1913 – Secure Email Validation with Brian Minick

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:06With us right now, it's Brian Minnick. Brian, you are the chief operating officer for Zero Bounce. You're found on the web at zerobounce.net. Zero Bounce, obviously, I think it's a brand I'm familiar with, and I suspect a lot of other people are as well, because you provide an invaluable service, which we're going to talk about on this episode. Brian, it's great to have you. Thank you so much, Josh. I'm excited to be here today and excited to share some information with your crowd today. Yeah, yeah. Well, give us just a quick overview of what Zero Bounce is and who you work with. Yeah, absolutely.

1:38So Zero Bounce is a SaaS platform and we do email validation and verification. And so what we do is we kind of think of ourselves as the data cleanuppers of the world in email. So we help email marketers and we help anyone that is collecting data to make sure that the contacts on their list are still valid, deliverable, and ultimately provide a suite of tools to kind of help and manage your sending reputation as an email marketer. Yeah, pretty important that you get that right. Would you mind talking about just how important this is, especially in 2024, which we'll talk a little bit maybe about some of the changes that have happened about if you are going to be sending any volume emails, you better be playing by the rules in 2024.

2:22for. Yeah, that's right. And even, you know, we saw a big kind of shift in data quality, by the way, in during the pandemic and through the pandemic as jobs were shifting, companies closing, raising these type of things. So the hygiene of your list is actually really important. The reason and why it's so important is the sending reputation, which is really this giant mystery for most people in the world, especially in technology space. But this email reputation, you're sending reputation is something that is looked at when you send email marketing. And the quality of your sending really determines if you're going to be in the inbox, the spam folder, blocked, marked as spam, these type of things.

3:03It's super important. And email marketing, I've heard it over and over, Josh, I couldn't disagree more. Email marketing is dead. It's dying, blah, blah, blah. It is the cheapest, highest quality form of ROI you can potentially put into a business. That's proven over and over and the stats are still confirming this. So having kind of the right cleanliness, tidiness procedures in play is super important. And especially with Google and Yahoo making these massive changes in February, which everyone should be alarmed for two reasons. Number one, Google and Yahoo got together in the meeting and agreed on something.

3:38So there's click, right? I mean, there's something's going on there. Everyone should kind of be aware. Those are competitors and they're teaming up uh and then you have uh these kind of requirements that they're putting in for senders who are sending more than 5 000 messages a day and even if you're sending less than that these really still apply to you because they're best practices and so why would you not be doing best practices regardless of the volume there's no cost to these by the way it's just simply set up and understanding what you have to do yeah well do you mind maybe just sharing a bit about the evolution of the inbox.

4:12Particularly, I work a lot in B2B. I don't know if you've got maybe some insights on that world. I do know that for me, man, am I picky on my inbox or my email inbox. I have multiple email accounts that come into the company. There's one I've got that's personal and I'm kind of a slash and burn person in there only because I think historically, you know, the inbox has just been not a fun place for me to hang out. Yeah, it gets money. And I don't think you're any different really than a lot of people, right? I mean, I have personal accounts. I have many accounts purposely made to give it to what I would consider the garbage zone, right?

4:49Like, I don't want all their email not checking this regularly. I don't care what happens with the data. So you're not unique there in a sense that everyone's doing this as well. And so as a sender, you have to actually be paying attention to this stuff. Everyone is so focused, especially in email marketing around quantity. It is what they feel the Holy Grail of 10 ,000, a hundred thousand, 1 million, 10 million. It's not about quantity. It's about quality. Yes. The quality is no different than anything else in life, right? Quality really pays off. And so you really want to just make sure that the contacts you have on your list are good deliverable contacts who will open your mail, click your mail and engage with it.

5:26These are giving you kind of all these good, let's call them brownie points for that sending reputation and they don't hurt you. And then there's bad ones out there, bad email addresses that mark you as spam, you know, complain and do all these different things. Those are giving you negative. They're chopping away at your ankles here on your sending reputation. And people just continue to send to them with just blindly because they're thinking it's a numbers game. It is not a numbers game. It's a quality game. And that's kind of a lot. Well, you know, what I'll try to share some insights on. Yeah.

5:56Since I don't know if you know the answer to this. So let's say that you have a personal account and it's just for like your family, but for some reason, spammers got a hold of that email account and you're like, I don't want business mail to this email account. And so you're just super aggressive and consistent and marking every single thing as spam that's not relevant. Is there a way to kind of get yourself delisted from the spam directories? I wish. And it's also a problem with cell phones, right? So as an entrepreneur here and someone that's an executive in a company, I have a personal line, I have a business line, and I keep it strictly separated by design.

6:36When friends call, I want to know which line is what. And they have tapped and got into my personal stuff and I'm getting business calls there. It's no different to me. But no, I wish there was some sort of way. I mean, obviously you can unsubscribe. A little tip, if anyone's using Gmail, I'll just throw a little tip out here. You can put your account plus something else. So for example, my name is Brian Minnick, Brian Minnick plus upmyinfluence at gmail.com. And anytime now you get random mail, at least you can say who sold my data, who is the one who sold it. So you can get some sort of indicator there.

7:11It's not bulletproof, but at least you know who you can get upset at. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about ZeroBounce and how ZeroBounce becomes a really, really great partner. Would you mind maybe talking about some of those, you know, those services that are included with Zero Bounce's suite of, you know, just things that help us stay where we want to be and not where we don't want to be? Yeah, absolutely. So there's kind of two different aspects here and points of view. There's the proactive approach, which is these are people that know that data quality is important. They'll hook us up to websites, sign up forms, checkout forms, newsletter signups, And in real time, we can tell you if an email address is good or bad and even give it to the user.

7:55So the big case here is typos, especially on mobile. People are losing a lot of high quality data simply because of an unintentional typo on the form. You can hook us up to your form and immediately catch the user while the user is still on your website and actually suggest the fix if we can find it. So there's kind of the validation side. So that's cleaning up the email data, right? So you can be proactive or reactive, meaning you're uploading lists. and we're cleansing them and giving you back really the ones that you want to target for marketing. In addition to that, there's a kind of some complimentary tools that will help email marketers or really anyone that's dealing with reputation.

8:33So we do blacklist monitoring to see if your email, your domain or your IP addresses are on any blacklists, which are really important. If you're blacklisted, it's automatic spam, by the way. And one thing to remember, Josh, and a lot of people, you know, the more I talk about it, the more I realize people don't understand this clearly, is people can think, oh, I'm not on the, it's not, it's not, I'm on the blacklist or I'm not. It's, there's hundreds of blacklists. And are you on any of them? That's the question, right? This is not a true, false. Yes, no, this is a wide array of potential, you know, so you got Gmail, you got Yahoo, AOL, right?

9:08I'm not even going down the business route. All these kinds of different things that can really put those restrictions on you. So there's tools there, there's inbox monitoring and testing, where you can send us seed accounts. We'll tell you if you want to inbox or spam. We're doing email warmup. So people that are doing cold emailing, biz dev people, prospecting, those are the hardest on your reputation in your domain, especially if you're purchasing data. It's just the giant no-no, don't do it. But you've got to clean all this stuff up. DMARC, which is something that Yahoo and Google enforced.

9:38We're providing that as a service and a monitor. And really just, again, a plethora of tools to enable you to be the best marketer with the best hygiene possible. Yeah, so these are all, and how does, in terms of like, you know, all these individual services that we've been talking about, would you mind, and again, to our friend that's listening, here's the easy thing. Just go to zerobounce.net and follow along. I don't know, Brian, if you know offhand, like how you structure the products. Do people just buy these individual services a la carte or is there an all-in-one solution? Yeah, so we kind of do it in two different routes.

10:14The validation piece is generally, it's a very wide array of people. So just so you're aware, there's nobody too big or too small for us. And there's no geographic boundary. So I'm operating in every country of the world, paying customers in every country of the world. Well, minus Russia and Belarus for sanctioned purposes. And what we're doing is you would put in basically the amount of emails that you have. We would spit out a price for you right on the website. We're transparent. We have nothing hidden there. 100 ,000 emails, for example, is 390 bucks, and the turnaround time on that is one hour.

10:45So you go out to lunch, you come back, all your data is cleansed. And then secondary, all these tools that I'm talking about, the monitoring, the testing, the analysis tools that we offer, we bundle them up into a toolkit and really kind of give you a very affordable and some options maybe based on how much volume or size of teams you might have. But we do offer a free version for every single person. I would encourage people to do that. You You can get everything that I've talked about. You can get full versions of for free at limited quantity. So you can get an idea of what it's like, what it can do for you, and test it out.

11:20Yeah, I'm on the website right now. So the free, you know, the freemium solution you provide, it's free. That's$0. You have one inbox test, one email server test. You get a blacklist monitor that's scanned every 24 hours. I mean, that alone, like what a no brainer. Yeah, totally free, by the way. These are not watered down, limited. We're going to act like we're going to tell you something, then we're going to force you to buy it. That's not how it works. And those replenish every month, by the way. So you can do 100 validations. You can do all of those tests. Everything can go once per month, totally free.

11:53And for anyone who's kind of starting up, bootstrapping, watching the pennies, watching the dollars, please, by all means, this is why we built it, because we were that company as well. And so we never want to forget where we came from. Yeah. And so you work with some pretty, pretty, pretty big brands, Amazon, Samsung, Netflix, Disney, Sephora, HubSpot. They're sending out some emails, aren't they? Quite a bit. So, you know, people always say, oh, I have these huge lists. And I'm like, well, I have seen some big lists. So let's talk about it here. But you'd be surprised. There's people out there with billions of records.

12:28And there's people out there with a handful of records. Again, nobody's too big. Nobody's too small. We can help it. Really, absolutely anybody. And it's equally important, regardless of the size. I think that's really what's important for me to share. Even if you're a small guy thinking, I don't need this yet, you do. You actually really do. these, you know, the ability to be an inbox or spam is the entire outcome of your, of your campaign. If you're in the spam folder or people marking you as spam, that's it. You know, it's, it's never going to work for you. And you're going to say email marketing is a failing channel.

12:59Well, it's not. I mean, the stats are there. It's not. Yeah. All right. So in terms of like, maybe just best practice, would you mind, I mean, I'm sure you know quite a bit about this, but Would you mind maybe sharing some best practices for email marketing today? Maybe a couple of do's and a couple of do nots that come immediate top of mind in terms of like what is working today? What are Google, Yahoo and everyone else no longer going to allow you to do? So, for example, I know, you know, way back in the day, you know, you could say, well, you could buy this email list and they're all opt in.

13:36Trust us. You know, you can buy this and, you know, we're allowed to sell it to anybody. So would you mind maybe just kind of sharing a little bit of that? Yeah, absolutely. So maybe let's start with some of the do's or do nots. Do not purchase a list. That list has been repurposed, repackaged, retitled, relabeled, and really not in a good way grown by a sense of them guessing emails, putting different emails, bots are going in there. They're selling size, period. And all they're doing is repackaging these titles to tell you that it's specific for you. And it hits you, right? It hits you hard.

14:10Like, hey, I have a bunch of SaaS users that really are competitors to zero bounce. Here's all the users. This is garbage, guys. They're just it's a sales tactic to get you to bite. That's really all it is. That data is bad. Don't buy it. If you have bought it, which is kind of one of the things I see a lot. If you have bought it, you've got to clean that data up, especially if you mixed it in to your great data. That's the killer. If you haven't cleaned this up, so do clean up that data. If you have ever worked with it in the past or kind of lingering habit. Another do is I would really suggest that people use the best practices for collecting data double opt in, meaning that somebody is clicking a link in their email to confirm whatever it is, the data you're giving that they're providing you.

14:53So that's a great way to make sure you have a real person and not a bot and not some kind of other bad actor out there on an email address. Remember, bots attack the web. I mean, they're built and designed to do this. And when you think, oh, man, I got 100 signups today, and there are all these random weird stuff, that's not 100 signups. You got hit by a bot. So keep that in mind as well. Another do is definitely follow these new kind of guidance by Google and Yahoo, DMARC, one-click unsubscribes, and making sure you have a low spam complaint rate. This is something people are not talking about enough.

15:30And if they're not super familiar with email marketing, everyone that marks you as spam is considered a spam complaint. You are allowed 0.1 % of your campaign can be marked as spam. That's considered acceptable. So let's put numbers behind that. One out of a thousand can mark you as spam. That's it. Wow. That's not hard to do. And what we're finding is we're doing a bunch of studies. Companies like AOL and some of the other providers, their button, mark as spam, stands out much easier than Marcus Red. So a lot of people are using Marcus Spam as the way to manage their inbox. Again, it's not even intentional and they're killing you.

16:06So let's identify these people and segment what you might be sending them. Don't send them potentially absolutely everything. Be smarter, right? Segment your data. So that's definitely another do. And I would say one more is a don't is trying to bury these unsubscribes or removing the unsubscribe completely and saying, there is nothing that ticks me more, Josh, than somebody saying, reply to me to unsubscribe. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how this works. Guaranteed you just got an instant report of spam if you do that to me. Instant. And I hope you keep emailing me because I'm going to ding you every single time.

16:40No questions asked. Guys, these are bad practices. Don't do these. Yes, you're can spam compliant. You're following can spam from a legal point of view, but you're not following it from a reputation point of view. So that's another kind of don't. I mean, to be honest, Josh, I could go on and on here for 30 minutes on do's and don'ts. So shut me off if that's enough to start with. Yeah. You know, a couple of things. Now, this said email marketing is still amazing as long as you play by the rules is what you're saying. But, you know, a couple of things that I had found here, I was actually just working on this for a presentation.

17:14But, you know, in terms of like if it's truly unsolicited and it's salesy, 90 percent, like I saw this, it was a harvest business review, 90 % of top-level B2B decision makers are just not going to respond. They're not going to engage it. Like, it's a rule of thumb. Like, there's just, you're going to have to nurture that relationship in some other ways in addition to that rather than just coming right out of the, coming right for the jugular and from a sales perspective. And then 60%, you'll appreciate this. I saw this on WebFX, and I'm sure you have similar data, but 60 % of all email users report that if you spam them, that gives your brand or company a negative perception.

17:55So it's just not worth it to be sloppy with that. You know, again, I guess, you know, for me, I would just, I would justify, is this email, is this email going to, like, they're going to understand why I'm emailing, who we are, like why we're connected or something. That's what's always going through my brain before I send any email out. Absolutely. Super important. And also, you know, be mindful of the type of content you're sending people and really think about what you actually want them to do with that email. So I have seen good ones, right? Where it's like they send a little funny, you know, and Josh, you kill it with these little clips of like a little animated click me if you actually want to learn more.

18:37You know, I can see you've done stuff there, right? And people will appreciate that. But when you hit me with because I get three of these a day, because it's the canned system out of all these email softwares. Hi, Brian, I noticed you're the COO of Zero Bounce. Can you tell me any more that you literally did nothing besides importing data and hit send? Guys, this is clear as day. People are catching on to this stuff. Be smarter. Be intelligent. Go after them on LinkedIn a little bit. Get them to know your face. Send them a nice message. Ask if they want some donuts for the office. Do something that's different.

19:12Don't just sit here and do what people have been doing for 20 years and still think it's working because it's not. Hmm. I love this great best practices, zero bounce.net. It's free for early and just go look through the suite of services. But I would say, listen, if you're a marketer and you're not using a service like this, it's just inevitable. It's a matter of time. You're going to have some deliverability issues. And is it really worth it for you to be out of commission for a month or so? And I think most of us would agree, our email, being able to communicate with our customers and our audience with regularity is pretty mission critical today.

19:50Brian, you have a lot of great resources through Zero Bounce as well. Where should somebody go? I mean, obviously, we talked about zerobounce.net. Is there anything in particular that you would recommend in terms of resources or next steps? I would definitely recommend for anyone to set up a free account. You're welcome to do that. You can try everything out. But besides that, if you want to learn more, either A, you're welcome to chat with our team. We do kind of free consultations and deliverability guides. And then also one thing that might be super interesting if you're kind of in the technical or technical side of email and you love the ideas here, we have an email decay report, which we've been doing every year.

20:23And it is kind of crunching all the numbers on ROI, the amount of bad data that we're seeing. I mean, just keep in mind, we're validating multi-billions of email addresses on a monthly basis, right? So the amount of volume that we see is insane. and some of that data we can aggregate and kind of share it back. So you can get an idea of what's actually going on in the email world and share it, you know, use it to your advantage. You know, information is key to performance. Excellent. Brian Minnick, you're the COO of Zero Bounce, your website, zerobounce.net. Go sign it for free. My COO, while we were chatting, I said, hey, do we have a blacklist monitor that we're using?

21:04And it's like, we've done it manually. we've checked it out, I think on some online tools, but how much better would that be to know about it quicker, sooner rather than later. And so it's Brian, it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for all the insights that you've shared today. Thank you. I appreciate being here today and hope I hope I was helpful for your audience.

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