Email lists are set it and forget it – right? Not so fast – there are ways to optimize your list to make sure the right information goes to the right potential clients, and to prune inactive members to improve deliverability and keep your messages in the inbox instead of the spam folder. In this Behind The Scenes, we take a look at some of the techniques we use to keep our mailing lists in good shape that are applicable regardless of the email marketing provider you’re using.

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[0:00:00.7] LR: Email marketing and list magnets. Welcome to another Rosen Institute behind the scenes. I’m Lee Rosen. I’m joined by Ned Daze. Ned, How are you today?

[0:00:09.7] ND: I’m doing well Lee, how are you?

[0:00:12.0] LR: I’m good. I want to talk about email marketing and list magnets and really, the list maintenance piece of this is what I think about. I actually worry about this. We have a long history of email marketing both with the institute and with the law firm. We’ve created these really good lists but the way I think of it is your list, while it’s great on the first day, when somebody signs up, it quickly starts to degrade over time. It deteriorates, it atrophies, it’s not nearly as good a list a year from now or two or three or four years from now. You know, the one thing you can count on is that time will pass so you know your list starts to atrophy.

[0:00:53.7] ND: I think an email list is unfortunately not a set it and forget it Type of project. I think a lot of people go in with the idea that, “Well, I just need to get a bunch of people on this list and I’ll have a couple of emails and I’ll be done,” and there’s really a lot that goes into it and not just in terms of the content you’re putting out but in terms of making sure that people are engaged with it, making sure you’re kind of giving people the stuff that they want.

So yeah, that’s what I’d like to kind of go over today is kind of talk a little bit about how we’ve approached this in the past, kind of the things we’ve tried to do to make sure that we are – kind of the reasons why, we really try to make sure that we are only emailing people who are still interested in getting our messages and what we do to kind of make sure that we’re tailoring the message to those individuals.

[0:01:40.0] LR: It’s tempting to think of your email list, sort of like you do your address book, you know, your contacts list on your phone or whatever that it’s just a repository of that information and you know, you kind of think, well, the worst thing that could happen to my contact list or my address book is that somebody changes their email address and of course you want to keep up with your friends and connections and know their latest email address.

But with an email marketing list, it’s more than that, it’s not just keeping up with email addresses. Of course, some people will change email addresses and your emails to them will start to bounce. But more than that, this list is sensitive because when people stop engaging with it, when they stop opening the emails that you send, it damages what I’ll call your – I think this is a good term for it — your sender reputation and that has consequences.

[0:02:34.0] ND: Yeah, there are a couple of things to consider her. One, the service is actually providing the bulk mailing capabilities, they are really always trying to keep a look out for making sure that they don’t get penalized. They are essentially sending emails for you even though a lot of times your email address is appearing on these messages going out, the messages are coming off of their servers and they’re responsible for the messages.

They are really keen on making sure that they don’t get a whole lot of spam complaints and aren’t flagged as spam in various email providers. They go to great lengths to generally make it easy to tell how many people are opening these things up and how many people are reporting them as spam and giving people the opportunity to unsubscribe.

But beyond just that, because we’ve got these kind of such big companies handling our email, now Microsoft and Google and Yahoo! and they’ve got access to a lot of this information, they’re starting to implement a lot of changes where they really try to filter out email based on what is best for the end user. Whoever has the actual email account, they’re starting to try to batch and filter emails preemptively to kind of cut down on some of this marketing clutter.

There’s a lot of, even – I don’t want to say junk mail or like spam in the idea that people are just getting your email address and sending you stuff you never asked for. But I know I am just on so many lists, having bought so many things and signed up for so many accounts over the years that I just get hundreds and hundreds of messages a month that are things I signed up for but stuff I really don’t care about. So in a lot of ways, I kind of welcome these features but they can certainly impact the kind of stuff we’re trying to do and we’re trying to use email to market.

[0:04:06.5] LR: Right, yeah the last thing you want is to put all these time and effort and energy into creating either an email auto responder sequence or broadcast emails or newsletters or whatever you’re doing and have those emails sent out by your email service provider only to end up in the spam filter, you know, in the junk mailbox or whatever it is and not to arrive in the receiver’s actual inbox. That’s kind of a disaster.

The thing that I worry about for us is that, you know, you send out lots and lots of emails and if you have that degrade over time, you don’t do any business. I mean, that’s the bottom line is what’s the point of doing this if nobody’s seeing your emails and then they’re not buying whatever it is that you’re selling.

[0:04:51.4] ND: Yeah, if nobody’s opening your emails, there’s not much point to doing it. I think kind of the first way to approach this and this is not – I guess, kind of more rudimentary on some level but the idea of kind of segmenting emails is really, I think a good place to start on this because again, I think a lot of people, then we did this I think in the early days.

Where you get people on your list and you figure, “Well, all I need to do is have one kind of sequence or one list of people who I’m sending broadcast messages to,” however you kind of want to set that up. Pretty much all of these services give you an option or the ability to segment people in terms of which messages you’re sending out.

I think this is probably kind of a good starting place, not only because it’s good in terms of making sure that you’re getting the right people. I think it’s just kind of handy as a marketing tactic in and of itself is to actually be able to break people down by the kinds of things that they’re interested in.

[0:05:44.3] LR: Maybe we’ve implied this but I want to just say it overtly. If people stop opening your emails, these companies that you just described, Ned, Google, et cetera, start recognizing that those emails are not getting opened. If they’re not getting opened, the likelihood of putting those emails not in the inbox but actually in a spam, junk-type box. The likelihood of that increases pretty dramatically.

So you’re talking about segmenting here and I think that’s a great topic. What you’re trying to do is send emails about the right things to the right people in order to increase the likelihood that they will open and read those emails so that your emails to everyone will continue to show up in the inbox and not get filtered by the spam filters.

[0:06:31.2] ND: Exactly, a lot of the times, they’re going to be emails, we wanted to send out to the whole list and we want to make sure that we’re using that on occasions where it makes sense. But a lot of times, it really makes a little more sense if you’re going to be running specific campaigns or if you’ve got particular auto responder set up, you might actually want to modify those in a way where you can direct them at people interested either in a particular practice area or a particular topic, something along those lines.

Or even if you’re doing this for a fairly small list of referral sources, a lot of times, you can break this up based on the things that might be more interesting to doctors or accountants or other attorneys versus just kind of things going out to a big group with large topics.

[0:07:10.2] LR: A really good example for us with our email list was that we had emails about child custody and we had people on our list who had children but we also had people on our list who didn’t have children. We knew very quickly in developing these campaigns that the people who did not have children did not open the emails about children, naturally. They didn’t care. So we were damaging our list by sending emails to people that predictably were not going to open those emails and we wanted to maintain this high open rate and we were sending the wrong stuff to the wrong people.

[0:07:49.9] ND: Yeah, and if we have a segment of messages or a group of messages covering a few days that’s specifically about child issues and we’re sending these emails out, people who don’t have kids are just going to ignore our messages for four, five or six or maybe more days straight, however long we’re actually talking about that.

Not only are you running the risk of they might get a little disinterested just in general just because the emails aren’t necessarily talking about things they’re interested in. But also, those scores are being reflected, again, kind of back of the service that you’re doing in some of these emails and Google is also Microsoft, whoever is also saying that you’re sending out a bunch of emails that people aren’t opening or that they’re just deleting without ever reading.

[0:08:27.8] LR: So services like the one we use, but most of them today, we use ConvertKit but services like this make it really easy for you to segment the list. For instance, we can send out an email and say, “Click here if you have children, click here if you don’t.” We can record where they clicked in their record and now we know who on our list has children and who on our list doesn’t have children and who on our list doesn’t seem to want to respond to that question.

We can then target or segment, as Ned is saying, the children emails to the people with children and skip it for the people who don’t have children. It really is very easy to do that with the technology today and that dramatically increases the likelihood that everybody’s going to open the emails because the emails are specific to their needs.

What are some other examples of ways to segment out the list, Ned?

[0:09:25.5] ND: Yeah, well there are a lot of ways to do this. I mean, like you mentioned, a lot of them these days have the ability to click links inside of emails and then kind of break people up based on how they’ve interacted with your emails in particular.

There’s also the option of just using the signup forms, wherever you might be signing people up for the email list. You can actually, most of these services give you the ability in their little form builders or you can have a developer work on this where if you are sticking a form on your website or somewhere on the web, you can make a single form or particular forms, tag people or segment people in such a way so that they go into a particular bucket or segment in your account.

So if somebody signs up on the page, specifically dealing with our circumstance where we were in family law, we might have a page dedicated to property division. We could put somebody in a segment or bucket that said, “Okay, these people are definitely either they’ve got some properties to divide, these are the kinds of things they’re interested in.” If they signed up on a page about child supporters, child custody, we knew they had kids and we could send the messages about that. So sign up forums are one where you can do it.

You can all see these things like where they actually signed up. So if they signed up on your site versus social media, you can break people up in that manner. A lot of these services now will record the IP address of the people who were signing up to your list so you can actually approximate the physical location based on the IP address if that’s something you want to attempt to do for people either in particular counties or cities or states depending on that.

Then another way we did was through incentives. So based on a lot of the times when we’re getting people on to an email list, we try to give them a reason to sign up. So they get access to a course or an ebook or a download of some kind. Based on the incentive we were offering, we would kind of break them up into different segments that way as well.

[0:11:10.5] LR: So you have all these ways to be creative in terms of figuring out what these people who are signing up for your list are all about; what they care about, what they’re worried about and the sky is the limit here. We certainly have done all sorts of experiments, you can too. You might discover that they work for a particular company because that’s the domain name that they’re using, you know? bob@IBM.com, works at IBM or whatever it may be. You can sense specific information about your practice area as it relates to that company.

Or you mention geographical areas, Ned. That’s a really, I think good idea. If you know somebody’s from a particular geographic area, for instance, if you’re doing residential real estate, you can send them information about the real estate market in that particular county or part of the county or whatever it may be. So I really like the idea of segmenting all of which is intended to support the hygiene or health of your list so that you will keep getting this high deliverability that you will keep having your mail going into the right box and not getting screened into one of these secondary boxes.

Are there ways, Ned, to measure and to test how you’re doing with this effort to keep your emails getting opened?

[0:12:30.2] ND: Yeah, there are. There are a few tools out there that I found pretty helpful, I’ll list those in the show notes. One called the sendscore.org is a pretty good one. There’s one at mail-tester.com that’s a good one, a couple of the good ones that we’ll have links too. These essentially allow you to either paste in the content of a message and get a report.

A lot of services already do this where they will kind of give you a spam score based on kind of the words you’ve used or the code text ratio of your message but some of these will also allow you to enter in either an email address or an email domain so the domain from which you are sending these messages and get a score on how likely it is that this will actually go into the inbox and not be filtered out as either bulk mail or junk mail by some of these other services.

[0:13:17.1] LR: Yeah, you really are being watched and that was a sort of a disturbing lesson for me to learn. I had no idea that there was such organization out there watching us and seeing whether people were opening our email and then rating us using these sender score types of ratings. Then communicating with the companies handling the email for the recipients, people like Google or Microsoft or whoever and saying, “Hey, this really isn’t from a company with a very good reputation.”

We’ve been through phases where we’ve had deliverability issues and I’m sure anyone who has managed an email list has seen that happen. Sometimes, I think we assume that they email that we’re using for marketing isn’t working and in fact, what’s happening is it’s simply not being delivered because you have worn out your welcome by sending the wrong stuff to people who don’t want to open it, they start to perceive it as spam, sometimes they mark it as spam and it just doesn’t resonate and so the providers of those email services, the people like Gmail and Google realize that this is just junk coming from this particular sender.

[0:14:25.7] ND: Yeah, there are big databases out there, it’s almost like having a credit score but it’s for your email domain in particular and I think beyond just junk mail, I think we’re all familiar with spam and stuff gets automatically marked as spam. We think, “Well, I’m not sending spam, I’m sending something that somebody actually signed up for so of course this is going to go to their inbox and they’re going to want to see it.” But particularly, recently, I mean, services like Zoho and google and I think Microsoft does some of this as well.

We mentioned this a little bit, they are starting to batch where they’re kind of considered bulk mails into separate tabs or inboxes. So I think by default now, Gmail kind of breaks stuff out into emails from things like notifications from social networks or shopping related emails or kind of bulk messages that it realizes are kind of from mailing lists. A lot of times what can happen is, even though somebody signed up for your email list or your auto responder and maybe you’re sending out even a message that’s not necessarily on a sequence, you’re kind of sending out a blast on Friday, everybody letting them know about one thing or another.

A lot of times, those are actually getting stuck in this other inboxes and a lot of people just don’t understand that that’s how Gmail is organizing things now or it’s something they don’t bother to get to for a week or two because they know that a lot of fit is just going to be updates from Amazon or you know, wherever they bought flowers last Valentine’s day or something like that.

[0:15:44.4] LR: Right. The bottom line is, you want people to open your emails and that’s really the key and the segmenting I think is a really good approach to making that more likely. But there are also some really simple basic things that you can do in order to increase the likelihood of getting the emails open and we’re really aggressive about those things with the Friday file.

We don’t fool around. We really want our emails open because we don’t want our sender score to be damaged. We want to maintain a good reputation so we strive in the subject line to write something that is more likely to get opened and not ignored. We spend a lot of energy. I don’t know if we spend as much time on it as we should, Ned, but I feel like we spend close to as much time on the subject line as we do on everything else that is in the email.

[0:16:39.5] ND: It’s really important, that’s really the one thing you have that’s going to hook people and get them to open or not. That’s really the one number we’re trying to measure is that open rates and again, all these services give you a pretty good statistics on open rates of your emails. That’s just the number, we always want to be going up, we don’t want to see the open rate going down.

Some of these services will give you interesting tools like being able to AB test headlines. So it will send out to a small subset of your list, let you AB test the headline and then it will let that go out for maybe two or three hours and then it will send the rest of the messages to using the headline that was the winner. We also will occasionally resend our emails to people who didn’t open them. So with something like the Friday file, if it goes out on Friday, we might then on Monday or Tuesday, to anybody who hasn’t opened that message, to ahead and resend it to try to get that engagement and again, this is all kind of –

[0:17:32.7] LR: We in fact do that – don’t we do that every single week? We send it on Friday?

[0:17:36.2] ND: Every single week, yeah. Every single week we do that.

[0:17:38.4] LR: So our system on that is we mail it on Friday and it goes out at 11 AM eastern in the first batch and that’s with one headline, right?

[0:17:47.0] ND: Correct.

[0:17:48.1] LR: Okay and then we send it again on the following Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday but only to the people who have not opened it on Friday, right?

[0:17:57.3] ND: Exactly.

[0:17:58.1] LR: And we’ll AB test that second send when we send it on Monday or Tuesday and it does exactly what you just described. It will send for the first few hours, it will send with two headlines, it will measure the open rate on those two headlines and then send all the rest with the winner, the headline that won right?

[0:18:17.7] ND: Exactly. You know, there are a couple of other things to consider here as well and there’s been plenty written on kind of how do you optimize your emails and what kind of tricks do you want to try to make sure these are getting through and getting past a lot of these filters because again, sometimes these things are being filtered automatically even though the person may in fact want to actually read it. So making sure that the headlines are workable is a primary one.

A lot of times it’s worth looking at the value of an HTML versus a plain text email and what I mean by that is when I open up an email that I’m just going to send somebody in my personal email account, it just sends as plain text. A lot of times when you get these marketing messages or even something like the Friday File, we are using HTML so we can do some nicer formatting and stick in images and sections that correspond to things that have happened that week.

There is a fine line here between things that appear most like real messages are generally what are better for your score and your open rates. So something that is a plain text message you are going to lose out on all these cool features like being able to click on links and have fancy formatting, but that’s generally going to have a slightly better chance of making it through some of these filters. So again, it’s something to weigh how much of that you want to have in that tradeoff.

And again, some of these tools that will actually look at your message in particular, if you copy and paste the text and they give you a spam score, what they’re really doing is looking at things like the actual language you’re using inside of the email and some of the other content in there. So if you’ve got free Viagra six times inside of your email, you may very well get marked as spam by a lot of these automatic filtering services.

[0:19:55.4] LR: So I want to go back to this headline thing, because I think that it is worth just being very clear about. When we send out a Friday File email, we are writing at least three different subject lines or headlines, whatever you want to call them and it’s a major investment of time but we are really striving to bring that open rate up to get folks who are engaged. So if somebody sees that headline on Friday and it doesn’t really trip their trigger and get them to click open, we know it.

So when we send it again early in the week, we’ve got two possible headlines hopefully one of them is better than the other and now, we’re taking a second shot at getting them to open because we really, really, really want that open rate to stay high. So we don’t just go for one and done, we keep trying. We keep making that effort and I think that it is actually a big effort for us because we do it every Friday. It may be smaller for you if you’re doing an auto responder sequence, where you test these headlines over and over and then send a second time with your service. You want to look at the technology and see what your system will do.

[0:21:02.1] ND: Well this is really the first thing to play around with this, the headline. I mean this is the thing that is really determining that open rate is somebody reading this and thinking, “Okay I’ll read the email,” and I really don’t know that you can overthink this enough. I mean, we have done some crazy stuff. We’ve tested whether emoji in the subject lines work better. We do AB testing all the time obviously. It is really an important factor and so if your deliverability rate is low there are a few things to check.

One, set up some account, some things like Gmail and Microsoft mail service or Yahoo!. Sign up for the email list and see if they are delivered and if they go into these other inboxes. But the other thing is to actually start experimenting with the headlines and one of the things that we did at the law firm is once we had people segmented out so we know, “Okay they are either on the child or no children list” so we can tell them well they are not just opening it because they don’t have kids.

Once we knew they were in a segment where they were interested in what it is we were talking about, we could very easily tell because we could track message by message, how well the headline correlated to what it is they wanted to know because we could say, “Oh all right, message four only has an open rate of X percent, which is like 30% lower than all the other messages. So let’s go in and tweak that and see what we can do to bring that back up.”

[0:22:17.2] LR: Yeah, I actually find that if you are really into this it is a fun game because there is lots of – they are keeping score so you can keep tweaking and playing and optimizing until you get it all just right but the bottom line is you really want to get these folks to open these emails. You want a high open rate and in a perfect world, they not only open it but they would click on things inside the email and in an even more perfect world, some of the folks will reply to you. They will engage with you, they will send a response back.

All of that will help you to maintain a high center score and to keep those messages going into the right email box. But, realistically you can’t please all the people all the time. You are going to have some people who week after week whatever it is that you try they aren’t going to open your emails. We certainly have that with the Rosen Institute Friday File emails. There will be people who sign up, open our emails for a while but at some point, maybe we get redundant or they get tired or they have priorities or workload or whatever but they just stop opening the emails and despite all of our efforts we can’t get them to open emails. They are a problem for us because they are lowering our sender score.

[0:23:33.9] ND: Yeah, if we’ve got a list of X number of people and half of them aren’t opening any of our emails, that’s a problem. That sends a message to the people offering the email service that we’re using that we are sending something or have people on our list who aren’t interested and this sends a message to the email providers like Google and Yahoo! that people are getting these messages they aren’t necessarily interested in.

So as painful as it is, we engage in a fair bit of pruning where we actually remove people from the list who we’ve marked as not being interested, they having to open up emails in a while and we haven’t been able to re-engage them because we really want to make sure, I mean A, just generally the people who are on the list are actually still interested in being there and getting what it is that we are sending out but B, making sure that our deliverability rate is still pretty high and our open rate is still pretty high.

[0:24:20.7] LR: So what we’re doing is when someone has not opened our emails for three months, that’s basically 12 emails on Fridays and then 12 emails to follow up on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday when we resend because they are all getting all those resends because they didn’t open it on Friday. So they are now three months into this cycle of not opening our email. We then consider them cold subscribers. These people just appear not to be interested.

Now we don’t know at that point whether they aren’t opening the email because they don’t want to know what we have to say or if it’s because our email is not being delivered to a place that they’re seeing. It might go into one of these secondary email boxes that Ned has described or it may be going into the spam filter. We don’t know what the problem is. All we know is that they’re not opening and I will add to that, sometimes the report that you get that they’re not opening is inaccurate.

Sometimes your software will say, “Hey they didn’t open the email,” because whatever mechanism they’re using for that is a fairly straightforward system that each of them uses but it may not work properly for that individual. But what we have to assume at that point is that for one reason or another, they are not opening our emails. So we now really want to get them off our list but I will tell you, I just can’t stand the idea of just giving up on an email subscriber. Because we spend a lot of time, both in the law firm and here at Rosen Institute, getting those people on the list in the first place. So to just hit the button and say “delete” is almost more than I can handle, emotionally.

[0:25:58.8] ND: It’s very challenging and we certainly try to give them every opportunity that we can to get back on the list. As you mentioned, these things aren’t perfect in tracking a lot of this stuff. So what we do is when we see that somebody is a cold subscriber, so they haven’t opened up any of our emails in three months, we put them on a special auto responder list. So they get a sequence of three emails. They are offered an incentive to click and stay on the list.

The clicks we can obviously track pretty reliably and we can automate this in ConvertKit and that if somebody gets one of these emails on the sequence and clicks one of the links in it, they will automatically be taken off of the cold subscriber list. So we can say, “Okay this person has clicked the link, obviously they’re engaged for whatever reason they either haven’t been opening them but want to or we just haven’t been able to track that properly.”

[0:26:48.3] LR: Now, can I jump in here, Ned? We’ve tried this on ConvertKit and have not had much success. Where we’ve moved somebody from list A over to list B in order to re-engage them and what we’ve always wondered is, is the problem that our emails are being ignored or is it that they are not being delivered properly and so we have experimented quite a bit with moving them off of the ConvertKit list and moving them over to a separate list with a different vendor.

In our situation, we have been using a company called GMass, which has a really high deliverability rate not quite as much functionality but we can put them on GMass and have it sent via Gmail. It’s a little bit different and apparently a much higher deliverability rate. So we are doing this reactivation sequence on a separate provider in order to at least have the better shot of overcoming any deliverability issues. So we can find out if this person really isn’t interested or they simply haven’t been seeing the emails in their inbox.

[0:27:47.5] ND: Yeah, that is worth mentioning again. You know, I mentioned a lot of these services like ConvertKit or MailChimp or whatever. They look like they are sending out an email from your address. What they are actually doing is they are sending an email from a MailChimp server or ConvertKit’s server looking like it’s your email address and so when you use something like GMass where it’s literary sending out your Gmail box, sometimes that’s what it takes to actually get the message through because it is literally coming from the actual address it says it is and so sometimes, the deliverability rate there is higher. That can actually work.

[0:28:22.2] LR: And so if they are not seeing the email and they realize they’re about to be cut off because you put them in this re-engagement sequence and what we do in our sequence is say, “Hey, we are going to stop mailing to you.” Then if they actually see the email now that they weren’t seeing before where the open it for some reason they decide to open, now they can click on this link and stay on the list. Now each time we do this, we get a fair number of people who say, “Oh I have been reading the emails. I am not sure what’s wrong.”

And so I think in some instances, those folks were just being measured improperly by the email service provider, by ConvertKit in our instance. There may have been something blocking the signal that was coming back to ConvertKit that has said that they had opened the email and so of course, we moved those people back onto the list but other people just continue to ignore us. We don’t get them to re-engage even though we do try pretty aggressively to get them to click again to open again.

[0:29:19.1] ND: Yeah, and so once we have exhausted all of our options and they haven’t responded to us, they haven’t opened up our emails inside of ConvertKit and haven’t responded to us, via these emails in Gmail, we do what is very hard for us to do and remove them from the list and then obviously that doesn’t prevent them from signing up in the future if it is something they want to get back on for whatever reason but we found that that actually has been helpful for us, and that A, it gives us a better representation in terms of our overall number on our list.

It obviously keep the email company happy because our deliverability rate goes up and we can purge some of these folks and really just make sure that we are keeping things clean. I mean on the one hand, I hate to remove people from the list when that is our goal is to always get as many people on there as we can. On the other hand, it really doesn’t make much sense to be sending them emails when they aren’t opening them. And with a lot of these services, you know you are paying per email. So if you’ve got a few thousand people on your list or never opening an email, it is costing you to mail them every month when there is not much point to it.

[0:30:16.5] LR: Certainly. So here’s the deal: You are being watched. You want these emails to get delivered and the big companies out there are keeping an eye on you and they are judging your reputation in order to decide whether your emails are worth being delivered. They measure that in large part by watching to see whether folks are opening your emails and reading them. You really want people to open and read your emails.

You can do that by segmenting your list and sending the right emails to the right people so that they will find it all interesting and useful and when people are not opening your emails, you can be aggressive about attempting to re-engage them and if you can’t re-engage them then pruning them from your list so that you can keep a nice clean list with a high open rate. That’s what we are doing, that’s what we encourage you to do. Anything to add, Ned? Or have we covered it all?

[0:31:16.5] ND: You know just one thing, you had mentioned a little earlier and that a lot of times we try to prompt people to actually email us back and that’s again one of these factors that a lot of these services and a lot of these databases are looking at. If you can get people on your list even if it is a fairly small number but get people to actually message you back when you send them one of these bulk emails, that is a fact that it is really going to work in your favor.

I mean, as we have seen even when we were dealing with something like the law firm where we had to just a gigantic list, we would put out calls all the time to have people email us back. Certainly, we got a lot of messages but nowhere near the number you would expect given how many we were mailing out. So I would encourage you don’t feel like you are going to just end up with a deluge of people messaging you all kinds of crazy stuff.

Maybe you’ll get a few crazy messages here and there but it is one of these things that is really likely going to improve your deliverability score if people are actually replying to your emails messages and we just find that better kind of all-around for the marketing anyway.

[0:32:15.3] LR: All right, as usual, this is behind the scenes. It is an attempt to give you a feel for how we are doing things. Hopefully you’ve got more creative, better, more effective ideas that you’re using. We would love to hear about those on Slack, let us know what you’re up to and hopefully, some of what we’re doing will be useful for you. Bt again, it’s just one approach. There are lots of ways to tackle these problems so we just wanted to give you a feel for the way we’re doing it.

Ned, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Until next time, I’m Lee Rosen.