A Conversation With Yanna-Torry Aspraki of EmailConsul

The phrase "email deliverability" is a mouthful of syllables, but it becomes nearly poetic in the hands of Yanna-Torry Aspraki of EmailConsul.

She sat down with host Matthew Dunn to discuss the issues, players and mysteries of deliverability. How are Google and Gmail different from Hotmail? Who is Spamhaus, and what's their role? (Quite pivotal, it seems.) How is deliverability like a credit rating?

Yanna-Torry's intense interest and and involvement in this complicated technical space makes it seem almost fun. If you're wondering whether buying an email list is a good idea (it isn't), you should listen to this conversation. If you fly an 'email geek' flag, you'll enjoy this conversation. And her closing thoughts on the future of email will interest just about everybody!

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With

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[00:00:00]

Matthew Dunn: good morning and good evening where my guest is. My guest today is Yanna-Torry Aspraki From email counsel. Is that accurate?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yes, it is Jan Torres frack from Emma console. Yes. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yanna-Torry and I were on one zoom call and I was like, I have got to get her on and have a conversation about email because you pretty much bounce right.

Outta your seat on email topics. And it's just delightful. So thank you for making the time. Thank you for having me. tell, tell people a bit about the company and yourself first. So tell

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: me about, uh, of course, so I'm in Tori have a very long name. I, the people who know me know, I can talk about email and deliverability, nonstop, Uhhuh, [00:01:00] anything ever happened to you and my mom could pretend to be me for quite a long time, cuz I bounce everything off of her.

Nice. So she's just as much as a specialist as I am. Nice. Um, and uh, I started, uh, email, uh, at cake mail, the best company on the planet, uh, the best, um, teams as well. And, uh, it was a Canadian ESP. So I started all the way from product expert, all the way to product, uh, manager. Um, or what is it? The engineering team manager.

I was learning. I was young and uh, it was great. I got to, to meet Kevin Husam and talk about deliverability and then that was it. So I went to school to be an engineer and I ended up in deliverability and that's close, close clothes, clothes. Um, but definitely not where I thought was

Matthew Dunn: gonna be, you know, I'm curious, uh, engineers, I think of as, uh, you know, great solvers of puzzles so I can see the fit with deliverability.

Yeah. But deliverability, which we'll talk about at length, I'm sure. [00:02:00] Seems like a, a, a. Less predictable space than a lot of engineering takes place in. Is that fair? Um,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: yes, it, I think so as well, but I think it's like, um, I don't like this term either, but gut feeling as well. I think the more, yeah.

Situations you go through, the more you can instantly tell where the issue's coming from or what could be the cause. Yeah. Um, and that's the best part about being an email? I don't not even deliverability in everything else. Right. The more situations you're put in or the more situations you have to fix, or you learn from other people that have to fix the easier it becomes to make decisions in the future.

I see.

Matthew Dunn: Um, yeah, a lot of, a lot of accumulated knowledge. That's not necessarily, uh, you know, in a guidebook,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: some. . Yeah, it is just you, you just know, and if people ask you, then you, you can go on this long winded explanation of oh, when this happened, that, and then this and that, which means this. And then it just keeps on going.

So I like that. And, um, I'm also very artistic and I like the, so it was nice to [00:03:00] have to deal with, uh, you know, machines mm-hmm and also to deal with humans that are trying to create these marketing strategies. That might not be the best idea on the planet. So being kind of right in the middle, uh, I don't know, keeps me on my toes.

Things change all the time. What I know today is not gonna be there tomorrow, probably. Uh, so it's ever changing, which is super fun. Nobody, I don't, I don't like doing the same thing every

Matthew Dunn: day. So if someone's listening to this and their, their marketing function includes email, but they don't really have the, the, the, the time and the trenches to have touched on deliverability.

How would you define that? Relatively briefly? Deliverability itself?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: What? Okay. Um, I'm gonna go one step back and talk about, so, um, everybody has played monopoly, at least once in their life, probably doesn't know the rules, but we know we have to throw the dices, go around. We know the, you know, getting outta jail and we know how to play the game.

Now, if you've ever played monopoly with somebody who knows how to play monopoly, they're going to win the game. They know how to [00:04:00] take all the money from everyone. They know when to make the right decisions. And when it comes to email and deliverability, that's the big problem. We all know how to send emails.

We all think we know more about our customers and what they wanna receive. But if we don't know how to play the game, we're gonna be penalized. Whether we like it or we, or we know it, or we don't. Okay. So deliverability is the art. It is an art of making, uh, the emails land in the inbox or any of the promotional, uh, you know, update tabs, if a land's in spam or the, or nowhere or junk, then we are considering that the email has, does not have good deliverability mm-hmm

And this all goes with you as a sender and the relationship you have with your. And the machines that are protecting those subscribers. So that's how I would define deliverability. Okay.

Matthew Dunn: because, you know, if you're outside the, the email space, the technical part of the email space, at least like there's a temptation to go, you just hit send and it arrives.

And obviously it's a little more complicated [00:05:00] yeah,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: we would, we would hope after so many years of it existing, it would be a little bit more complicated than just send, receive.

Matthew Dunn: Why is it more complicated than that?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Well, I dunno about you, but I don't like most of the emails I get in my inbox mm-hmm and I'm hoping Google just can sniff it out better and better as time progresses.

Mm-hmm um, I don't have enough money to buy more than one mattress every so many years. So if you send me another email, I'm just, what's the point. Right? Right. And sometimes, um, sometimes the issues also, uh, the people that are making the decisions now used to do our jobs back in the day. And those things don't work anymore.

Yeah. Uh, either because technology has progressed or the things that the audience wants has changed, you know, you might be in business in 20 years, your audience doesn't remain constant over that 20 year period. Most of the time, uh, I cannot come up with a business that has the same type of audience for 20 years in a row.

But, um, people change, things have to change and that can sometimes be an issue. I don't, I've never seen the word [00:06:00] sale or three exclamation points, be the reason emails online in the inbox. Okay. Um, It's a lot more than that. Uh, there there's like the whole, the whole, uh, secret stuff from that's coming from deliverability is there to protect us.

Yeah. So, um, unfortunately, no matter how annoyed we are by these changes that everyone, all the mailbox providers are doing, we just kind of have to the follow in change the way we're doing things, to make sure that we can follow those rules or those changes, you know, let

Matthew Dunn: stick with me on a little historical trip and let's see if we get, uh, close in an edifying way.

When the, the spectrum protocol is under email, which means internet email now, um, were designed and that took years, the original objective was to be able to, for me to get a message to you, uh, relatively reliably, Globally universal address. You know, we finally settled on that [00:07:00] simple name at domain scheme.

So we got that bolted up. And one of the many things amazing about the internet and email was there was no, there was no real cost factor involved in sending. Yes. And if you look at the early history of email, fairly certain, fairly soon, you have people going, oh, wait a minute. I can communicate with a lot of people at once.

Hmm. Might be a useful marketing or advertising tool. I think the first email ad was a deck, a digital equipment corporation. Yeah. A sales guy. Yeah. And he is like, Ooh, this is really successful. Thank you very much. And we created our own problem didn't we? Yeah. We're not having a cost so, so my inbox, your inbox everyone's is overwhelmed and here's where I'm going with this.

The terrain you work in deliverability. wasn't necessarily engineered as careful, carefully to [00:08:00] do the technical job of putting some breaks and controls on yes. Like there's, there's, there's not a deliverability RFC number, fill in the blanks. There's a lot of different parties involved in determining whether or not my domain can deliver email to your inbox, but it's not, it's not particularly straightforward.

Am I wrong about.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: no, it's it's, you're absolutely right. Um, the way I compare, I talk about deliverability is comparing it to the credit score, the American or Canadian credit score system. We all know how it works, right? No, we all know how it works. We pay our bills. We get a better credit score. We don't pay our bills.

It's bad. If you close a credit card, somethings like closing a credit card is counterintuitive. You assume if I don't need the credit card I don't need, and I close it. Why would I be impacted? Yeah. But that on the bank side means, well, why can't you manage your money? Why can't you just put Netflix on it every month and just pay the $10 and keep the credit card.

Right. Um, so that might be counterintuitive if you explain to somebody says, oh, okay. It makes sense. Why the bank, or like the, your credit score [00:09:00] might go down. If you close, you know, loans and things like that. Okay. But we don't really know how many points we're gonna lose. If I don't pay my at and T bill this month.

Right. We just know over time, it might affect us. Same thing with deliverability. We know that, you know how it works. Don't send spa emails, don't scam people, don't clip BAE. People don't do the things you don't like in your inbox. To your own subscribers mm-hmm and you're gonna be fine now, what does fine need, you know, 700 credit score or 800.

And that's where I come in as a tax lawyer that knows everything and everyone, and connects two of them together. Right. So that's the easiest way for me to explain

Matthew Dunn: it. No, that, that that's actually, that's a good analogy cuz it, because it , it lets me pick, pick a fight a little bit. Um, nice. one of the things, I mean, as we're speaking, uh, Joe Biden's president of the us, one of the things, one of the many things Biden talked about as a candidate, um, was the issue of credit scores in the us, in the us credit scores are managed by three private [00:10:00] companies, TransUnion, Experian, Equifax.

Um, and so you've got a, a, a, a fairly vital piece of your personal and financial existence dictated by for profit companies under quite mur. Quite hard to understand sets of rules that ultimately end up, you know, paying to resolve. One of the things Biden said going in is should shouldn't this actually be a more clear cut government run thing.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Okay. So pros and cons. So I moved from Montreal to the Netherlands. Okay. They don't credit cards here are not real credit cards. You don't, you cannot just indefinitely owe a credit card. Something as long as you're paying a minimum payment. Yeah. After X amount of days, the whole credit card, even if you had $1 that you, that was remaining to be paid, the whole credit card gets locked.

Mm-hmm cause you went over those couple of days. Yeah. Um, I see it. That's. As, as an Canadian person, I still like, wow, that's a good idea. I cannot go into debt. Right. No one will allow [00:11:00] me to be in debt. Right. But I needed to buy a MacBook and I was like, it would've been nice if put on a credit card for the two, three months.

Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, I don't like this anymore. Depending on what situation I was in, I liked, or I didn't like the idea. Yeah. Um, of course, like there's two points here, all rules. Uh don't like if you have one rule, it cannot work for everybody. Because in my case I have the money for the MacBook.

I just didn't wanna save $500 a month and then buy it. I just wanted to buy it now and pay the hundred dollars later and use it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not the end of the world. It's not the, the bank wouldn't have been an issue. Go get a small loan. It's not something I'm used to, to go get a thousand dollars loan.

Yeah. That I can pay. Maybe two weeks later. Um, and then the there's the other point, unfortunately, there's rules that are created because there was that one idiot that did it. So you can't bring glass bottles on a balcony or on a Torah, you can't do this because there was one guy, one person that abused the system or did something stupid.

Yeah. So those two points together, I don't know, kind of [00:12:00] nullifies the thing. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, it, I, I guess one of the places I'm driving with that set of questions is it, it takes specialists like you to, to help resolve the urine allergy credit score, the deliverability scoring, which is a constantly changing puzzle.

And, and from a technologist perspective, I find it kind of stupid and poor design that something that important is that randomly structured.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yeah, well, it's all randomly structured. Some, some mailbox providers might get angry as here. Well, one of the issues that we see is that all the mailbox riders don't work the same way.

So that already makes it complicated. You know, um, Hotmail is really keen on spam house. You're on spam house. No, every single email is gonna bounce. Right? Um, Google, I have seen situations where people are not, they're not scammers, but they're not good senders. Okay. Okay. Sending too many emails, they [00:13:00] kind of have consent, but it's not very clear consent.

Let's say or million and one things they're on spam house. Google puts all their emails in the inbox. Everything is green flying colors. Why? Because they have huge engagement. People love their emails. The business that are in lucky them. Yeah. So, um, the mailbox providers don't work the same way, so there's no way to streamline it.

So we, as the really specialist, just like a tax lawyer would mm-hmm uh, or, you know, the lawyer of any very rich person, you know, the loops, you know, the, the hoops you can jump through, you know, who you can talk to. Yeah. So, and that's actually gonna bring me to a point, which is my life's work very young, but I would like for it to be the thing people remember me by, I would like to make this knowledge accessible to everyone.

I think it's really, really shitty that, um, big companies that can afford to pay people like me, which were not a lot of people out there. Right. It's it's not like a job. That's you just go to school, you learn it. Yeah. You, everyone, we we've all answered the question. How did you get [00:14:00] into email by mistake?

I don't think anyone's ever said I woke up and I said I was gonna do email. Like, everyone's my mistake. Right? So there's not a lot of us, um, connecting with the right people is very difficult. You have, you know, organizations like MOG that make it very difficult for some businesses, even if they're, you know, they're good businesses to be part of the events or to meet people that might help them.

Mm-hmm then there's the money problem. There's the fact that people don't even know this exists. Yeah. And there's the part of, if they know it exists, they can't afford it. They, they cannot find the information where us, between us are preaching to the choir a little bit sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And to share knowledge between us, which makes us better at what we do.

Perfect. But we're not helping other people. So that person is going to, I don't know, MailChimp or HubSpot and is sending emails. And then it's like, eh, email doesn't really work. Maybe the problem wasn't that it didn't work. The problem was like, you don't know how it actually works so that you can do the right decisions.

Right. So that's my goal. I wanna make it accessible to everybody. And that's why I talk a lot. .

Matthew Dunn: So when, so when, uh, [00:15:00] someone new to the use of emails and marketing channel makes a lot of the classic mistakes that people knew to the channel made, like they, they, they sign up for a platform to be able to send to a lot of people.

They buy a list off the back of a truck. they hit send to a whole bunch of people who never asked for their messages. And then they wonder why, uh nothing's nothing's going anywhere, right? Yeah. Yeah. and so they, they put themselves into technical or communication debt back to your analogy for a second.

Right? They're they they're the score for their, uh, sending domain or their ESP, uh, uh, sending domain or IP addresses got ratcheted way, way, way down. Good. So far happens a lot so far.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: It happens a lot

Matthew Dunn: without even knowing it without even knowing it. Yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: And you people know it, they think they're doing the right thing, cuz it makes sense.

The way we sell our email marketing tools. Yeah. I mean, have we ever sold an email marketing? Have any of us worked for a company like, oh, [00:16:00] come to us, we will take care of deliverability for you. That's what we always say. We're gonna take care of it. Yes. Which means we're taking care of our infrastructure.

If you're an idiot. Now I'm gonna be very insulting that everyone's gonna hate me. If you're not making the right decisions, you're buying list, you're doing things you shouldn't do that you didn't know, you shouldn't do probably. Um, there's not much an ease we can do. You can rotate around and change companies.

That's not gonna help you. And then what do we say? We manage your up. We're gonna easily upload your contacts. You're gonna easily create a design and you're gonna easily press send. What about authentication list, cleaning segmentation, all these tools that they have, where, oh, we have a landing page.

Great. I send emails. I don't okay. Let me start building a list. Having, you know, knowing what my subscribers want and then maybe we'll talk about landing pages. Mm. It is just, um, I think there's like a lot of things that are creating, um, this, this black hole of information. Yeah. Yeah. We, of course, as an ECP, I'd like for my customers succeed and grow their list so they can pay me more.[00:17:00]

The more to send the more context they, you know, of course. , but I would prefer that it can do it without getting angry at me because their deliverability is not going well. Cuz I never took the time to tell them things. And then they're like, oh, well I don't like mail. I'm gonna HubSpot. Those are not competitors, but let's say they were it doesn't work that way.

And, and um, in my line of work I get, and I assume everybody at email actually, uh, people come to me with a problem that they understand that I can fix, but then they do, they don't wanna do anything I tell them to do. Yeah. And they still want to see a change. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, isn't that what my mom was telling me.

Like, you know, you can't, if you want change, you have to change something. You can't just keep doing the same thing again and again, right. It's like this huge ball of information of like, you know, cremation points, make your emails go to spam or promotion tab, business, spam box, you know, do everything you can in your, in your life to move it in the inbox.

It's like, we're focusing on the wrong things here. Yeah. Let's, let's start by getting Google to [00:18:00] accept the email and then we'll figure out where it goes in the inbox. Yeah. Um, people don't think about it and, and it's also an assumption. Yeah. Everybody, you know, especially everybody sends an email and receives the emails and then we're all.

Oh, you remember that one time? Five years ago I sent an email. No one got it. We kind of ignored that. Oh, it happens. No, it just, it doesn't just happen. Google didn't lose your email on the way. That's not the post office. There's something that happened. And we are very we're we kind of learn to ignore it.

Oh, whatever. Let me just send it again.

Matthew Dunn: Right. You know? Right, right, right. You've you've mentioned 'em a couple times. I wonder, I'd like to delve into it a little bit. Uh, let's start with the inbox providers. You touched on outlook, Hotmail, uh, Google, uh, Yahoo. Um, am I correct? That the, that there's an increased concentration.

Of of inboxes. It's not a bazillion different email clients. It's [00:19:00] sort of fewer, fewer serving more and more.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Exactly. So, um, we're in the tool that we have, uh, animal console. We have like the Yahoo, we're doing seed listing one of the features and we have like Yahoo and, um, AOL and Verizon, because it's what people want.

Yeah. Uh, but behind it, it's the same company. It's the same spa filterer. Yeah. So if you have an issue with one, you're gonna have an issue with the other. Yeah. So testing one of them would've been enough. Yeah. And, um, customers like, no, we want every single inbox you want to see if their emails inbox in China and we're like, do you send to China?

No. Well, okay. So then we have to start educating the customer. Like this is how pen filters work, you know, but it is true though. It is interesting to do C listing tasks with various types of inboxes when you know which ones you're looking for. Mm-hmm because you know what each of them is looking for. So you might not be sending to Germany.

But they really care about, you know, um, consent. They care about content mm-hmm , uh, especially adult theme. Things are very, very strict on that. So if you were, for example, in the adult industry [00:20:00] and you send emails to JMX, they would immediately block the email or let you know that they don't accept this kind of content, which can make maybe, maybe think, oh, maybe I should blur the pictures.

Maybe I should be more soft in my tone. Yeah. Because it might not be as important somewhere else, but it's definitely as important content. Of course it's important. Right. Um, Google has worked on engagement. They definitely care about engagement. So whatever your strategy, thinking of how to get people through social media, same thing with Google, just that the problem is not that people are not gonna see your pictures, that they're not gonna get the email.

We don't want that. Uh, Hotmail is. And we're still trying to figure out what Hotmail is doing. Um, I think everybody, a lot of people have issues with Hotmail, but they're, they're IP based. That's how they give you information. Okay. So they care where you're sending from and where you're sending from can also show what type of sender you are.

Mm-hmm and then they're really cutting down on authentication. Finally, DER's been pushed and they're reading it. Um, they care about the content and they definitely care about your list. [00:21:00] Your lists are key. The list is the most important factor that's gonna hurt your, your, your sender reputation. So

Matthew Dunn: by, by that, you mean if I've, you know, if I've got a list of a thousand and, uh, and I got them from the wrong place and some of the addresses on the list are bouncing, they're

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: bouncing, bouncing, or reported as spam or, um, or spam traps in

Matthew Dunn: there.

Spam trap. So spam, could you define a spam trap right?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Quick. Oh, so a spam, shop's an email address that's created just for the sole purpose of catching centers who don't have consent. Right, right, right. But they're hidden on LinkedIn. They're hidden on websites. They're hidden all over the place. Yeah. And it's not one spam chat network.

There's a lot of them. Yeah. Um, and um, no matter how much, um, technical list, hygiene cleaning you're doing, you know, with bouncer or tools like that, they cannot cash them. All right. Because there's millions being created every week. There's no way you can foretell and they'll find some of them, of course they can tell certain [00:22:00] things, but they won't find them all.

And it takes one stem trap to know what you're doing. Just one and that

Matthew Dunn: the entities creating spam trap addresses, this is the email industry, broad strokes. Self-policing right.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yes, it is. Self-policing and it is security based. Uh, there is, it's a security part of email, let's say not in terms of protecting who's receiving emails, but just kind of knowing, you know, like the bank reporting to Equifax.

You didn't pay your loan this month. It's just that we know this, the people who are listening or paying for those services to know who's a good send, bad sender, make their own decisions based on that. So I know that certain people, the, the, they will give the information to specific parties like the mailbox providers or the ESPs, so that they can be more secure.

They can fire customers maybe, or they can block emails, but the way they use this information is up to the mailbox provider, which is why Gmail is not gonna necessarily put your emails, block your emails, right? Because you're on spam house. Microsoft [00:23:00] decided that if you're on spam house DBL, every single email is gonna bounce.

Um, so they have the information, what they do with that information is different because different scammers or different spamers like real spamers. Um, the, the definition we think of a spamer is, um, doing different things to different people. So they're protecting their own customers that way. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, and by spamer we can define that. So a real spamer is somebody that's sending unsolicited emails. So if I sign up to Walmart and I give them my consent, I give them consent for emails. I didn't give them consent for a hundred emails a day. They would become spamers technically, if they're doing something that I'm not agree, that I think is unsolicited on top of the fact that spamers are also people who buy, you know, just try to scam you out of your money and so much, but that usually tends to be a scammer.

Spamer just, I don't want your email

Matthew Dunn: so tough self policing job. Right. Um, because if you sign up your, you know, your example, sign up, sign up for Walmart and [00:24:00] someone at Walmart decides to send five a day and you didn't want five a

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: day. I'm I think I've reported a

Matthew Dunn: spam. Right. Right. Which is, which is, which is reported how like roughly

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: speaking.

Oh, okay. So it's it, to me, it works like a bounce. So, you know, you write an email to somebody, you make a type on the email inbox says, Hey, we couldn't deliver XYZ reason. Right. Same thing for the feedback loop. But the cool part about the feedback loops or the part that everybody doesn't know about is that the mailbox, provider's not obligated to tell you who reported your email list fan.

Yeah, yeah. Is the best thing. And every everybody's like what? Because I don't have a lot of spam complaints. Of course you don't, your list is 99% Gmail and Gmail. Doesn't tell. Right.

Matthew Dunn: Okay. and what doesn't mean? There are no complaints is what you're

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: saying. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't mean there's no complaints.

It just means that they're not returned to you like a balance and say, Hey, this is the person that complaint. Yeah. And this is not a mail. This is not a ESB problem. This is a [00:25:00] mailbox problem. The easiest thing you go to online, you're write MOG, FPL, uh, spam. And the first link you're gonna see is going to be explained to you, which inboxes give you that information.

Yeah. Which inboxes tell you on a domain. So, you know, it's like a percentage, 3% of the Gmail. People said spam, which ones I don't know. And which ones don't tell you anything. yeah. Yeah. And that's, and unfortunately, the companies you would assume giving information are not on the list of people giving you information.

They're on the ones telling you based on your domain. So like today we received a hundred emails and 3% of those complaint. And that really, really hurts people. Cuz then the question comes in right then how do I clean my list and how do I this? How do I, that the, the open rates are not a good metric.

They never were nothing changed. Apple just announced it. Cuz it's apple. If Jan Tori went on LinkedIn and said, open rates are almost worthless, uh, or you have to be very strategic when you're looking at them with great assaults, no one would've listened to me, but apple said it to everyone. It's like, oh my God, uh, we've been the, the stuff that they've [00:26:00] introduced has has been happening, we don't know to what extent and all the mailbox providers, how they do it specifically, but it's been happening.

So if you've made your decisions in the past, based on your opens and your clicks and your engagement, you can still do it just now you can do with, um, right mindset. You know how it works. You can look maybe for the, the outliers when you're looking at your statistics to make decisions. But the spam complaint, one is usually a new one.

People don't know that, um, the mailbox writers don't tell you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a shock because like, oh my God, how do, how, what do I. I, I think the answer's easy, but

Matthew Dunn: or logical, but you're the specialist. Um, exactly right. Uh, you mentioned 'em a couple of times, uh, spam house who yes. Who's that. And who's that what's their role.

And who said that's their role? ,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: they're also soft leasing. Um, they're, they're making their own decisions and the company's growing, but it's an organization of very secure people that are trying to do [00:27:00] something good for the world, whatever they think is good for the world. So like Google thing, engagement is important, Hotmail things, your, your spend shops are a big problem.

Um, they are the police or the FBI of one of them depends how you're looking at it, uh, of email. Yeah. Uh, they're just trying to give the people who need to make decisions like the spam filters or the email marketing software providers, more data. Unfortunately, with email, we don't have that much information.

Or it's not concentrated in one place, uh, which is the real issue. You have the information we have to go to like 25 different places. Some of them is also secure, so you don't have access to it at all. And spam house has created some things that they're looking for. And then whenever they see it happening, they can then let somebody else know, Hey, we see this, do this domain.

They're sending to spam traps. Therefore we can assume strongly they don't have consent. Let's block it. Um, people always see the negative side of it. I like to see the positive side of it. [00:28:00] If I did a contest, uh, for, for my company, for example, and a bunch of people signed up and I sent an email when the contest ended and I ended up on spam house DBL, it would let me know that maybe my form was.

Somebody injected emails in my thing, maybe I should look back at my list. Maybe it didn't grow 30,000 E subscribers overnight. Maybe things were injected. It also allows me to protect myself, just like a bank calls you to make sure you're the one doing the big payment on your credit card. It's annoying.

Cuz the payment failed and you have to call the bank and let them know it was you. But I do like knowing that that protection is. Hmm. And spa house just monitors, things that they think are important to them. Mm-hmm and they're able to give that information to the right parties, whoever wants that information pays for it, uh, so that they can make better decisions.

Hmm. They're doing it in a secretive way because they don't want us to reverse engineer how it works. That's the big problem in the secrecy. And I think is that one of the big secret problems is that if we were to explain to the [00:29:00] T how it works, then people would be able to go around it. If I know how it works, I'll just not do that.

Right. Uh, so they're trying to let you figure out on your own case, by case, what do you need to do when something happens? Yeah, yeah. Based on what we're monitoring.

Matthew Dunn: It's, it's, it's interesting that one of the natural sources of analogy and explanation that, that both of us have touched on even in the past half hour is, is credit and finance and, and, and that world is sort of analogous a way to understand.

But banking regulations are written down into law. Yeah. And spam house decision or private company in Anora. Yes. Making, making decisions about what's good and bad. And I question, I, I it's self-policing but I, I, I, I kind of question whether that should be okay.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Do you really okay. Yeah. [00:30:00] Um, we can talk, we're gonna talk about so many things um, when it comes to the regulations of the bank who decides them and why and how, and how many of those regulations were not made for the small people and we're ready for just specific cases and for specific people to hide money, pay less taxes or whatever the regulations are, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. All, all the, I don't think. Yeah, but, but, but in short, a, a, a, a governed. Process by elected representatives different the Netherlands than in Canada, than in the us. But there's sort of a clear chain of, I voted that dork into office. He voted on this bill that bill affected how fill the blanks works in banking regs.

There's not such a clear chain of influence to let's say, spam house, or even to Google's decision about this, this, but they not folder or. ,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: they don't get to decide whatever they want without the whole community as well, more or less being [00:31:00] on their side. If, if the email community ever feared abuse, mm-hmm we would shut that.

I don't know how we would shut that down, but we would do something about it. Um, and it's not going to be, uh, Jan Tory that's angry at spam house is gonna be the whole community on top of that spam house is not making decisions. They're just raising a flag. That's up to Google to decide if they wanna listen to that flag.

And they don't necessarily a hundred percent

Matthew Dunn: due deference. I disagree with you about that last statement, because there's a value judgment, even in an algorithm. Technology is not value neutral.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Oh, of yeah. Yeah, yeah. But they don't look like so there's decision Hotmail does. Yeah. But Google made the decision, not spam house spam house monitors.

Spam says, we know you sent to a spam trap, but

Matthew Dunn: choosing we'll let it know, choosing the threshold of a monitor. Is a decision choosing what to report

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: is a decision. Yeah. It's research and it changes over time. Yeah. Just like, like then we can start arguing about how does Google decide what email is [00:32:00] spam and not.

We can just continue going that way, but unfortunately that's not gonna end in anything

Matthew Dunn: and it not gonna get, it's not gonna get published either to your earlier.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: No, right? No, it's not gonna be published. It's it's I think what we're already doing as liability specialist, we're already reverse engineering.

We know what the laws want. We know what people want. We want what the inbox are trying to protect people from. Therefore we can assume logically what we should not do. Right. Or what we should do in order for them to like us. Um, , that's literally what it is. Yeah. Which is literally what it is like, well, you know, in America we can buy list and it's like, I get it.

But the law allows it. But Google doesn't who is Google to decide that they're above the American law.

Matthew Dunn: Right, right. Good. Well, they, they, they can just I'll run with that. They can, because there's not a whole lot of actual law around this particular domain. We're talking about email right there. Apple, apple, yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Apples of [00:33:00] gray area. What

Matthew Dunn: is spam? Very gray area, right? Apple, apple didn't break any laws when they said will handle images and pixels differently than the way they've been handled in the past. I mean, plenty of squawking from people who depended on some of the data back from that, but honestly, apple didn't have to answer anybody to anybody with that decision.

Did they. I know. Yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I would've liked a very organized way for email. Maybe probably wouldn't be making as much money maybe I don't know. Sure.

Matthew Dunn: Maybe,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: maybe. I don't know. Or I don't know. There's a lot of us out there, but still it would, people would be able to figure it out on their own. The issue is that this is something far beyond, you know, is Walmart and know that they couldn't send me five emails when there's other types of, you know, because we're talking about normal businesses that, you know, just like to send a little bit of emails or get some new leads.

Sure. Nothing bad. It's not perfect. I don't like it in my box, but it's not the end of the world. Yeah. But in order to catch all those really, really, really bad, what is it like a, I don't remember the percentage. Yeah. But it's a really big percentage of the amount. Actual [00:34:00] scammy scam. Scam. Yeah. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. It's, it's humongous. So we're, this is where it comes. I think that somebody did something bad and now everybody's paying for it. Mm-hmm um, the scammers and the scammers and the blah, blah, are doing things. And now Google's like, well, let's reduce the amount of emails and if they are not allowed to do it, maybe normal business or two are not allowed to do it.

Mm-hmm . And then the laws came into place and then every inbox is different. And now, like, for example, um, I don't know if it's gonna happen or not, but Europa is trying to enforce that every single inbox mailbox provider in Europe has to look at authentication. Do you know. Interesting. Most inboxes don't look at it.

I mean, even Hotmail isn't even giving us DM a reports before what last November? October? Which Hotmail? Why weren't you giving us this information? Mm-hmm , I'm putting a DMAR policy to reject and you take it as maybe we'll we'll we will we'll listen to your reject. Mm-hmm no, when I say reject you reject it.

Oh, well now it's now it's taken seriously, but what does that mean for all the [00:35:00] mailbox providers? They, they weren't doing it. Not cuz they didn't want to, they didn't have the resources to do it. They don't have the, the capacity to look at that kind of data to report to blah blah. So the government or the Euro bar, whatever they're they're gonna shut down so many mailbox providers.

Yeah. Which means that the Hotmails and the Googles, they gonna usually it's Hotmail I think is gonna swoop in and buy the mailbox providers and your dot. I don't know your ad Videotron or your Azio or whatever. Inboxing look at authentication is gonna up being a Hotmail. I think that's a little bit.

Well, it leads to it's, it doesn't impact anybody , but it will, at some point businesses, don't not all of us know what authentication is. So you

Matthew Dunn: that already, so will lead that particular issue. Uh, let's say regulatory requirement to handle authentication will lead to increased inbox consolidation.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Uh, I think it will.

Yeah. On top of the fact that senders will not be able to inbox [00:36:00] as, as well anymore legitimate senders that were doing things perfectly fine. Yeah. Uh, even to my super strict deliverability standards, um, which are stricter than the mailbox providers, by the way, usually, cuz we really wanna make sure everything's okay.

And people can pivot. Yeah. But still, um oh, , which is why I, I created a group that does it for free, um, because I it's like the first, you know, gap, you know? I mean it's the middle class is disappearing and the same thing will happen in email. I would be very disappointed if um, people. Felt the impact and they didn't know what they had to do.

And nobody told them, it's like, you buy a car and nobody, nobody in the whole world knows that you have to change your oil. Right? So you go to the mechanic and the mechanic me tells you, please just do it. And they're like, no, no, no, no one's ever told me that you still have to do it though. No, no, no. I'd rather just buy a new car.

That's I think is what's going to happen. And I'm very, very scared for everybody else because I know a lot of friends that are opening [00:37:00] businesses. They're, you know, they're buying their first domain and they're saying their first few emails and if it became regulatory and the inboxes had to, I'm sorry, my dog is playing outside.

Um, she, uh, she not Luna. Uh, the people would not land in the inbox anymore, especially if it became mandatory, mandatory. Right. Can you imagine, right.

Matthew Dunn: Whoa . Is that a, would that be a, is that a case of, uh, well intentioned, but not fully informed regulation?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I think it's kind of like, we have to do something about it.

Okay. So it's like, we'll do it. And then there's gonna be another big apple wave, like GDPR and castle and all those things. Mm-hmm we have big news thing and we'll let people know. Then I just don't understand what we can't let people know now. why does the law have to change for people for mailbox or sorry, ESPs or, and mailbox writers.

So force authentication. Yeah, that, that that's actually what one click in equations. You can, you can do your Google tags and everything with one click and [00:38:00] you sign into go daddy, and it just works. Yeah. And you can't do that for ES for, for email. Come on, man.

Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're, you're on, you're onto what I was, uh, intending with that earlier question, which is sorta like we got regulations pushing technology adoption where the, the, the engineering's not there, the standards aren't there.

yet. And the small guy who, the small, let's say inbox provider, in your example, who says, wait a minute, I have to do what? Yeah. Um, I just lost, you know, two developers cuz someone's paying more. I don't, I can't do it. Yeah. And they're outta business, right? Yeah. Email is

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: no one gets a budget for it. And we always talk about marketing.

We don't get budget, we don't get budget for it. For anything. People don't wanna, they want me to solve their problems, but they don't wanna have to hire me. Right. They don't believe. And like, and I was making joke. It's not a religion. Okay guys, it's technology. It's been there for a while or you guys are doing it.

I'm doing it. What is there to believe? Yeah. And especially the really special. Not that we barely do [00:39:00] anything, but most of the time we're just repeating what Google wants and then you're shooting the messenger cuz you don't, I didn't call Google and made them do the rules. Right. I'm just telling you what the rules are.

Right. And people get immediately get offended. I don't know what there is to be offended by just don't send emails to Google. Don't want them do, but they want them

Matthew Dunn: do, do we tend to have a model in our head rightly or wrongly? That email just works. Cause I've been sending email forever. Ah, and I get frustrated if I can't just send

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: mm-hmm yeah, I've gotten the, I've been doing this for X amount of years and I never had a problem.

Yeah. Okay. Well Google did an update and now you have a problem.

Matthew Dunn: So yeah. And now you have a problem. Well, honestly we saw that a different history side trip, but a, a, a similar kind of wrenching change in a formally, fairly open playing field called the worldwide web. Mean, there was a time you hung out a website and people visited it.

And now I would guess the SEO budget, [00:40:00] which is bowing to the search engine gods is, is more important than the content itself. Cuz if it's not gonna get found or it's gonna get ranked low, it doesn't matter if you've got a website right. And site. Right. and I know, and there's a constant guesswork. You look at the whole industry of SEO.

It's kind of analogous to deliverability in a sense, right. You've got this whole industry of specialists who are playing this constant puzzle, solving, guessing game about what a, a handful of companies might do to, with tomorrow's release. That's gonna screw all their clients. Well, my, my, my, my site doesn't show up anymore.

Uh, yeah, that's right. It doesn't. sorry.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: And also we forget, like, we are almost, um, like preaching, you know, Google and security and stuff, but they also make mistakes. Yes they do. Yeah. Yeah. We have to add that in the mix. And then that's, I guess where people, um, done with it [00:41:00] yeah, the Instagram I'm gonna go become a millionaire with Instagram.

Like, okay, you go do that. You kind just let me know. It goes, ,

Matthew Dunn: we're going, we're going way down the rabbit hole. Let's uh, let's try a different one just for fun. Um, bill gates said back in the late nineties, and it might have been in, it might have been in his wrote ahead book, but he said he wished that, and I'm paraphrasing.

He said, he wished that in the engineering of, of internet email, that it actually been built. So there was a tiny cost per send so that if someone decides to be a bad actor and a spamer, there's actually some friction in the system to prevent the abuse that creates many of the problems that we're trying to self police around.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: reaction, but aren't, we aren't, we, uh, aren't like scammers buying lists with fake credit cards and then going to like bouncer and then, or any other other list cleaning or whatever tool, then using another fake [00:42:00] credit card to clean their list and then go scam people.

Matthew Dunn: I mean, I, yeah, I, I, I, I don't doubt that, but if, uh, you know, if it costs a penny percent and all had expensive

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: what's that it still wouldn't be that expensive, would it wouldn't for like that 40%, even if it's gone down to 30, which I don't think it has.

Yeah. Uh, 30% return. Uh, but the things that the 30% return I'd like to, I would love to know return on what return on what yeah. Does it include the employees? Does it, does it include only the tool that I'm paying? Yeah. What about the expensive deliverability specialist? Yeah. Does that include, I don't know.

Um, but 40% is high, even if it was a quarter of that, 10% is a lot of money. For an email. Yeah. And the less you send, the more theri will go up. I'm just saying, Hmm. Sending a million times a million times a day. Um, it's gonna cost more to get the customer. If you just sent to the three people that wanted your mattress theri would skyrocket way over.

I

Matthew Dunn: would skyrocket. Right. So you, if, if you knew who [00:43:00] they were, which is part of the, you know, marketing side of the puzzle. Yeah. And if you knew that they hadn't, or hadn't bought a mattress yesterday, uh, which is a huge problem. right. Display ads following me around cuz I was shopping for, you know, hiking boots.

I'm like I bought enough with the hiking. How many more am I gonna buy? Right. I only have two feet. Sorry. right now one.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I don't know. I, I, I always like to tell people, I mean, it's just like logic, just sit down and locate like, uh, the, you know, yellow, rubber duck kind of thing. Or look at yourself in the mirror and say, does my client need 27 emails this week?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, is we have this? Like a, the more we send the more, no, the more you send, the more chances you get, that's it it's, it doesn't, it doesn't mean that the more you send correlates into more money, it just means you have more chances. Yeah. So why not? And, and, and then I love to tell people like, well, you can just chance it and send all those emails.

Mm-hmm and chance who Google decides gonna get the email. Right? Because the [00:44:00] one power of email I think, is that you get to decide who sees what message, when you're doing social media ads, you are telling Google who you would like for it to see, to see it. And then you're hoping Google shows it to the people who fit that the bill with email, I decide.

So why would I do whatever I want send emails and then. Let somebody else decide again, if my email should be, should land in the inbox or no.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and with, to, to, to take your analogy and expand it just slightly with those other channels, you actually pay to get the chance of exposure to someone interested in X or someone like group Y not the specific Jan Tori signed up for my list.

I'm gonna send her a message about the thing I think she's interested in, and we're at least trying to do a one to one. Uh, thing.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yeah. I gave you my consent. I gave you my attention. I went to your website. I purchased something, I [00:45:00] almost purchased something. There's a relationship there. There's something you can get gain from me.

And that's the whole point of email as well. Like the, the email is the message to get people to do something. It's not the whole thing. Most of the time we want something beyond that. If it's just informational, I get it. But most of the time we want them to buy something, come to an event, look at my website, read my blog post.

So if I put the blog in the email, I'm not getting traffic on my website. I'm not getting all the other things I would like from the customer email. It's just there to bring and push a customer, remind people you exist and get them to do something. Of course, if you're a lawyer, maybe you're not gonna get some return customers depending on the type of lawyer you are.

Yeah. But the SaaS or the e-commerce, which is usually the people who are having all these issues, um, don't you want something from your people? Or do you just, oh, I have a hundred percent open rate. Cool. Do you make any sales? No. Who cares. Mm

Matthew Dunn: mm. Yes. But yes. Sub stack.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Oh my God. What is, is happening there?

Matthew Dunn: The E [00:46:00] the email, the content in the message is the point, isn't it? Yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: But that's the one, five thing, but the deliverability is sharing a domain. It's just not a good idea, right? No. Right, right, right. But yeah, but that's their goal. That's their goal. Engage with them. But what happens even if you pay for something, how many services do I pay for like Netflix and prime and Disney.

And then I use the one I wanna use mm-hmm and I keep paying the rest. Mm-hmm people still need a look and see, like, there has to be a life cycle or an amount of time. No matter how much I love your email. Like, and I have a lot of people that I follow. I look for them in my inbox, so don't have the time to read them all.

Sure. Yeah. Even they should, at some point realize, Hey, you know, this guy was really, he loved my information, you know, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, whatever you're, you're talking about. Okay. He's educated enough. And now he's not in that little thing anymore. Yeah. Um, which is the same problem with people who do, um, how do you call them the, the job, the job listings.

Yeah. People don't need jobs 20. Like most of the time don't need [00:47:00] a job alert for the 52 full weeks of the year. Yeah. I might be bored at work. I'm unhappy. My boss does something to me today. I I'll screw this. I'll find another job. And then I subscribe to the alerts after two weeks, unless I got an interviewer.

I'm probably not gonna until I'm angry again. Or I wanna move again. Yeah. The, we need to really understand our customers and, and because then you're not gonna need somebody like me. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: well, it, it, it does strike me with what you just said about like job listings, email. It does strike me. This a fairly weak design in, in this, uh, set of standards, we call email on the feedback side.

It's, it's, it's pretty difficult for me to tell someone I'm interested. I'm not. And, and you could say, well, you can always unsubscribe. Well, yeah, but that's a binary. Yes, no permanent thing. And what if I, I have no easy way to say, I wanna hear from you a quarter as much as you want to talk [00:48:00] to me. Right.

There's just no easy way. No standardized way to do that. Is there.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: No, there isn't my so many analogies. maybe that's why boner sent me. I don't know. Or maybe they don't. We'll see. Um, we built a cell phone email is a, a smartphone that we built mm-hmm and then we gave it to a really, really, really, really, really old person that lived, you know, under a wall and then said, this works like a pager.

Yeah. Yeah. And that is our fault. Yeah, because email is a two way communication street road, whatever the expression is. I'm looking for here. yeah. If you send an email, you can reply to it. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: It's like what? But most, I, I agree. I agree with you. But most email marketers, you can say like,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: of course, like maybe not every single case you should or reply back an email, but you can, you can ask them for reviews.

You can ask them for pictures, you can ask 'em for which you can use then for free social media posts and whatever you need in your business. Um, it's, it's the ultimate thing you can show to an inbox. Of course, my email is [00:49:00] wanted this crazy lady responded back to it. This is the best thing you wanna show paying your bills on time or paying a loan in like under 30 seconds.

That probably looks good on your credit score.

Matthew Dunn: but you can't, um, hook in earlier, something you said earlier, what, what you can't do at least not easily is buy something with email.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: No, I don't. I think we could, I think a lot of business are doing it correctly. They've cracked the nut, but in general, I think the vast majority.

is figuring out what they're gonna send based on a calendar that they created and of things that are happening. Yeah. And then they're creating content to entice people. Yeah. And that's when they start thinking about people. Yeah. And it's like, no, like, like, um, I'm preparing a podcast actually. And we're talking about black Friday in June.

Mm-hmm um, there's things you need to prepare about there's things there's but no one thinks about it as a black Friday starts [00:50:00] and now starting early and earlier, um, mm-hmm, the emails and the amount of emails. And I. I don't know what I feel. I feel that the fear of missing out has left the black Friday thing.

It was a one day thing. And I remember like years ago when I, I was younger and I was trying to buy TV or something and I was like, oh yeah. And it's Canada. We, it sucks. Black Friday sucks. It's not American. Yeah. It's not the same. Um, and then it was like, yeah, you gimme 20% off. Yeah, cool. There's gonna be 20% off Christmas and there's gonna be one Valentine's day.

There's gonna be one on my birthday and there's gonna be one in September and there's gonna be one for back to school. There's gonna be, yeah. Then what's the strategy here, guys, reminding people of holidays. We know they know when there's a holiday holiday. So, uh, I think we start thinking about the, the, the people that we want to manipulate into buying something or get something out of them too late in the cycle of decision making.

What are we gonna do this year to grow our business? [00:51:00] We're gonna go do this. Are we gonna go do that? I'm gonna do that. And. We're gonna send them one shitty email to remind them it's Valentine's day . like really like they know. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Um, you know, and like all those good things you're talking about.

Like, I remember the women of email were talking about this nice email they received before mother's day. Would you like to opt out from mother's day emails? Yeah. Yeah. And now it's become the total opposite. People are talking about it so much that what was the point of it to begin with? And it is just like, come on guys.

Like, we, we all know what we don't like, the, the span filters are here to help us not receive what we don't like. So when we're on the other side and we're the sender, why do we do the things we don't like?

Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I don't know. I am. And I get it like budgets and changing the company. Like I understand the bigger picture here.

But at the end of the day, when you're having a meeting and you're trying to see why numbers don't match, or they're not going where they're supposed to go, unfortunately you have to take like a million steps back and start from the beginning. Is this the right thing that we're doing, [00:52:00] doing something for a very long time?

Doesn't mean that it's a good thing. I don't know if it's like an, like a older way of thinking, you know, like we, we tended to stay at jobs for longer in our careers. We didn't, you know, now the whole thing is like, move around, get it raised. And I dunno if that as well is instilled into it. So people have been in businesses for a very long time, so they understand the bigger picture of their own little business of their own little bit, their own business.

Sorry. And then they go and they make the decisions and they're making the decisions like they were before based. Facts and things they've done in the past. And now this crazy lady from Canada is like, oh, it's all wrong, Google. Doesn't like you anymore. And I'm like, what are you, what are you talking about?

I've been doing this. I started from the bottom and went all the way to the top. Of course, I know what my business wants. It's just, I don't think Google cares about your business in particular. That's, that's the thing they care about their business, which is us. The subscribers. Yeah. Yeah. We need to factor that in the decisions.

If we just knew, if we just knew, I think we would make decisions differently. I feel, I feel when I talk to people and I educate [00:53:00] them and they're like, oh, crazy lady email. Okay. Let's listen to her. Um, they end up making the right decisions without even realizing that they're doing it correctly, let's say, or that they are thinking about the customer first.

So that's why I think making the information accessible to people will help them make better decisions if they understood how email actually worked. Mm-hmm how do, when does deliverability come into play? Um, you know, people might know about warm. But a warmup is not gonna save you if everybody's reporting your email a spam mm-hmm , you're just slowly wrapping up to your spam, you know, like, um, and it's and when you tell them that as a joke.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, so it's this image that we have of email, oh, the dog came running in. There's the image of what we think email is on top of we've done things for certain time. Then we have the companies that are selling us, certain things, uh, like editors and lists and, um, deliverability or everything that affects it.

And your center reputation is like a black hole of information. [00:54:00] Hmm. So you go back to the things, you know, things, you can count things, you can calculate things you can, you know, uh, and we don't dig deeper, but I would love to know how to play monopoly for real. And one day I will learn one friend that really knows how to play.

I know how to throw the dice and pick up cars and, you know, keep the, the game going. So that's, I think how for email is just gonna be, that's gonna be the revolutionary thing. If people understood that it was a little bit more complicated. And gave it as much attention as every time Instagram changes their algorithm.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Three pages, not 30 hashtags anymore. The maximum is seven or I don't know, whatever. Yeah. Why doesn't anybody do that? About email, everybody sends emails and it's the easiest thing to do.

Matthew Dunn: Why? Yeah. Why, why is, why? Why is it that, that everyone in email will argue the most, the highest ROI marketing, digital marketing channel email seems to be at the bottom of the pecking order in so many companies like how come

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I don't?

I think all of them if you [00:55:00] look a lot of the, like the email geek, slack channel, people complain with the same thing. Like, oh my God, I had this idea and did this. I, I would've needed like three hours. Why can't they tell 'em gimme three hours to make them them millions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's the thing, it's the image that we have of email.

It's the assumption, you know, we assume everything about email cuz everybody does it. People don't remember how we used to create inboxes back in the day. Right. It wasn't an email and a password. And I'm like, we have to set things up. Um, and then everybody came in and started doing things for us. So we just, you know, sent emails or we know how it works.

We put an email address, subject line don't even need one and you press send. And that's what we know. Yeah. And we know what we don't like.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Google, you don't even know how many emails Google's not even showing us. Right. And we're still pissed about what we're seeing in, in boxes.

Right, right.

Matthew Dunn: And right. And, and we're all exhausted by our own inbox. Yeah. Like I honestly exhausted, like, you

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: know,[00:56:00]

and it's it just, and it's, I don't know, like, of course we carry over like email, come on, guys. It makes total sense. Um, but yeah, it's, it's the, the, the image or the, you know, the idea of email it's old, it's been there. It's easy. It's Google doc, or like, it's like Microsoft word and the format of a. Letter, you know?

Yeah. I can get information and I can shoot information and

Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah. Well, and there's also no, there's no, um, there's no figurehead company in the email space.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: No. Right. And you don't even have a figurehead person. We have one amongst us. We know who who's the Neil Patel of

Matthew Dunn: email. Yeah. You're right. I'd love to be that one day.

Yeah. Right. Well, I bring him up frequently. There's a, there's a newsletter that I pay to get every month. Okay. Happily pay. Like the content that I get in the inbox is why I pay. Cuz the guy writes a ton. He writes, well, he's incredibly smart, et cetera, et cetera. Um, [00:57:00] and he does, he like, there's no commercial.

Uh, there's no commercial incentive aside from me continuing to subscribe. Right. There's no links. There's no ads. There's no nothing. I'm like interesting. But it's, it's completely the quality of his thinking and writing. That makes me continue to pay. So in, in that super narrow channel, I think of him as a, not an email rockstar content rockstar, perhaps.

Um, but he's just valuable to you. Yeah. Valuable to me. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. He valuable to me, but yeah, there are, there are no Neil Patels of, of the inbox that, oh, everybody knows. They're brilliant. They're amazing. And every time they even send right. The cash registers ring and, and crowd celebration

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: or everybody who knows, Hey, Google updated it.

Like Google update is ful to a million times a year, but there's some updates that seem to impact more, uh, the changes. Yeah. So they, something that they thought was okay, might not be okay today. Yeah. Therefore, if [00:58:00] you're doing nothing, that was okay, but not okay anymore. You're gonna have a problem and then I'm gonna have a problem.

So I'm gonna have to argue with the customer, uh, and try to make them believe how technology works. Um, What are, I don't know, what are we gonna, who's gonna tell these people that, so we tell each other, right? Yeah. We're gonna immediately tell each other. I'm gonna immediately tell my friends, Hey, I see this, you see the same thing on your end.

Yeah. And then we try to find, we're trying to, that's what we're trying all to do. We're trying to reverse engineer what the change was and yeah. See, what's gonna, is it a mistake? Was it a problem? Is it actually a change? Is it there to stay? So we monitor. Um, but there's no one telling the, the email muggles.

Yeah. Hey, Google did something. Yeah. Why don't you just double check your list one last time or your engagement or your Google post semester? Which another thing people don't know about. Yeah. Um, you, a lot of the eco facts, you have to pay three bucks a month. Most of the deliverability stuff are free. If not all.

And, um, You can, if you send enough emails, get the information. What does Microsoft [00:59:00] think of you? What we think of you. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm gonna assume here the American market, that's the only two you really care about. I, anybody really cares about at and T anymore. maybe me. It's just, if your list is 99%, uh, one thing you can monitor your blog list, you can monitor your reputation with the important inboxes and whatever they like, or they don't like the other inboxes are probably not gonna like, or like yeah.

The idea is the same, how they do it is different of course. But the idea is the same. So just don't, don't be a spamer don't be annoying if your own parents don't wanna read your own emails, probably your customers. Don't my mom loves to read everything I do. So she gets bored of what I do at some point.

Like, I hate to fix something , you know, it's normal. Like if you don't like sometimes, um, that's something's activity I like doing is, uh, do you subscribe to your own company emails? No. Okay. Let's just for one week, subscribe you to, to your own company emails. And then they, the first couple of days they remember right.

And they're [01:00:00] gonna go look and then give it a week or two, they completely forget about it. And they're like, oh, look

Matthew Dunn: at that. Look at that. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. They're percent open. Would you sign your mother up for your company emails and and so on? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's good self test. It it's, it's difficult, especially when it's a company talking to, to, to keep that, um, sort of I'm looking for, uh, good actor, good manners.

Fidelity. I had a, this is sidebar, but relevant had a, had a guest on this podcast a couple weeks ago. Who, who does? He does very well with his email program. Not a huge list, but. It's very personal. Like he writes everything. He's got a very distinctive writing style. Um, and his customers love what he sends them.

I'm like, you know what? That's cool. A lot of companies don't send anywhere nearly as in nearly as interesting a content as this one [01:01:00] man shop does, it's got this sort of corporate voice and sell, sell, sell. And as you said, it's like, they're always telling me what holiday is coming. I know what holiday is coming.

Thanks. You don't need to tell me that it's just an excuse for you. Tolog your, whatever you're trying to sell. Exactly. And it's not interesting at all. Yeah. You know, sometimes you catch me to good moon. Maybe I'll buy something, but that's pretty arbitrary. Versus I look forward to the email from, you know, Jany about deliverability issues.

Why? Cuz it's distinctive voice. It's very informed. It's useful to me. Yeah. And so on quick,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: because if they were too long, maybe like, okay, I like one email to emails, but I have to take the time outta my day to read them. Yeah. Some people have the time to do that. You know, like, uh, when I got the, when I got access to email geek, slack channel, the first time, I don't think I worked for like a month after, I was like, just like the reading and scrolling and what do you mean?

And then it, I just got lost. And then at some point now I feel like I'm not on it enough. And it's just like, okay, I'm, I'm getting my information from other places. LinkedIn has been a Twitter and LinkedIn has been a [01:02:00] place people have been going to, and I don't, I don't feel I'm at the same stage. It was years ago or I, I changed my phones and I didn't have slack on it for a while until I had a customer that needed it again.

And until then, situational things happen. Yeah. And we forget about, it's like, yeah, Tori loves my brand. Of course she's gonna buy. Yeah. Okay. But maybe something's happening in my life right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not gonna do that. We, we, things are constantly changing. And, and me, I'm just here to, to mediate and to point you in a direction and tell you what you need to fix.

Also, I can get more information, but at the end of the day, the company's the one that needs to be asking all these questions is my content relevant. Do I need to send this email? Yeah, because that would give your, your, the, your email team, maybe not a bigger budget, but to give them more time, if they didn't have to concentrate and create those redundant emails, right.

They might be able to create these phenomenal emails that they're gonna send to 1% of your list, but it's gonna bring 10%. Yeah. Um, yeah. 10% more than any other kind of email.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And time, time, time is [01:03:00] time is budget. If, you know, if you, it is, if, if the email I've I've yet to talk to someone who's function is email marketing, who seems like they've got time to do it the way they want.

They seem like the busiest beaver on the, on the planet. Most of the time. Right? Yeah. Side question for you. Since you mentioned it, one of the, one of the early sort of, uh, positioning and growth things that drove slack. Was we slack are going to replace email and I don't think they pitched that anymore.

But what do you think of slack?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I like it, uh, from all the other chat tools. There's a lot of them out there. Mm-hmm um, I like slack. I like the, the convenience of use mm-hmm I like that I can have like contrary to my Google account account, have all my Google accounts on one account. Uh, I have to kind of switch between them in slack.

I get it done. I don't have to pay for anything. I don't have to do any, I just sign in and I got all my slack there from work or for, you know, the geek, slack channel or whatever. Um, definitely [01:04:00] doesn't replace email though. No, it's I don't think we're expecting the same thing from a chat and from an email.

Agreed. Yeah. Agreed. Like I usually tell people, like, if you, if I, for some reason I don't answer back in like 30 seconds, uh, ping me on LinkedIn. I've got like three phones that have LinkedIn, Bing, Bing, Bing. Everybody knows. Even my mom knows. So I will not miss a message. Slack kind of has the same idea for me.

If somebody sends me a message, I'm going to see it. Interesting email it. I might not see it right now, or I might not respond to it as quickly. It feels like it's something I need to prepare to do, answer back to a customer or whatever I'm doing my inbox mm-hmm and whenever I'm bored or I don't wanna work, I go in my promotion tab and I buy stuff.

That's that's how I end up buying stuff in my inbox. Eh, bored. Oh, maybe reminder. Um, I am definitely not a good, um, e-commerce subscriber. I don't think anybody would like me on their list. Cuz I subscribe to things to remember to buy them one day. When I think it's relevant or good enough for me to buy,

Matthew Dunn: which is as it, which [01:05:00] is as it should be, but not, not how email marketing departments want it to be.

Yeah.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: yeah, exactly. So, so that is what is a, so I, I can understand how difficult it might be for a marketer to make a decision. Yeah. Because of all these situational things, about how humans just work at the end of the day. And that's why maybe focusing on creating better emails instead of more emails would help your ROI period.

Yeah. Yeah. And all the marketers get raises. Also. It's not something we like, we get a lot of money when we work for a company that knows what an email geek is and how much value we can bring. Yeah. But usually marketers, um, might not make that much money, uh, when they're doing email and they don't even know emails, a thing, they're just, it's just a job.

Right. And, um, if they knew , if they knew yeah. If they knew the, their, their, the, the value of the work would be seen, which is the problem. You know, every time a company or most of the people I see, every time they make money, they don't ever [01:06:00] attribute it to email. Yeah. How are you supposed to define the, the calculations that would prove that email is the reason this person came back?

Matthew Dunn: Well, it, I, campaign genius only influencers, R P origin, uh, ran a, a survey to, to try and get a pulse on the impact of NPP. We did a survey about a month ago, um, and they did a webinar on the findings. And one of the questions that we snuck in there intentionally was, was the, where do you measure different things?

Question? And I expected email and mostly email marketers responding. I expected people to say, I measure, you know, opens, I measure opens and unsubscribes and so on in my ESP. But one of the things we asked them, where do you measure revenue? And the answers were a mess. A substantial number of PE people said they pay attention to revenue inside the ESP, ESP second measuring revenue.

[01:07:00] Right? Not a handful of them said we measure on, uh, you know, Google analytics or something like that. I'm like, no wonder we're having problem at the attribution argument because why we're not putting our stuff, our poker, you know, our, our stuff on the same monopoly board as the other guys. Exactly. But we're trying to win the argument.

But based on politics, the ESP said we drove all the, we, we drove a whole bunch of traffic and revenue. Well, nobody else uses the ESP. Why should they believe you?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yeah. And also they calculated differently. I mean, like we Google analytics calculate stuff, and sometimes I, I look for the formula and I disagree with it as if I know better.

But , it is, that is a problem. There's a lot of problem with the email. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Well, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it seems like a fairly isolated channel compared to. Yeah, others fair.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: I think it is. Yeah. The way it works, the mentality behind it, we have this residual mentality that's, you know, connected [01:08:00] with new things and the new things are always related to security, right?

Like it's more secure and always gonna steal your information less can. It's never like to make you happier. Why isn't security there to make you happier? Of course, I'd be happier. You know, I can just put my thumbprint and walk in my house. So if I forget my keys, I'm good. I'd be happier. It's secure. I got the cameras.

Like we always look at security as like, ah, great. What am I gonna have to do now? You know, what hoops am I gonna jump through to get in the inbox? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? I don't want spa in my email. I want that mattress reminder in 15 years or maybe 10 years when I, I feel old and I need a new mattress.

You should know that. And then I don't know who I'm expecting. What so you

Matthew Dunn: know, well, this is a wild eye hypothetical. If, if, if you were a heavy duty Gmail user, yes. And, and Google's came and said we've connected up AI so we can tell what you're really interested in right now. And we'll take the stuff you're not interested in like mattresses and basically make it disappear.

So you don't have to. [01:09:00] Yeah. Would you

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: trust it? We're kinda already doing that. Yeah. Oh, trust it. Hell no. you use the word AI to begin with? No, no. Right. But I do believe that Google is the front person. Let's say maybe I'm wrong. I don't know my opinion. Um, that they're getting very good at guessing what I want.

I Spencer, and I can tell that because I, uh, like, like we trust social Instagram to show me the, the app, like dog pictures over, I don't know sunglasses. Right, right, right. Do I trust that? Instagram knows what I want. No. Do I use it? Like I trust it. Yes.

Matthew Dunn: Do, do you have a choice? No. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the inbox points though, the email inbox is starting to have some of those same characteristics,

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: right?

Like, oh, when I see it, uh, I take care of my parents' inbox. Oh wow. And my dad is definitely the one who doesn't know how to use one I's 73 years old. And, uh, he [01:10:00] sees the email and calls me immediately. Like you can read it and then make a decision based on it. And I realized sometimes I sign my parents up to stuff cause I'm helping a customer and I wanna see things.

And, um, I'm an idiot. And I forget to remove the emails. And at some point I realized that my mom, for example, immediately very quickly, the emails are gonna disappear from our inbox. My dad, on the other case, not as quickly, he tends to sign up to, he can't tell a real website from a fake one as much. He's not, you know, he's not super good at the technology stuff holds his phone very far.

My mom's inbox is really rather clean and mine even more. Um, so I can already tell it's the same email from the same sender at the same time. And I did the same stuff at the beginning. I was looking for the emails to see that they receive or whatever I was doing. But over time, if I forgot somebody or they kept, I kept trying to see if there's any issues.

I saw that the emails were not landing at the same place between inboxes mm-hmm and were not even landing sometimes at all between of them. [01:11:00] Um, you can tell that it is being catered and the more time progresses, I think the better it's gonna make decision, but it will never be perfect. Impossible. Google doesn't know I broke an arm today or that I, I bought a dog or he's gonna take time.

Every time a change happens, it needs to relearn everything. So it's never gonna be perfect. So that's on to the marketers and the business to let the marketers. Um, analyze data, had read an article a couple years back. Um, um, they were, were saying, you know, back in the day, I don't know when back in the day was, but back in the day, uh, lawyers, engineers, doctors that was important and then software engineering came up.

There's a lot of that happening and they were suspecting that the next thing wouldn't be necessarily technology related. It would be more on the, um, data analytics side. So we want a human and very precise analytics, a human that is under understands how technology works, but that will not be created, will not be done by man anymore will be done by more machines.

So a person that understands what machines are [01:12:00] doing and what they want and how they work, and somebody who understands what a business needs and is gonna be able to take those two together to make better decisions. Mm. Apparently that's the future of work. So, um, people that can, um, and by data analysts, I don't mean somebody who looks at the data just like, oh, I see bigger open rates.

I mean, like. The story, very, very bad with the, the names of places, whatever they were making research to see these planes that were coming back, they, they had shot during war and oh yeah. They were like, you heard the story, right? Yeah. So we wanna protect the places that were shot, so that there'd be longer.

And then some guy was like, why don't we check where the planes and never came back, got shot and fixed those issues or reinforce them. Right. Yeah. And you, you read it and you're like, ah, yeah, that, that definitely makes sense. The first one made sense too, to me, like the planes came, they shot here. Let's let's fix the wings or whatever it was.

But then the second point came in, it was like, oh yeah, That makes way more sense. You, you fix the place, the planes and never return. Yeah. So those kinds of those types of people are the [01:13:00] ones that are gonna be the future, because they're going to understand enough about technology. They're gonna understand the bigger picture of their business.

Mm. And they're gonna be able to decipher, you know, and like kind of a, yes, that's a direction we're going, that's it? Those, that's why those in our, I thought it was very interesting. Yeah. I felt it was very close to what email geeks are doing. And not only deliverability in statistics, we are trying to guess stuff from an open.

Maybe your subject line was good. Maybe I, how many times did I click on the wrong email? Cuz my emails, my inbox I have are like really skinny. So I've opened emails that I've never actually opened. Yeah. Yeah. And so many things. So how does a marketer? I I'm in a, the time because I set the rules, deliverability set the rules and then people come, well then what am I gonna do?

I don't know, go talk to a marketer. right, right. I have my opinions and my ideas and experience and stuff, but I'm never gonna be as good as some marketers out there. Oh my God, the stuff they come up with. It's so clever. So interesting. But it's not the majority of it. [01:14:00] Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Majority of it. It that it's gotta be tough to be clever that frequently.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Yeah. So frequently and some businesses is just difficult. Right? Like I keep eating the lawyer. One of course. I mean, if I do divorces, like I can't sell two for one divorces.

Matthew Dunn: let's all except you know?

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Right. We'll see how it

Matthew Dunn: goes. Parting question for you. Yes. Where, what, what. What would you expect be different substantially different. This is a future of email question in say, five years in the email space.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: What is gonna change? Yeah,

Matthew Dunn: big

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: change. I think the, I think these spa filters, the mailbox providers, all the people that can make decisions. The ones that we don't know that are self governing are going to become so strict that people are going to notice that emails more complicated than it is interesting. [01:15:00] Um, I think I felt it in the last year, uh, last August, September last January, February, uh, types of industries that couldn't inbox anymore, the whole industry, boom can't inbox anymore.

So I think people are gonna notice they're gonna get, everyone's gonna get a slap in the face one after the other, because the more things that we're doing that are incorrect or unwanted, and it doesn't need to be a big on just unwanted. Google is gonna make it his job or whoever is gonna make it his job to protect its customers from it.

So the day that technology, um, reaches thing under, as close to understanding of what we want, we are going to get hurt. And we saw it with social media. Uh, we could spend people and do all these email like pictures and whatever. And at some point it became really difficult. You had to Woohoo to get, to get those likes and get those things.

You really need to work at it. It wasn't as easy anymore. And I think email is kind of tired of it and that's what's gonna happen. That's that's my guess. People are, are gonna know [01:16:00]

Matthew Dunn: interesting. I love that. I love that. That's a great, that's a great sort of projection to watch for, you know, there's not a hundred percent accurate exactly access to happen, but that's a heck of a trend line, uh, to throw up

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: are gonna get, they're gonna get that slap in the face and it's gonna make people panic.

Like what COVID did. Oh, COVID it made people panic, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: It could give it definitely a, definitely a reset, definitely a reset button. Well, I knew this would be awesome and fun. Thank you for the time. And the, and the wisdom. I, I, I suspect there's some really good lessons for a lot of different businesses in, in some of the things you've shared.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I, I can talk [01:17:00]

Matthew Dunn: That's okay. Well, my, my guest today has been Yanna-Torry calling me from the Netherlands and chatting on zoom. Thanks.