Okay, Chris, welcome to the podcast. Um, Chris, you're the founder of Audience Bridge, and um, just tell tell me more about what you do. And today, we're going to talk a lot about email deliverability, inbox placement, email engagement. These are super important topics that we haven't really covered in depth before because if your emails aren't landing in the inbox or in the right spot in the inbox, you know, nothing really else nothing else matters when it comes to email marketing newsletters, right? So, you have to get that foundation in place first and we're going to dive into that deep today. So, um, tell us what's up and what you do. Cool. Thanks, Matt, for having me. So, Chris McCuel, uh, founder of Audience Bridge, and we have a strong focus on email deliverability, obviously, uh, getting the emails in the inbox, um, as well as helping people get more engagement on their newsletters, which helps inboxing and helps grow their lists, um, and helping folks on that. And we're working on building tools and a SAS product as well tied behind that for email deliverability to help people get more insights than they normally would probably from the norm the normal ESPs that are out there. kind of giving them, you know, tips and things of of what to look out for, when things they need to be concerned about, you know, any flags that might be happening, give them notifications so that they can fix it before it becomes a big issue. So, that's something that we're looking to roll out here in 2026. Sounds good. Okay. Maybe let's start with the the basics and start from the beginning. I want to get into advanced stuff. We want to talk about, you know, how people are scaling, you know, newsletters and email lists to hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers and how that affects deliverability and growth. But we'll start with the foundation. So deliverability is on everybody's mind, but you know, a lot of people just don't understand how it works. Maybe could we start with like a lot of people think like which email service provider they select is really important and it definitely matters. It's not the only factor, but maybe just start off how you think about that, like you know, how should people think about selecting ESP to work with? There's a lot of options out there, you know, like Mailchimp, Behive, HubSpot, ConvertKit, the list goes on. So, like how do you approach that with clients and like how much does that even matter? Yeah. So, what I would say to begin with the ESP you're using really not going to be the big factor in deliverability in general. Surely whichever kind of product user interface you like using. Most of the ESPs nowadays have all the functionality, all the deliverability that you need. A lot of people don't probably understand or know is that behind all these ESPs, a lot of them. They're all using the same MTAs or the same sending infrastructure. So they might be tied to like a send grid or a mail gun or Amazon SCES which are all basically simple way of explaining it. It's the system that gets all these emails that need to be sent out and actually sends them to where they need to go. Um and they're all using the same ones. So you could be on say Beehive and then you're sending on the same infrastructure that you're sending on you know uh say campaigner. I don't know if they both use both use uh sign grid or not, but you know, just as an example. So, it's not really as far as deliverability goes. The deliverability is going to really be tied to your domain reputation and how well you're managing your list. the the technical setup and the technical part of email deliverability isn't as big of concern because all these ESPs have their stuff in order and when they're onboarding you or you're getting your stuff set up, they have everything where you're getting all your records put in place, your DKIMS, your demarks, your SPF records, they make you set that up so that you can mail because nowadays if those aren't set up, you're not delivering an email. You know, last uh it's a little over a year now, but Google and Yahoo passed uh their new requirements. Microsoft just passed the requirements this year on it. So if you don't have those things set up properly, you're you're not your email is going to bounce automatically. So you don't really have to worry about the technical side of emailing um because that's all taken care of by an ESP ESP use. Tell us about there's there's a lot of things to break down on what you just said, but maybe we'll just start with domains. And so this is again this is the more basic part but a lot of people when they first start they send from a I believe we call it a shared sending domain. So you're sending from you know matt.behive.com or matt.substack.com. You're sending from that that email service provider shared sending domain or you could choose the option to set up a custom domain. So it's you know growletter.com or or chris.com whatever it might be. So just tell us like how that works and what people should do. Should they have a custom domain from day one? Is it okay to use a sending shared sending domain? How do you think about that? It's a good question. So, I prefer always having my own custom domain just because if your plan is to scale or grow your list, eventually you're going to want to be on your own custom domain anyways. And if you start later, then you have to build that domain reputation up again. Um, you know, there's way they they call, you know, the smart warm-ups or whatever where they're sending some of it through your domain versus the other one to try to get it back, but I'd like in the beginning having it there so you don't have to worry about it later. You're you're it's easier to grow your reputation from zero to really good, then move a bunch of traffic over and start off with good on a new domain. It's it's a lot harder. So, if you're planning on growing, then you might as well get a custom domain if you can afford it. you know, some of them aren't. I mean, it's not that expensive to do, especially if you're thinking about this being a business for you. Um, so I highly recommend using a custom domain. Share domains have, you know, good uh use cases because you're sharing the domain reputation of say Beehive that's already there. So, you will have deliverability. So, if you're moving, you know, say you have a list and you move it over there from somewhere else and you didn't have a uh a domain already established, you know, you're using another shared domain, you probably want to start in their shared domain so you don't lose any deliverability and then slowly move over to that custom domain. But if you're going to start from scratch, you have the opportunity to do a custom domain. I I highly recommend doing that. Yeah. And I think the the key difference is when you're on a shared domain, you're sharing that domain in the reputation of it with everybody else who uses Substack Beehive, ConvertKirk, whatever it might be, right? And some people that send from that platform might have a great reputation. Some people might have bad reputation and be doing spammy things. When you're on your own custom domain, you you control your reputation based off of, you know, what you send, who you add to your list, other factors, that type of stuff. If if people are going to go set up a custom domain, whether it's from day one or or maybe they're just watching this now, they already have a list of thousands of people. What are like some are there things they need to know to set that up or is it pretty straightforward? Like are there things they have to have in place to make sure that's set up correctly that people should know about? It's pretty straightforward. You know, like I said, your ESP is going to direct you on how to do that. They usually have step-by-step instructions or walkthroughs. You're going to have to go to wherever you have your domain registered. It's called the registar. A lot of people use GoDaddy. Um, you know, could be anywhere else, but you basically got to go in there and update your DNS records, which is what you know, all the information behind a domain, you know, where the emails come from, where where to go to get to the website, the IP addresses for all the servers that are kind of attached to it, any policies that are in place for security or sending emails, it's all in your DNS records. So, you would have to go there and update it. Some people might not be comfortable uh making updates like that. So, they might want to get someone who can update the DNS for them if they're not comfortable doing that. But, it's pretty straightforward. It's not not that difficult to do. I do want to mention uh just back what you said previously about the the shared domains is it's it's very important to understand that yes the shared domains you're sharing across all the people using it and there are some bad actors that could take over and a lot of times they look for for those kind of opportunities to where you know even the you know for beehive they see a new hot platform there's tons of people on it um a lot of people are using it joining it and and you They think it's they can kind of get in there with their shady practices and sending some some questionable stuff and stuff like that can can hurt the the reputation and platform and get shut down. I mean, this happened uh I remember this happening a few years back on like Campaigner um on their shared IP infrastructure on one of their shared pools or whatever and and it took down a lot of good senders for for a while because it was all shared. So, you just got to look look out for that. And that's another reason why if you're on your own custom domain and we can get into layer down about dedicated or shared IPs, the more you have control, the more you have to worry about anyone else, you just worry about what you guys are doing, what your sending practices are. Um, and you're going to be better off following. And what about you, some people just don't aren't familiar with this stuff. So demark, spiff, like the requirements to send. Can you just tell us like what those mean and what people need to worry about when it comes to those things or do they need to set them up themselves? Do they need to get So, so your your Well, I guess we can start with DKIM is is basically like a I know how in layman's term it's kind of like a security key, right? That you're using that's saying that this is verified to send from here. If not, if you're not seeing this, then don't accept those emails. So, it's kind of like a security link or, you know, security thing for for the email deliverability. Your SPF record is is basically saying what domains you would like to have delivered from. So it'd be like you're allowed to accept emails sent from Gmail because I have a Gmail. I'm sent from my Gmail apps thing. You can accept emails from Beehive. If I'm sending Beehive or Send Grid. So if they see an email come from another provider like Mail Gun, they won't accept it because it's not on this preferred sender list you can call it. And then the demark is basically telling you what to do with emails. And you can have settings as far as don't do anything. You can quarantine them or just block them in general. And there's some reporting settings there. But those are the three main uh policies that are that are established right now. Yeah. And if you're sending from a custom domain on something like B or ConvertKit or Mailchimp, will they set that up for you or do people need to set them up that themselves? They will. People have to set them up theirelves as far as uh kind of like I explained before, they just got to update the DNS record. So they'd go in there, they say, "I want to send from, you know, say Beehive, select custom domain." They'll say, "What do you want to send from?" You put mattry.com and that's going to be the the domain you're sending from. And then they have a thing where it says verify basically your domain. You click that and they'll give you the records of what you have to update inside of GoDaddyy's DNS. You just go there. they're going to be text records or uh a CNAME and stuff like that. They walk you through it and what you're supposed to select. It's pretty straightforward and easy to do. Okay. Yeah. So, BI is going to help folks do that through when you select the custom domain or whatever you use should help you do that. If um if people are having issues, is there like any there's your blog and stuff. Are there any resources that people should check out if they didn't set these up correctly or if they're confused about setting up? Yeah, they can go to uh my blog on uh audiencebridge.io and uh I got I got different newsletters that were sent out on this specific topics. Uh I also have uh videos on YouTube. You look audience bridge 2. There's one for SPF. There's one for DKIM. Uh there's one for Demark as well. So okay, I'll find those afterwards and we'll we'll link those three below because I that's one where people a lot of it's not rocket science, but a lot of people just get caught up there. Let's let's talk about um this won't be relevant to everybody but shared IPs versus dedicated IPs. Just tell us like what that is. You know, almost everybody is sending from a shared IP even if they have a huge email list. Uh tell us like what that is and then when or even if people should ever think about getting a dedicated IP to send from. Yeah. So uh shared IP let's just call let's just know what an IP is for people that might an IP is just basically the location of a server it's identifying server just like your address at your home right my you know my address going up 1721 Corandis road your IP would be 168.24.125 2.4.125 that's the actual location of where emails are being sent from uh the server. So when you're talking about shared versus dedicated IP on a shared IP that means multiple people are sending from that one IP address. You could have 100 people 10 people 5,000 people all sending from this one IP address. On a dedicated it's solely for that person who's using it there. it can get more complicated because I can have a dedicated IP that I purchased for just me but then maybe I'm sending three different domains on it, right? So there's there's layers of shared and what people call dedicated but at the basic level a shared IP you can think of multiple people from different uh newsletters, emails, businesses sending from it and then a dedicated is just one person, one company sending from it. So the benefit of a shared IP infrastructure is that like we talked about before, you're sharing the reputation across everything that's being sent. So when you're sharing that, if one person tries to mess it up, it's not going to hurt the deliverability as much as if it was just one person, something happened on the on the dedicated IP. So that's good on the sh that's the the benefit of the shared. So a lot of people when they're getting started or they're you know they they're they haven't or they're moving a list over they start in shared because they want the reputation where it is and each IP and based on uh we'll call the ISP which is the inbox service provider Gmail Yahoo they're going to accept and this is no one knows exactly how much what the reasons are um but each IP address is going to allow a certain amount of volume to come through. So you might have an IP address that allows 5 million emails to come through an hour. They might have another one that allows a thousand to come through. It's all based on how long those ISPs been around, how much they've been sending over time, what's the quality of all the traffic going on there. So they're all different. So if you're going to a shared IP that's been there for a while, it's got good reputation. So you know you're going to be able to send and deliver emails there. Where if it's dedicated, you kind of have to build that reputation up on that dedicated IP slowly over time. We can't just get on a dedicated IP and then boom, you're sending a million emails a day. It's not going to happen. You slowly got to warm it up and build that reputation where on shared you have the ability to start sending um you know decent volume or normal volume without having any issues delivering right off the bat. The problem with the shared is like I said, you know, you're sharing it. So if there's one really big person on there and they do something bad, it could hurt the deliverability for everybody in that IP block or the IP, they call them IP pools because there be multiple IPs in a in a pool just so more volume can go out. And then as far as like when you may want to go to dedicated, you know, I know some people like you said that they've always been on shared and they've never gotten off. I know some people that don't like shared, they've been on dedicated, never gotten off. It's really going to be tied to who are you using and which ESP you're on. If you're on a shared IP in infrastructure, you know, for example, I could say like Beehive once you get to a certain size of list and sending volume, they may ask you to go on your own dedicated IP because they don't want you to, you know, you might you might start making up like 20% of the volume on on a shared IP and then to them it's probably too risky for something to happen because then it'll hurt everyone else in that the deliverability for everyone else in that pool. So like we we want to move you on your own thing over here. you might not have a choice of going to dedicated. Sometimes ESP just directs you that way. Yeah. And mo most people most people don't ever move to a dedicated IP. It's not really as high a priority as all the other things we'll talk about today in the custom domain. But usually when people do, it's whether they're forced to or they have in like usually the hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they're sending more than once a week on average. Is that typically what you see? Yeah. Yeah, I mean these I'm talking I'm talking about real high volume bottom senders, you know, people sending daily, you know, millions a day, you know, they're a lot of them are moving on onto uh dedicated IPs because they there's no shared IPs that can hold them. Yeah. So, it's just not relevant for everybody, but just good to explain what it is because hopefully if you're if you're doing well, you'll run into that problem eventually. Yep. Okay. What are um you know for some like a lot of the audience you know has a like a very small list or no list but then there's a big chunk of people who are probably in like the email list of 5,000 to 50,000 subscribers. Like what are the main things they should be thinking about when it comes to like setting up their deliverability for success but also improving their deliverability? Like what are the factors that affect this? If there's, you know, three, five, six things they should be looking at in a monthly basis, what are what are those things? Yeah. So the first thing that I preach and tell everybody and it's one of the main things I always say is everyone needs to have what I call a base sending segment. And this segment is your is your segment that you're sending all your emails to no matter what. It's consists of usually three three factors. One is has anyone clicked in a certain amount of time? Has anyone opened in a certain amount of time? or has someone recently subscribed? So, what that means is basically like an example would be what I call a 6030 for instance and we'll look at this as as like a you know daily sender or you know five times during the week um more of like a daily newsletter. So, if someone's clicked in the last 60 days, they're in the bucket of people you're going to send to every every time. If they've opened in the last 30 days, you're also going to send to them. So they might have they might have not opened but they clicked 35 days ago. You're still sending to those people. Yeah. This is an or function. So people that have at least or any of these three criteria you're going to send to them. They don't have to meet all of them. They just have to have at least one. Correct. Correct. Um and then the other one is subscribed. You know, have they subscribed in the last 15 days? You know, people have their own criteria uh their own windows of some people are tighter. They're like, I want to someone who's click in 30 days, open 15, add it in 10 just cuz they send more frequent. So, it's all depends on how often you're sending, the frequency of sends, are you sending multiple times a day based on what your criteria goes. So, it can get really advanced. That's really where I come in with a lot of my my bigger clients and enterprise clients of of the deliverability because there's more facets to it. They're sending out lots of volumes. They're doing triggered sends, all this other stuffs that can affect deliverability. Um, so the segmentation can get more advanced, but starting off, you should always have a base sending segment of people that are opening or clicking or have been recently added. And if you have that, you're going to keep your deliverability premium as you grow. Um, you shouldn't have any issues for the most part. And then what it does is if people fall off that list first, if they people have subscribed and they haven't engaged at all, which means they haven't even opened after whatever your your activation window is, you move those people off to the side and you might send them a final, you know, one final email to try to get them to engage. And if not, just get rid of them because they're not doing anything for you. You know, you've given them plenty of opportunities. Let's um let me just touch on that real quick. So, we're basically sending to our base sending segment, which is essentially active subscribers. And then if someone doesn't um open, let's say within 30 days, that's usually a typical time period, then we're going to send them, you know, a win back email or a re-engagement email to try and get them to open and click again. And if they don't do that after one or two re-engagement emails, then we're going to stop sending to them or even potentially remove them from the list depending on how people might approach it. Yeah, over time they might uh remove them. I I like to keep the openers on there and attempt to re-engage them over time uh at different periods. Give them a longer uh leeway since at one point they were engaged. Um, never remove clickers ever. Um, unless you know that they're bots and they're fake, then you want to get rid of those people. The ones that I like to get rid of immediately are the non-engagers, people that have never opened. So, if you've sent to them 15 times and they've never opened an email or 30 times, you know, I don't know, whatever your window is, they're not going to open on 31. They're not going to open on 32. They haven't opened. They subscribe to your thing to your newsletter and they then they're either it's either a bad email address, it's a throwaway email address or their second, third, or fourth email address that they don't even monitor. So, it's just it's not adding any value. the more that pocket of people that are not engaged build up, the less your engagement metrics to the ISPs, the more they get affected, the less uh, you know, click-through rates you're getting, the less open rates because of it will hurt your deliverability. So, I like to just delete them because well, couple factors. One is a lot of these ESPs charge you for contacts, subscribers. So, you're going to just have a, you know, once you get to 100,000 people, if 30,000 people have never opened, you're paying for 30,000 people on your list. That could be saving you hundreds of dollars, you know, a month. Uh, maybe a thousand. I don't know. Everyone has different pricing. And then on top of that, I've done it, I've been doing this for a long time, and I've done it numerous times where I've accidentally sent to the entire list. I think everyone who sent emails has accidentally done that. And by removing them, at least you're you're you're sending only to your engaged people or your dormant people that at one point were engaged sometimes. So it won't be as bad as if you sent to everyone with all these non-engaged people. So I like to remove them for that reason. Yeah. And I think um one thing to just underscore is if so if you sent someone usually between 15 to 20 emails and they haven't opened any of them, the odds of them opening after that are near zero, right? And and a lot of people they just think like I still got a shot with those people, right? When what you have to realize is there's no shot. And by continuing to send to them, you're hurting yourself and you're hurting your deliverability with all the people that are opening and clicking your emails. Yeah. And I think a lot of people just don't realize that. Yeah. They just get everyone everyone gets too caught up with the uh vanity metrics. You know, how big is your list size? And then they don't, you know, they think that's more important. But, you know, I've seen people with 10,000 list, right? put their their open rates only 20%. And then so basically 2,000 people and then they cut the list to 5,000 because 5,000 people weren't engaging or doing anything and now their open rates are at 50%. So they're getting actually 2500 opens. So 500 more opens and more clicks than they were getting when they were sending to the whole list because their engagement goes up, inboxing goes up, which means more people are seeing it, more opportunities open, click. Um, that's what people don't understand, especially when it comes to list growth. They want to grow, grow, grow, grow grow. And if they're not keeping their list tight enough as they grow, the worst thing that happen is you lose a little bit of deliverability. Now, you're paying to acquire all these customers or you're working your ass up to, you know, organically build them through all the stuff you're doing. And then it's going to the spam and they have zero chance to even you have zero chance to engage them because they're not even seeing your email. So you're wasting all that money and that hard work where if you kept it tighter, you would have more people that are engaging, activating, and then, you know, it's going to be better off for you, you know. And I think I see you I I get your emails all the time. I think you do a good job of, you know, you send a lot. Uh I think you're very um uh what's the word? What do you preach? Consistent or I don't know if it's consistent. consistent like uh a salesy I guess you could say. Um on some of your emails, you're trying to get the the action or the thing you want and if people aren't interested, they're just going to subscribe. You're not important is you're not worried about losing those subscribers because they were never going to in the long run benefit you or your business or whatever because they just weren't your perfect subscriber that it's not really what they were looking for. So yeah, I would rather you'd rather get those people off the list than have them not adding value. People who aren't clicking, you're not making money. especially if you're a newsletter. Um, not not like a B2B, more of a or a bisop type of of email. If you're just your normal newsletter like a morning brew, the hustle or any of these, hustle is a little different now since they got bought by HubSpot. But, you know, they they're not making money unless people are clicking on ads because then advertisers aren't going to be happy. So, yeah, it's like unsubscribes aren't necessarily a bad thing. You know, removing dead subscribers who never opened from your list isn't a bad thing. It's just like a natural normal thing because people who unsubscribed weren't going to buy anything and in the vast majority of cases. And then people you remove or who unsubscribe weren't going to click ads. And people think like the total list size matters when it comes to like what ad rate they charge for newsletter sponsorships, but really all that matters is how many how many clicks you're getting, how much traffic you're driving, the quality of that traffic, and and how they convert downfunnel to that sponsor or advertiser. The total list size doesn't matter. And so by doing these things we're talking about, you're actually going to get sponsors better results, right? The sophisticated sponsors who have a lot of big budget don't care about the vanity metrics. No, I mean if it if it doesn't if it doesn't back out for them, they're not going to, you know, yeah, you got them one time maybe, but they're not going to reby. You can, you know, uh at one point I remember uh me and a business partner years ago, we were selling uh newsletters at a, you know, it wasn't even that expensive, but like a $10 CPM rate. And over time, I'm like, you know, I don't I I think that's just probably too much. I it it seems like you know you start getting into the whole like um make goods like oh it didn't work out for me so we got to send again. So in the end after we did all of our calculation they're like you know what this is more like a $5 CPM for for for for this newsletter. So we started selling a $5 CPM you know and they kept booked full the whole time instead of having to you know we were just overselling it. So the CPM rate isn't really can't just count count it on on the list size. It's got to be the on the performance. Yeah. Most advertisers, they just like when they look at your media kit, it's like they they look at, you know, list size, open rate, all that stuff. But they're really just looking at like ad clicks. Like that's the only metric they really care about. And they look at who's in your audience and your survey data, that type of stuff. And then that's how they make the initial decision. And then the decisions to renew are all based off of performance. And so no one cares about all all the other stuff. At least maybe that was true a couple years ago when there's a lot more brand advertisers and there's more marketers throwing money around when we had zero interest rates, but it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. So just maybe let me tell you what I do and like you can critique if this is like good practice or not. So I send to a base sending segment. I learned that from you. Oftentimes I'll make it more broad than what you described, you know. So instead of, you know, at least one click in the past 60 days, maybe I'll go 90 days. Maybe I'll expand the open rate window, the open window to 60 days, expand the sign up window to 30 days. And often time, I don't know if you do this, but I'll I'll like depending on my deliverability and engagement, I'll make that um base setting segment a little bit bigger or I'll dial it back and be more conservative depending on how things are going. Is that like a common thing people do? Yeah, that's that's that's the correct strategy. So, as far as your you're extending out your segment, that's probably normal. I mean, you're not sending daily. Um, so, uh, when I was talking about mine, mine's was more daily. Like I think my audience bridge newsletter is at a I think it's 120, 90, 60 because it's only once a week. So, I'm giving them six times to open, right? Yeah. So, you got to tie in your base sending segment with with the frequency of your sends. So, yeah. And then as far as what you were saying is is that's that's how you manage deliverability, right? So, a lot of times if you have your base sending segment over time, no matter what happens, as your list grows, your open rates and your click rates are going to kind of fluctuate with the size. It's going to be hard to ever keep like a super like say you're at 50% open rate, you know, consistently at at a list of like 20,000. If you go to 50,000 and even even if you're keeping that same base sending segment, your open rates might drop just because someone might have opened one time but they're not consistent openers. You know, whatever the reasons are, it varies. So your deliverability, your inboxing can actually go down a little bit. So then that's like you're saying, you would want to tighten up. So instead of doing your your 90 6030, you you might go to 6030 15 or something, whatever that number is to see the engagement go up, get more inboxing. And then you might stay there or you might increase it once it looks good and and and and then try to get more people back engaged. And then if it's things are looking really bad for whatever reason because your your open rate you see them drop to like 30% or something then there's probably a deliverability issues which there's a lot of different more advanced techniques you can get into to analyze what's happening but then you're going to want to tighten up to only send to most recent people. I like why are you going to add people on there that haven't clicked in 60 days? Right? The chances of them clicking on 61 days I don't know. They're probably not if they're not getting their inbox they don't care anymore right now. So they not if it's not getting their inbox, they try to get it back in the inbox by condensing getting more engagement signals to the ISPs. So they start putting a higher percentage of your your emails in the inbox. So based on how you're seeing your metrics is is how you have to kind of manage your your your window of engagement. And what I like to tell people is I don't really you like, oh, what's a good open rate? There's no necessarily good open rate. Uh, one because all the ESPs track it differently. Some some might get rid of the MPPP, some don't, you know. So, you don't really know what the the the actual open rates is with all these bots and security uh scanning uh, you know, things and and everything that's happening. So, I don't even care about open rates anymore. Uh, only thing I use open rates for is to create a baseline for my deliverability reporting. So, I know that if I'm at 40% consistently, then that's my baseline. And then if I see a drop, I know something happened. And then I can diagnose what happened and go there. But to say that 40% is good or bad. It's different in every niche. It's different for for, you know, like I said, the ESPs. So, don't weigh too heavily on the open rate. just learn what is good for your list and then use that to monitor if you're having a deliverability issue. And uh for those who don't know, MP is mail privacy protection. I don't know if we have time to get into that, but I just want to mention the acronym. And then the other things I do and again I just want to get your critique on all this. So I'll walk you through all of it real quick. So I exclude uh bounces. So one or more bounces like I don't have a segment. I don't send to those. So I'm just sending my base send uh for my weekly newsletter. If I'm sending a marketing email, I will send that to a even smaller segment that I feel is more targeted and most relevant for that marketing email. I rarely send marketing emails to the entire base sending segment. After 30 days of zero opens and zero clicks, I'll send one re-engagement email. I think one is all that's needed. And then I forget because this I don't do this as often, but after like someone's been on the list for I think 90 days or something and and received let's say 20 emails and they never opened any of them, I will I'll remove them from the list. Um, but yeah, like I want to walk you through what I do just so you can critique it and also so kind of people can see an example who are listening. What do you think? Yeah. No, I think it it it makes sense. The one thing that you got to be careful is is is those balances. Balances are a funny thing again because deliverability things I was saying especially on shared IP infrastructure or other stuff. So for example, uh I give you a pro example right now. I reached out to behive because my list not not a super large list of that's for audience bridge. I was seeing a bunch of deferrals going to Yahoo domains. And I don't have a ton of Yahoo on the list, but for whatever reason, like I send it at 11:00 a.m. It didn't hit my seed AOL address. AOL is also Yahoo if people are confused why I said Yahoo and AOL. And I it didn't hit my inbox till 11:00 p.m. So I I and then I looked at another uh Yahoo address that was on the list and I could see that when I look at their history, you can see deferral, deferral, deferral. So a bounce means that it was a bounce means that it's sent and the inbox provider is saying we're not accepting it right now. They're going to give you a response back whether it's this email doesn't exist. You know uh we think that this content or something might be spam. Uh too much volumes coming from an IP address. Whatever the reason are, they have a bunch of different reasons that they they could send back. And then usually your ESP is going to be trying to send it back if it wasn't like an invalid uh response over time. So I think they I think behive ended up trying to send it back, you know, 12 times throughout the day. So that's 12 bounces and finally on the 13th it got through. So what's the reason for that? You know, is it just too much too much volume going out in those IP address shared cool we were talking about during that time at that one point? But with your bounce segment, I think you said if the if you see that they bounced once, that doesn't mean it didn't deliver. So, I'd be careful with taking out all bounces because they just might have been a temporary deferral and then you'd go back. So a couple things you can look at and that's also the problem with the when you're working with ESPs you don't get the granularity that you would when you're when you're doing like enterprise level deliverability or you're seeing stuff uh from the actual MTAs or or the you know send grid the SMTP writers send grids or mail guns where you can actually see all this data under reporting like for Gmail for instance you'll get a a common balance will be uh mailbox is full storage is full, which means they've had so many emails or or whatever or they have a paid account and they haven't paid or or whatever the reason is. So, it's bouncing because of that. Now, a lot of times, you know, it could be just an email they don't monitor anymore and they they don't care about. So, yeah, over time you you should stop sending to them, but sometimes it gets fixed. they either pay their thing or they uh they clean up their inbox, whatever, because they just weren't using it for however long. So, there's more advanced stuff. It's it's it's it's too much for like normal regular newsletter operators to worry about because it's gets very complicated. If you don't have a very large list, it's going to be a small percentage anyways. But, if you're not there's I'm just trying to explain there's different things for bounces that could be happening. That doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily mean that you should just exclude bounce. Yeah, because I wasn't sure if that was good to exclude or not. And and luckily that that segment is like 600 people out of, you know, 55,000. So it hasn't been like a big problem. So would you say if I just, you know, send the base setting segment, don't exclude bounces, you don't think that's going to negative negatively affect my deliverability? Probably won't. What I would say is I'd go ahead and spot check uh those bounces. See the se look at the segment of the bounces and click on a couple email addresses. look at the history of what what was happening and it should show that it was deferral, balance, whatever. And then look to see if it end up hitting delivery afterwards because you'll see bounce, bounce, bounce. It'll say delivered, but actually finally went through. There's definitely something like that in the segment for sure. Okay, we don't have a ton of time, but another topic that's super important is inbox placement. People want to land in the primary inbox. This is never going to happen 100% of the time, but people want to land in the primary. They don't want to be in promotions, other folders. How do you think about that? What are some recommendations you have to improve inbox placement? Yeah, so inbox your inbox placement is really going to be tied majority to your domain reputation. And your domain reputation is what the ISPs rank or value your domain at. Um, some ISPs like Gmail uh have great visibility where if you set up Google Postmaster tools, you can put in your domain and they'll tell you what your domain reputation is. Is it high? Is it medium? Is it low? Or is it bad? It also shows you IP reputation in there. But by looking at that, you can tell if you're having issues or not. If you have a drop, it's it's an easy way to see if you have a drop from high to medium. You're having it doesn't like something. So, you probably want to tighten up your segment or whatever you're doing because you did something to cause them to not like what you're sending or the people weren't there wasn't enough engagement or signals for them to think that you were, you know, a high uh high ranked domain, you could say. So, so you want to focus on that and and the way they look at it is a few things. Obviously, they look at your engagement, right? They want to know how many people are opening, what percentage of people are clicking, what's the open to click, the uh open to clickthrough rate, and uh you know, the higher the better, obviously. Um, I like to tell people I like to see a 5% clickthrough rate or better to try to be, you know, consistently in the inbox. You know, depending on your niche, that could be a lot harder and what type of emails you're sending uh to get that high. I know like for instance, finance uh niche, clickthrough rates are a lot lower than that and you can still inbox. So, but they're looking at your your engagement basically opens, clicks. You want to get keep those as high as possible. The biggest factor of having issues with deliverability is going to be your complaints. So your complaints need to be under 0.10%. To make sure to to have any opportunity of being in the inbox. If you're consistently if you're consistently below 0.1. If you're higher than that, you're going to have, you know, iffy chance of getting in. So the way the standards state is that point or what is it? 0.3% is like the max complaint you should have. And if you're above that, you're going to be not delivering complaint meaning people clicking spam. Clicking spam. Yeah. Spam in most cases. Yeah. Okay. So, your spam rate complaint rate needs to be under 0.1% for best deliverability. You can go up to 0.3 and be in that low thing, but you'll probably be like medium domain rep, which you know, for high high volume senders, they might be fine with, but once you get above that, then you could see your stuff tank really quick. You can go to bad reputation really fast. So, by monitoring your your complaint rate, you can easily, you know, tell when you may maybe need to make a a remediation or something. Maybe you need to tighten up your segment because you're saying some or maybe you have to identify who's complaining. Maybe it's a bad source of traffic. You started doing co- regge, you know, buying some midpath traffic, co-redge from from a new partner and find out it's a bunch of garbage email addresses that have been coming in that have been just complaining, you know. So, you're going to want to identify those things. So, that's the that's the biggest factor to is the complaint rate. So, if you can keep your complaint rates under 0.1 and you have good opens, good good clickthrough rates, which your base sending segment, if you have that established, should keep you there, then you should you should have really good chances of hitting the inbox. And that's helpful. Do interactions matter? So like people obviously, you know, a lot of people ask people to move this email to your primary inbox or reply to this email or even sometimes people will say like star this email or add it to your contact list. I don't think anybody has ever added any emails to the contact list in the past 10 years. Um how do you think about stuff like that? Uh they could have an impact. Obviously it helps a lot more on on on lower volume, right? Okay. I mean, once you get to tons of volume, you know, one person adding the contact list or one person moving you around uh isn't a big of a percentage as the whole to really make an impact. You know, it's always good. Replies are always great, especially if you're replying back. So, replying and starting a conversation always helps um build signals. Uh and the contact list, you know, people do it. they'll star it. But it's funny because they they know that you do that or that that it's in their contact list. Or for example, I was just on my seat seed AOL account yesterday and I got an email from I forget who it was and I clicked on it and it said, "We put this message in your inbox because it's in your contact list, but you know, we think this may still be spam." So, it's in the inbox, but they have this big like yellow warning. I think it was yellow color saying, "Hey, this still might be spam." And I I accepted it anyways. It was It was fine. But they still based on the their that domain's reputation, even though it was in my contact list, they're still questioned letting me know that they're questioning it. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't I don't even think I know how to add an email to my contact list, but I It's I think like you hit the star button. Uh Oh, does that do it? I I hit the start button just for like keeping track of things. I think that's maybe the most common use case. So, I need to reply to this or something. And hit the start button. Well, you're you're that's why everyone was landing in your inbox. Yeah, I guess so. There's a lot of stuff we can talk about. Let's see. Well, what else would be good to cover from here? I I have I know we're at time. If you can go a couple minutes over that I got one good one topic. Get your get your uh thought on it. Uh I have mine. I've preached this before. So, what what's your take on single optin versus double opt-in? Oh, yeah. I've talked about this a good bit and for whatever reason this is kind of like a point of debate or some people get kind of heated about this but I'm um there are exceptions based off of the context of who's signing up but I'm always single optin because it's just so arbitrary to have someone sign up uh for your list and they have to open this confirmation email and then they have to click this link to receive future emails from you. Um, and you know, you'll lose, I don't know, 20 40 50% of people who never click that confirmation link. And um, there's a reason that the biggest senders with the most engagement don't use double opt-in, but there are contexts in which it makes sense to you. We can talk about, but what do you think? No. Yeah, I'm on the single opt-in crew. you know, the whole double opt-in came about uh before there was a lot of other technologies and and things out there and and mailing practices and filters as far as spam filters. So, a lot of they they know how to block stuff that's no good. You know, how to validate email addresses to make sure that they're good email addresses. So, if you're doing email validation on on your subscribers, you'll know if it's a deliverable email address, a deliverable email address, if it's verified, things of that nature, or if it's a spam or or whatever. So, there's plenty of things in place to make sure doesn't happen. And I'm like you, like if if it's a newsletter, um, I want to send them my what they're going to get to. that's the most engaging thing they're going to get that they're going to want to receive. Not necessarily a welcome email they might not open or click and then you lost that person. Yeah. You know, people are just trained to ignore welcome emails because they usually don't contain anything important. Right now, if you're a fast product or technology, yeah, you're doing that for confirmation of the real person and thing that's more of a security issue. Um finance stuff, there's reasons you may want to do it, but in general, if you're just a a newsletter, there's there's zero reason in my opinion to do it. So yeah, the the context that I was referring to is probably more, but like a referral program. So one of your subscribers shares your newsletter with a referral link to a friend that usually will have double optin. Like Vive has a referral program and I believe that has a double optin built in because you don't want your subscribers just sending it to fake email addresses and then getting whatever referral reward you have by uh cheating the system essentially, right? And so there there's exceptions to all this, but they're rare except Yeah, that's a perfect perfect exception. But and again, that has nothing to do with deliverability. That has to do with you getting frauded. Yeah, exactly. If you have any questions for me, if we have time, I'd love to answer them, but do you want to talk about like the future of the inbox? You know, I've written about this. I don't know if you read my post about this. There was um you know Adam from workw week had a post that went kind of viral within the email community about this. Did you ever read that? This happened quite a few months ago that that post was out there. Probably have. You can recollect uh give me a little reminder on the topic. I guess the question would be how do you think AI is going to affect the inbox? You know, Gmail all that stuff. Um which what do you think's the inbox is going to look like let's say three five years from now? So AI is going to have a big impact. Obviously it already is. Um they're already starting to do like summaries at the top of emails which are you know eliminating a lot of the copy and and especially for long form sales copywriters that are doing all these these emails you know summary stuff. So it's going to take away from a lot of that. I think clickthrough rates are going to go down because of this. you know, if you're getting summaries, a lot of the stuff, uh, you're just going to miss out on a lot more opportunities. They're doing the smart, uh, you know, what is it? Uh, uh, superhuman. Is that the right one? I think superhuman is like a new inbox where where they organize your stuff. So, they're automatically organizing instead of now you don't got to worry about the inbox, the promo, whatever. Now you got to worry about all these new technologies that are using AI to to automatically place your emails in different spots and you know now it becomes more arbitrary. You know now they're going to put you down in you know instead of inbox with other other important stuff now you might be down in newsletters or in you know services or you know whatever they want to break it up as. So it's going to be a lot harder to to get the engagement. So, I think that's that's going to be a a major factor. But email, I still see email having a lot of value and leg room just because, you know, it's still a direct communication with with the people that you can't get anywhere else. People that really want your stuff are still going to read it. You know, the summary is only going to get you so much. Um, it's going to really come down to probably, you know, providing a lot of unique value, not not too much generic stuff because AI is going to be able to give that all right off the bat. Uh, more storytelling is going to be valuable. Uh, an email uh because that'll be a unique viewpoint. So, as far as AI and that, that's that's kind of what I see. Uh, as far as on the deliverability horizon, um, I I see that they just released a bunch of these sender requirements the last year. You asked the last year and a half. They're trying to make it more secure to send emails, more verified that it's an actual sender, who the sender is. They have BIM that's come out. I don't know if you're familiar with BIME. Um, or or VMC's or CMC. of veri uh verified common mark certificates. And what these certificates are, they're basically proving that you're a real business, you're a real brand. So, you have to go through a process. It's probably like 1,600 bucks a year or 1,800 bucks a year. It's kind of like an SSL SSL certificate for like an e-commerce store for your website, so everyone knows that it's secure so that you can, you know, you're not scared to provide information. This is kind of like that. is saying that this brand is a real brand. Um, so I think I can see that becoming a requirement in in the future where they're like just to get rid of all these like no-name people or whatever that aren't real mailers. I can see them kind of adding that as a as another security layer on top of who's sending emails to verify that. Will it be that expensive? They'll probably have to have a lower tier for lower tier emails, but they're going to want to verify people somehow to ensure that it's a legit business for this is for high for high volume senders, not for your your personal emails and all that stuff. I I think that's definitely going to happen. As far as how the user experience of inboxes change, I think that's way more up in the air. Like I I think it's it's really hard to predict what the UI of G like obviously superhuman is kind of a different thing because that's that's a niche expensive platform but like the user experience of Gmail Yahoo I don't think that's going to change very much. I don't think people want it to. I don't think they're incentivized the platforms are incentivized to change it a ton. But it's just something that's almost impossible to predict. Like will things be non non-cronological? That would be real damaging to a lot of senders, but I really don't know if that's going to happen. Summaries, I think Gmail does summaries on transactional emails, maybe some other ones, too, but definitely transactional emails, which are helpful. Will there be a summary for every email? Yes. I just don't know how valuable or used that will be because like most emails are just super short. If you're receiving an editorial newsletter, if you're if you're choosing to read the summary instead of that editorial newsletter, you might as well just unsubscribe because it I don't know that just user behavior doesn't make any sense to me. So, I'm just there's a lot more question marks when it comes to that. And so, I'm not so certain about what's going to happen there as far as UI verification. there's going to be more of that. Um but but UI, I think anybody who says like it's going to look like this in the next year is just Oh, yeah. No one knows. Ridiculous. Yeah. No one knows that. So, yeah. I think as far as like things that would be concerning to me and to everyone. So, non chronological order where it's basically just like picking who they think you want to read and who you want to reply with. That would be a challenge, especially if you're at the bottom of that list essentially. This is one that I would like but a lot of people uh would get damaged by it like a list management feature. And I think this is in progress or like you can just see okay who am I subscribed to and then you can just go and uncclick unsubs like one click unsubscribe from all of them. That's already a feature. Is that rolled out in Gmail now or it's it's not 100% rolled out. Um they're rolling I think it's I guess still like in in beta mode because it's not everywhere. Um, but that is a feature where you click on it and then you just can bulk unsubscribe from everyone. Yeah, that's definitely happening. There were like third party tools that like people would install and like try and integrate with Gmail just to do that, but they never really took off. That one I think if your content sucks like that one's very concerning. But then if you're really exceptional, I think that might be an advantage to some people. Um, box is less crowded and you can really stand out. Yeah, I I think I think that integration is a is a win uh for the email space. Obviously, it's going to it's going to weed out a lot of the the garbage, which is great. And then, you know, you knew that was coming because that was one of the the set requirements that came out with a year and a half ago was requiring the one-click unsubscribe uh in the email header of all all bulk senders. So, uh what that for people know what that means, it's it's more of on the technical side. And it's not an unsubscribe link that you include in your email when you send it out. It's actually natively integrated within the ISP platform. So Gmail, there's a little you'll see like a little unsubscribe link or button. It's on your your mobile app or on the computer. You click that actually goes through um and now Google knows that that person should not be receiving emails from you. So if you start sending emails from to that email address, Google knows and Google will will ding you for not honoring their unsubscribe the oneclick unsubscribe policy. So they had that set up so you knew that they were going to come with that kind of feature where there's like kind of your list management. Yeah. And and I I like features that give the user more control. List management does. I don't like features that give them less control, which is having a quoteunquote algorithm or um non chronological order where the the Gmail or superhuman is deciding for you unless you opt into that. Like people who use superhuman, they opted in that they know that's what they want. That that's fine for them. But that's one that will probably be the most damaging, but the one that I think is least likely to happen. Obviously, list management is happening. And then another one that could be damaging that may or may not happen is just like a newsletters tab. You know, we have promotions, updates, social. I think some email service providers might or or ISPs, inbox service providers might already have a newsletters tab. I don't use all them, so I'm not totally sure, but that one, depending on how you look at that, that could be beneficial or that could be damaging to a lot of senders. Yeah, I I that's another one I think would be beneficial in the long run because, you know, if if if they want your stuff, they know where to get it and you're going to show up there and, you know, if your content's not good, then, you know, you're going to if you pop up the newsletter tab, then you know, I could see it how like depending on your reputation, like sometimes your newsletter right now might end up in the promo folder, right? or it could be in the in the in the in the spam folder for whatever reason. But if they had a newsletter tab, maybe it would just end up in the newsletter tab. If they know to go there for all their newsletters, maybe they don't move you to a promo or whatever, they'll easily find you there versus like I don't I don't know who does. I'm sure people might go to the promo folder. I've never gone to the promo folder in my life. So, if that kind of like pushes that to another level like oh no, it's not a promo, it's a newsletter. Then maybe there's better opportunity. It's all going to become with with what what the what the people get used to doing. So they got Yeah, it's definitely better. I in theory I think it's better to be in the newsletter tab than the promo tab. And I think almost everybody would agree that's just like a higher order of priority. Obviously primary is first and then probably newsletter tab will be second above updates and promotions and social and whatever you might have. And so that that could be a good thing. Obviously you want to be in primary and hopefully you should have still have the shot at being in primary. What would suck, which I don't think will happen because it takes away user control, is that like they just force it to always be sent to that tab. I don't think that's that makes sense because that's taking away um a feature that users already had, which is being able to change what emails go in which tabs, but I think that would be damaging where you're just locked into that box forever. Yeah, I don't think they would. I think like you said, I mean, the primary tabs there for a reason. They'll probably keep it there. If they if it's if it's a, you know, newsletter that you're constantly engaging with, open it opening, it'll probably probably fall in there, but it'd be nice to have that fallback newsletter versus the promo like it is now. So, absolutely. Well, I think that's a good spot to wrap up. Anything else you want to share before we wrap up? I'll um we'll put a link to the YouTube videos you mentioned and um audience bridge down below as well. Uh yeah. uh you sign up to my newsletter, audience bridge um for insights on deliverability, engagement uh and list growth and you can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn which will be somewhere down there probably. Um that's it. appreciate you having me on, Matt. And uh just so everyone knows, Matt is amazing at at what he does and he's even better at his uh his self-promotion and his social media feed and all this. I don't know how he gets all this content all stuff out. I know it's not just him. He's got a team behind it, but he put put out a lot of good stuff. So, thank you, Chris. I appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. I think this is useful for a lot of people. So, thanks for doing this. And that's the podcast.