In this week’s episode
- What gets your staff into work every day – passion or pay? Sometimes it’s a combination but maybe it’s more one than the other. This week Paul helps you identify their motivations, which can make it easier to grow your MSP
- Also on this week’s show, do you know how to truly measure success every day? Paul has two simple but hugely powerful things you can do to make sure you set the context for measurable success
- Plus there’s an extremely valuable conversation with Paul’s featured guest, all about improving your email deliverability. And news of a big prize for next week’s 100th episode
Featured guest
Thank you to Adrian Savage from Deliverability Dashboard for joining Paul to talk about how to improve email open rates.
Connect with Adrian on LinkedIn.
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert
- In discussing how engaged your staff are, Paul mentioned Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey
- Thank you to Praveen Ramesh from SuperOps.ai for recommending the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
- The October 12th milestone 100th episode will be sponsored by Datto and will feature a special panel of industry experts including Will O’Neal, Richard Wingfield and Justin Esgar
- Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@
paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to Episode 99 of the show. Here’s what’s coming up for you this week.
Adrian Savage:
It’s the one biggest behavioural change that people need to make. By having that much higher open rates, you’re going to be helping your overall reputation.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be looking at some questions that you can ask your staff to determine how engaged they are at work. None of us want disengaged staff so this is a great way of finding out who’s really engaged and actually who’s actively disengaged. Plus, next week is Episode 100. We’ve got a great show, a very special episode put together for you, and we’ve got a big giveaway as well. I’ll give you more details on what you can win later on in the show.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
If you’re a long-term listener to the show, you’ll know that I’m really into my productivity things. I love gadgets and methods of working which help you to get the most out of every day, and this isn’t about working as much as you can. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s about having a good work-life balance. And in fact, in last week’s episode, I’ve just listened back to it myself, I was talking to a guy at a talk I did, and we were talking about work-life balance and whether or not his business goals were in line with his vision for his life. And it kind of made me realise I didn’t really talk to you last week about the tools.
Paul Green:
There are two tools in particular, that you can use to add some context to your life every single day. So, the first of those tools is your vision board. I’m sure you’ve heard of a vision board before. You get a whole load of pictures of things that you want to do in the future, intangible things. You don’t know exactly what they are or when you’ll do them, but you put pictures of them up on your vision board.
Paul Green:
So, I’ve got a vision board here in my office, in my home office. There’s a picture of someone scuba diving on that. There’s people sitting in a lovely cafe in some kind of Spanish harbour because that’s the lifestyle I’d like to lead. There’s a picture of a very, very nice Spanish villa with a pool. That’s going to be mine in the future. There’s a kit car. And I don’t mean one of those funny-looking Morgan things. I mean like a proper kit car that someone has built. I have no mechanical abilities whatsoever. So, I quite fancy building a kit car. What a great way to learn as a retirement project. Then I’ve gotten on there I’d love to do more TV presenting. That was fun. I’d love to be a fiction writer. So, I’ve got a picture of Roald Dahl and there’s a whole series of things in there about the money that I want, the passive income in the future, and the giving back. I want to set up a charity that has a very specific aim, but all of that’s on my vision board. I look at that every day. And in fact, sometimes when I’m just sitting thinking, thinking about things that I need to do with the business, my eyes will fall on the vision board.
Paul Green:
But the other tool is a more practical tool. It’s something I read every single morning. It’s a list of my current goals and I’ve got them written down here. In fact, I have a book here. It’s literally a book I keep by my bedside. It’s locked away in a bedside cupboard and it’s got in there my goals. So, every single morning, once I’ve had a shower and actually put my contact lenses in so I can see, I read my goals. I’m not going to tell you what my goals are, but I’ll take you through some of the categories. I sit down once a year with my best friends, and we did it just a few months ago. We sit down and we figure out what do we want to achieve in the next 12 months. We talk primarily about business, but we also talk about some personal stuff as well.
Paul Green:
So, for example, I have nine goals that I’m currently working towards. Remember, the difference between a vision and a goal. A vision is an intangible thing in the future. It’s somewhere you want to go, but you don’t yet know the details of it, whereas a goal is a very specific thing. It’s a tangible thing. You know what it is that you want, and you know when you’ve got there. In fact, you may have heard of the acronym SMART as in SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. So, I start my goals book, which is literally a book with some pages, and my goals are written down. I started with the dates that I want to achieve these goals by. By the 26th of August 2022, I will have. That’s what I’ve written at the top. Let me read that again. By the 26th of August 2022, I will have.
Paul Green:
Now, that’s the date that me and my friends are next sitting down. We’re going to sit down and have another goal session on that date. We’ve already planned that date in for next year. And I’ve then got some health goals, some business goals, some business acquisition goals, property, personal, and then some balance habits that I want to try and stick to.
Paul Green:
So, my first is health because health is the most important. If you don’t have your health, nothing else really matters, right? So, I’ve got on there a weight goal. I’ve still got a little bit of weight I want to lose. I lost loads during the last lockdown. I want to lose a little bit more and then maintain that weight. That’s one of my goals. There’s a running goal on there for me because I have got out of the habit of running. Last year, I did a thousand miles. A thousand miles. Isn’t that insane? I was never a runner before, but I did a thousand miles last year. This year, I’ll probably scrape about 350. So, I want to get back to running at least 50 miles every month.
Paul Green:
And there’s also on there a balance, a health habit about how many hours I work. So, I try very hard to work no more than 30 hours a week. Now, I will often do a little bit more than that, but as a sole parent, it’s just me and the 11-year-old here, I want to make sure I’ve got plenty of time to give her the best possible childhood that I can give her. Then I’ve got my business goals. I’ve got on there a goal about how many members of the MSP Marketing Edge I’m working towards. Of course, that’s a private goal, but it wouldn’t be too difficult for you to figure out. We want to jump up to the next stage on that. And then I’ve got a profit goal as well.
Paul Green:
And then we go into other things. So, for example, I am buying businesses at the moment. I’ve got on here an acquisitions goal. How many of those security and alarm companies that I’m acquiring, how many I want to buy in the next year. There’s a property goal of how many more buy-to-lets I want to buy. There’s a personal goal about refurbing my house, and we want to build an extension and do some work on it. I want to get that done because that’s been dragging on. And then I come to my balance habit goals. And I figured out over the last few years that I’m at my happiest if I read for 30 minutes a day, if I get at least seven to eight hours sleep. I’m happy if I cook properly once or twice a week. I really like cooking. I have to force myself to do it. And of course, I batch up four or five different portions so they can go in the freezer for the nights I really don’t fancy cooking.
Paul Green:
Then I’ve got on there some personal ones, just about things like making sure that I enjoy some personal time when my daughter’s at school or away with her friends. Things like not forgetting to do the things I really love, like going to the cinema. And I know it sounds crazy that I’ve written these things down, but here’s the thing. Every single morning, once that shower’s done and those contact lenses are in, I read this book. I read these goals. And what these goals do is they set a context for the day. Everything I do throughout the day, it’s at the back of my mind, asking myself, “If I do this, will it get me closer to the goals I want to achieve? If I do this or don’t do this, is it going to move me closer towards or further away from the goals that are very important to me?” And I know they’re important because I read them every day and I agree with them every day. These are the things that I want to achieve.
Paul Green:
As my daughter gets a little bit older, I’m going to share this book with her. I’m not going to let her read it every day, but I’m going to show her what I’ve done, what I’m working towards, and the context that that’s set me every day. She’s not quite ready for it yet. She’s going to just started secondary school. But I think in a few years’ time, particularly when she gets nearer exams, I’m going to help her learn to set goals for her life, to have a vision for what she wants to achieve in her life, and then tangible goals that she can work towards. And of course, I’ll encourage her to have a goals book that she reads every day.
Paul Green:
So, do you have this goals book? Do you have the vision board? These are two incredibly useful tools to help you start every day with great context and make sure you’re always, in some tiny way, always working towards the things you most want to achieve.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
There’s a really cool employee engagement survey which has been running for years and years and years. In fact, 2.7 million people have been through that survey, and just by asking them a set of questions, it’s been able to ascertain whether or not they are engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged in their work.
Paul Green:
Now, let me explain what those three different categories mean. So, engaged employees, they’re the ones who treat the business like it’s their own in a good way, not in a bad way. They’re your very, very best staff, your partners, essentially in the business. And they’re the ones that you would trust with absolutely everything because they are the ones that seem to answer that emergency text at 9:30 at night when it genuinely is an emergency. They’re the ones you can trust in almost every situation. They’re highly involved in the business. They’re enthusiastic about it. And as I say, psychologically, in their hearts, they’re stakeholders, they’re owners of the business, regardless of their actual ownership stake.
Paul Green:
Now, the vast majority of staff do not sit within that engaged category. A few of them do, and it depends on how many you’ve got within the business. I find that the fewer staff you have, the easier it is for all of them to be engaged employees. But the bigger you get, the more often you find that your staff are not engaged. And not engaged means that it’s not bad. They just don’t have the passion and the engagement that the engaged employees have. So, they turn up to work, they do their job, and then they go home. And their engagement needs are not being met by the business that they’re working in, by the work that they’re doing. So, they bring their time and they give you their time to do the work, but they don’t really bring a lot of energy and passion into their work.
Paul Green:
Now, if you’ve ever worked for a large corporate organisation, you’ll see dozens and dozens of those people. In fact, the vast majority of people working for the large corporates are not engaged. They’re turning up for the salary, but there’s just no passion for what they do. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather work with engaged people rather than not engage people, and all of my team who’ve been hand-selected and I’ve either worked with them for years and years, or they’re just the right kind of people, they’re all fully engaged with what we’re doing, and that’s how we’re able to move at such speed.
Paul Green:
So, you’ve got engaged as a category of people. You’ve got not engaged, and then you’ve got actively disengaged which is the final category. I have a different definition for actively disengaged. I call them internal terrorists because these people are actually working against you. In fact, they’re not just unhappy at work, they are resentful about their unhappiness, and they’re acting out their unhappiness. In fact, they potentially undermine what their engaged co-workers are accomplishing every day. Now, I’ve seen people like this. You’ve seen people like this. And by the way, if you have someone like this, just fire them. Get HR advice, but really, they’ve got to go.
Paul Green:
All of this comes from a company called Gallup and they regularly do what’s known as the Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, and just go and google that. Go and google Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey. Now, they don’t really talk to businesses like ours. They’re talking to bigger businesses so you’ll typically see when you look at their results from the regular Q12 survey, I think they do it quarterly, you’ll see that they often have higher levels of not engaged than you would expect to see in small businesses like ours.
Paul Green:
But there are some very interesting questions in there. I don’t suggest that you ask your staff these direct questions, but they’re the kind of questions you might want to ascertain with your team. So, for example, I know what’s expected of me at work. You ask someone that question and I’m guessing Gallup gets them to rate it on a score of 1 to 10. I know what’s expected of me at work. Can you see how important that would be for someone to know what is expected of them?
Paul Green:
another one, the next one in fact is I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right, followed by, at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. These are great questions. They directly strike at the heart of the engagement of the person that’s working with you. Another one, in the last seven days, I’ve received recognition or praise for doing good work. Question five, my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person. Number six, there’s someone at work who encourages my development, and the next one, at work, my opinions seem to count.
Paul Green:
Now, I’m not going to read them all to you because you can just google them. It doesn’t take long to find them, but there are some cracking questions there. Maybe as you’re sitting doing one to ones with your team or any kind of development sessions with your team, you can be asking yourself using these questions. In fact, you could even directly ask them how engaged are my team. I can ask these questions, listen to their answers, and see how engaged they are. Let me tell you this. If you can get more of your team to be engaged, this whole growing the business thing is a hell of a lot easier than if you’re trying to drag people with you kicking and screaming.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
James:
Hey, this is producer James. I’ve got some really exciting news about next week’s show. But being completely honest, I know you’re not excited that this podcast will have reached its 100th episode. We are of course, but there’s something in it for you. To mark the occasion, thanks to our friends at Datto, for the 100th episode, if you’re an MSP, you can win a $100 Amazon gift card, or of course, the equivalent in your local currency. A great prize purely for treating yourself with, but in the spirit of spreading the love, we’re going to make five winners, not just one. So, each winner getting a $100 Amazon gift card for our 100th episode, thanks to Datto. To find out how to win, just be listening to Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast next week. Episode 100 out on October 12th.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Adrian Savage:
Hi, I’m Adrian Savage, founder of Deliverability Dashboard. I can help you avoid the spam folder, double your open rates and get more emails in front of more of your audience.
Paul Green:
And in fact, in our company, Adrian, you are known as the miracle man because you helped us when we had a major, major deliverability problem with Microsoft emails which we’ll talk about later on in the interview. But thank you for joining me today. I want to talk about email marketing in general before we talk about deliverability. I’ve been doing email marketing for, I don’t know, must be getting on for around 13, 14 years, and I’m sure you have seen exactly what I’ve seen, which is that email marketing really does seem to be getting harder and harder and harder.
Adrian Savage:
It is, but at the same time, then it’s still one of the most effective channels that I have found to communicate with as many people as possible. It has got harder, but I think it’s more, it’s the same as anything. The world changes as we go on, and I think it’s still possible to get great results as long as we know what the rules of the game are. The challenges we face, it’s a bit like search engine optimisation or something like that, the rules are always changing and there’s not always someone around to tell you how those rules are changing.
Paul Green:
Which is exactly like search engine optimisation. We have to kind of guess these things. So, in terms of email deliverability, I know you’ve been doing this for quite some time. How long have you been in this world and what have you seen change in terms of deliverability?
Adrian Savage:
So, I first got into the whole email marketing thing about 10 years ago. Prior to that, I was a fairly typical geek. I was employed in IT and telecoms, and there’s only about 10 years ago that I escaped that world and discovered the whole world of entrepreneurship and business and marketing and things like that. And I started off just doing email marketing, using Infusionsoft for people, but I very quickly saw that some people, even back then, were struggling to get their emails in front of their audience. They were ending up in the spam folder and things like that. And probably the last three to five years is when I’ve really started specialising in deliverability.
Adrian Savage:
But what I’ve noticed is, as you said, the rules have changed as time went on. I’ve got fond memories of the good old days where you could just build the largest email list you could, and then you just keep mailing the hell out of them until they would buy, die, or unsubscribe. And that used to work really well, even kind of six or seven years ago. And it’s only as Google and Microsoft, in particular, have started to change the rules more recently that I’ve seen that change and we’ve had to get cleverer. Even when I was just a generalist, there was always this kind of focus on, well, how do I know if my emails are getting to my audience or not. So, I found that I could understand how that worked better than some people. I enjoyed helping people with that part, and that’s how it became my niche if that makes sense. So that’s all I’m focusing on now.
Paul Green:
So, ordinary businesses like the MSPs listening to this, I guess they’re getting caught up in Google and Microsoft and Apple’s battle against the mass spammers. Are those are the people that are causing all the problems? Is it a case of the 1% affecting the 99%?
Adrian Savage:
It is, although the irony is that spam is a much greater volume than that. There’s this company called Telus Research that are owned by Cisco now. They provide a report every month showing what proportion of email is considered spam versus legitimate, and either the volume change on a monthly basis, the actual percentage of spam is always around the 85% mark. That is to say, only 15% of the emails that go across the ethernet every month are considered legitimate. This is the challenge. This is why it’s so difficult to be heard amongst all that noise because Google and Microsoft and all the other mailbox providers have to protect their users from this threat that spam poses because imagine if all of the 85% of the spam didn’t get filtered out, then no one would use email. That is a challenge that we face is how can we stand head and shoulders above the spammers to make sure that we get through and the spammers don’t, and that’s why it is so difficult.
Paul Green:
So, let’s look at some of the most common factors that affect your deliverability, and then after that, I’m going to ask you what’s been happening over the last couple of months because I know there’s been quite a few changes recently, especially with Apple. So, typically, what are the factors then that affect deliverability?
Adrian Savage:
I lump everything into four key areas that I call my RACE method and RACE spells out four things. We’ve got reputation, we’ve got authentication, we’ve got content, and we’ve got engagement. So, let’s start with reputation. It kind of makes sense that reputation controls everything. If you’ve got a bad reputation, then you’re more likely to end up in spam. So, if Microsoft or Google, in particular, think that you are sending a load of nonsense out, then they’re just going to start automatically putting everything you send into the spam folder. And there’s lots of things that you can do that affect your reputation.
Adrian Savage:
We’ll talk about engagement in a minute because that’s the biggest thing, but there’s all kind of the common sense things like making sure you’re getting consent from your audience before you mail them, not mailing people that haven’t given you consent, making sure you’re checking a reputation and not sending out poor quality content, things like that. And the most important thing is to actually keep your word. So, if someone signs up to your mailing list and you say you’re going to mail them once a week, don’t send them something every single day. And similarly, if you say you’re going to send them something every single day, don’t send something once a month because you’re not keeping your word. So, a lot of it is around common sense to protect your reputation and just do what you say you’ll do.
Adrian Savage:
But then when we get into authentication, this is a very specific technical thing. And again, because your audience is mainly MSPs, then this shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for most of them is make sure your email authentication is set up. We’ve got SPF, which is Sender Policy Framework. We’ve got DKIM which is DomainKeys Identified Mail, and those two things are vital to set up when you start sending out marketing emails. If you haven’t already got that set up, then it’s a one-time thing that you have to do. But authentication is vital because that tells the world that you’re a legitimate sender of emails and that’s something that spammers can’t do. So, that covers reputation, authentication.
Adrian Savage:
Content I could speak for about three weeks on. So, all I will say at this stage is that it just matters what your emails look like, and it’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it. The more you can get an email to look like it came personally from you to the person that you’re sending to, the better, the fewer images, the better, the fewer links, the better. Rather than send that one newsletter with lots and lots of links in, then it’s often better to send more frequent, short emails with one call to action in each one.
Adrian Savage:
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with content is, in their email signature, they will put images and links to every single social media platform they’ve got which suddenly means you’ve got way too many images, way too many links. And also, if you link to things like YouTube, then often that domain itself can have a reputation issue because people object to the mix they receive on YouTube, and YouTube can end up on a block list.
Adrian Savage:
So, content is really, really vital, but the most important one is engagement because that is the biggest indicator that Microsoft and Google, in particular, use to work out if you’re a good quality sender or not because they’re looking not just at your open rates, but they’re looking at how many people are you sending emails to that aren’t opening your emails. And if you keep sending emails to people that don’t want to hear from you and are ignoring you, then you’re effectively telling Google and Microsoft that you’re sending out bad quality content.
Adrian Savage:
It’s much more important to only send the emails to the people that have recently opened something from you. And as long as you do that, your open rates as a percentage will go up. The number of people reading your email in the short term won’t change that much because effectively we’re gaming the system here. But by having that much higher open rate, you’re going to be helping your overall reputation, and the better your reputation is, the more likely it is that the future emails you send will land in the inbox and not in the junk folder, or the clutter, or the spam, or promotions, or anything like that. So, engagement is the one biggest behavioural change that people need to make if they haven’t done so already, and that will make the biggest difference.
Paul Green:
And I don’t know if you remember, Adrian, but a few months ago, that was pretty much what you got me to do. In fact, I remember you telling me, “Paul, you need to email fewer people.” And I had an aneurysm because I spent years building up my list. I’ve got a few thousand MSPs who’ve all opted it into my database. The problem that we had was we were getting great deliverability on Gmail and Yahoo and all that kind of stuff, but we had terrible deliverability on Microsoft, which is a bit of a pain when most of your audience uses Microsoft email products.
Adrian Savage:
Absolutely.
Paul Green:
You did fix up for us in, I think it was about two to three months, Adrian, which was just wonderful. And one of the key things that we did, which we’re still doing now you’ll be pleased to hear, we’re still using your software to identify when people aren’t opening their emails and we then move them off into a separate re-engagement campaign, but we stopped sending them the routine emails. And our deliverability, touch wood, lots of touching wood happening here, but we haven’t had any issues since then. So, I mean, I don’t know if we were a typical client where you were able to help us sort of within two to three months, do you find that people tend to get themselves into much bigger holes and have bigger problems?
Adrian Savage:
When I looked at how everything was for you then, you guys certainly weren’t in the emergency room. It was kind of more things aren’t great, but they’re not terrible. But you were hearing anecdotally that people weren’t getting your emails and things like that. I’ve worked with some clients where literally they’ve got themselves into Google jail and their open rate has dropped to less than 1%, and happily, you were nothing like that because those kinds of problems take a bit longer to fix.
Adrian Savage:
But that is an interesting point to stress actually before I talk a bit more about this is there is never a quick fix for email deliverability. It does take time because Google and Microsoft between them control as much as 60 to 70% of an email audience. Google is often more than 50%. Microsoft is often 10, 15, 20%. So, you’ve really got to play by their rules, and it does take time before they notice that you’ve changed your habits, and you’ll see a slow but steady improvement over a month or few normally. Particularly if you’re having problems with Microsoft, then the thing to bear in mind is that Microsoft consider a contact on your database to be disengaged if they haven’t opened anything from you in 15 days or more. So, that’s just over two weeks which isn’t much time. If you’re only sending one email out a month, then there’s not much chance of your audience remaining engaged. The common practice is to stop sending emails after people haven’t opened something for three months or longer. But even by doing that, you’re still sending emails to the Microsoft part of your list to maybe sort of five-sixth of those people, Microsoft will consider to be disengaged.
Adrian Savage:
But as you say, you nearly had an aneurism when I said you’ve got to stop mailing all these people on your list. And it is difficult because businesses invest a lot of time and a lot of money collecting those email addresses and nurturing the relationships. But if people aren’t engaging with you, then the value of those contacts that are disengaged falls very, very quickly, and it’s about making sure we’re maximising the return on our investment by only focusing on those contacts that still have a high value. And it is sometimes very distressing to see how quickly the value of that list can go down as people disengage, which is why I also always recommend people to have a very strong lead generation process in place so that as people do naturally disengage, just because you get natural attrition, you’re always replacing those with new people that are keen to still hear from you.
Paul Green:
Now, let’s talk about what’s happened over the last couple of months and I must give a caveat that we’re recording this interview in the first week of September. So, we’re recording it a month before it’s broadcast and, Adrian, unfortunately, one of your superpowers isn’t looking into the future. So, if some things happen between the point of recording this and broadcast, you’ll have to excuse us for not talking about it. But what’s been happening over the last few weeks with Apple?
Adrian Savage:
Okay. So, a couple of months ago, Apple drops a very subtle bombshell on the world of email marketing by launching a new feature that is coming out when iOS 15 goes live in September 2021, and that feature is email privacy. And Apple are going to give all iPhone, iPad, and Mac users who upgrade to the latest version of software the ability to opt in to this email privacy, which means that Apple will start blocking marketer’s ability to see whether emails have been opened or not. And the way they’re going to do this is they’re going to preload every image in an email, or at least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. We will find out in another week or two whether that’s the case or not.
Adrian Savage:
And because the only way we can track email opens is by embedding a little invisible pixel in every single email and waiting for it to be downloaded, if Apple are preloading all of these images in the emails, we’re expecting to see a 100% open rates from anyone using Apple mail on their phone to read the emails that we send. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s going to a Google recipient or a Microsoft recipient or Yahoo or some other internet provider, it’s down to the email client that each individual recipient is using. And if they’re using the standard Apple mail program on their device, then Apple are going to start preloading these images, or that’s what we believe, which is going to make it much more difficult to understand who is and who isn’t opening our emails because Google and Microsoft are still going to want us to only mail the engaged people.
Adrian Savage:
So, we are going to have to get much smarter in working out how we deal with that, and firstly, can we identify the people using Apple, and secondly, for the people that we know are using Apple, then we need to start looking not at the open anymore, but whether they’ve clicked an email and whether we can get them to engage with us and demonstrate their interest in other ways because we do still need to remove those people from our audience who aren’t engaging. It’s just we’re going to need to have superpowers to work out who those people are.
Paul Green:
That sounds fun figuring that one out.
Adrian Savage:
It is.
Paul Green:
I’m guessing there’s some very intelligent minds out there figuring this out.
Adrian Savage:
Well, the knee-jerk reaction has been okay we’re going to abolish email open tracking and just look at clicks. But the difficulty is you might get a 30 or 40% open rate, but only a one or two or 3% click rate on a good day. So, I think it’s probably impossible to prove who is really engaged with you just by looking at email clicks. So, we have got to work out how else we can do that. And the good news is that even though Apple do have a stranglehold on the email client market, in some cases, as much as 50% of an audience uses an Apple device to read their email, it still isn’t everyone. And normally 50, 60% of an audience are still going to be using some other email client and we can still continue to track them.
Adrian Savage:
So, in the short term, the tactics I’m focusing on are creating software that will help identify who’s using Apple and who isn’t so that way then we can still do proper engagement management for the people that don’t use Apple. And the people that are using Apple, we need to start coming up with more clever ways of getting them to engage with us, getting them to click, getting them to do other things as well. And worst case, then we might have to send emails out every now and then saying, “Please click here to let me know you’re still there, or I’m going to stop emailing you.” We might end up with smaller lists as a result of that, but again, it should drive the quality up. But again, as you said, by the time people listen to this particular episode, then we will have a lot more understanding of what’s happening, and it’s something I’m going to be doing a lot of work on in the next month when we see what the impact is, once everything’s gone live with iOS 15.
Paul Green:
Don’t envy you at all with that. Tell us a little bit more about your business, Adrian, and how we can get in touch with you.
Adrian Savage:
Sure. So, Deliverability Dashboard is a software that I’ve created, or rather, the collection of software tools and reports that help people manage their engagement and their deliverability. It starts with a free email health check, and we’re about to support a lot more different email marketing platforms there. And you can find the health check at emailhealthcheck.net, and then we’ve also got a deliverability checklist that goes through the most important things, the RACE framework, and you can get that at get.deliverabilitydashboard.com/checklist. And then as well as the software, then we also offer one-on-one consulting which is what we did with you to help you turn your email performance around as well.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Praveen Ramesh:
Hey everyone. This is Praveen Ramesh from SuperOps.ai. The book that I recommend everyone to read is called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World by David Epstein. It gives you a perspective on what it means to have an outsider advantage in your core job.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Will:
Hi, I’m Will.
Richard:
Hi, I’m Richard.
Justin:
What’s up? I’m Justin, and next week we have this special 100th episode where Will, Rich, and I will be taking your questions about marketing in your MSP.
Paul Green:
And that really is going to be an absolute cracker of a show. The MSP Marketing Podcast’s hundredth episode, the special one, is going to be on the podcast platform of your choice next Tuesday. See you then.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
