How to Stay in the INBOX! w/GUEST: Michael Barber CMO of StarTech.com & Top Email EXPERT in U.S.! | Ep. 305

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast presented by marigold and we have one of the smartest people to ever be on this podcast which isn't saying much when i'm solo because i'm not doing that much but this dude's smart who we got we got michael barber now if you're in the world of email marketing marketing general maybe you know him he is the head of global marketing and manager director of the UK of Grow Schools. And Grow Schools is really cool because they actually help school leaders get the money and resources and stuff they need to be a thriving school. But beyond all this great stuff Michael's doing in the world of education, he is like the most knowledgeable dude about marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and his sessions blow my mind when I go to them.

1:24I'm thrilled to have him here. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. It's so good to be here. Excellent. All right, listen, before we talk about the topic of the day, which is busting some myths about why your emails do or don't, or is that right? Do, don't, whatever, why they go to the inbox and why they don't go to the inbox. Tell everybody, how did Michael become Michael? Michael became Michael because he was sitting in a newsroom in college and our news director came in one day and was like, hey, we've got this thing called a website we need to build. And I very like, you know, sort of like raised my hand in an effort to build what was the first student newspaper website at the University of Arizona.

2:04Go Wildcats, Bear Down. And it ended up getting ranked the number one student college newspaper in the country by Princeton Review two years later. And that took me down an almost 22 year path of being at some of the West Coast best ad agencies, helping them grow. and then going to consult for both B2B and B2C brands in a variety of both digital and marketing strategy initiatives. And then I've spent the last two and a half years in-house leading a team of marketers at Grove Schools. That is cool. So when I was in college, I wasn't making websites. I don't know. There was a lot of beer involved.

2:45Well, there was still a lot of beer involved. You know, you go to the University of Arizona during its heyday was certainly there was a lot of libations involved, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. But somehow managed to do some fun, smart things in between the Friday and Saturday nights. I like hearing that. Okay. So let's jump into it. When people talk about, let's talk about email marketing. If you go on right now and you Google, hey, how do I stay out of the spam folder? You'll get 100 lists of spam trigger words. there'll be all this information out there about how to either do it or don't do it right to stay in the inbox if you're an email marketer.

3:21But I feel a lot of it is misinformation or outdated or whatever, and you got the goods. So can you break down what is the truth? How do you become more likely to have your emails stay in the inbox? Yeah, this is really a three-step process at its core. The first of which is you got to think of like, how does an email get into the inbox? Think of this like a journey. So we'll go to step one. Email comes off your email service provider and it hits your inbound mail server. So those are like the ISPs, the Gmails, Hotmails, Yahoo's of the world that are essentially the inbound mail servers where your campaign goes out to.

3:54Those inbound mail servers are looking for a couple of things. One, they're going to look at the IP addresses that your server is sending. And there's a couple of things that even Google has come out and the Gmail team has come out with since February, 2024, when they gave us a bunch of sender requirements that they say, hey, there's a couple of key things your IP address needs to have. One is a PTR record. Two, if you're on a shared IP, which hundreds of brands are on a shared IP, you got to make sure that shared IP isn't sitting on any block or blacklist, right, and monitoring it. And same for private IPs for dedicated IPs.

4:27If you're doing that, if you're like a high volume sender, you've got to make sure you're, you know, monitoring those block and blacklists. And then three, just make sure that that IP address is not ending up on any of those lists regularly because that's going to impact deliverability. So that's like the first step one. Make sure you're doing all the things from an IP address perspective on that inbound mail server. Step two. So we get through the inbound mail server. All of those inbound mail servers are going to go out to your DNS and they're going to look at your authentication protocols. We got clarity from the folks at Gmail this year about what they're looking for.

5:03Two categorizations, every sender needs to have an SPF or DKIM. And if you're a bulk sender, you need to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, right? So having those bare minimum three authentication protocols in place and making sure that they are the right authentication protocols, you're monitoring them, they're not going down. That's going to be step two. Do all of those things pass, getting into the inbox from there. And then all the major ISPs are looking at all your reputational data. And that's where things get interesting because for many years, you know, all that reputational data was built on things like opens.

5:35But engagement these days is way more complex. They're looking at how much time you're spending reading. Where are you putting this message? Like, are you dragging it from a tab to primary? How often you're opening them? And that's all happening at the subscriber level. So they're aggregating that data to understand all the way down to the email address. Does this individual care about the campaign that's coming through? So let me just say that back to you in even more basic terms. So if I get somebody to not just open up an email I send to them, but click on it, that's going to be a big checkmark in the column of going back into their inbox in the future.

6:10Is that a fair statement? That is a fair statement. A click is a strong signal of engagement in a campaign. So is it important anymore to avoid things like the word free in the subject line or capitalizing a word in the subject line? Is that a thing that should be like front and center if you're a marketer or you could put that off to the side a little bit? You can totally put that off to the side. The spam triggers are much more on the technical infrastructure these days and the behaviors of your campaigns than they are to do with words or content you've got in there. All right. We are liberating people as we speak.

6:43I want to ask you something that's off script. You all send out a lot of email promoting what you're doing. some of your email goes into the promotions tab and all of that, regardless, maybe it's Gmail, maybe it's the new Apple iOS, whatever. How much do you care? Do you try to get out of that? Does it matter to you in terms of your marketing? It doesn't matter to me as the marketer in the room, I'll be honest with you, because I think people at the end of their inbox are setting up that inbox, how it works for them, right? Now, don't get me wrong. We do things on like welcome campaigns and initial conversion campaigns that say, hey, if you find us in the Gmail promotions tab, because we, you know, we've got tools that can tell us which particular inbox is opening up those campaigns, drag us over to primary.

7:27If you're, we're adjusting the Apple messaging, of course, because all that has changed over as we've gotten Apple intelligence in their mail app, right? Drag us over to that primary tab or add us to VIP or add us to your contact or address book, right? So we're doing that in early campaigns to try and drive our new subscribers to be in the right place. But for me, I'm like, there's only so much we can do. And at the end of the day, the subscriber wants the experience that they get. And we all saw that data when Gmail rolled out tabs. I think we're at a decade at this point. That tells us that at least the people that have got that Gmail tab structure, most of them are checking that promotions tab at least once a day.

8:05And almost all of them are checking it at least once a week. So less concerned. But yeah, we're doing things to try and get people to drag it out. But I worry less about it these days. I'm on the same page 100%. And one of the things I really like about you and your approach with your team, you're very test-oriented. You guys are always focused on the data, looking at the data, testing things. And one of the things that I always get asked about a lot, and I don't have a good answer, so I want to know what your answer is, is, hey, in my organization, how do I get the higher-ups, the people that I'm reporting to, to allow me to test certain things?

8:37They're not open-minded to this. They're kind of set in their ways. How do you build this culture of testing with your marketing programs? A couple of key ways that I've seen have worked well, at least to sort of knock down those walls around a testing. One, show a competitor that's doing that very test, right? There is no executive in the world that wants to feel like they're being left behind. And if you can show examples out in the marketplace of either similar brands or your core competitive set that are definitely testing some things you'd like to see happen, it is a really good sort of mirror to put in someone's face and be like, well, they're doing it.

9:13Shouldn't we? And the answer to that question isn't always yes, right? You need to think about, like, is the test that you're doing, whether it's on the content side or something, does it meet the sort of brand standards? Does it meet voice and tone? Does it meet the things that give you that experience from a brand perspective? certainly. So one thing, you know, if you're, if you see other brands doing it, and those brands are admired by that person who needs to sort of give you the green light, then put that in front of their face and in the most in the in the easiest way possible that doesn't feel like you're shining a spotlight, if you will.

9:44The other thing is, is consider advocating for tests on smaller, you know, sort of segments before you consider larger groups of like super engaged subscribers, Maybe ask that tests happen in smaller, less engaged subscribers to see the impact on those so it doesn't impact potentially big dollar generating groups of segments that you're sending your core campaigns out to. And I'd say the third thing is, at least when you're going to ask for a test, you're coming with a hypothesis. You're coming with what that test looks like. You're coming with the plan. You're laying out the timeline and saying, you're giving that individual who needs to say yes, the easiest path to yes.

10:24If you just come and ask for the test, you're not going to have, you're not going to get an easy yes. But if you come with the test of, here's what we think is going to happen. Here's what we're going to do. Here's the timeline. Here's the insight that we're trying to get out of it. It's much easier to say yes to a structure and a plan that it is to just say yes to just a hypothetical. I'm a billion percent stealing that because you know what? You're so right. If somebody, my team came to me with a whole layout of why they're doing it and the hypothesis and all this stuff and said, this is why I would be really difficult for me to say no.

10:53Uh, so I think that's, that's excellent, uh, advice. All right. Super random question. You know, before you came on, you're saying that you just flew in today to where you are and you were on a plane. So I want to know when Michael goes on a plane, sits down next to somebody and they're like, Hey, and they started asking you a question. Are you a talker on the plane or are you a shut it down immediately guy? My husband will tell you I'm a talker. I am pretty rare to shut it down. And I think the other thing for me is I think those like really impromptu, plain conversations can actually end up in opportunities to like potentially work together, at least like find some really interesting thing or a common ground.

11:36I don't know. I'm definitely the talker. If you talk to me, I'm going to talk back. And you never know. My boss always shares this story where when he started Grow Schools 14 years ago, we had been initially funded by Barclays Capital. And this was just before our last major recession here in the U.S. And the day that the funding was supposed to close for our first financing round was sort of the beginning of the pullback in Wall Street. and Barclays called that morning. And although we had been approved for$100 million line of credit to utilize to start the business, they pulled that capital that day.

12:17And two weeks later, he was sitting on an airplane and he had been going back and forth to San Francisco, back and forth to New York, having conversations with other banks, with other potential equity firms and equity partners. And he sat down next to someone and struck up a conversation and that person became our second investor in our company. So you just, you just like never know. Now I will say this, you got me post red eye. I'm not talking during a red eye. I am going to, I came in with a beanie, a hat. I had headphones. I sat down, I drank my water and I promptly put my head on the side of the window and went to sleep.

12:52So there's a time and a place. There's a time and a place for a conversation. Yeah. I completely agree. Red eye. You do not talk. You know, I had the worst thing that happened was I, I was on a flight and I thought I was talking to somebody. I didn't know who they were and i just found out but me and wife just found out that we were pregnant like literally just found out it was very early on you run out the 12 weeks it was like crazy early on and i was so excited so i told this woman next to me because i didn't know who she was complete stranger and it was and so we land whatever and then i get a phone call like a few hours later from my mom i go what's going on she was how did you not tell me this woman lived three doors down for my mom i had no idea of who she was and she bumped into my mom told my mom And that's how my mom found out.

13:32And she was so pissed at me. And I'm like, I'm never telling anybody anything ever again. Yeah, I have a crazy story of having kind of like a similar experience, but on sort of like the celebrity level. I used to live in L.A. and I was coming back from London. My mom and dad are from England. And I struck up this conversation next to this person next to me. And I had no idea who it was and exchanged a few pleasantries. And as I got off the plane, a flight attendant caught up to me and she goes, how was she? and I'm like how is who I'm traveling by myself and she goes oh you know you were sitting next to Emma Stone on that flight back how do you not know who Emma Stone is what's wrong with you this was this was just as they were doing the premiere for La La Land I had no idea and I was like a huge fan of like uh her early movies but she had a cap on I didn't recognize her at all so I think that was the lesson learned from that one was like if you're going to act with some if you're going to interact with someone on a plane, at least get their life story.

14:28And I would have known that it was Emma Stone, hopefully at that point, but you know, one of those things that is a major drop of the wall. I mean, that's Spider-Man's girlfriend. I mean, that is all right. Listen, everybody's got to follow Michael. Michael, tell everybody how you get involved with your world. What do they find you were going to put in the show notes? Tell everybody everything. I'm at Michael J. Barber, pretty much everywhere online, LinkedIn, Twitter, X threads, blue sky, all the normal places. So if you want to DM and say hello, that's where I'll be. Love it. Thrown in the blue sky.

14:57It's a whole new world. I dig it. All right, Michael, you are awesome. Appreciate you being here. Put it all in the show notes. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, man. It was good to see you. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. lastly if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 free visit guru events.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like damon john martha stewart and me guru events.com check it out