot of cases, it actually has nothing to do with you. Like, for instance, we had customers that were sending payment notifications, like for real, because they were in ERP.

Vira: 26:01

Like transactional emails?

Nicolas: 26:04

Yes, yes. But they were like, hey, your customer wants to pay you. Please provide us with your banking information. So, and they were in spam. They were supposed to be legit. And the reason it was in spam is because they had a specific character in the URL that was creating a problem. And I still don’t know why, but we were able to figure it out. The tool was telling me, yeah, you just need to change that character and you’ll be back to inbox.

Vira: 26:29

That’s crazy. And I assumed honestly that all of the transactional emails like always go to like inbox. I mean, that was just like my assumption that they go into the main folder and then the promotional goes into promotion and And then if you have like email deliverability issues, they go into spam. But transactional emails, I didn’t realize they can go into like promo or spam as well. That’s super interesting.

Nicolas: 26:53

No, no, you have this problem is like kind of widespread. And the second thing is we even have personal emails going to spam because right now, even if you use Gmail, you can actually send a small newsletter with Gmail. So you can send a small newsletter to 100 people and I can tell you a story. So we have a system where you add a pixel that tells you if you’re in promo promotion or spam, and you can add it and it will track for you. And I use it for our users, and I use the Gmail system to send a newsletter to our users. And that actually— and I looked at my— and the new tracker was like, be careful, you’re in promotion. I was like, it’s not possible. I just use Gmail tool. And I was actually in promotion because when you added— so I’ve run it through Inbox Booster. So like, it’s kind of bad. It’s my job to fix those kind of problems. And Inbox Booster told me the unsubscribe link that Google added, we’re sending you to Huh, that’s very interesting. So even Google had that problem at that time. So it’s very widespread and it’s very common. And the reason is nobody really knows. I mean, so you cannot have the basics and you need a little bit better. It’s kind of, sorry, it’s a problem that’s going to get worse because of all those new AI tools. Everybody will have that comment spam filter, will have to rely on systems. But the truth is, it’s the job of the sender to make sure that your email is ending up in the right folder. So, it’s your job. And even as a person, like as a normal, as a regular person, or a business person, you’ll have that problem. Even if you’re a restaurant sending a newsletter, you’ll have that problem. So, it starts to be very widespread.

Vira: 28:33

And you mentioned briefly AI technology, like RISE, of AI technology popularity. So with the increased use of AI and like machine learning and spam filtering, do you think this technology will affect the industry? Are there any like emerging trends or developments that business owners or email marketers should be aware of when it comes to deliverability?

Nicolas: 28:59

So the problem, so right, as you’ve probably seen, there has been a lot of changes in the spam filters in the last few months with Gmail. They’ve made things very hard for everybody. It’s because of the AI tools, because right now they were relying on the domains and they were relying on key elements of the content to detect if an email was in spam or has to be delivered in spam or promotion. And because of AI, they know that it will rotate. So they’re trying to use other type of metrics, but right now they’re kind of shutting down the domain. Like when you have a new domain, it’s hard to get to the inbox initially because of that. So that’s the first. So it’s going to be harder. That’s kind of what that means. It’s going to be harder and you’ll need to be more careful on what you’re sending. That’s on the kind of the bad side. The good side is it starts to be very, very easy to generate very personalized offers and that’s out of deliverability but more in the content and the copywriting side. And we know that those are working because you can start to have tools that say, hey, if they bought that, you know, they will buy this product. So you should probably send them an email automatically. To do that and you’re able to be configuring it out and some tools are going to merge generating automatically the email. And in fact, I know a couple of companies doing that and they’ve been able to raise revenue of, but this is working for big brands. They were able to raise revenue by like 10 to 30% of those email marketing.

Vira: 30:21

Interesting. Interesting. Can you share that case study of how you guys were able to help say some of your customers to like improve their deliverability? I particularly like the Y Combinator one, because I think this is like one of your biggest clients. I’m not sure, but I’ve just like read this case study online and I thought it was very interesting. So can you tell us more about like how you guys helped them to get out of spam folder?

Nicolas: 30:51

So in the case of Y Combinator, they’re actually not our biggest customer because just before I answer, a lot of our customers just come in and they Because we fixed their problem and they completed us afterwards. But what we did is, so in email tooling, you have this deliverability, you have this kind of onions layers, you have different layers of problems that you need to address. You first address the first problem and then usually a second problem will surface and maybe a third and a fourth. What you do is you run your emails through a tool, it will tell you the first problem, then you do it another time and another time until it’s kind of working.

Vira: 31:28

Until it’s resolved. Yeah.

Nicolas: 31:29

So in the case of Y Combinator, the first problem was they were in promotion because they had imported— so it was a content problem and our tools flagged some key elements on the email. And actually, because it was Y Combinator, I talked to them a little bit and it’s because they imported the base template from Mailchimp and they were using Mailchimp and they built the base template. Some elements were sending their email to promotion because Google understood that everybody using that base template were sending Interesting. So they removed it and it was working. And then after that, they went back to promotion. And this time it was because of the domain reputation issue. And the problem of— and I talked to them a little bit and what happened is they were— it’s because they were sending to people who are not engaging. So they just needed to prune their database from the non-engaged users. And now it’s been boxed and there is no more problem.

Vira: 32:30

The template thing is fascinating to me though, because I mean, that’s pretty much the first thing you do when you start sending emails. Very often you as a new business just like go to platforms like Klaviyo or Mailchimp or something, you like get their template and like redo it. Have you seen it across the industry? Is that like a popular, like a common mistake people are doing?

Nicolas: 32:54

Yes, if you start basically, if you start to have high volume, you need to redo your template. Yes, usually. But it depends. Like, again, there is no one set rule because the spam filter, even if you’re using the base template, might send it to inbox. What’s really happening is at high volume, let’s say you’re sending more than like 10K per day, or let’s say 100K per month, they start to be a lot more stringent. So, the spammers are stricter with you. So, once you start, we’ve had customers who are sending like a million emails per day, here you have to be careful with the spammers are going to be less lenient with you. That’s kind of what you need. So, the more you send, the more or less room for maneuver, leeway you have. That’s kind of the thing to kind of keep in mind. And so if you want to avoid that, so in the case of vacuum cleaners, they’re a big brand and such, we don’t really have a lot of problems. They were in promotion. They would have done that with some, with a, let’s say, a less known brand, it’d probably be a lot more instant.

Vira: 33:58

I see.

Nicolas: 33:59

But they would have addressed it faster. So, but yeah, a lot of the time it’s because a lot of the content problem from what I’ve seen has nothing to do with the actual users or our customers. It really has to do with the sounder, has to do with somebody else who they just reuse the word of somebody else. And for whatever reason, we don’t know. We just know that if you remove it, there is bugs in the statement.

Vira: 34:22

Interesting. Interesting. And I like that your tool can pinpoint the little issues as well that can be fixed. So Nicolas, if you would have to summarize everything that we talked about, what are some of the best practices that business should follow to have good deliverability rates or to improve their deliverability rates?

Nicolas: 34:44

So the idea is there is no one-size-fits-all. And what you want to do actually is test your email. So, you know, you know, you check your open rate and all that. But the easiest is you use Inbox Booster. I’m biased, of course, but you use Inbox Booster before you send an email or once per week and you use the test tool and it will tell you if you have problems. And if you think you have problems and then you can know what to do about it, but you want to control your inbox placement. And this is important and it should be part of what you can use your own test addresses if you want, but you need to be mindful that at some point they will stop working. So you need to create new ones or you can use Inbox Booster to do that. Other tools we’ve seen, they don’t rotate enough the test addresses. So it’s kind of the same problem, like they’re going to work and at some point they’ll stop working. On our test, we’re actually very careful about that. It is something we actually patented. But so, but the idea is you want to test everything You want to send a test email maybe for every newsletter, but just for deliverability purposes, not just for the rendering, just for deliverability purposes to make sure that it’s actually working. You want to do that at the very least once per month. And if you’re serious about emails, we have customers that test it every day.

Vira: 36:04

Interesting.

Nicolas: 36:04

We even have customers that are actually using our hidden API to test the emails getting out of their platform. To make sure that they’re not in spam.

Vira: 36:15

Interesting. Yeah. But because I like, when I, when that first happened to me, when I sent myself like a preview and it ended up in spam, I was very surprised because I thought that this is like literally a preview that is getting delivered directly to your inbox, but turned out that, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think like Google and stuff, they don’t necessarily understand if it’s a preview or if it’s an actual email, right? So it just places the email wherever it would place it if it was a real email. Is that correct?

Nicolas: 36:47

Because, yes, the best thing to say is it’s a new email for you. But if you send like 10 or 20 emails to you, the spam filter, like Google, will learn if you want to receive all of your email in inbox or even all of your email from your domain. And in your case, it could have been in spam because it was the same domain you were sending to. Because you could actually use the— so there are a lot of reasons. And it’s not because you are in spam that everybody else’s emails are in spam and conversely, it’s not because your email is sent to a mailbox that everybody else will. So you really need to test. There is not a lot of options around that. And you need to test all of— not all of your emails because it’s going to be too complex, but you really need to kind of do that regularly and make sure that it’s working.

Vira: 37:34

Awesome.

Nicolas: 37:34

And the problem is when you start to be spam, it’s your engaged users, they will still receive your email. So you will not know until it’s really too late that you have a problem. It’s really hard to kind of— if there is one takeaway, it’s test your email on a regular frequency or before you’re sending a newsletter and after. Just do it once per week or once per month just to make sure that And you’ll have surprises.

Vira: 38:05

Yeah. Yeah. Like for us, for my clients, it’s like a standard practice to send yourself a preview before you send it to the list. And I think it’s a good practice for all of you guys who are listening to do.

Nicolas: 38:16

But that’s not enough.

Vira: 38:18

That’s not enough.

Nicolas: 38:19

You need to really send it to, again, you can use Inbox Zero and this is free. So you can do it for free. But because you need to send it to ideally a new account each time, that’s kind of where you would want to. That’s how, you know, if you send it, if you send your preview just to yourself, spam filter will know and they will not put yourself, but they will know, they will know you’re a special case.

Vira: 38:40

Right.

Nicolas: 38:41

Because you’re receiving a lot of email and you actually like them very much.

Vira: 38:44

Yeah. Okay. It can get suspicious. I agree. Cool. Nicolas, if people want to learn more about what you guys do or if they want to test out your tool, where should they go?

Nicolas: 38:57

So they should go to inboxbooster.com and we have for a And we have this free test, free trial for all of your listeners. So when they go to inboxbooster.com/getbacktoprimaryinbox, I think you’re going to put the link out, and so they can test and they can get a resolution for free if you’re in time.

Vira: 39:20

Perfect. We will share this link in the description box. I’m going to test it out for my brand, that’s for sure. I’m working on creating emails for the new brand that I’m launching soon. And I just want to fix the problem before it happens basically on a big scale. So definitely go guys to that description box, check out that email. We will also share a few more Flowium resources that we’ve created specifically for deliverability reasons. So that might be interesting for you to check out as well. It was so much fun to have you today on this podcast. Honestly, I learned like a lot of new stuff. So thank you so much for coming. It was really fun to have you.

Nicolas: 40:03

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Vira: 40:05

Thank you. Okay. Okay, guys, thank you. And we’ll hope to have you back here next Tuesday. Take care. Bye, everyone.