#80. 5 Steps to Get Out of the Spam Folder | Podcast

Vira: 0:16

Today we will be talking about five steps to get out of the spam folder. And even if your emails are not in the spam folder, in this episode we share a lot of really good insights on how to improve your deliverability.

Alissa: 0:53

Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Email einstein. Hope your 2022 is going awesome. I’ve heard some crazy stories that 2022 has been getting off to a crazy foot, but here we are. We’re making it. We’re making it through the year. We are so Vira and Alissa here. We’re two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are super passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium, full service e commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we’re all about here at Flowium. And we’ve got a goodie for you today. Vira, take us.

Vira: 1:43

The oldie but goodie.

Alissa: 1:45

Oldie but goody.

Vira: 1:46

Today we will be talking about five steps to get out of the spam folder. And this topic is especially it’s perfect for January because I know that some of the brands probably got into the spam folder over the holidays. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays. Hopefully it’s not your brands, but just listen it and maybe you’ll be able to use this information in the future. And even if your emails are not in the spam folder, in this episode we share a lot of really good insights on how to improve your deliverability. So five steps to get out of Spam Folder let’s do this. I found this really fun fact about email marketing. Surprise, surprise. Alissa, do you actually know why we call spam spam. Like the spam folder, why we call it.

Alissa: 2:50

I know what spam is like. Not in email marketing terms like this and I apologize if anyone actually likes spam, but it’s like a weird, like it looks like ham in a can and it’s. Yeah, no case.

Vira: 3:03

It’s like a canned. Canned meat. Yeah, yeah. Like, honestly I didn’t even know what spam like before I came to the states. Like in Europe we don’t have this product. So I thought that the spam was spam, like email marketing spam or SMS spam or whatever. But actually you’re partially right. It’s somehow connected to the spam meat and like the spam folder, they are connected. There are at least like two stories that explain how spam becomes spam and spam meat become actually synonymous with like a junk email generators. So the first story relies on the probably like untrue but widely popular assumption that spam uses some sort of substitute for meat rather than like real deal meat. Right. And fake meat, fake messages equals spam. So this is like an analogy they have. So this is a fake meat. We call it spam and this are the fake messages. We call them spam too. So that’s like one of the theories and I actually really liked it because I’m not a big meat eater, especially the spam one. But there’s like another theory that actually claims that the name comes from a 1970s show, like a TV show or something like. Or I think it was even like a circus show. And there was the sketch where the group of customers, they came to the spam themed restaurant and everything there was made of spam or made spam. And eventually, yeah, it sounds disgusting. And eventually in that sketch like all of the conversation were about spam and yeah, all of the conversation, just as unfiltered spam could drown out all of the legitimate email in your inbox.

Alissa: 4:46

Oh, okay, that makes sense.

Vira: 4:48

I don’t know, that’s like one of the theories. But I was like super curious so I googled like why spam called spam. Anyways guys, today you’ll hear that word a lot. And today we’ll be talking about five steps to get out of the spam fold there. Five true and tested action items that you can do today. But before we go there, I know that Alissa has a pretty cool pro tip of the week, Alissa.

Alissa: 5:11

I do, I do. So this is kind of like a little hack. Not even a hack, but just a little tip or trick that you can implement like almost right away in terms of getting out of the spam folder. Well, or making sure that you don’t ever go into the spam folder. So kind of more of a proactive tip. So the tip is to encourage your customers to reply to your emails. And I’m giving kudos to angel, our Flowium technology director, again for helping me figure out this pro tip. Because I actually had a client ask about this and I was like, hmm, not sure. And so I checked in with him and he was like, yes, this is actually a really good strategy. However, if you are a business owner, you want to make sure that there is a very specific business goal in mind. Because if you send out an email encouraging your customers to reply to your emails and then you get 250 emails in your inbox and you don’t have the bandwidth to go through those emails, it will help with your deliverability, but it will really, really slam your team. Not spam, slam, slam your team, make them super busy. And now they have to reply to all these customer emails, which, I mean, it’s not a horrible problem to have, but again, if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it, then don’t do it. But encouraging your customers to reply to your emails, it helps these platforms like Gmail, Outlook, even Apple Mail understand that you’re not spam because customers are actually replying directly to your emails. And how often does a person actually reply to a spam email? So when you get customer responses, it helps you with your deliverability and helps make sure that you stay out of the spam folder. So that’s something that you can implement today just to make sure that tomorrow you’re not finding yourself in the spam folder. So that’s your pro tip of the week.

Vira: 6:55

Right, and do not send those emails from those like email addresses. Do not respond at something.com oh, gosh, I’ve seen it a lot of times, like make it possible for your customers to respond to your emails. That’s a huge one. You will got a, you will get a lot of brownie points for that. That’s for sure.

Alissa: 7:12

For sure. And the most frustrating thing as a customer is I actually made a purchase, an e-commerce purchase last week with the brand and they sent me an email confirming, like saying thanks for buying, blah, blah, blah. And I wanted to reply to the email because I had an issue with the email. And obviously because I’m an email marketing nerd, I was like, hey, I want to tell you about this issue. I couldn’t reply to the email because it said do not reply. And then when I went on their website there was zero way for me to contact these people other than like through a chat bot which I was so annoyed about.

Vira: 7:39

Don’t. Don’t love them.

Alissa: 7:41

Yeah, no, don’t love it. So definitely make sure that people can actually reply to your emails. That’s really, really important.

Vira: 7:47

That’s true, that’s true. And you can easily change the from email in Klaviyo or whatever platform you’re using. So you can send it to your assistant or to someone who’s like taking care of those responses. Just like make sure that they are easy to reply to. That’s a big one actually. Thanks for doing this Pro tip of the week. I feel it’s perfectly connects with the topic of, of the episode today. And today we’ll be talking a lot about your sender’s reputation and like spam folder and stuff like that. So for those of you who are new to email marketing, there is such thing that is called senders reputation. So basically this is your like rating or this is your points and the most major email clients like Gmail or Yahoo or whatever you’re using, they actually track how recipients interact with your emails from your domain. Want to know that this guy is not a spam, that this guy or this girl, they are legit, their email is legit. So they are specifically look at things like how many emails are marked as spam or how many emails bounce, how many emails are opened, what are your click through rates and stuff like that. So all these factors combined, they basically influence your sender’s reputation and this major email clients, they use this information to determine whether your emails have to be placed in the in your customer’s private primary inbox or spam folder. But worst case scenario you are already in the spam folder. What would be your five must do steps? So step number one would be to take another look at your opt in process. This would be step numero uno. That’s something that we always start with. Even like before we start doing anything with email marketing we’re just like try to set and see where the emails, where are those people coming from? You want to ensure that you are keeping track of how people opt in into your list and who are these people? If the process of opt in is very clear and very like easy and positive experience for your recipient, you will probably have more engaged contacts subscribing to your list. But unfortunately we’ve seen it a lot of times it can work the other Way around too. It’s very tempting to grow your list by just seeing like 100,000 potential customers.

Alissa: 10:28

Oh my gosh, these purchase lists, I get bad news.

Vira: 10:31

100 bucks. I know, I know, right? Email marketer nightmare. And if you are still considering this idea, don’t, don’t. Because the price you will pay. Not for the list, the list is really cheap, but the price you will eventually pay for this would be huge. Purchase lists, they are like taking bumps, you know, like taking time bombs. Like sooner or later they will destroy your email marketing. They will destroy your sender’s reputation. You don’t want to mess around with purchased lists. Yeah, I mean providers will see that you are breaking the rules by sending to those like people who didn’t subscribe to receive your email. So you will be in big, big trouble. But actually the good way to get high quality leads would be to turn on double opt in. And I know we discussed it a lot of times in our previous podcast before, but if you want to play it safe and you want to get like the top, top quality leads, maybe it is a good idea to temporarily turn on the double opt in. Double opt in is basically when someone subscribes to receive your emails instead of just having one usually have like additional step where they will receive the email to their email to confirm that, yes, I actually want to be subscribed to this list. So this is like the safest, safest way to go. And

Alissa: 11:55

It’s just a lot of steps.

Vira: 11:58

That’s, that’s true, that’s true. Yeah. It will probably affect your conversion rates for that opt in form or for whatever you’re using. But the quality of the leads you’re getting will be so, so worth it. So you have to decide what way you want to go. But if your open rates and click through rates are super low, this is probably like one of the strategies that we, we would recommend you to consider. Obviously not. If you plan to build your list at a rapid rate, this is probably not the best strategy to use. But for the sake of having better leads, this is the way to go. So step number one, take another look at your opt in process and get rid of those fake emails. That would be number one step.

Alissa: 12:39

Yeah, no, totally. And the, the double opt in like you mentioned, Vira, we’ve talked about it a lot, but it is, you have to kind of weigh, weigh the pros and cons of. Because if you’re, if your list needs it, then it’s necessary even though it’s kind of annoying. And for the most part, we actually remove it for a lot of our clients so we can help their list grow exponentially. But when duty calls, duty calls, and you gotta turn it on. So. Right. So step number two is actually to clean your list regularly. And we actually talked about this in episode number 34. We actually created a whole episode on this, and it was called how to clean your list. So if you haven’t listened to it yet, I’ll go through kind of the five sort of ways that we suggested on how to clean your list and kind of briefly talk about each one. So, and these are actually strategies that we implement internally here at Flowium for all our clients, making sure that we’re working with a clean, useful list of subscribers, as opposed to keeping those 500,000 subscribers that maybe you got like 25 years ago when you started the company. That’s not always the most effective way to go about it. Sometimes the really smaller list actually do a lot more work for you than having, oh, I have a million subscribers, but only 10,000 of those subscribers are actually purchasing with you and then also opening your emails. So for number one, it would be to identify your unengaged contacts. And there are a couple of different ways that you can do this. The way that we kind of do this internally here at Flowium is we basically determine the subscribers who have not opened an email in the last 90 days or three months, have not clicked through an email in the last 90 days or three months, they were created in the last 15 days or they were not created in the last 15 days. So anyone who was created in the last 15 days but haven’t fulfilled any of those things, we give them the benefit of the doubt. So if they haven’t been created in the last 15 days, they haven’t opened an email, they haven’t clicked through an email, then at that point, we start to identify them as being unengaged contacts. It’s interesting because a lot of our clients get a little antsy when we say that. But we’re not talking about people who are not customers, because people who are customers and are going to your website and buying. That’s wonderful. But what we’re concerned about is the health of your list in regards to email, not the health of your customer list. So you have to remember that those are two different things. People who are opening emails aren’t necessarily customers, and people who are customers aren’t necessarily opening emails. Both can be true at the same time, but one is not mutually, or one is not, like, dependent on the other. They’re both mutually exclusive terms. So in terms of unengaged contacts, this is a really important thing to be honest about and truthful about who’s actually engaging with your emails and who’s not. Because at the end of the day, your emails are a huge aspect of your revenue. They’re not the only aspect. But you do want to make sure that when you’re sending out emails, you’re doing a good job of sending to people who are actually relevant to your list. So that’s the first part. The next step is to identify hard and soft bounces. Hard bounces are emails that don’t exist or no longer exist. And soft bounces are emails that are either temp, the inboxes are temporarily too full or the person is just sending out an auto response because you actually have their work email. Anything like that. In terms of your hard bounces, those are probably emails that you actually want to get rid of on your list because those emails don’t exist. So there’s no point in sending an email to those people. Your soft bounces. So in Klaviyo, when we create our segments, we actually automatically suppress people who have soft bounced seven times in a row. It’s likely that if someone is like on leave or like on vacation, they’re probably gone for about two weeks. And so if someone is now just not working for that company at all, but they’re soft bouncing continuously, you’re not really reaching that person. So after seven times in a row consecutively, if they’re still soft bouncing, then it’s likely that they’re just not going to be reading your emails. It’s not worthwhile. So that’s number two. Number three is identifying your spam traps. So the way that we kind of identify this internally is we want to kind of find out the origination of these emails, right? So if there’s an email address that the person didn’t take any sort of activity on your website, they haven’t been active on your website, they haven’t viewed any products, they didn’t actually manually opt in either through the homepage pop up or for through the footer on the bottom of your website, if they’re not making purchases is they haven’t started the checkout process, if they haven’t done these things that only a human being would be able to do, not a robot, then it’s likely that they’re a bot of some kind. There’s no way for someone to appear on your email list if they don’t actually do it themselves. Again, unless you have bought the list we mentioned already is not okay. Just randomly putting emails onto your list is not okay. So if people have. If an email has not actually taken any action in terms of your emails or your website, it’s likely that it’s a bot or it’s fake account that you probably shouldn’t have on your list anyway. So we get those off there too. In terms of removing suppressed accounts, that’s the fourth kind of step. Making sure that once you’ve suppressed someone, you have the option of keeping them on your list, but it’s unlikely that they’re really necessary. When you suppress a profile, you actually keep the data inside of Klaviyo, but you can’t actually send emails to those suppressed profiles. So if you need that data, if you want to understand more information, you can keep them. But honestly, you’re not even allowed to manually unsuppress someone in or sorry, you can manually unsuppress people in Klaviyo, but you can’t override a suppression. And honestly, you shouldn’t be manually unsuppressing people anyways. That’s like, really goes against all code of conduct when it comes to email sending. Unless you have a hunch that maybe these people will come back, or you have some kind of strategy in place to try and get people to opt back in, it’s unlikely that you really need these suppressed accounts in your Klaviyo account, for example, or whatever ESP that you’re using. And then the very last step in cleaning your list regularly is giving subscribers the opportunity to choose how often they want to hear from you. And we talked about this in terms of the preference page. So creating some kind of preferences center where people can tell you, like, I want to get this email, I don’t want to get get that email. I want to hear from you once a month, twice a week, et cetera. So that’s a really good way to make sure that you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right moment. But not only that, you’re kind of joining that with what your customer actually wants. So that’s kind of the fifth step. So overall, all five of those steps kind of get embedded into step number two, which is making sure that you’re cleaning your list regularly. And those five steps are kind of different ways that you can make sure that you’re doing the list clean cleaning and keeping a healthy and clean list in your account.

Vira: 19:31

Right. One of my clients actually asked me, can we do like a spring cleaning of my. Of My list, I’m like, hey, no it’s not, not a once a year thing. We are doing it regularly, like on a monthly basis. That’s just like something that we have. We have this like system in place that keep your list nice and engaged and that’s super important. Yeah, the step number three is actually to identify your engaged customers and email primarily to those customers. And you’re Alissa briefly talked about it. And step number two, but let me just quickly remind people what it means and how to increase or decrease that segment. So just because someone has subscribed to your list does not necessarily mean that they are engaged and that they actually want to hear from you all the time. Like a good example would be if like you subscribe to receive discount from this like mattress or socks company that you were looking into and you purchased the product and done, you’re not interested, interested in that email anymore or in that product anymore, like until the next time you need to purchase the product or something. So should I be as a marketer, should I be bombarding you with emails? Well, probably it’s not, it’s not the good idea. Sending emails to everyone all the time is, it’s not a good move. You will get into the spam folder, you will decrease your deliverability and if your deliverability is already low or your score is low, just like don’t, don’t mess with the sending email to your entire list. So generally brands like end up in spam folder because they are not sending relevant and interesting content to their customers and customers are flagging them as spam. That’s why we recommend to go with engaged segment most of the time. So engaged segment is someone who have opened or clicked your email within the certain time period. Now here’s where it gets interesting with accounts that perform really well and we see that they constantly have open rate of over 25%. Plus we can say that okay, this account performs really well, which means that we can probably make that segment, that engaged segment bigger. So say we started from like 90 days, but we see that this account performed really well. It is safe to expand it to 120 days. Now when you have low open rates, the logic is kind of the same. But it works the other way around. If you see that your open rates are constantly like 10% or 5% or something, decrease that engage segment. If you’re right now sending to like 120 days, try sending to 90 days. Try sending to 60 days. Try even doing for 30 days for like a month or so. Just so the email services like Yahoo, Gmail or any other emails, they can recognize that you are a legit sender, that yes, they are sending emails, they are having really good open rates and click through rates just for the sake of improving your open rates and click through rates and senders reputation. That would be probably one of the main strategies that we recommend when you have troubles with your sender’s reputation. And another little trick that you can do, try not sending as many emails as like as you usually do if you have issues with senders reputation. Like maybe do, if you were doing like every day, maybe do once or twice per week. That should be enough. But make sure that this would be super relevant email, that it would be really, really well segmented and that you will only send it to people who actually want to hear from you. Play with subject lines and play preview text. Just make sure that this email will get delivered and it will be seen in your customer’s inbox. So that would be our step number three.

Alissa: 23:18

Yeah, and I love that the testing is one that I’m always like, oh, the possibilities are endless. But you just have to start, you have to start somewhere and then you can kind of move on from there. Because that’s my whole thing is like what’s a good starting point? But you just gotta do it, do it. And then you’ll, you’ll, you’ll be guided by the marketing results.

Vira: 23:36

Right.

Alissa: 23:38

So in terms of step number four, we’re calling it sending targeted quality content. So what I’m really gonna focus on in this phrase is targeted content. Obviously the quality content, it’s gotta be there. And we’ve talked about providing quality content in the past through previous episodes. But one of the episodes where we specifically talk about targeting your content is episode 29. It’s called how to segment your list to increase open rates in 2021. So I’m pretty sure, sure, since we started this podcast last July 1st, which is crazy because we are rapidly approaching our one year mark of having launched our first podcast episode, which is really exciting.

Vira: 24:19

But crazy.

Alissa: 24:19

Yeah. Since that very, very first podcast episode we talked about relevance, that was a big key word for us. And then also segmentation in terms of sending targeted quality content. You have to start becoming a product pro at segmentation and making sure that segmentation is like a primary focus for you when it comes to sending out your emails and sending out your campaigns as well. So in that episode 29 when we specifically talked about segmentation, there were a lot of like granular points that we brought up. In terms of how to segment your list, we won’t get too granular today, but I do want to talk about kind of like the four rules of segmentation that we provided in that episode. Just as kind of a refresher. Because I know for me I, I need to be refreshed on segmentation like every two days. Cause if I don’t think about it and I don’t keep it like my primary focus when I’m working with my clients, it’s really easy to forget about and then just start sending generic emails to a generic engaged segment. And that’s not really like best practice, right. Moving forward. So first rule of segmentation is that it is absolutely not optional when it comes to segmentation. You have to get more and more specific over the course of time. If you’ve been running your email marketing for like three years, at this three year mark, you should be at the point where you’re now sending very specific campaigns to very small segments or groups of people, groups of subscribers that are found within your Klaviyo account. To the point where like, you should have a rough idea of like which of your clients like pink T shirts versus purple T shirts. And out of those clients, which of them wear an extra small, which wear a small, medium, large, extra large, that kind of thing. Like, that’s the kind of level of like hyper segmentation that we’re talking about about here over the course of time. Obviously if you’re just starting out, you’re not going to have that much of granular information on your customers, but you do want to get to that level. That is something that you want to aspire to. So that’s the first rule. Segmentation is not optional for any of you email marketers out there and also for your E commerce business owners, the ones that are running their own email marketing. You’re an email marketer, you’re an E commerce owner, but you’re also an email marketer. So it’s not optional for you either. You have to do it. Rule number two is making sure that you know your audience. So again, going back to that example that I just gave, but we’ll, we’ll bring it over to the socks or mattress example, right? If you’re selling your mattresses, you should know which clients need a twin size, a queen size, a king size, a full size mattress, how many mattresses they need for their home, what kind of mattress do they like? Do they like firm, do they like kind of soft, do they like spring, do they like the like memory foam mattress? You should start to understand these things about your customers. So then that way, once you launch new products, once you have sales on specific products, you know exactly who to cure those campaigns to. Same with the socks. We had a guest on our podcast recently and it was, I think it was Tim Kilroy who actually provided a ton of information on the benefits of freelancers versus agencies when it comes to your email marketing. His son is a sock connoisseur, so he knows everything there is to know about socks. When it comes to the materials, the lengths, the socks that are most appropriate for different things, that’s the kind of information that you want to have on your clients. Which of my clients use my socks for hiking? Which of them uses them for general fitness? What about for business meetings, et cetera? Like, those are the kinds of things that are super, super important for you to understand. Again, so you can start sending out your appropriate campaigns, the appropriate content, high quality content to those customers that meet the criteria of the campaign that you’re looking to send out. So that’s the second, the second kind of rule. Third rule, those who do nothing do harm. So again, going back to that whole concept of knowing who your unengaged customers are, your unengaged subscribers, if they are not adding any value into your email marketing in terms of opening your emails or clicking through your emails, then you need to figure out what to do about them. But you need to stop sending them emails and probably need to stop having them take up completely vacant space in your ESP amongst your subscriber list. So making sure that you’re not wasting all this time trying to win people back who just don’t care about you. I know that none of you would ever try to contact an ex from like 10 years years ago because so much time has passed, it’s very unlikely that they’re ever going to take you back. Same concept here with your customers. Once they’re gone, you do what you can to try to win them in a very short amount of time. But don’t try to win these people back from like two, three years ago. They’re gone. They’re long, long.

Vira: 28:44

Unless you have a really good offer.

Alissa: 28:46

Yeah, unless you have the most phenomenal offer ever or you’ve just completely changed your business, then at that point I would consider it. But even then it’s like, is it really worth your time and effort? Right. Probably not. And then the last rule of segmentation is just making sure that you’re planning a little planning goes a long way. So when it comes to creating these campaigns, creating These emails, these kinds of things. Just making sure that you have a very set strategy about how you’re going to be sending things out to your highly targeted lists that also have the really high quality content attached to them too. So when it comes to segmentation, that’s a great way to try to get out of the spam folder, but also to make sure that you’re avoiding the spam folder altogether. Because without that high quality targeted content, you’re going to start blasting people with emails that they’re going to consider spam and then you’re going to end up in the spam folder real, real fast. So that’s your step number four is making sure that you’re sending targeted high quality content to all your subscribers.

Vira: 29:45

Right. And yeah, all the, all the good points, Alissa. And we talk about the relevancy of the emails all the time. But I mean it’s kind of an old story now, but it is very relevant. Yeah. So yep, step number five, this is steps number five and six, they are sort of like bonus steps. But considering getting a dedicated sending domain is like another thing that you can do. I know that in Klaviyo, I don’t know about the other platforms, but in Klaviyo I think you need to have something like 100,000 subscribers to be able to get that domain domain that like dedicated sending domain. But for those of you who don’t know what it is. So basically setting up a dedicated sending domain shows that you are actually shows to like Gmail and Yahoo that emails are actually coming from your brand rather than from Klaviyo shared domain. And if you are a smaller client and I really like how our director of technology and hell how he explained it, he said that basically when you don’t have your own dedicated sending domain, what Klaviyo and other platforms do, they group people in this like little neighborhoods based on their sender’s reputation. So the better is your reputation in better neighborhood your email will live. Right? And the bummer is with this neighborhoods is that sometimes deliverability of your email does not only depend on you on how well your specific email performs. Because maybe if someone like messed up in your neighborhood, all of the people in your neighborhood will suffer from their action. So this is how it works. But it also works the other way around. The better you perform, the better you act as an email citizen. You will be basically moved to a better sending domain. But if you are a big guy, if you have 100,000 plus clients or contacts on your list, you can definitely consider Getting a dedicated sending domain, because in this case, you will be the only one responsible for your. Your deliverability. It’s like living in condo versus living in a house, right? You will have your separate house with your like, separate plant. You will be doing whatever you want on that land and you will not be bothered by your, like, noisy neighbors or people who make the value of the property go down because they misbehave or something. I don’t know. You understand what I mean? So if you’re a big account, consider getting a dedicated sending domain because it can really improve your deliverability in the eyes of inbox providers, since you will now send emails from your own designated domain. So that’s a big one. Consider it.

Alissa: 32:37

I love it. I think that’s a good one. Okay, guys, I think we have time for one more bonus. Bonus. Bonus. Bonus step. Yeah, and I touched on this really lightly earlier. So our bonus step number six is make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe. So you don’t really want to keep someone in. In a relationship that they don’t want to be in, right? That’s kind of awkward. And it just, it adds like, really weird tension and pressure to everybody. No one’s happy. No one’s happy. Even though they’re still there with you. Like you’re not happy because you know that they’re not happy, right? So when it comes to making it easy for your, your, your customers or your unsubscribe or your subscribers to unsubscribe, a couple of things here. One is going back to that preferences page that we always talk about, and it’s actually a service that we provide here at Flowium is, in terms of that preference page, you want to make sure that that exists not only to help your customers manage their preferences, but also providing a landing page so people can actually unsubscribe from your emails. And I know that really kills all my email marketers out there to think of people unsubscribing for your from the emails that you work so hard to create. And don’t get me wrong, I feel the same way, and I know Vira does too. But ultimately you don’t want to keep people where they’re not happy. So at the very footer, the very bottom of all your emails, you need to make sure that you add two links in there, which is standard, common practice. I’m pretty sure there’s some legality behind that, but we’ll get into that another time. In terms of the footer, you need to include Two links. One is to manage their preferences or give the subscriber options to manage their preferences. It will link them to their preference page. And the other one is a link link just to unsubscribe for the most part, we actually link that to the preferences page as well. Because on the preference page you can unsubscribe from everything. But the other option that you have is just to leave the default option there where you click on subscribe and then it takes you to another page that confirms, hey, thanks for unsubscribing or you’ve been unsubscribed, we’re sorry to see you go, or whatever it is. Just to really, really simplify it, I actually had a client the other day and I thought this was really, really interesting who said, I would prefer to leave that unsubscribe link as just a link to unsubscribe. Because for me personally, and this is the client talking, for me personally, when I want to unsubscribe from an email and then I get sent to a preference page, it irritates me more than anything because I just want to unsubscribe. I don’t want to update my preferences because if I did, I would click the Manage Preferences. Which is kind of interesting because now it kind of puts you in this dilemma of like, okay, but we have, we don’t really want you to unsubscribe. We want to give you some options before you say like, no, leave me alone altogether. But at the same time, if you have that Manage Preferences link in the footer, shouldn’t the customer click there if they have any interest in managing their preferences and then click on the unsubscribe if they just want to unsubscribe altogether. So that’s a bonus step number six for you to make it easy to unsubscribe for your customers. But also it kind of leaves you with this decision that you need to make as a company. Company, right? So that’s definitely something that you want to figure out as, as a brand is how easy do you want to make it for people to leave? Do you want to make them work for it a little bit? That’s a decision that you’ll have to make as a brand internally. But that is your bonus step number six, making sure that you make it easy for your customers to unsubscribe if they want to. So letting them leave when they want to.

Vira: 35:56

Right. And I mean this is like a no brainer. You have to have the unsubscribe link guys, for God’s sakes. And I know that like platforms like Klaviyo, they don’t even allow you to send the email if you don’t have that unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. But back in the day you could actually do that not with Klaviyo, with like other email services. And I feel like a lot of people were abusing that. So it was like impossible to unsubscribe from, from email like back in 2000s or like mid 2000s. I’m glad we are not there anymore. So yeah.

Alissa: 36:26

No I’m, I’m with you there. I’m totally with you there guys. As always, thank you for listening. Don’t forget, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. If you like what we do, leave us a review so you can get your very own free pair of Flowium socks. We’ve had actually some funny applications for people applying to work here at Flowium which is really cool. Our team is always expanding so if you are interested in getting involved in the email marketing world, we are always, always hiring, looking to add to our amazing team. But in some of the applications that we’ve received people are like please send me Flowium socks which is really great. So make sure that you leave us a review and we love to send you some Flowium socks. Just go to flowium.com/socks make sure that you leave a review, leave your information there and then we’ll send you over some socks. And as always, not only if you want to join the Flowium team, but if you also want to get involved in a community, make sure you join us at flowium.com/community there you’ll be able to kind of see all of these like minded email marketing individuals share, sharing, helping, answering questions. It’s a really cool spot so make sure that you check it out. And just as a side note, if you are interested in joining our team because again we are hiring for account managers slash project managers. Make sure you go to flowium.com/careers and you’ll be able to apply there. And hopefully you’ll be able to join our team.

Vira: 37:50

And if you’re our podcast listener, you will get some brownie points from us. So yes, major, submit your application. Such a fun team to be a part of. So yeah. And next week, come back next week because we will be talking about new and exciting win back strategies to try in 2022. We’ve prepared a ton of fun and cool information so come back next Tuesday.

Alissa: 38:11

New and exciting, come back next Tuesday. And thank you guys again.

Vira: 38:15

Thank you.