Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
Jordan Cooney
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Hello, SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Alex Goffstein, who is the co founder at pitchbox. Pitchbox offers a comprehensive influencer outreach platform which is designed to streamline the process of connecting influencers and and managing campaigns effectively. Yesterday, Alex and I talked about link building in automation and today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing email deliverability. Okay, here's my conversation with Alex Gopstein, the co founder at pitchbox. Alex, welcome to the Voice to Search podcast.
- [01:20]
Alex Goffstein
Hi, Jordan. Great to be here.
- [01:22]
Jordan Cooney
So yesterday, Alex, we really dove into link building, its core foundations, where it is today in the market, and ultimately how automation has been a key ingredient to helping organizations, marketers, influencers, that you're trying to reach out. And that is kind of the linchpin of what success is now in a really good campaign. A digital PR or link building campaign is dependent on automation. Today we're talking about email deliverability as it pertains to link building. For our listeners who aren't super familiar with that and don't know a lot about email deliverability, can you give them a little bit of a basic understanding of what that means, why it's important to link building as a key foundation to those efforts?
- [02:07]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, absolutely. So many of us don't think what happens to our email after we click the send button, right? There's a lot of things that happens. All of a sudden, miraculously, it ends up in the other part of the world in somebody's computer, in Inbox. But in reality, a lot of things happen. It takes a lot of hops, it goes through a number of servers, it goes spam filtering machines. Try to understand whether they should or should not deliver and where they should deliver your email and most importantly, where it should end up. Now that's really, you know, what's, what's email is all about. And if we talk about email deliverability, why we should care about it, I guess we should not just talk about the emails that I'm sending to my friend or a colleague. But it's the cold outreach emails, right? Those are the ones that we care about because those we're trying to send a lot of and reach a lot of people in a short period of time. And what most don't think about, some, some say, okay, well, it's important for me that the email and receiving server actually accepts my emails and gets me into the inbox and we'll talk about that as well. But a lot of people don't think about the mail server that actually sending your email, that it's also looking for signals should it actually send your email out or not. Right. And if we take the most popular mail providers out there, such as Microsoft and Google, which is the Gmail, they don't necessarily want you to send blessed emails. They don't want you to send a thousand emails from your email account a day and have every single email be identical because ultimately that reflects badly on them as a sender. Correct. Because they care about their sending infrastructure, they care about their IPs and so on and so forth. When we talk about deliverability today, in fact, in 2024, beginning of the year, they've all kind of joined forces, I think the Yahoo Googles, and they've put some measures in place and some rules in place and said there's certain things we're not okay with. Like, we're not okay with you blasting out a ton of emails out of one email account. And that's probably what you've been hearing in the last year, terms like email warm up, email rotation and things like that. And those things are all real and they have now sort of been amplified in the last year because of the changes that they have made. And when we send outreach emails, when I mean we. I'm talking about people who send cold outreach and care about it. What you need to think about today is making sure that your emails are not very templated. That personalization was important a while ago, but now it's more important not just because you want to make sure that the personalization makes the person on the receiving end feel nice and warm and fuzzy, like you actually wrote the email, but it's also the sending service because they don't want you to send the same identical email with the same subject line a second one second to the next second to the next second back to back.
- [05:09]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [05:09]
Alex Goffstein
They basically ban your account. And then you're like, what happened? My emails are not going out. Right? Yeah, and you do that through multiple people in the organization using the same domain. And all of a sudden none of your emails, even to your friends are reaching them.
- [05:23]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [05:24]
Alex Goffstein
What the hell just happened? Right? So those are things you need to be mindful about. You need to consider those things. So we talked about automation yesterday. You can now implement personalization. Automation now is able to personalize your emails, right? Using, obviously utilizing AI, you can now utilize all the technology to make sure that every single email that you send has a different subject line, that the body of the email is unique enough not to raise any flags with the email providers that you have more than one email account that you send your outreach from. And they rotate from one to the next to the next, like round robin, for example, depending on your email volume. So all of these new things that we need to be mindful of today before this email even gets out of your computer, that's what we need to not, not re. Not on the receiving side. Right. And then you have the receiving side of things. Now the email comes in and many people think, well, I'm not sending emails to Gmails. I'm not sending emails to free. Like I'm B2B. Like I don't have to care about Gmails. Guess what, you're wrong. Because if you send an email to Alex at Pitchbox, which is my email address, guess what that email goes through. It goes to Gmail. Because we live on Google workspace.
- [06:37]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [06:37]
Alex Goffstein
Again, something people don't think about it. Aha. Well, now all of a sudden you start blasting your B2B emails. They are going to Microsoft, they are going to Google, they are going to the same Gmail platform. Just people pay for it, that's all. But it's the same, you know, it's got the same filters, it's got the same technology under the hood.
- [06:56]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [06:56]
Alex Goffstein
Now all of a sudden you sending 100, a thousand emails that are all templated, and let's say your email provider let it happen. The Gmail is not receiving emails yet. You send it to Pitchbox, you send it to another domain, another domain, and they're all coming into Gmail. And Gmail is like, okay, well this guy Alex is sending hundreds of emails and every single one of them is identical. They're all coming into our system, right. And they'll, they'll put a pause on it, right. They'll send maybe 20, 30, 40 and wait. And the waiting period is what will the people who we actually do deliver those emails on the inbox? How do they react? What are the Actions they take. Well, they didn't even open it. They don't care about the sender, they don't care about the email. Or even worse, they clicked spam. Well, guess what happens with the other 80 emails that are sitting sort of in this waiting box, waiting their trial. They're not going anywhere. Right. They're going right into spam because the first 20 have said, you know, send their signals. So all of these things you need to consider. So personalization is extremely important. Rotation of email is extremely important. You can't send way too many emails out of one email box. Yeah. And also some people just, they're like, okay, well I'm going to buy a domain, get an email account set up and start blasting a hundred emails a day.
- [08:17]
Jordan Cooney
Let's break some of this stuff down. We covered a lot of stuff here, Alex. Probably more than what most people can process, especially if they have zero experience with email deliverability or email systems in general. You know, let's talk about a couple components here. Like, the first one is that component of like creativity in the sense that you have to be personalizing, you have to be creating unique messages. You have to be like doing a lot of work to ensure that you're delivering something that is of value through the system. Because if you just blanket send out 7,000 emails that all have the same title and subject and all have the same body, it's probably not going to work. You mentioned this. How do you go about that process of completing that requirement for good email deliverability? What are the mechanisms, what's the effort that you and your team or your product put into play to help create uniqueness in, in your emails to improve deliverability.
- [09:14]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah. So it, it starts with extracting some information from the website itself. Right. So I'll call this a very simple personalization for sitters. Like, there's zero personalization. We all know what that is. Right. There is extremely little personalization. That's, you know, that's high, Jordan, and that's the end of it. That's your personalization. Yeah. Then there's like, the next level of personalization is maybe just like a really, you know, I have your company information, I have your website domain, maybe I have the title of the last article that you've written. I can include those things. And those are the basics. Right. And that said, most systems can probably do that. Hope that they can do that. Right. Give you some, some of that. But that was a, that's like, I'll call this the bare minimum. Then you have the ma. So let's just before we go to AI, then you have the manual personalization that. So personalization and inspection kind of goes hand in hand. What is what I mean by inspection? Just because you have an automation in place for prospecting, it doesn't necessarily mean that every single site or company or the record that comes in is a perfect fit. So that's where the inspection comes in. So you can look at each individual site and a lot of the tools like including Pitchbox, you have a, we call this inner browser that you open up the site and it loads the website right inside Pitchbox and you kind of make the decision. Yeah, that's a good fit, right? I'm reading it. You know, if we talk about a fitness like let's say I'm in the, I have a, I have a company that it's in the fitness space, we produce some kind of fitness equipment. I'm finding some people talk about how to, you know, build their six pack or something like that. That's a good one. Right? But then for whatever reason I found a site that talks about, I don't know, maybe cars have six packs but they have packs of some sort in their engine. It's like, okay, well that, you know, that didn't, doesn't look right. So I probably shouldn't reach out to that. So that's the inspection part. Shouldn't happen a lot but it, you does like, you know there's a funny, funny story that I have a client that they are in a home improvement business and they do window replacement. So obviously when you do a keyword window replacement you get some things around like Windows 2000 or Windows whatever operating system. So you might get a little bit of that overlap. So that's the important part of it and making sure that you don't end up with you know, sites that seem like it's should be just keyword based, that it should be relevant, but it's not. So anyway, that's the inspection part. But then the personalization, it happens around the same time you look at the website. Yes, this is a, I have the title of the post which is like how to build your best six pack while dieting or something like that. Or not dieting. Then I could say okay, well what is this article about? Maybe I can add a little bit of personalization about is this a personal blog? Is this a mommy blogger? Are they talking about specific gender? Are you talking about a specific location? Are they talking about specific foods? And maybe I can extract some information in there and add that into my Email. So that's where really personalization takes start. Real personalization start to take shape. But you can imagine that is very time consuming, right? We're coming back with, hey, we're trying to do a lot of automation here, but we can't. And obviously with AI, AI is doing a great job with analyzing content and then just producing certain things. Now you're back in the game with automation where you can and what Pitchbox does, we basically look at the page, we extract H1, H2 keywords, content links, outbound links, internal links, anchor text, and all that OG tags. And then we feed that to AI and we let you write prompts. So you write a prompt, you say, just let's maybe praise, let's write a little praise to the author of this article. How cool a couple of concepts are. And you can write that prompt and then you just fire this off. And all of a sudden, instead of you looking at each individual and trying to find some angles that you can include in your, in your email, AI is just written for you in a matter of seconds in bulk. So you have a thousand sites and all of a sudden you have a thousand unique subject lines. Because AI was able to generate the subject line based on the content in that article, right?
- [13:26]
Jordan Cooney
And so like, when you, when you think about like the, these different, like, concepts where you're, you're building in like this uniqueness and you're using like AI to your point, you know, to help, help build in the uniqueness, like, are there triggers that you guys have to like, help, you know, marketers and SEOs know, like, hey, it's time to like, improve uniqueness or it's time to like, improve this effort to scale up our deliverability. Like, we're running into like this red zone. Like, how do you, how do you like, know when to put that effort? Because, you know, to your point, from, from yesterday's episode, right? Like, you're sending out seven messages or more to try to make a connection with people. So at some point you kind of run out of the creative juice, but you got to go back to the well and get that creativity or that effort going back in, right?
- [14:13]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, for sure. So I think one way is to, when you start to see your response rate start to drop from campaign to campaign, you kind of need to have your baseline. So when you're starting your initial campaign, that's going to be your baseline and then you kind of start optimizing from there. And obviously there's, there's just best practices if you're on A campaign, you get a 5% response rate. Well, I'm doing something wrong, right? I know the Pitchbox says we need to have, you know, 20% response rate. That's good. So that's, let's, let's go after that and maybe there's a North Star, we shoot for 30. But you might be running your campaigns and all of a sudden things starts to, to, to drop down. You're like, okay, what's on a calendar? Okay, Easter people are taking time off. Okay, well, maybe that could be the case. But no, doesn't look like it. We're still, you know, it's like, you know, business as usual. Why are we starting to drop? Okay, well, we starting to drop because. And we started to evaluate that. Now we also Pitchbox because we're in the durability space. We have been working for last couple of years, been working on a product which all of our customers have access to and it's going live in the next probably couple of weeks. It's called mxrite. What we do is we run every email template through this scoring system. We kind of have our own tuned version of this spam assassin that tells you whether this email has a really good chance of getting into the inbox or not. And it also happens, you know, at scale. But if you don't have access to a tool like that, for example, you just need to look at, okay, are my, what are my response rates? And if they're starting to drop. Usually that's the key is like you have a, you have a problem in your outreach. You got to look at your. Yes, you have to look at 100 last emails that you've sent and see, maybe you're missing something there where your personalization is just not working properly. I mean, I've seen, been in space for a long time. I've seen people still kind of make mistakes. They'll go, and it's not just related to Pitchbox, but they'll use, they'll go online and they'll find like, find me a great email template. And I know HubSpot has done a pretty good job with doing like all kind of versions of outreach and I think including links and, and influencer outreach. And they use their own parameters for merge fields. Right? So use like a regular bracket and people will take that and dump it into this different system where they use curly brackets. I mean, we've, we've all received those emails. High bracket name, you know your company, you know your brick. So unfortunately those mistakes are, you know, people still make those mistakes Most tools should analyze your email before they let you save templates like this and tell you, hey, you, you know, you're. There's, there's definitely a problem here. I've seen that, you know, like, I've seen campaigns, customers have great success, 20, 30% response rate, and then all of a sudden it's like down to zero. Like, what happened? You know, there's a problem with Pitchbox. And our team would go in and be like, no, you have, you know, they're, oh, we just hired somebody new and they brought these templates with them from a different system. Okay. So, you know, those are the, those are the things, Those are the signals you need to definitely look out for. And just be careful when you're setting up automation. I always say that you want to scale and automate things that work, right? If you think about this, like a lot of people, they would love, they love the idea of link building and they want to get into link building. And first thing they do is like, okay, let's get a tool. And I'll say, what are you getting a tool for? Well, we want to speed this up. Well, do you have a proven process in place that you want to speed? Up? Because if you don't, you're going to start making mistakes. Guess what? You're going to speed up. You're going to speed up your mistakes. You're going to burn through all those contacts and all those prospects that you put together.
- [17:45]
Jordan Cooney
Garbage in, garbage out.
- [17:47]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, exactly. Garbage in, garbage out. So no, before you go and automate, do it manually, get it right, and then you can start automating what actually works.
- [17:58]
Jordan Cooney
Right? And so let's say for those listeners of ours who are already on the track of doing this well, who've already scaled up some campaigns, have some good ideas, things that are working, where should they go and learn about improving email deliverability? What are some of the best places to gain knowledge, gain insight, develop those other templates? Do all that stuff that you just shared with us. What are some of the resources you use? What are some of the ways that you keep sharp in this space? Because I get the sense that it's an evolving thing, right? It's like you can't just stand still in order to stay ahead of email deliverability and have success rates?
- [18:34]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you always need to continue reading. I mean, we try to put up some content around how to do this, right? There are some interesting automation tools, like Clay, for example. I think they put out a really good content. There's some folks that Just doing lots of code outreach and are willing to share on LinkedIn. But honestly, it's all about experiments and give it a shot. Nobody's going to hand over, you know, their absolutely 100% proven template and say, do this right. They figured things out on their own and they're gonna. They're gonna spin it until it stops working. So try to. Try to be that, you know, try to be that person who comes up who experiments and don't give up. Like, just because you ran a campaign or two or three and you didn't get any results, it doesn't mean outreach doesn't work. Outreach works. It just doesn't mean that you hit the nail on the head yet. You haven't figured out what works for you, for your business, for your pitch. Just keep going at it. And sometimes it just takes. It just takes time. We had a sales guy, he was doing outreach called Outreach for pitchbox for a while, and you have not had any success. And now all of a sudden, it's just the responses start coming in three months later. Right. And accounts started to close five months later, you know, like, okay, well, obviously he was extremely disappointed. Things aren't working. Let me change a million things. And he did. But I'm like, ah, go back to your previous. Like, let's look at that deal that we closed. How did that originate? Where did that come from? Like, let's. Let's see that maybe, just maybe your life cycle, maybe your sales cycle is a little bit longer.
- [20:12]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [20:13]
Alex Goffstein
Than. Than what you're reading out there. Because, you know, obviously on LinkedIn or social, people go out there and they talk about their successes. Do they always talk about their failures? Do they talk about how much they've struggled? Not always. Some do. Right. But not always. So, yeah, just don't be discouraged. Keep giving it a shot. And I think a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, if they have this entrepreneurial mind, they're most likely optimist, Right? So if it didn't, they're okay with hearing a no, they're okay with failing. And if you don't fail, you don't learn. So, yeah, failure is key here. And if you're new to cold outreach or you're starting this process, guess what? You will fail a lot before you see success. But once you see success, that's when things start to shine.
- [20:59]
Jordan Cooney
Experimentation. Such a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices Search podcast. A huge thank you to Alex from Pitchbox for joining us. If you'd like, get in touch with Alex, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company website.
- [21:13]
Ben Schapp
Pitchbox.Com okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the DA.