Stop Blaming Marketing: The Real Reasons Your Emails Land in Spam

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to Email After Hours by SenderScore. Powered by validity.

Speaker A: We're your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.

Speaker B: And I'm Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. I think it's fair to say that email marketing is pretty complex. The challenges, they never really stop, do they? Deliverability, authentication, segmentation, inbox placement, AI optimization. There is a growing list of things that marketers are expected to understand, kind of often without the time, resources or technical backgrounds to really unpack them.

Speaker A: Yeah. Welcome to our world. And joining us today is Israel Al Rawi, founder of the winbox and a full stack email consultant who works at the intersection of deliverability, infrastructure, lifecycle marketing and revenue strategy. Israel has generated literally millions of dollars in revenue for her clients while helping them simplify the scary parts of email. That's especially important for the smaller teams and the nonprofits who are trying to do it all by themselves. Israel, welcome to the show. It's really great to have you with us on Email After Hours today.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I always love talking about email.

Speaker B: So there's never a heritage.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: And we're going to do it. It's going to be lots of email talk today. But before we do, start with a little icebreaker. And I really wanted to ask you about one of your like semi recent LinkedIn posts. So you said you'll never follow a company page just because someone invited you or DM'd you the link, which, yeah, I'm with you. Um, but in your opinion, what's worse? The unsolicited please follow our page plea or the classic just circling back message sales email after like 10 minutes of silence?

Speaker C: You know, I don't, I don't mind, um, I don't mind cold outreach when it's done one on one and it's like genuinely like you've been researched and just ask. Um, I actually have had a couple of people on my, in my LinkedIn DMs who asked if my service would, you know, their service would be helpful to our business. And we've started a conversation and now we're working together. And then I've had others where it was just like, hey, I know your business sucks and our, and our tool can fix it here, like just shove it in your face. And I was like, I never asked for this.

Speaker B: How dare you.

Speaker C: Somebody wanted me to try out their new tool that was like ad based. And I'm like, have you even looked at my pro? I don't do ads. What? Um, so, yeah, I think the, I think the direct ADAs, like people who have the audacity just to assume cold outreach is probably the worst. Um, the circling back is probably the second worst when you don't respond and they just keep coming back. And I know it's probably automated A3, you know, sequence outreach, but you know

Speaker B: there's one more coming, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's just, it's, it's funny because I think the most recent thing that they've done is use my clients. So my clients will add me to their Google workspace, um, with their email. Like so I'll have Istratez.com emails and they'll, these cold outreaches are coming in asking me to basically, you know, use their tool for my business, the winbox. So now it's like, I found your other business email and I'm sending you. It's, it's a whole mess and I'm like, I just, I can't anymore. It's um, I think it's important to call these people out, but I don't know if it's going to go away.

Speaker A: Danielle, you got me thinking there where you said, you know, you know, there's at least one more coming because in my life I just report them all to mime cost. And so if there was another in the sequence, I'll never see them. Maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should like cut them some slack so at least I can, you know, see the follow ups.

Speaker B: It's one of those things where like yes, it's annoying, but every now and then they make me laugh. Like they kind of provide a little bit of entertainment. So I'm here for it.

Speaker A: There is that, uh, isra, the big theme in your recent presentations has been simplifying the scary. So taking concepts that feel overwhelming and making them more accessible for smaller practitioners and nonprofits. Why do you think email marketing has become so intimidating for so many teams?

Speaker C: I think there's so email marketing is a very low barrier entry for a lot of businesses. It's very easy to set up. I can, you know, go into an ESP set up and send my, you know, and my first email within like the next hour if I want to. And I think we were sold that email is easy to send your email and make money. The issue is the back, the infrastructure that builds email and then, you know, the gatekeeping by mailbox provider is where it gets complicated. And this is where you'll see businesses trying to kill email. Email's dead. Try sfs. Email's dead. Try direct mail. Email, you know, is dead. Try social media. Uh, but the thing is they can try to kill it every, you know, couple months and it's still the most, you know, um, it's the most, it's the most profitable, uh, channel for businesses if done right. Um, but it's also a necessity in a business because you need to communicate regardless. How are you going to do it? Social media you cannot use because again, you're at the, you know, mercy of the algorithms, um, and then you're going to go run ads, which is expensive. So email is really a necessity for email for businesses. However, it gets really scary when you start using it long term. The short term is easy. It's the long term, the long game of building your infrastructure and your, you know, communication with your subscribers where it gets hard and kind of, where we kind of come in and try to help build those systems and guardrails for businesses so they don't see as scary as it is.

Speaker B: And you have described yourself, it sounds like you're doing this all the time as sitting between or sitting really at that intersection between marketing, uh, and deliverability. So what does that actually look like?

Speaker C: I actually had a recent conversation with one of my team members and I was just saying that deliverability sits at two things. It's first a tech issue, so you have to have your tech right, but then it's a strategy issue because deliverability touches every single aspect of your email. From your traffic coming in, your list segmentation, how you set up your email, htmls matter, your URLs matter. All of that is impacted by deliverability, um, or it impacts deliverability. Um, and right now the one thing I do want people to understand is that you don't control deliverability. The mailbox provider does because they've set their standard and filters and then your subscriber does on the other end. You're basically the middle person trying to appease the mailbox providers, make sure you're in good standing with them, but also delivering that strategy that keeps your subscribers engaged enough to keep your email relevant and inboxing and to that role of

Speaker A: you as the middle person. I think we all know that one of the tensions that marketers are constantly struggling with is how to balance revenue goals on the one side with best practice requirements on the other. How often do you find yourself having to explain the why behind the deliverability recommendations? You know, initially might even feel a bit, bit restrictive, but there's good reasons for them.

Speaker C: So if we're talking about like deliver the deliverability world and the marketing world, when this rev, when revenue comes into play, I see as you know, our deliverability space can be rigid. And marketers don't like rigid, they like very loose. So we're trying to like, you know, I always say, um, I'm like, I push the boundaries enough, um, that you make the maximum amount of revenue, but I keep you safe enough that you never lend in spam. So we're kind of like, it's like a tug of war. Like you're just pushing and pulling and making sure that. Are we giving our clients what they need at maximum capacity with their emails, um, to deliver the revenue? But are we also being compliant with the deliverability practices that we need in place? Um, most of them, it's hard, it's hard to explain how we do it because at the end of the day they kind of just give up and give us the reign to do it. Um, my goal when I come in to explain deliverability is I can get you. There's two scenarios that come in our way. Um, either their reputation is down. So like their domain reputation, we can fix that easily, um, depending on the damage, but we can get them up between like 30 and 90 days to a good reputation. Um, and the second one is most people come into deliverability issues because of their list management. Let me just put it that way. List management is the issue with a lot of businesses. They're either over segmenting or under segmenting. So when we come in we clean the system correctly. So we are removing the real invalid, um, lists and we are expanding their actual engagers that they've been missing out for so long. So when we do those first couple sends the revenue kind of skyrockets for them and they're like what, what are you guys doing? Is it, did we change the template? Did we change the language? And I'm like, no, we, we reached more people in their inbox. And that's the whole goal when we

Speaker B: um, initially met to kind of talk about this. Simplifying the scary. We, we identified a couple of areas that they are just so they can be to new marketers or even seasoned marketers. Really complicated, uh, intricate, freaky. So we're going to break those down and we're going to try to simplify them right, make them a little bit more accessible for everybody today. And we're going to start with the more technical end of things and that is dmarc. Starting with an acronym. DMARC is kind uh, of comes, I mean when we talk about things that are difficult to kind of Internalize and deep reporting. This is one of the things that marketers I think tend to get stuck on. So why do you think that DMARC feels so intimidating to marketers and especially maybe smaller senders?

Speaker C: DMARC is scary because it actually requires work. I think that's where the scary comes in because so DMARC is, it's domain based message authentication, reporting and conformance. It is an analytical report that comes through every day almost for um, businesses that tells them what's happening with their domain, who's sending on their domain, you know, are there, you know, shady activity happening. You need to pay attention to does everything look good back? I believe was it 20, 24 they the mailbox providers started enforcing. You needed at least a policy none on DMARC to even inbox that enforcement is actually, we're actually seeing it now in 26. Um, if you don't have a DMARC, you're going straight to spam. Even if you have a DMARC policy, you're not guaranteed the inbox. Uh, they prefer you to be on the quarantine or reject side. DMARC actually monitors your domain reputation and that's not just impacted by your email marketing, it's impacted by every single platform you use. I get emails like why am I getting a DMARC report every day in my email? I'm like, you're supposed to be looking at that also.

Speaker B: Just one.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's just crazy. So it creates like this, I don't understand why I need this and I don't know what I'm doing with these reports. I actually uh, built an analysis, DMARC analysis in my cloud dashboard and I just pop them in there and it just gives me a review. So like that's the great thing about AI is that it simplifies your um, analysis reporting. Like you can just read that real quickly. But the issue is businesses are not monitoring their dmarc and that's what you're supposed to be doing to secure your actual, um, secure your actual, you know, infrastructure and make sure nothing is being spoofed or spammed or um, on your domain's behalf. So yes, it's great to have the policy none. But you're not, you're just, that's just like the scratch of the surface. You need to be um, you need to go deeper and you need to be able to understand who's sending on your platform. And the reason businesses fail at this is because they keep adding tech stacks. This is why we come in as a tech Stack, um, auditors and consultants, because they keep adding tech stacks and when they abandon them or leave them, they don't take them off. They're still on their DNS records. Maybe they never closed them. And so that creates a security issue for you in the future. Um, that's the whole point of dmarc, is to show you, like, are you even using this? Like, remove it if it's not being, um, used. So that's where we kind of struggle with businesses because they think that just having that record there as policy, none is enough. When it's really, that's where you start and you need to move towards actually enforcement. Um, so, yeah, it's not scary, but you need the technical side to understand what's happening.

Speaker A: I think you gave us a great explanation with that previous answer. Um, if you're stripping away all the technical jargon, what should senders actually be looking for? Simple terms in their DMARC reporting.

Speaker C: So what you, what you want to look for is basically who's sending on the behalf of your, um, your domain. That's really what you're looking for. Uh, and it will get flagged for you in the report. Like, I'll tell you that, you know, Klaviyo sending, Shopify, sending, and then like randomly some app that you've never heard of is on there. Or like, you know, you have, I've had a client where they're like, we had a send grid, um, reporting in there and they had no idea where those emails were coming from. And it turned out it was like an old app they were using that was built on SendGrid and it was still sending out a welcome email every time somebody made a donation. Um, so like, we caught that and we were able to, you know, remove it because if you're not, it can be easily spoofed. And um, you know, people can send on your behalf and it still be as legitimate because you have that record there, um, even though you're not using it. So we wanted like to remove and reject anything that's not coming from our specific domain. Um, and then, you know, the, the platforms we're using. So I mean, if you go into, um, if you pull up your DMARC report and like just pop it in, like I said, into AI and be like, just tell me what are you seeing? It will tell you like, these are the platforms are sending from you. It's just to help you flag anything that may be off or maybe you've missed or maybe you've forgotten about.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you recognize all of these platforms should they be sending for you? And is all of your authentication passing where it should be passing? So is that where you would tell, like, uh, for, for a marketer that's just getting started and might be really easily overwhelmed, because DMARC reports can be beefy. Like, especially if you send a lot of mail, you're getting a lot of reporting back. Would you, to simplify that process, recommend that they start leveraging like AI to get visibility without being overwhelmed?

Speaker C: I believe, um, easy. DMARC and other platforms do it for you as well, but you can build your own and make it specific to your needs. Um, but yeah, I mean, it just makes it easier because like you said, it's beefy and it's, it's. I don't know. I'm sure you've opened a DMARC report. We've seen how it looks. It looks like it's like written in hieroglyphics. Like, nobody, like, what am I looking at? Like, that's, that's the whole point. Like, everybody's like, I don't know what I'm looking at even if I open this. And I think this is where AI is really useful to help you analyze and analyze quickly, especially when it's on a daily basis. Um, I believe that somebody should be assigned in the business to at least pop those in weekly and look at them that.

Speaker A: Couldn't, uh, couldn't agree more. When we were prepping for today, you said to us that many email problems are actually infrastructure problems cunningly discussed as marketing problems. So in your opinion, how often does weak authentication end up being the actual hidden root cause of the problem?

Speaker C: I'd say about like 15 to 20% of our businesses are only authentication issues. Um, and those are easily fixable. The reason I say that is because it's just correcting your records. Um, and, and the records have to be put in accurately. And that's another thing. Like, we'll go in there and it's like missing an underscore, missing a dash or a letter somewhere. And it, it literally like, just fix that and you're back in the inbox. So, um, a lot of it is just not understanding authentication. The thing I have actually an issue with ESPs and your domain hosting sites don't tell you anything about that. Um, sometimes they'll verify and be like, it's verified, but it's not, it's not put in correctly. And I think, you know, if you're not trained in the tech aspect, you don't, you don't Know that you're like, I have my spf, I have my dkim, what's going on? And then like somebody who's trained in like pulling it, pulling it in and be like, okay, I see where the issue is. We have the wrong, you know, um, format or the wrong uh, whatever wording in there that all impacts it. Um, so yeah, it's just, it's hard to. Authentication is hard for most businesses and it's usually businesses who are starting out

Speaker B: and I have seen even senders that are on major ESP platforms where this should be out uh, of the box and set up correctly. Uncover. Whoops, we missed something right through.

Speaker C: Looking at DMARC reports, it's usually two types of businesses. One starting out and they don't know how to put their authentications incorrectly. And then ones that are in the growth or big stages that have forgotten about their DNS record, those actually are the biggest problem for us because they have a big security issue if they're not cleaning up their DNS records. So I mean authentication is an issue because people are not educated on them. Um, and that's an easier fix for us than the actual vulnerability strategy side of like the marketing side as well.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, for sure.

Speaker C: That's like more open ended and you know, different when, especially with us senders because you know it's that, that's your opinion, that's their uh, usually reply.

Speaker B: Now speaking of opinions, the next kind of scary item, less maybe hieroglyphic looking but still uh, easy to glaze. Your have your eyes glaze over when you're looking at them. These are bounce logs. Um, and again very technical and also not really. I mean there are certain rules but they're not like 100% standardized across mailbox providers. So we're getting a little bit of opinion depending on or perspective from each mailbox provider. But what so let's move to bounce logs and bounce analysis. What are marketers missing when they don't pay as much attention as they should to their bounce data?

Speaker C: Bounces are probably the hardest thing. No, sorry, not the hardest thing. The most missed metric in an email marketing program. Um, first of all there's hard and soft bounces. Most marketers don't differentiate between two. I've gone into so many accounts where um, businesses will put like start, exclude, like exclude anybody who is bounced since the last email when we are excluding like hundreds of thousands of people and I'm like what are you doing? Um, they also don't realize that m majority of ESPs will suppress their Hard bounces for them. So like, what they're actually doing is they're dealing with the soft bounces and they're eliminating their, basically a lot of their subscribers and revenue drivers because they don't understand. And there's two types of bounces. Let's explain what hard and soft bounce is. So hard bounce is invalid. You know, um, an email that's just recognized as you cannot send to, so that's why they remove it. You know, the ESPs will remove it from your system automatically. Um, soft bounces are emails that may have been sent to a valid email address, but it bounced for some typical reason, like inbox is full or the server is down. Something happened along the way. Um, most ESPs will retry to deliver that, um, email several times. Um, we kind of like want to see it under 5. But like for us, our Klaviyo users, um, I think Klaviyo goes up to seven times before it registers as a hard bounce and moves it to the hard bounce, uh, suppression mark. Um, so the thing that most marketers don't understand is that when you're working inside your, um, espn, your email market marketing program, you're most likely just working. The bounce rates you're seeing are most likely coming from soft bounces. Um, that does not mean you need to go exclude them from your list. You need to start paying attention to what type of soft bounce is. Um, you know, and a lot of ESPs now kind of give you a little rundown of like, okay, here are, here's the log for the day. And there's codes. Of course, um, we can go into the codes, but I think that's a little bit more complicated there. But like you can, I'll tell you like inbox unavailable, unavailable mailbox or um, you know, server down or something happened. Like, I'll give you the explanation and your job is to recognize the pattern versus just doing an overall suppression. Um, you need to understand what's happening with these. Why is that? Why are these soft bounces happening? So just to give you an example, when Yahoo earlier this year, um, you know, they shrunk their mailbox storage, we had a huge bounce rate issue with Yahoo Mailbox, uh, uh, subscribers for a couple of weeks. And marketers, if you don't understand that nuanced, you are just saying, okay, these people are being rejected for a reason. I'm just going to remove them, suppress them. And that impacts your revenue over time. So it's really getting into like the nitty gritty of bounce logs because it's not as easy as like, oh, this person bounced. Let's move them, um, so we can have a clean list. It could be somebody who, you know, um, opens and clicks and converts all the time. They just made it. They had an issue with their Yahoo, you know, and a lot of those accounts kind of got resolved over time because people cleaned up their mailboxes. So, um, this is probably the hardest part of email monitoring for us because it's very tedious and you have to keep at it. Um, which I can understand why marketers don't want to deal with it. They kind of just like, hey, the ASP just tells us remove these and we're just going to remove them.

Speaker A: Um, tedious, but extremely important. And I think you've given us some great insights and suggestions there. We're going to move the conversation on to our next scary topic, tabs placement. A lot of marketers still panic when they land in promotions. Everyone wants to be in primary. Does the industry sometimes misunderst tabs? Misunderstand tabs entirely in your oppression?

Speaker C: Not only misunderstand, they've made a multimillion dollar business out of it, which is very hard to open your social medias all the time and see this marketing tactic, uh, is the issue with this whole thing, I think, I mean, the promotion tab is the inbox. It's not. So what I've seen most, uh, marketers who basically push their inbox placement issue is that, you know, it's, it's primary and then promotion and then spam. And if you're in promotion, you're one step away from being in spam. That's how they explain it. Um, the issue is there is you. Even if you force yourself into the inbox and the primary inbox, you know, by putting in whatever, you know, hidden codes and all this lovely stuff they're doing now, um, at the end of the day, that subscriber will dictate their mailbox. And I think this is where, um, these businesses are paying thousands of dollars to be lied to about inbox placement. Um, um, we've done, I've done tests all over this. Um, it does not impact revenue in the way they say it does. A lot of these inbox placement, I have several clients still using them because I guess to them it's like more of like a safety mindset of like, oh, no, we're, we're in the primary, people are seeing us. But if you only have like a 3 to 5% open rate increase, that's not significant enough for me to Tell to tell me that, you know, um, being in the primary is better than being in promotion. We've also seen forced primary, um, inboxing to lead to a higher spam complaint rate because subscribers didn't ask for your emails to be pushed into their primary, they know it's going to be in promotion. Um, also if you're using a mobile app, it doesn't matter because a lot of people don't even have tabs on their mobile apps. It all shows up in one inbox. So it's, it's, it's this education piece and it's just I've kind of given up on this because people will believe what they want to believe. Um, so I, I don't, I don't force it but I educate around it that like it's not, we're uh, not coming in to fix deliverability so you can land in primary. We're coming in to fix deliverability so you can inbox. So we're removing your subscribers from putting you in spam to the inbox versus moving you from promotion tab to primary because that's their choice where they want to see you.

Speaker B: And even, even in promotions now mailbox providers are increasingly prioritizing relevance and engagement signals. And like that's what we've seen with Gmail relevancy sorting in promotion. So here's the reality, right? You are going to be classified correctly and when you're in, you have to make sure you're relevant and being engaged with. So how should marketers adapt to this new relevancy sorting reality?

Speaker C: They need to work harder on their strategy. Um, that's, that's short term. There's a lot of. So this is the thing with email marketing, the boom that happened between 2020 and maybe 2024, you know, these agencies came up because it's a low barrier entry, um, easy to send out an email, make and make money. The email doesn't have to be great. Um, it's a top of mind channel as well. So like the more you send, I know people don't like to hear this but the more people see you in their inbox, they're more likely to engage with you whether positively or negatively. That's up to you. Um, this is where relevance comes in. Are you sending relevant um, email content to that subscriber? Um, and the issue here come, the issue with a lot of these programs are, is that we treat traffic sources the same. Somebody coming from an ad and social media and a webinar and a giveaway are not the same. People, um, that content needs to be relevant as they trickle down to your main list. And I think that's where we're, you know, relevance is important here because if you're treating somebody who saw a product on your ad and came through an abandoned car the same as somebody who signed up for a giveaway and you know, they're not. Those are two different type of conversion levels.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker C: it's gonna, it's gonna impact their, their behavior towards your emails. So it's important to understand why people are um, basically signing up to your email marketing and how do you create content around that that keeps them engaged? It was Trevor from sendex, I believe I just saw it yesterday. He said the first email, the first email that you send needs to build onto the next one. Engagement has to keep going as you send emails. And I think we've lost that art of how do you keep them coming back? Um, and that, ah, that you know, that requires you to understand your subscribers.

Speaker A: Of course a key part of relevance is segmentation. It's one of those concepts everyone agrees is important, but a lot of brands still struggle to execute it. Well, are there any recommended segmentation approaches that are unexpectedly simple but genuinely effective?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I actually um, I focus more on exclusions versus inclusion segmentations because those are those. It's easier to exclude people from your list than to include. Um, a lot of ESPs kind of have like holes in like the segmentation process. So like you can set it up right, but somebody will like a group of subscribers might leak into that that you don't want, um, getting it. So like we focus more, we educate more and it's easier for our clients to exclude than include. So we'll have several large um, inclusion lists so that they're engaged based on their life cycle or engage buyers or you know, engage based on a product. Uh, those are your inclusions. So like if I want to send an email to everyone on the list because we're making an announcement, we'll add that inclusion. And then the exclusion would be making sure we are removing anybody who is not engaged with our emails. So like we'll create like an engage, like somebody who has not opened or clicked our emails in the last 180 days because we know that's where most people fall off. Um, that's an exclusion. Or somebody who bought in the last seven days. Um, because that's when usually um, the purchase to delivery time, you know, so we'll, we'll take that into account. Like, so we like to create exclusions to Remove people who have already took a behavior on our email versus just like adding more inclusions because you risk more loopholes in that.

Speaker B: So, um, when it comes, I'm smiling because earlier today I was telling Guy, um, about why I should have been explaining excluded, um, from certain email campaigns that I was receiving. So I love the idea of like when it comes to segmentation, looking at exclusion over inclusion to create sort of more refined.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's easier to think about too. Like our clients love this method because we're just, uh, we're just thinking about who shouldn't get this email versus who should because then it gets complicated. Right? So you get, you can get very,

Speaker B: you end up back in the old batch and blast situation

Speaker C: and I mean impacts your deliverability. Right? Because you are only sending to the group, you are excluding the people who shouldn't get this and you're sending to the group that should get this. So our delivery, our metrics look much better, much healthier and our volume, you know, stays consistent there. So we focus on exclusion versus inclusion because that's kind of like our little secret method. I mean we do have, we also have like spam trap programs that we do, um, to basically clean out your list before it even comes into your database. Um, that's important. Monitoring traffic at the source. A lot of people don't monitor their bounce rates. There are spam complaints and you have the highest bounce and spam complaints at the traffic source. So when somebody sign up, so welcome series are bought from you. If you're using like TikTok shop, people aren't excluding those. And you are the issue with like these marketplaces, yes, they become hard bounces, but you, you are sending a first email to them and that builds up over time. So you know, we've seen like logs with like 50% bounce rates because they're sending to so many TikTok shop. TikTok shop buyers, but we don't have their email. But it's still a hard bounce and it's still impacting that deliverability because you're sending to an invalid email. So, um, creating a cleanup process on the first touch point is important too.

Speaker B: Now that you've brought TikTok in some way, shape or form into the conversation, I feel like you've introduced a perfect segue to our last potentially scary item and another one, and one you cannot exclude, we are going to have to pay attention to it. That is writing for AI. So one of the newer topics that you've been exploring is how, how do you do this how do you write for AI? And as mailbox providers increasingly use AI driven filtering uh, into their relevance models and display functionality, do you think marketers need to be thinking differently about how they structure and write emails?

Speaker C: So typically we work with a lot of D2C E comms, uh, businesses and a lot of theirs are image heavy. One thing we, we emphasize and I actually oversee this because it's so important and many don't do it is if you're going to use images you need very good alt text behind those images. Um, most do not have it. Um to this day like we, I have clients, I'm like hey you're still not adding it. Um, and you know it's even their text base is an image and I don't find that necessary. Um, I actually am, I'm pretty fond of building within the builders of the ESPs. I don't know why everybody hates them but I don't. Um, so like when we take on clients we actually shift them from an old image. I'm like if there's text, we're writing in text because that's important to your, to the AI now because they're scanning your emails and telling subscriber what's inside that email. And if you only have images it's going to just say this was sat from here. Here's their social media, here's where you unsubscribe. I don't know if you've seen that but like the email summarized as all the images are not there and it's just telling you logo unsubscribe here. Um, which you know sucks for a lot of, you know it sucks when you build something great and then nothing you know comes of it. So um, I try to focus on if it's text based, we add text based. My, my rule of creating emails is if the image can add to the conversation but it should not take away from it. I love anything you say in that image or that image headline should be reiterated in text form in that email. It's not that hard. Um, I know people love on brand and visuals and stuff like that. Leave that for your landing pages. I don't know, leave it for your social media. Do something a little different. Our clients who have the simplest emails do the best because first of all it's clean. The HTML, the HTML is clean, it passes spam filters quickly. Second of all it's easy to read and scan. Um, and it's, it's just, it's a clear over clever kind of concept. I know there's you know, there's the argument of like, you can be clever, yes, you can be clever, but the, the message has to come through and AI is not any different. It's reading it like a subscriber would read it. Who has images turned off if you

Speaker B: don't, he's not looking at that intent. Right. Simplicity does rule.

Speaker C: When I the AI, I mean it is and email. At the end of the day, email is a calm channel. I'll die on this hill. It's a medium. You are not supposed to leave your subscriber, especially if you're using it for marketing. It should not be where the subscriber stops. It's a vehicle to move them to the action that you want them to take. And that should happen outside of the email. Um, especially now with segmentations where opens and clicks are not even reliable anymore because again AI and machine opens and bots, um, you do need that extra touch point outside the email to really understand what your subscriber is even doing. Uh, so yeah, it kind of goes back to the whole segmentation and relevance.

Speaker A: Israel, uh, this has been such a great conversation, we need to start wrapping it up now. But if you had to finish up with one key piece of advice for our listeners that would meaningfully improve their performance and deliverability, what would you go for?

Speaker C: The one advice I want listeners to know is that deliverability lives inside of every piece of your email marketing. So when you are, when you are building your program, your infrastructure, even your emails always ask how does this impact m my impact me getting into the inbox and how does it impact the subscribers reaction? Um, I think that's as simple as it is. If you, if you send good, relevant emails, you should be good. That's, that's really where it is. Um, but also on the other side is you should also clean and maintain a good system to send those really good emails. So I mean it's really hard to put it to one, but again, deliverability touches everything.

Speaker B: I think pretty good takeaway. Always deliverability on the brain. Isra, thank you so much for joining us today and making some email marketing scarier concepts feel a whole lot more approachable. Uh, if our listeners want to reach out to you, what's the best way that they can?

Speaker C: I'm on LinkedIn, that's my only social platform I'm on, so you can join me there with my shenanigans. I'm trying to simplify deliverability for the everyday user there so you um, can follow me there and if you want to reach out. Uh, thewinbox.com we have a contact us, uh, if you want to get an audit done or uh, inquire about our services, you can submit a form there.

Speaker B: Amazing. And for our listeners, be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes. And of course, don't Forget to visit senderscore.org for more resources to help you become a stronger sender.

Speaker A: That's right. And just one final word. Uh, Danielle and I are always really proud of our great guests on, um, Email After Hours. We're always looking out for new guests to feature on future episodes too. So if any of you out there are listening and you'd like to join us for an upcoming episode, drop a comment, ping us on LinkedIn, fill out the guest form linked in the show notes and we'd love to hear for you. Thanks for listening today. We'll see you again in two weeks time. Bye. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And don't Forget to visit sendascore.com for loads more great resources to help you become a stronger sender.

Speaker B: Uh, to all you sleepless senders out there, thank you for joining us after Hours and see you next time.