Is anyone even seeing your emails?
Just because your email was delivered doesn’t mean anyone actually saw it. In fact, more than half of your new leads may never see a single email you send.
More than half. Let that sink in.
It’s not your subject line, offer or copy. It’s something happening silently before your email ever reaches an inbox.
In this episode of Data Beats Opinion, SegMetrics founder Keith Perhac talks with Adrian Savage, co-founder of EmailSmart and one of the sharpest minds in email deliverability. They dig into why the open rate you’re tracking is probably lying to you, the single most-overlooked engagement metric, and why blasting your entire list could be quietly wrecking the one marketing asset you actually own.
If email is core to how you sell — and it should be — this episode will change how you read your own numbers.
Watch the full episode →
Meet Adrian Savage
Adrian Savage is co-founder of EmailSmart, maker of the Deliverability Dashboard, where he helps senders diagnose email deliverability and visibility problems that mailbox providers won’t reveal. He’s analyzed thousands of email accounts and pioneered rolling 30-day engagement tracking as a way to measure list health that open rate alone can’t capture.
Connect with Adrian at EmailSmart.com or on LinkedIn.
Show Notes
[00:00] Introduction
[00:53] Catching up with Adrian
[01:34] How Adrian got into email deliverability
[02:52] How email deliverability rules have changed
[04:23] Why deliverability is such a confusing word
[05:54] Why you can’t measure if an email is actually seen
[08:31] Getting people to rescue emails from spam
[12:44] Tracking engagement instead of guessing
[14:43] The 30-day metric nobody tracks
[16:50] A real launch that failed from bad visibility
[19:41] Attention spans and the point of no return
[22:21] Reply rates, sending addresses, and domain reputation
[28:20] Cold outreach and staying under Google’s radar
[30:44] The future of AI and personalized email
[35:30] “List size is vanity. Engagement is sanity.”
[40:06] Why AI can’t handle deliverability
[44:18] Where to find Adrian
About Data Beats Opinion
Data Beats Opinion is SegMetrics’ monthly podcast exploring what’s actually working in growth and marketing today. Host Keith Perhac, founder of SegMetrics, sits down with domain experts to uncover practical strategies you can implement — not just theory.
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Transcript: Adrian Savage – Ep 14
Keith Perhac: What if more than half your new leads never see a single email you sent? And not because of bad copywriting, and not because of poor targeting, but because of something happening silently before your email ever reaches an inbox. And this horror story is true for lots of businesses, and they have no idea.
In this episode of Data Beats Opinion, we’re talking with Adrian Savage, co-founder of EmailSmart, and one of the sharpest minds in email deliverability, or really, as he prefers to call it, inbox visibility. We’re going deep on why the email metrics you’re watching are probably lying to you. Also, the number one thing you should be measuring but probably aren’t, and why emailing your entire list could actually be destroying that single asset that you’re trying to build.
If email is critical to your marketing, and it should be, this episode will change how you think about it. Let’s start the show. Adrian, super happy to have you. Hello. Like, this is exciting. We’ve, we’ve known each other forever, like way back in the day. Years and years. I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been. More than,
Adrian Savage: more than, more than 10 years. Mm.
Keith Perhac: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Adrian Savage: Yeah. A long time.
Keith Perhac: Yeah. I don’t… It’s, you’re one of those friends that I don’t even remember where we first met, it’s been so long.
And those are the best friends. So I’m, I’m super happy to have you on this, and- Man, email is, uh, it’s a-changing. Yeah. Ooh. So, uh, I think this is very apropos, and I’m really excited to, to talk to you about this.
Adrian Savage: Awesome. Let’s go for it.
Keith Perhac: Yeah. So for people who don’t know you, uh, give us a little bit of your backstory.
How… Email is, and especially email deliverability is such a thing, how’d you, how’d you get into this? Like-
Adrian Savage: Yeah, you don’t kind of wake up one morning and think, “Hey, I wanna be an email deliverability specialist.”
Keith Perhac: Unless you’re a masochist, like
Adrian Savage: And I’m, I’m not, definitely not. Um, so I mean, I got into tech when I was still in short pants.
I was about seven, I think, when my dad brought an Apple II computer home, if anyone remembers those. Um- Mm-hmm … and I read the manual and taught him how to use it. So that’s… I’ve been a geek for the last, what, uh, 45, 46 years, something like that. I’m showing my age a bit. Did the usual corporate stuff, escaped from that maybe 15 years ago.
Uh, my ex-wife very kindly moved to the other end of the country with my kids, and the only way I could keep seeing them was by quitting my job and going into the big, bad world of being an entrepreneur. So that was how I got into the world of email marketing, because I joined mastermind groups, and I was the only techy guy in the group, so everyone was like, “Hey, Adrian, how do I do my email marketing?”
And then a couple years later, it was, it was like, “Hey, Adrian, some people aren’t seeing my emails.” So that’s how it all started, is I just kind of stumbled across people that were having what turned out to be deliverability problems. Mm. And I just started learning about how to get the emails to land in the inbox.
Um, back then, 10, 12, 13 years ago, it was a very different, uh, landscape to what it is today. Back then, as long as you didn’t have certain spammy words in the subject, and as long as the server you were sending from was well trusted, then your emails would get through pretty much. Um- Mm-hmm … fast-forward to now, and there’s a million different rules that you gotta follow if you want your emails to be seen.
So it’s changed a lot in that time. I started off writing software to help people get their emails seen, and that’s, I think that’s how you and I first met when, when I launched WeDeliver back in 2015 or something like that. Um- That’s right, yeah … and then from there, as Google started to change their rules and, you know, back in the, the late kind of 2018, 2019 even, Google were using AI to decide whether to deliver emails or not.
Things changed so that rather than where you were sending it from, they started looking at what you as a sender were doing. Um- Mm-hmm … and it’s all evolved further from there, and it gets more complex. So one of my jobs is to stay ahead of the game there. Um, and I’m very lucky that Evan, who’s my co-founder of EmailSmart, he’s even more of a nerd than me when it comes to how emails land in the inbox.
Um, so that then gives me the time to focus on getting the best possible software to help people get their emails seen as well.
Keith Perhac: I think one of the hardest things about email deliverability for an end user, right, someone who’s not in this, is that it’s completely opaque, right? Yeah. We have no idea if our emails are getting through or not, and there’s, there are tools that help- But even they are like, they’re either super expensive or they’re…
We don’t know how to read them, right? Yeah. And so when we’re talking about email deliverability, like, what does that kind of mean? Because I think there’s, and I think you’d agree, there’s different layers of deliverability now that we have… Like you were saying, 15 years ago, there was no promotions box.
There was no notifications box. There was just this fire hose of, of content in your inbox, right?
Adrian Savage: Yeah, exactly. And this is why if I had access to the folks that, that maintain dictionaries and things like that, I would have them go and find the entry that says deliverability and scratch it out, never to be seen again.
Because nobody understands what the word actually means. Some people think it means delivery. Other people means has it landed in the inbox. Other people mean… think it’s, “Oh, it’s something that my email provider’s gonna take care of anyway, so I don’t care.” And this is why I hate that term, because it confuses people, it sounds incredibly techy, um, it’s very easy to just say it’s someone else’s problem, and so on.
So this is why I’m trying to focus a lot more on what really matters here, which is what, what I call inbox visibility. Mm. Is your mail landing in the inbox, and is it being seen? Because if your email isn’t being seen, it doesn’t matter how good your offer is, it doesn’t matter how amazing your audience is, it doesn’t matter how good your copy is.
If someone doesn’t see your email, you can’t make a sale. It’s as simple as that. So we don’t care if it’s been delivered or not, we care has it been seen. That’s what matters here.
Keith Perhac: What is the measurement of being seen? ‘Cause it can’t be open rate, because an open rate, now that they auto open emails and stuff, is a difficult number- Yeah
at that point. Yeah. So, like, what does being seen mean?
Adrian Savage: This is the challenge. You cannot measure it because the only people that know if your email has been seen or not are the mailbox providers themselves. The only person that knows… If I send something to your Gmail address, the only person apart from you that knows if you’ve read it or not is Google, and they sure as hell ain’t telling anyone.
So you can put as many tracking pixels and whatever else as you want in there, but as you just said, you know, Apple and even Google these days, they sometimes preload those things. So it looks like someone’s opened something even if they haven’t. So we can’t track opens like that. We can’t track clicks because let’s face it, if you send an email out and you get a 3% click rate, you have a party.
But that doesn’t mean that the 97% didn’t open the email. We just don’t know. Right. So I’ve spent a lot of time in the last five or six years trying to work out, well, what metrics can we come up with to infer whether people are seeing your email sufficiently or not, because we can’t measure it directly, so we have to come up with different metrics that help us get an understanding of what our audience is doing.
And based on what we can see, we have to kind of fill in the gaps because it’s a bit like SEO. Nobody knows what Google’s rules are, and email is just the same. Um, and anyone who says they’ve got this software that will tell you whether it lands in the inbox or the promotions tab, that’s great, but they’re just…
They’re mainly, with the greatest of respect, they’re selling snake oil because the only way you can tell if an email lands in the inbox or not is to look inside an email, inside a mailbox. Mm-hmm. And the problem is these people doing that, they’re either buying the data from real users that may not be representative of your audience, or they might be operating their own inbox, and all that can do is either open things or not open things.
And- Right … Google changes the behavior of whether the email lands in the inbox or not based on the behavior of each individual subscriber.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Adrian Savage: So if someone’s saying, “I can tell you if this lands in the inbox or not,” they’re only telling you that for that one specific mailbox they’re monitoring or the collection of mailboxes they’re monitoring, and they’re not gonna be real people normally.
And- Yeah … they’re either gonna open everything or ignore everything, and, you know, you can’t read anything into what someone else is telling you they are seeing.
Keith Perhac: It’s so personalized at this point, up to a point where we… And we don’t control that personalization- Right … at all, right? And but there are things I believe that you can do from the user perspective of the person getting the email that then would make those emails always come in, like responding to an email and stuff like that, like that type of engagement.
Is that still valid? Like- Oh,
Adrian Savage: yes, absolutely. Because, you know, I’ll, I’ll focus on Google because they are the biggest mailbox provider by at least a factor of two. Typically- Mm … Google will control more than 50% of all the addresses on your email list. If you’re a standard business to consumer or even business to small business, Google are gonna be in there.
So I’ll focus on them, but actually Microsoft and Yahoo that typically make up… You know, between the three of them, they make up 75, 80, 85% of an email list. They all have- Mm … similar rules. So when I talk about Google, I’m, I’m including everyone else in there as well. But what Google are looking at here is, well, what signs can I see that show that Keith is responding to Adrian’s emails?
And opening it is obviously one of them. Keeping the email open and scrolling through it is another one. Clicking a link is another one. Replying to an email is a really big signal. And then there’s other things, if you don’t do it, then that’s a negative signal. So if you ignore my email and leave it in the inbox unread, that’s a bad signal.
The worst possible signal is if my email lands in the spam folder for some reason and you leave it there. That’s the, that’s, that’s the worst.
Keith Perhac: Interesting.
Adrian Savage: Yeah. Because obviously Google will treat people with suspicion sometimes, and, you know, the biggest challenge is when someone opts into your email list the first time there’s a greater than 50% chance that that first email is gonna go into spam no matter how good your reputation is.
And if your recipient doesn’t rescue that from spam and mark it as safe, then they are unlikely to ever see another email from you again.
Keith Perhac: I mean, considering how much spam… Like, I have probably 10,000 spam emails- Yep, yep … in my spam folder, and it’s like I don’t go in and clean that up, right? Like, Google’s cleaning that up every 30 days when it deletes them.
Yep. But, like, if something gets in my spam, there’s a zero chance that I’m seeing it.
Adrian Savage: Exactly. So if someone signs up to my email list, the first thing I have to do, and this is my most important job, and this is why I never have an upsell on my thank you page. The only thing I care about when someone opts into my email list is please go and find my email and get it out of spam.
Keith Perhac: Way back in the day when we were doing work with I Will Teach, um, we had a script that would check the MX records of the person’s email address and see are they on Hotmail or, like you said, Gmail. ‘Cause everyone’s… Even if it’s their own domain, they… There’s a high chance they’re still using Gmail as the primary provider, right?
And we would give them a link to search for that, ’cause we knew what the subject line was. Mm-hmm. And we’d be like-
Adrian Savage: Mm-hmm … “
Keith Perhac: Looks like you’re on Google. Click here,” and it will open the email and search for it and go find it. Is that still a tactic you see that works? Is that, like… There, there’s so much that has changed in the years, right?
Adrian Savage: Yeah. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve… That’s, that’s something that I’ve never heard before. But as long as they’re using the web interface into Gmail, then that is, that’s, that’s absolute gold dust. So that’s exactly it, particularly if it’s making it to check the spam folder as well, because that’s the biggest issue is it’s not just finding it, but finding it inside the spam folder and marking it as safe.
Because Google is probably the most flexible with this, um, ’cause with Google you can create a rule that says, “If an email comes in from Keith at SegMetrics,” say, “never put it in spam, always put it in the inbox.” Mm-hmm. So if you wanna be that kind of hard-hitting with your audience, you can actually say, “Don’t just rescue it out the spam box and mark it as safe, but create a rule to say never send it to spam.”
Keith Perhac: Right
Adrian Savage: And that’s the, that’s the ultimate way, but unfortunately I would say 99 people out of 100 are never-
Keith Perhac: Yeah, not gonna do it. First of all, they probably don’t know how to do it. Yeah And second of all, they probably wouldn’t set that up, right? Exactly. But
Adrian Savage: w- but you know, we, we can, we can do the basic version of that, which, you know, Evan, my co-founder, he calls it modifying human behavior.
It’s training people to go into the spam folder, grab it, rescue it, mark it as safe, put it back into the inbox, and then if you tell them to reply to it as well, that gives that extra legitimacy signal to Google saying- Mm-hmm … Hey, this person hasn’t only rescued it from spam, they’ve actually replied, so they must be interested in this.
And the more things you can get people to do to engage with you at the time of opt-in, the more likely you are to get your emails delivered forevermore for that person.
Keith Perhac: So this is interesting because this is something that, you know, we’re, we’re all about data. We’re a- about understanding how much of this gets that engagement.
How are you tracking if people responded or not? So let’s say that you have that, that people signed up for the list. You’re like, “Go into your inbox, respond to this thing. I’m gonna give you a PDF or whatever,” like just something to tease them into, into engaging and responding to that. How are you then measuring that on the back end of this person responded, this person didn’t?
Adrian Savage: All we can do is just see if the open indicator is there or not and see if they clicked. That’s, that’s all we can do. And the, the time that my heart sinks is when someone asks me to troubleshoot an individual email visibility issue where they say, “This one person hasn’t got my emails.” And that’s the toughest thing to do in the world because we don’t really know what’s happening.
The only thing we can do with this is look at things at scale and look at the trends because, you know, okay, I mean, I’ve analyzed thousands of different email senders, so I’ve got an idea of what good looks like and what not so good looks like. To some extent, as long as the metrics are within a, a tolerance range, somewhere in the middle, so it’s like if, if the, if a typical open rate is somewhere between 45% and 60%, then it means people are doing okay.
If the click rate is, you know, 1, 2%, ideally higher, then that’s okay. And then you have to look at the trends because obviously we know that Apple are kind of, you know, they’re, they’re, th- they are distorting the figures because they’re making it look like a lot more emails were opened than really were.
But as… And, and this is why I expect to see an open rate of 50 to 60% these days because that includes all of the fake opens and things like that. So as long as it’s that range, it’s okay, but the thing that matters is the trend. Right. Because as long as you are fairly consistent with your opens and your clicks, you know you’re doing okay.
If they start to go down, you know you’ve got a problem, and that’s when you need to investigate. And that’s looking at kind of the simple stuff. But then one of the metrics that I look at that I don’t think anybody else does, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve yet to find software that does it, is looking at how the overall audience engages on a rolling 30 days.
Keith Perhac: Hm. Mm-hmm.
Adrian Savage: And what, what I’m looking at there is, well, how many people have opened at least one email in the last 30 days? How many people have clicked at least one email in the last 30 days? We, we can control that level because obviously if they’re not clicking or not opening, we can stop sending to them- Mm
and that will artificially inflate the percentage of people opening or clicking because, you know, I’ve always joked to clients that I can double their open rate overnight, and the way I do it-
Keith Perhac: Just by sending less emails.
Adrian Savage: Yeah. I just, I just delete half their contacts off their list that haven’t opened for a while, and suddenly-
the number of openers hasn’t changed, but the open rate’s doubled. Yeah. And here’s the thing, Google love you if you’ve got a high open rate because what Google wanna do is they wanna make money from the ads that they display when someone opens an email. If you’ve got a low open rate, you’re not making Google much money.
So it’s very much in your interest to only send emails to the folks that have recently opened something because they’re the ones that are most likely to open the next one.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Adrian Savage: And that’s what matters here because the other side of that as well is, and this is, you know, this is probably the, the least talked about metric ever.
The reason I’m really excited to be sharing this on this particular podcast is because I would expect that the majority of people listening to this will be fairly clued up about numbers and ROI and- Yeah … and how well things are performing. Because a lot of my clients spend a lot of money on ads, maybe-
Keith Perhac: Yeah
Adrian Savage: 10, 20, $30,000 a month is not uncommon. Now, if you are doing this right, you’re gonna be doing lead gen on the front end, capturing the email address, and then following up because we know that not everybody buys straight away. So if the follow-up emails aren’t getting through, then you are losing the ability to sell to those people.
And for a typical new client or new prospect that I look at, the metric that I look at is what percentage of new leads have opened something in the first 30 days? Now, it is possible to achieve 90% of people opening something in the first 30 days. The challenge is that most businesses, it’s less than 50%.
And one guy I spoke to last week, who’s coming on board as a client now, it was under 10% of his new leads- Oof … opened anything in the first 30 days. He was spending 30 grand a month on ads and he was wondering why his launch had gone from 100K last year down to 25K this year, and that was why. Nobody was seeing his emails.
Keith Perhac: That’s painful.
Adrian Savage: And he wasn’t measuring that metric, but most people don’t. So if there’s nothing else that you take away from this podcast, the one thing I’d encourage you to do is look at all the people that have joined your list in the last 30 days and work out the percentage of them that have opened something.
If it’s not 80 or 90%, then you’ve got some work to do, and similarly, you, you need to look at the percentage of new leads that are clicking. If, if you’re not getting 50% of your new leads clicking, then again, you’re leaving money on the table, you’re wasting ad spend. And, you know, Evan, my co-founder, he’s got a, a very well-known client in the coaching personal development space.
She is achieving 75% of new leads clicking, which is insane. That puts her in the top 1% of all of our people we’ve ever measured. That’s crazy. So it’s possible to get 75%. I would say that 50% is a reasonable target, and if you’re nowhere near that, then please get some help.
Keith Perhac: Now I kind of want to see what our, uh, what our numbers are.
So this is… it’s interesting because, you know, we have that partnership with Kit. Uh, Kit Insights is running on SegMetrics- Mm-hmm … uh, on our data platform- Yep … and everything and using our analytics. One of the first things that Nathan and the team came to me with was the most important thing for our customers is to understand the engagement of that list, and especially not only just in the 30 days, but continuing.
And we were like, “Yeah, that’s an easy thing to do,” but we had never thought of it in those terms before of, oh, this is something that just needs to be out of the box. This isn’t a report that you go build. This is like a core fundamental piece- Yeah … of how your marketing is doing is that engagement, especially in the 30 days.
And he was like, “Here’s what it needs to look like,” and he has this really cool graph that he sent me, and I’m like, “This is brilliant.” And so we built that out, and now it’s kind of in Kit Insights right now and the main SegMetrics of like, of the people on my list, how long from the day they are created to whenever they stop are they engaging with those emails, right?
What’s, what’s that engagement life cycle over time? And it’s interesting to watch that drop and drop and drop over time, but you’re exactly right. In that first 30 days, you really just have to have people completely engaged because it drops off so quickly.
Adrian Savage: And that’s, that’s the challenge. I mean, if someone has signed up to your email list, in theory, they are…
that is the most likely they are ever to engage with you. The only other time they’re gonna be as likely to engage is when they just bought something. Right. So that means you’ve got a, you’ve got a golden opportunity to actually get that engagement there and then. And if you don’t manage that in that moment, then you’ve lost them.
Keith Perhac: When you’re talking about that first 30 days and you’re talking about that f- 75%, that 90%, is that at the end of that 30 days or is that at some point? ‘Cause everyone’s opening probably the first email or the second email, but from the beginning to the end, how high do you wanna keep that engagement there?
Adrian Savage: I’m not actually measuring that, believe it or not, because all we’re looking at is just that average 30 days because-
Keith Perhac: Got it. Okay …
Adrian Savage: you know, I, I… What I have looked at is the 30-day average isn’t all that different from the seven days because as you said, if they haven’t opened something in the first few days, they’re probably never gonna open anything in most cases.
Yeah. So we’re measuring at 30 days because that’s how far back we’re looking as well, so that way then if there was a contact that was added 30 days ago, then that’s still catching those ones as well. But, you know, on the whole, I would agree that it’s getting them to open that first email is what matters, and then the hardest thing after that is to get them to keep opening because- Yeah
you know, normally in a typical… I know, I’ve, I’ve seen someone in the past, they had a 12 email welcome sequence, and by the time they got to email number 12, then the engagement rate had dropped off from like, you know, 70% open to the first one down to about 15% for the last one because it was- Yeah … it became irrelevant.
So the thing that is definitely different to years ago is that human attention has dropped massively, so you need to get, get to the point quicker, get your message out quicker, make the emails shorter, and make sure there’s always something to keep them engaged. Because the other challenge is that three or four years ago, people would keep opening your emails, and then they might stop for a while.
They might have a couple of weeks before they see your emails. They might have a month, and then they come back and open another one. These days, what I call the point of no return has dropped to about 13 or 14 days. Yeah So if someone hasn’t opened your emails for two weeks, the chances are they will never, ever open email ever again.
Keith Perhac: I actually see that with my own emails as well, the, like the emails that I get. Like, I’ll sign up for someone’s newsletter, it’s like, oh, I’m really excited about this, and I’ll read a few of them, and then life gets in the way- Yep … and then I stop reading, and after two weeks of not reading, it’s just like it’s sitting there in my inbox, and I’ll get to that later is like- It never happens
the killer of that. Yeah. It never happens. It never happens. The… So this is something, uh, Laura Roeder at, uh, MeetEdgar was talking about her, her nurture sequence for people, uh, when s- they join the list, and she’s like, “We give out whatever they opted in for, that magnet, and then it’s hard sell for 10 days.”
Adrian Savage: Yep.
Keith Perhac: And it is every single day, every, uh, every email is a hard sell, and then it goes into a soft sell after that. But she knows that if they do not make that sale in the first 14 days, that the chance of them continuing to engage and to do anything just drops like a rock.
Adrian Savage: Yep, totally.
Keith Perhac: I want to go back to one thing that you had mentioned before, which…
And I’m just maybe tugging at a thread that doesn’t exist, but that reply to I feel is such a valuable metric, and you said there’s nothing that tracks it. Why, why is… Can it be tracked? Is… If we could track it, would that be something good to track?
Adrian Savage: It’s, it’s useful to track, but here’s the thing. If you tamper with the reply address so that it goes into some kind of system that’s going to track it for you, then you’re immediately watering down the effectiveness of it because Google’s looking for a reply to the same address that sent it.
And beyond that, if you’re replying to some kind of software that’s tracking it, that likely won’t even be on your domain. So I know that ActiveCampaign used to do a reply tracking thing, and the reply to address became some- something @activecampaign.com- Oh, that’s horrible … or- Yeah, no. No So that doesn’t work.
Um, I know that some CRMs will take control of the outbound and the inbound email, and they can report at that level. So as long as you are using that as your primary customer communication tool, then that’s one way of doing it and measuring it, but- Mm-hmm … that will only work if you’re using a CRM or some kind of email platform that does actually handle all the incoming email as well- Right
and it’s got some kind of way of marrying up the subject line or some kind of ID in there or something because, you know, the only other way you can do it is just if you’re using some kind of, um, support system for the replies, then you can probably train it to look for particular subject lines and things like that and do metrics based on that.
But it’s not… It, it’s certainly not an exact science, but getting a gut feel for what your replies are is probably useful, but let’s face it, the reply rate is likely to be even lower than a click rate. Right,
Keith Perhac: which is already minuscule- Yeah … 3%, 2%. Yeah. Yeah. And so interestingly enough You know, y- you touched on something which is that the email that you are sending from, the email, the actual address, is generally different than your standard email address, right?
You’re not gonna be sending from Adrian at, most likely. Right. Um, same domain, but different email address. Yep. We do the same thing ’cause otherwise I get so many, uh, so many emails when, when the wrong email goes out. Does that email address then, are there things you can do for that email address or does it not even matter?
Like, ’cause I’ve seen outbound email addresses where they’re warming the domain and they’re having like bots talk to each other, blah blah blah, what- whatever. But if an email address is only for your marketing, does… Is that a limiter, right? You, you get what I’m saying? Yeah. I don’t know if I’m asking a smart or a dumb question.
Adrian Savage: It’s not that much a limiter because as far as Google are concerned, the domain is the domain. Um-
Keith Perhac: Got it …
Adrian Savage: now, if you start splitting things out into subdomains, so you might have a subdomain for your marketing emails, then that does start to have a little bit more of a bearing on it. Mm-hmm. But the, there’s what I call reputation bleed, which is whatever the main domain has as a reputation and the subdomain, there’s gonna be an overlap.
If you’re, if you’ve got a subdomain that you’re sending all your marketing from and you get loads of complaints and the reputation drops for that, it will still bleed back into your main domain. So you can’t completely protect things. And, you know, interestingly, I’ve seen cases where people have spun up a whole new domain, almost a burner domain if you like, to try and just, you know, send junk mail and things like that.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm.
Adrian Savage: When they’ve done that, you know, or they’ve done it because they’d already trashed their main domain and thought, “Oh, I’ll spin up a new, a new domain and that’s gonna solve my problems,” unfortunately it isn’t because Google is too clever for them. Google’s very good at joining the dots and working out, hey, so this person who’s created, um, SegMetrics.com and they’ve trashed their, their domain reputation, they’ve now got this new domain called welove, welovemetrics.com, but look, they’re talking about SegMetrics.
It must be the same thing. So within a matter of days- Mm … Google will link the domains together because the AI is all-seeing, and it doesn’t matter how you- Right … try and game the system and, and, and pull the wool over Google’s eyes, they are going to, they’re gonna spot that and you will see that the reputation of the new domain you’ve just spun up will very quickly crash down the same way that the original one did.
So you, you can’t game the system. I think that’s… You know, I mean, I, I’m gonna go off on a quick rant there about gaming the system as well because you see people selling software or solutions and say, “Put this magic code into your email and I’m gonna get your email out of the promotions tab into the inbox,” or whatever.
The crazy thing is it works. But it only works for a few days until Google work out what you’re up to. Yep. Because as soon as you start stuffing code or changing what’s hidden inside the emails, then that’s a technique that’s normally known as hash busting, and that’s something that spammers have been doing for years to try and make emails look like something that they’re not.
You know, kind of a- Mm-hmm … a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if you will. And Google and Yahoo, I think Y- Yahoo in particular, their, their main email guy, he posted on… There’s, there’s a, there’s a Slack group called Email Geeks, which is awesome, and there’s this guy, Marcel Becker, he posted in that publicly saying if he sees this pers- any time that Yahoo see this person’s software attached to someone’s sending, they will block that particular sender as soon as they find it, um, because- Oh,
Keith Perhac: gosh
Adrian Savage: they don’t agree with it. It’s, it’s, it’s gaming- Right … the system. So, so be very wary if you ever see these too-good-to-be-true solutions that are gonna add magic code in to save your emails because actually, yes, it will work because they, they sell the solution to you and it works for a little while, but then sooner rather than later, then- You get caught
you get caught out. There’s, you know, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch in the, you know, there’s def- there’s no silver bullets in this game.
Keith Perhac: I mean, getting into, like, even SEO stuff, it’s the same thing. Like, if you suddenly make 1,000 pages with almost the same content, but it’s slightly spun, you’re gonna have a huge SEO boost-
Adrian Savage: Yeah
Keith Perhac: for about a month.
Adrian Savage: Yep.
Keith Perhac: And then it’s going to tank because Google’s gonna say, “Wait a minute, all these pages are exactly the same. They were created exactly the same time,” and, like, oh, look at this. And, and your, and your entire site may go down, right, in ranking because it, Google’s been, “Well, these guys are scammers.”
It’s, it’s very, it’s very frustrating. So I wanna, I wanna, um, I wanna touch on something that you said because I don’t, I don’t know if this is true or not, and I’d love to get your opinion ’cause I don’t know if people know this or not. So a lot of people, we also did cold outreach. We did the, okay, we’re gonna create seven new domains.
We’re gonna warm them up, and then we’re gonna do cold outreach through them. What you’re saying, though, is that, and correct me if I’m wrong, creating those domains, and if we burn that domain, it might affect our main domain because Google says- Yeah … oh, look, both of these domains have the word SegMetrics in them.
Yeah. They both have… They both talk about SegMetrics, and this one’s obviously spam. Yeah,
Adrian Savage: absolutely. There’s always that risk. Now, the way that people get away with cold outreach is by staying under Google’s radar. Mm. Because let’s face it, if a domain is only sending 50 emails a day out, Google aren’t gonna care about that.
Keith Perhac: Google doesn’t care.
Adrian Savage: Yeah. So that’s why people get away with cold outreach because as long as you keep the volumes low enough, you are less likely to get into trouble. I’m not saying you won’t get into trouble because- Right … you know, any, any kind of cold email, unsolicited email is still considered spam by Google.
It’s just that as long as you keep it low enough and as long as you can craft it in such a way that you’re less likely to get spam complaints and you’re more likely to get- good results- Mm-hmm … obviously, okay. So a lot of that is be very careful how you build your list of prospects you want to reach out to.
Be very careful how you word the emails. Make sure there’s something really compelling in there. So it’s, you know, so it’s, it’s the usual marketing principles. On top of that, then it’s just be very cautious and don’t send many of them.
Keith Perhac: It almost sounds antithetical to what a lot of the outbound people say, which is like, “This is a numbers game.”
So you want to be sending 5,000 emails a day or whatever, and I’m like, man, that just feels like, A, burning the domain, burning the list- Yeah … burning your reputation, and at some point it’s just like, okay, this is just spam, right? We’re not having a conversation. We’re not creating good content and good outreach.
Adrian Savage: We’re just spamming. It’s a numbers game until you get caught. But I, I guess the way the world is evolving, it’s becoming easier to make it more personalized. So I think, you know, there’s this, the… At some point, my prediction is that traditional email marketing is gonna disappear because it will be possible to personalize every single email that goes out, at which point the game’s gonna change again.
But the engagement trend is still gonna matter, it’s just we are going to be able to make it more possible to engage at an individual level rather than these email broadcasts and, you know, even the automations we’ve got today, they’re not exactly personalized, are they? There’s a couple of, maybe a couple of custom fields in there and a few bits like that.
But the more you can truly personalize each email you send, the more luck you have of, of a successful engagement, and that applies to cold email as well.
Keith Perhac: Man, there’s just so much, there’s so much to unpack here. And it’s interesting because you, you know, we’re getting into this, the zero-click marketing world right now where, um, Amanda from SparkToro was talking about the percentage of Google searches that turn into a click-
Adrian Savage: Mm-hmm
Keith Perhac: is now less…
It, sorry, 84% of Google searches do not end in a click is the, is the number right now. And she was talking specifically about owning your platforms. All, all the social platforms are locking down. You, they are changing algorithms at any point. They are changing what you can do with their data, and at the end of the day, the only thing you can control is your email list.
Adrian Savage: Yeah.
Keith Perhac: And, you know, you talk to people who have large email lists, uh, you talk to Brendan Dunn, you talk to Ramit Sethi, you talk to Eben Pagan, you talk to any of these people, I’m like, “Would you rather lose all your money or lose your email list?” And everyone’s like, “Lose the money.” Right? Like, w- because with the list, you can build that back because- Yeah
the list is the o- in this day and age, it’s the only thing you own. No one can take that away from you and show your stuff in a different way, and it’s probably the most valuable asset we have.
Adrian Savage: Absolutely. With, and I, I can’t see that changing because even, you know, my prediction is that a year from now, AI is gonna be controlling what people see in their inbox because you won’t get a traditional list of here’s all the emails you’ve received today.
Instead, there’ll be some kind of AI curated list saying, “Here’s the things you need to know today.” But the, the, the transport mechanism underneath that is still gonna be email. There’s still gonna be an SMTP connection from the mail platform to Gmail or something like that. It’s just what sits on top of it is gonna be different, and our role as marketers is going to be to change the way that we communicate and engage with that audience and measure the engagement because again, deliverability is gone.
It’s purely gonna be visibility, and it’s not just did your email get seen by the person, but can it get recognized as important by the AI? So there’s a whole- Right … you know, the same way that SEO has already transformed. Now we’ve got AEO, and- Mm-hmm … email is gonna go the same way. There’s no doubt about that.
So, and again, this is where I’m very fortunate to have Evan as my co-founder because he’s all over the like, he’s, you know, he’s all over that like a rash already. Um- Right … working out how, how we can advise people what they’re gonna need to do when Gmail launches their first AI inbox that’s in beta at the moment, and so on.
There’s, you know, we’ve got to be ready for the changes because the, the world is gonna change, and we have to keep up with it. The people that don’t, the people that… I mean, right now we’ve got people who are emailing like it’s 2012 still. You know, they’ll build the biggest list they can, and they’ll just mail the hell out of it until people buy it, they die, or they unsubscribe, and they wonder why they’re getting filtered all the time.
Now, those, those folks, when AI comes in, they’re gonna be even more dead than they are. But the people that are still being, they’re, they’re being pretty good by today’s standards, they’re gonna need to evolve as well. You know, on the one hand, Google is gonna make life more difficult because they’re gonna enforce things like quarantining and things like that- Mm-hmm
that they’ve come at some point. And if people aren’t reporting on the technical side of their emails at that point, then they’re gonna, they’ll have no idea what emails are getting through and what emails aren’t. And then beyond that, it’s like, okay, so we will do all the things to keep Google happy at the technical and the kind of the, the compliance level.
But then from a content perspective, how do we craft our emails so that the AI will recognize the relevance to the audience enough that they will show it to them? And then we’ve still got to get our audience to want to read it, open it, and, and act on it. AI is making it so easy to create the content now that r- when someone used to get 100 emails a day, they’re now getting 1,000 emails a day.
So we-
Keith Perhac: I, I was at a conference last week, and I came back to 520 emails. Oof. So yeah, and not even the promotions one. Like, that was in the inbox- Yeah … 520 emails, and most of them are crap. But like, it’s just, it’s so much. I actually use an AI assistant to scan my emails, see what I need, like categorize them.
Is this urgent? Is this like an update? Blah, blah, blah. You know, we talk about that email like 2012, right? And it’s interesting ’cause I’ve worked with people with giant lists, I’ve worked with people with small lists, and the value per person is so different. So if you have a million, two million people on your list, they’re probably worth a penny a piece, right, on average.
Your lead value for anyone on your list is probably a penny. And I’ve talked to people who have 20,000, 30,000 people on the list, and their value per person is like $79.
Adrian Savage: Yeah.
Keith Perhac: Right? Like-
Adrian Savage: Ah, I’ve got, I’ve got a distinction for you there as well, Keith, okay
Keith Perhac: Oh, yes please.
Adrian Savage: Obviously a lot of people look at their list size, and you know that term, there’s…
What is it? Uh, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. Um- Mm.
Keith Perhac: Mm …
Adrian Savage: now in the world of email, list size is vanity, engagement is sanity. So they might talk about a 30,000 list, but what percentage of those are engaged? Now, if your entire list is engaged, the value per lead or the value per contact on that list is fi- between five times and 10 times more than if you have an unengaged list.
So it really is in your interest to make sure you are managing that engagement really tightly and only mailing those folks that have opened recently because the value of your list grows by an order of magnitude. It’s not just like a 2X increase, it is five to 10 times.
Keith Perhac: Do you think that it’s FOMO? Like, it, it’s almost like a hoarding, isn’t it?
Yep. Because people are like, “Well, it doesn’t hurt to send it to someone who hasn’t opened in six months, and maybe if they open it and buy, that’s an extra 50, 100, $300,” right? It’s- Yeah,
Adrian Savage: and that’s a mindset people have, and I have to remind them of two things. Firstly, that Einstein’s rule of insanity, which I’m sure you know what that one is.
Keith Perhac: Is it the one to do the same thing, uh, and expect different results?
Adrian Savage: You nailed it. So if, if someone hasn’t emailed the last 25 emails you’ve sent them, then what in the name of all things sacred means they’re gonna open the next one? It is not gonna happen. It’s as simple as that. So that’s the first thing.
Um, and then the other side of that as well is if you’re mailing the people that haven’t engaged for weeks or months or whatever, then we’re already saying that Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting different results. They are not gonna open that next email. But this is where we go back to what I said about the point of no return.
We have got the data now that for a typical list, if someone hasn’t opened an email in the last 14 days, 16 days, something like that, they’re gone forever. So there’s just, there’s no point. Um, one of the tools that I released this year is called My Reputation Checker, and one of the things it’s got in there, kind of a by-product of what I built, is what I call the sending behavior and the results of that.
So on a day-by-day basis, I can plot a graph showing how recently did they engage from green through to red. So green is the last seven days, yellow is the last 30 days, then it goes to different shades of red. Oh, I like it. And there’s a separate graph that shows how many people opened those emails. And the headline news is this: You can barely ever see any of the red folks opening anything.
Hardly ever. There’s specific cases where you might, but on the whole you’ve got to accept that if someone hasn’t opened in the last 30 days, there’s, there’s, there’s more chance of there being, you know, a second moon up there around, going round the Earth than- … than that email getting opened. So it’s like why- Agreed
why, why bother, why bother doing it?
Keith Perhac: So for someone who is not in this every day- What should they be doing to see, oh, I have a problem, I need to go talk to Adrian, or I have no idea, or I’m doing great? Or like, what’s, what’s kind of the cadence on that? You
Adrian Savage: need to be checking monthly as a minimum. Um- Okay
and preferably weekly. I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. One, one of, one of the, one of the software tools we’ve got, we call it Smart Alerts, and it emails people when something falls off a cliff. But guess what? 97% of our users haven’t set that up. So i- How
Keith Perhac: many people are off the cliff at the beginning, though?
That’s, that’s the other question. It’s,
Adrian Savage: it’s, it’s not as many as it used to be. I think there’s a lot more email savvy senders out there now. But-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm …
Adrian Savage: yeah, I think, you know, this is why I’m, I’m very keen to make it easier for people to spot the problems and spot where they’re at. Okay. I’ve got a lot of new ideas that I’m working through at the moment.
They’re gonna make it easier for people to just get a, a better idea of how well their visibility is shaping up. So that way then as the world does start to shift, you know, I think it’s gonna shift very quickly over the next year, I wanna make sure people have got the right tools to make it easy for them to check it without having to be a, a deliverability nerd.
They can just literally say, “Right, tell me if there’s a problem with my visibility,” and then we’ll just send them an email when something goes wrong.
Keith Perhac: I think this i- this is interesting ’cause, you know, we, we were talking a little bit about before we started about AI and how it’s affecting software and how it’s affecting-
Adrian Savage: Yeah
Keith Perhac: the world in general, like content and email and everything, and I think a lot of the benefits that you and I both have in this new kind of AI-focused world is that these are hard things to do, and they’re not things that AI, A, can do now-
Adrian Savage: Mm-hmm …
Keith Perhac: and probably won’t be able to do later on because they have to have this structure behind them.
And as I have found out with my AI, just tossing data into AI, they are lazy bastards who, uh, will not, will not follow directions and just make up stuff constantly. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s interesting to me ’cause this is, this is something that is so- key and fundamental to all of our businesses. Email is the fundamental way to build and market our types of businesses- Yep
creators, coaches- Yep … SaaS even, and it’s not something that you can stick an AI at and go like, “How’s it going?” Right? Because there is so much behind the scenes that needs to be understood and calcul- and it’s always changing, and
Adrian Savage: yeah.
Keith Perhac: Interesting
Adrian Savage: you say that because I’ve had a, a lot of people now saying, “Oh, I’ve asked Claude what to do to help my deliverability.”
And I hate to say this, but what it comes up with is third rate at best. Even, you know, well, I, I have tried training different AI models with some of my own frameworks and tools, and it still gets it wrong.
Keith Perhac: Yeah.
Adrian Savage: So someone without that detailed training and context to start with is gonna struggle even more.
So, you know, it gets a few bits right, but in some cases it, you know… I’ve seen one case where the AI was telling people to do things that was actually gonna tank their deliverability and not improve it. You know,
Keith Perhac: you should, you should stuff your email with all of the, all this extra metadata.
Adrian Savage: Crazy.
Keith Perhac: We, we had the same thing.
So we were doing… I, I was testing out some AI analytics, ’cause everyone does, and I tossed in about 800 records of trials that had come in, and I was like, “Analyze these records. Let me know how, where they’re failing on these onboarding, or, like, what’s the biggest trouble that they’re having,” blah, blah, blah, just looking at the raw data, right?
So I uploaded CSVs, and it had this weird number in it, and I was like, “That’s a, that’s a really weird number. Why? What’s with that number?” And it said, “Oh, you uploaded 800 records. I just looked at the first 10.” And I’m like, “You did what?” Like…
Adrian Savage: Yeah. Like you say, lazy.
Keith Perhac: It is. It is, and that’s… It’s not smart.
It’s just taking in It’s just regurgitating everything, and sometimes that’s great. But if you’re looking for something that is constantly changing, like email deliverability, if you’re looking at something that is so nuanced, like email deliverability, like it just, it can’t keep up and it’s going to lead you astray.
Adrian Savage: Yeah, totally.
Keith Perhac: Right? Like, I wanna finish this off with one final question, and it, this is supposed to be lightning round, but I, I have a feeling this might go a little bit long. What’s the biggest email mistake that you see businesses make? Like, w- what’s, what’s the one thing that you see people time and time again and you’re just like, “Oh my God.
Why are you doing that?”
Adrian Savage: It’s very simple actually. People don’t realize that every single email you’re gonna send is either gonna help your reputation or harm it, and people don’t realize that. They see their entire email list as an asset, whereas if you’re mailing the wrong people on your email list, it becomes a liability.
So it’s as simple as that. You know, mailing the wrong people is the biggest mistake, and the wrong people are the ones that haven’t opened for a while.
Keith Perhac: It, it, it ties in a lot with what I’ve been seeing and thinking, especially in the realm of AI content, where people have removed that personalization.
Yeah. Everyone’s just a number. I have a list of 50,000 or 100,000 whatever, and I’m just looking at those percentages. I’m not looking at the people behind them. Mm-hmm. I’m not making sure, am I sending to people who are engaged, or am I sending this message to the right customer demographic within my list?
And the, the more specific you can be and the more targeted you can be, the better o- opt-in rates you’re gonna have, the better open rates you’re gonna have, the better everything you’re gonna have.
Adrian Savage: It’s… It is, it’s, it’s always just about, you know, sending the right things to the right people at the right time, you can’t go wrong.
Keith Perhac: Yes. It’s, it, it is 200, 300-year-old advice, and it’s still the main piece of business marketing- Absolutely … and we just keep forgetting it. And everyone, like, comes back to it and they’re like, “You know, we should really segment down and send our emails to only the people that are, that are really interested.”
I’m like, “Yeah. Yeah, you thi- yeah, you think?” Like, oh. Adrian, thank you so much. It, this has been such a pleasure. My pleasure. I always love talking to you. Where can people find you and, uh, got anything interesting for them?
Adrian Savage: So emailsmart.com is the place to go, and in the next few days, so probably by the time this, this podcast is visible, there’s gonna be something new called the Visibility Center.
Um, and that’ll be front and center on the EmailSmart website at that point. Um, I’m not gonna say any more than that, but it is gonna be something big and something very important, and it’s gonna be free. So that will be the thing to look out for, and I’m sure we’ll have to make sure that we share the, the URL of that and a little more details when the podcast gets published.
Keith Perhac: It will be in the, the notes below, and we’ll include that, and then we’ll send that out in email and hope that it gets delivered.
Adrian Savage: Awesome. We will make sure it does.
Keith Perhac: Adrian, thank you so much for your time. Yeah. It’s a pleasure. And, uh- Oh, yeah … as always-
Adrian Savage: Great …
Keith Perhac: have a great one.
Adrian Savage: Thanks.
Keith Perhac: Cheers.
