Unlock the Power of Email: Insider Tips on Email Marketing from Belkins

Hello, and welcome to b to b weekly. I'm Terry O'Connell. I'm gonna be your host this week for a really interesting episode. We have a fantastic guest on. He's the absolute expert in his field. It's Michael Maximoff. He is the co founder and managing partner at Belkins, a demand generation platform. If you're in the b to b space, you might have already heard of this business. They do a lot for appointment setting and they use email as a really great medium to reach new audiences and really help connect prospects with B2B businesses. So we're gonna have an awesome conversation diving into kind of an overview of how you can use email to meet new people and start setting new appointments, and we're gonna talk best practices, we're gonna talk trip campaigns, and deliverability. So we're gonna get into some really practical information there. So pull out your notepads. Be ready for that one. But before we get there, we have an awesome in the news story to cover this week. It's the story that's been taking kind of the marketing world by storm. Its Instagram threads. So this new social media platform has already reached a hundred million downloads. That is absolutely incredible in terms of adoption of the platform, and it's just celebrating its first week birthday. So here's our kind of first take at what we think of Instagram threads. First of all, it's very user friendly. The way they've set it up is extremely clever where it connects to your existing Instagram account, so you don't have to actually create a new username or pass you simply download the app, and then you can sign in and connect your Instagram user account to the threads app. What's really great about this is that it actually carries over your followers and the list of people that you're following so that immediately upon setting up this account, you already have a list of people that are gonna see your content and content in your feed. Extremely clever in terms of getting users in and getting them to immediately be power users in that you're already pumping content through. There's no build up time. There's no ramp up time. And for creators and brands, you already have that audience so you don't feel like you're having to restart from zero. So this was a really clever move on Meta's part, the parent company of Instagram and Instagram threads. And what has been the reaction from the market? It's been positive. People have traditionally joined threads by posting a gif or a meme, something saying hello world, hello threads, Really in a positive way, that positivity has continued through the first week. So it's an interesting contrast to Twitter, which traditionally has been a bit more hostile, definitely has a little bit of a darker side than threads has developed at least so far. A couple interesting things that we're seeing with threads is that it's really a little bit more oriented towards kind of the social world. It's a little bit more of a Instagram type platform where you see people having a lot more fun, making jokes, posting memes, Business leaders are coming on. New sources are coming on. Brands are coming on and sharing stuff. But even the content that they're sharing is a little bit more consumer oriented So if you're a b to b business and you're thinking about engaging here, know that if you are jumping in, definitely adopt a lighter tone off the bat. Be welcoming, be light, try incorporating some humor here. In terms of kind of content in the way that that's going, It's very oriented around light engagement. We're getting some comments right here. People are saying that they love threads, echoing what we've seen online. So we're seeing that people are really enjoying using the platform, but The big thing is, it's similar to Twitter in that it's for hyper engaged Internet users. So if you're a b to b brand and you're thinking about the return on your time for engaging your audience and finding your niche audience, we have yet to see that threads is gonna be a real powerhouse for that. LinkedIn is kind of the dominant social platform for business. You have the incredible ability to target your audience, build a business audience, and people know that they're going on there for education and for business news. So that's still very much solidified as kind of the king of b to b social media, we'll see if threads kind of moves over into a little bit more of that education space or b to b space. But for now, it's pretty light and it's very high touch. So just with the longevity of posts, you have to be posting a lot and engaging and commenting on stuff a lot. To be truly involved. Before we switch over and leave threads behind, we have a little bit of trivia here This is from our great friends at T boy Pod. They posted this. Nick and Jack do a fantastic job I highly recommend following and giving them a listen. But a little bit of trivia on other apps that have reached the hundred million user download mark. So the first one we have here is Uber. And how long did it take them to reach that mark? Five years. The next one is Instagram, the original Instagram app, and that was two point five years to reach that hundred million download mark. Highly accelerates from here. The next one is TikTok. They did it in only nine months, and then just earlier this year, All records were shattered. It was completely amazing. When Chat GPT and Open AI dropped the Chat GPT app They reached that hundred million mark in two months. Now, Instagram threads, completely blowing it away again in five days. What's really incredible here is one, you see the adoption of these new technologies. I think that speaks a lot to consumers. And to users of the platform where we're more ready to jump on new apps, test things out, as well as the developers knowing how to roll things out, knowing how to kind of prep the market. You saw it with Chat EBT is going from web based, city. Now with Meta using Instagram accounts to tie into threads, they're getting really good at rolling these things out. It's a very interesting marketing case study there. Moving from threads to our main story today, I'm very excited to jump into this conversation. As I said, our guest is truly an expert. He started the company that basically goes through, does the data testing, as well as setting the standards for best practices in email marketing and email appointment setting. Before we jive in jump into our conversation, we have a short clip where Michael drops a ton of awesome stats. So be ready, see if you can keep up. This is from the collision conference earlier this year. Let's roll the clip and we'll get into the interview. We took ten million of emails. We analyzed all of them in the last twelve months, and here are some of the steps. On average, the benchmarks you need to hit is thirty six percent open rate and seven percent reply rate. So it takes three hundred emails to generate one b to b lead. Email sequence with between two hundred fifty to five hundred leads has the best reply rate. Right? Think about that. Contacting two or four leads per the same organization will give you better reply rate. So if you guys are targeting one lead per company, or seven litre company. It's either too few or too or too much. Right? Now the first follow-up email boosts your reply rate by forty nine percent. So always do the follow ups. Now, call them a campaign that has three steps have the best reply rate. So it means that if you have two steps or four or five, maybe it's better to kind of step back to three. Now waiting three days before the second follow-up it will give you the best reply rate which is here thirty one percent. Now open rate peak afternoon, open rate has the best peak between two PM or four PM. Alright. Here you go. Reply rate has the best reply rate from seven AM, ten AM. I go next. So here you'll see on the screen some of the stats. So it means that the open rates are the best in the afternoon, rates are the best in the morning. So expect your clients to reply you in the morning. Alright? Alright. So the best day of the week to send out your Gmail is once day. Monday have the lowest open rate and the lowest reply rates, so don't expect a lot of emails on Monday. Open rates for cold day trade peak in January and November reply rates are the highest from April to June. CIO has the best reply rate. Founders more likely to open cold email. CTO CEOs has the best reply rate, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. That was an awesome clip. I I had a lot of fun watching that and I was furiously taking down my notes on all of those stats. Thank you so much, Derek, for having me. I'm so embarrassed to give you some context. For that clip, I was on the stage only for four minutes and my remote controller didn't work. So I was, like, just pushing the bottom all the time, and I was running all the time, you know. So but, yeah, thanks for showing it up. Yeah. That was actually started that my team did, we've analyzed over ten million emails over the course of the last twelve months that we sent on the behalf of one thousand customers in ninety industries. And that were the main takeaways of that research? It's so helpful and it's great to start from that data and it helps brands out there in the b to b space that are getting started with email marketing because everyone's gonna have a little bit of a unique blend. I mean, different industries are gonna be a little bit when you get into these really niche subsections that you get with b to b. Right. But having that baseline is so important so you don't, you know, immediately go in there and say, okay, I'm gonna send at eight thirty AM on Monday morning. That's when everyone's getting into the office. I wanna catch people as they're starting their day. Well, from that, we immediately know count Monday's out, you know, okay, you wanna go high. One of the things that I definitely noticed in there is don't be afraid to send to founders and c level executives, you know, those are the ones who open and reply and target a few different people at different businesses you know, putting one person on, I saw that it hugely increases when you send the email to a couple different people and use that approach. So true. And I'll be happy to speak today about the what is the best number of people reached out per organization. Right? Because very often people either send it to one person and they didn't get the right reply rate or they send to to a few people, like five, six people within the same organization, and they end up in spam folder. So we will talk about how many would be the the silver lining there. Well, that's perfect. I see in the chat that people are commenting with a few stats that they learned. Throw your favorite ones in there. I see people commenting about the times, I also see Ken is downloading threads right now getting ready to jump into his account from our in the new section. Everyone, if you have questions, drop them in the chat. I'll periodically peek down at the computer and read them out, and so we'll get Michael's take on on these hot questions. But to kick it off, let's talk terminology. So, Michael, let's have a foundation. Demand generation is a term that you hear quite a bit now. I feel like people use it fairly interchangeably with some terms that might have some different nuances with email marketing and lead generation Could you talk a little bit about what demand generation means in general and then some of those specific terms? Absolutely, Terry. So this is a very important topic to discuss because usually when people speak about demand generation, they mean either appointment setting or sales development only generation. Right? But how all these are different? So let's start with the lead generation. So lead generation is the process to generating leads but these leads are, you would call them prospects, right? So this is the contact information of an individual who might be a good fit for your organization or for your product and matches your ideal client profile, right? But it doesn't matter or it doesn't mean that that person or that lead has any interest or any notion into working with the organization. Now demand generation is actually the second step of that process. So demand Jan is when you actually contact in those leads, right, and you qualify them for the interest. So you create a demand, right? Now, appointment setting is actually the third step of the process. So you create demand, and then once the demand is created, you're looking for sales qualified leads or opportunities, and that's where appointment setting comes into play because the appointment setting process is actually setting up qualified appointments with them qualified leads, so now you have lead generation, you have demand gen, and then you have an appointment setting. Right? So when you're looking for a person who can drive appointment setting, right? That person should be experienced and expert in both in generating leads, in creating demand, right, and then also booking appointments. Because if you're just looking for you're looking for appointment setting person that can only do lead gen, then we are in problem there. You have to follow the flow. You have to have all of steps in in concerts to work out there. That makes sense. And I think that's an important foundation to have as we dive into the specifics here, And with our kind of next question here, I wanna dive into what you recommend for a drip campaign. We saw some stats on it, but could you talk us through what kind of a typical campaign you would recommend for b to b businesses in terms of number of emails and what the kind of tone of those emails are? Yeah. So I first off, I wanted to say that email is the great channel for everyone who is listening to this because this is a very scalable, very cost effective channel that is measurable, and you can predict the results of it if you do it right. With advertising, with SEO, with content strategy, with social, you definitely should do that. Right? It's twenty twenty three. If you wanted to be successful with your branding and with your marketing, you should be everywhere, right? But you should start with something, and we've seen so many times that when you a new business, when you don't have a lot of budget, when you are start up, starting with the email channel would generate the best ROI short term, and while you can generate that return on investment, you are able to add other channels and refinance those channels for for success. In terms of, you know, email channel and email Drip campaign. So as I mentioned, we've done email marketing and cold email outreach for customers. So we've done twelve hundred projects in the last seven years for customers in ninety industries, and what we've seen across the board, that the sequence or a drip campaign that consists of three emails, so one introduction email and then two follow-up have the best performance rate across the board. Of course, this number can go up to four to five. We've seen for some industries is successful, but you can explore that through AB testing, right? So when you already are sure that the three, you know, sequence works, and then you just wanted to tune results. Right? So what I what I encourage for people when they are thinking about the cold email marketing is that start with something, start with three emails, right? But then you always So you don't just start with one sequence. You do two, three sequences at the same time, and then you AB test. You know, be curious right, about this b as an experiment to s laboratory. Right? So you have one sequence with three, one with four, one with five, and then measure where which one has better best open rate, best reply rate, and generally, you know, understanding not necessarily just from the performance standpoint, but also from the messaging standpoint. Right? Like, You can test different introduction messages, you can test different follow ups, you can structure them differently. Because what I've seen very often is companies are sticking with one approach that might work or might don't, and then they are so disappointed with the channel or so happy with the channel then in two, three, four months, either they stop doing that or they over over, you know, overwork the grounds, overwork the, you know, the the sequence, so now they are now getting the results. But so by only experimentation and, you know, and AB testing, you can actually get the the real results. That's awesome. Sorry, do you want me to speak about the exact email? Well, you know, just to kinda break down what you were saying there a little bit that's so cool is that Email is a very accessible platform as you kind of started off with, and I I love your kind of reference to that at the beginning and then bringing it back at the end with your analytics. In that it's a lot more accessible than, like, threads or other social platforms where One, you're going through their own metrics. Two, those metrics are often views, and then you have to look at, like, if you have videos, you know, the time of you, You're getting very granular, and then oftentimes there are third party platforms that do multi -- Right. -- click attribution in terms of convert Email is very straightforward in terms of you have an open rate, you have a click rate, and did they go to your your link. Some of those big metrics that jump out at you right at the beginning. So what I'm kinda taking away from your your first things is that email is an accessible way To get involved and start reaching out, two, is that start with your three email drip campaign, then you can experiment from there And one of the things I took away from your video earlier was that you can do bundles of maybe two hundred and fifty to five hundred contacts is a great kind of bundle of list of leads to send to in each of your blast that you're gonna be testing. And that's a great starting point, but then don't get stuck in the same trend of using the same emails over and over evolve over time, bring in I know one of the things that's great is to bring in seasonality, bring in upcoming events. Yeah. So that you make sure that it's relevant, it's anchored, And then also, to your point, you get to see what's working and, you know, have those little micro adjustments to test. To let me add you something like throw a value bomb out there for people. So if you have an approach that actually works, like a best practice, and it always generates you the results like an email drip that you used for, you know, a seasonal sale or something. Right? What's happening is whenever you do a cold outreach, you always generate negative engagements. For example, like someone doesn't like your approach, click as mark as spam. Someone is not answering some bounced emails because you used an old database of leads. Right? But those negative engagements they impact your all immutability and all the spam filters, they always or also save the content of the copy of that email. So in a way, if you're gonna be using the same copy again for your next outreach, then the sending reputation of that sequence would be lower than if you create the new one. So this is just to add on the point of always experiment and come up with a fresh ideas because even though there's an approach that already worked, it might not work not because you used it for a different lead base but because it's gonna have a lower sending reputation. That's really interesting. And now is that through the email provider? That it happens and that it remembers that copy that, you know, was associated with those negative impressions? It happens on the recipient end. So when, typically the way it works is you have a sender and a recipient, so the recipient email service provider always analyzes the performance that or the results of the previous campaigns that the sender has. So it means that whatever you are doing right now, it doesn't mean that it might affect your current campaign but it will surely be to affecting your future campaigns. So taking care of your email deliverability now would help you in your future prospecting. That's awesome. That's something that I just learned right here. Email durability, making sure that you change up those emails So as you have people who unsubscribe or if you send to an old email where someone's left their business and that email bounces, that their email provider doesn't catch that in the future and then block future sense. That's a -- Correct. -- fantastic concept and and value bomb right there as you said. Well, we had a question from the chat here that I'll bring up. This one's from Logan. He raised In terms of your testing, did you look at anything in terms of what's included in the emails, paraphrasing a little bit here, but the first one I'll say is What do you think of links in email? Does that cause any more flags to go up? And then blinking videos specifically was what the question was related to? So I'll be honest with you. We've tested a lot of things, and what we ended up doing is we always send only plain text, we don't do HTML, and in that plain text, we never include links in the first email, in the first introduction email, you might add some links to your case studies to your website maybe to a video doing the second or third follow-up, but you never send it in the introduction email. Because it's very important for you to get that first email through to the recipient, so that you are not blocked by their IT provider or by their ESP. But once that first email is on or is in, then you can send the second or third email with, you know, with some links that you have. But then be very cautious about adding links Because what's happening is whenever you had a link or a tracking pixel, right, like when you track an open rate or click through rate, it's a third party pixel or third party data that is added to your email, and typically what is happening is it gonna lower down your sending reputation by default because it is treated as an email marketing campaign. And what you want to do, you wanted your emails to look like a business communication. Because what we're doing with you right now, we're not running email blasts. What we are doing, we are generating interest interest through business communication through a very personalized one to one or ten to one or one hundred to one but it's not a ten million email blast. So if you think about that, then you know that if it's a business communication, that you know, you can ask, hey, can I send you a link to our case studies? Hey, I have this one pager that I want you to check out because that's gonna to create value one two three. Would you want me to send you the link? And then once you have a reply rate when someone say, hey, Michael, absolutely send you that link, then you include the link and then you already have a communication going on? That's awesome. I love that as an entry point. And I think this is a great time to bring up a couple emails and look through them, see what you like about them, see if there's anything else. This is the the fun part here is as I was setting up this interview and talking with Michael, I actually saw I had some emails from Belkins, from one of your sales teams. So we're gonna pull up the first email in that drip campaign, and we're gonna see so I thought this was a a great email. Now one thing that I do see in here is there's a link in that first email that at least I received. But I I love the opening line here. Like -- Yeah. -- do you see it says it's a little small on my end, but it was about if we had the capability to bring on new clients. That is a grabbing line because I think it it catches the attention. It makes you think, oh, are they coming in as someone who's looking to be one of our clients and, you know, gets that first attention. Yeah. I I know this email. I actually wrote that email, and let me give you some context about that email. Alright? So this is the email that so Imagine this, I have a team of twenty five salespeople, and we've sent probably around two, three million personalized emails on the Belkin's behalf generating clients over the last seven years, and this email has the best open rate of priority rate. We're looking at about eighty to ninety percent open rate, and we're looking about twenty percent reply rate this particular email. And what is interesting about this email, first, look at the subject line. Right? We are putting market scale as the variable, as the personalized variable, and then Belkins, and you're curious. Right? You have a company name you have a validating student know whether it's a client, whether it's a partner, whether it's so you're opening up. Right? When you open an email, you have a simple, hey, Does market scale have a capacity for new clients? Right? You start with argument. It's like, obviously, I have a capacity for new clients, But what do you mean? So you keep reading, right? And then you say the value proposition. So if we could generate appointments for business with qualified prospects without cold calling or rather spent, would you be interested? So now I'm putting, hey, we're not doing cold calling, hey, you're not spending money or at, you know, how do that? And then I'm currently looking for companies in these days, I can generate appointments for, since we have seven years of experience in software development, I believe sharing our recites to it as what, fifty minutes of your time. Right? Now, the link here is an experimentation. We have link and we have without link, and this is the link to a calendar with our sales team. And what we've noticed is that yes, this email will have lower durability rate, so we're actually gonna have less people or less of these emails delivered, but conversion to appointment books are higher, so we've seen people actually click on that link and then going hat and booking calls with our sales team on on the website. So it's, again, when I mentioned about AB testing, it's about silver lining. Right? So if your metric is as we had, I want to book more appointments, then maybe including that calendar link in the first email would make sense, right? Mhmm. But if you feel that it's not a direct value for you, the link is not direct value and it's worth asking about something or and then or including the link in the second email, then maybe it makes sense to deliver more emails and then add the link in the second email. And as business who's sending out a lot of these emails, you've got kind of the knowledge to know, okay, this is our threshold without it. Let's test let's push our limits and push for that appointment setting. What I love in that email, there's a lot of mystery, but it's also very simple. You know, the subject that we mentioned. It's got the two businesses' names. So obviously, you know, pulling in a a custom field there to bring in market scale. But then At the same time, it's very short and simple. As you mentioned, you don't really know if this is an existing partner, if this is, you know, something that's going on, who this is. You know, you don't over complicate it right there, so then people open it and click into it. And then you grab them with the first line, you know, create some intrigue with the second question. And then one of the big things we talk about a lot is social proof. We do this a lot through our content marketing. By creating testimonial videos, by creating really authentic videos from experts who are talking about a product or service that they're working on or they're developing. Being really first person. But you've got some of that right there in a really quick line. So I think as I and thinking about emails and what we might do. I might play around with a little social proof links right there. That might be worth our AB testing. On on one in the future. Happy about that. Let's bring up yeah. Let's bring up the second one. We do have a couple more, so we'll bring up second one in the campaign here. This is a re market scale in Belkin, so it follows that best practice mentioned earlier of always replying. So you have the follow-up, and tell me what else jumps out to you in this one. Right. So first off, I didn't see the second, you know, this follow-up. I didn't create that. So it's an experimentation of my business development team. So obviously, I like when you open it up with a question, right, about just wondering, right? I like the value proposition and then you put them very simple, you know, what you can expect from us. But I think that what stands out here is bullet points with case artists and testimonials, right? I think that people need to use bullet points more, but never put more than two to three bullet points because I've seen so many emails when you put like five, six bullet points with a lot of sentencing, you know, on the right side, and it just people don't read that. So even with this second follow-up with with a first follow-up, right, it's short, it it has a structure, it has the right formatting, it held the bullet points, it has the right links to case studies, to so to show the social proof to testimonials. Right? And then it has that calendar link again, you know, for and then you'd see here it's so with this to arrange a short meeting to to share best practices, right? Because, you know, if you boot the call, it's not gonna be about the selling, gonna be about learning, right? So maybe I would learn something else. If those guys work with me on the industry and they can share with me the best practices of what can I achieve, I don't need to commit to anything? Can just learn. So why don't I go ahead and just book that call? Well, that's perfect. And so we've got a little bit of a a breakdown of those first two emails, the final one that we'll pull up here is email number three in the drip. Let's briefly look at that one, and then we're gonna talk about deliverability and making sure we can get past any security. Mhmm. So Right. So I so when you started the email, very often what I've seen is when you go right into the value prop or into something, the, you know, like in extending your story line of the sequence, sometimes people just didn't see your first or the second email. Right? So the third email is usually sent to those that didn't respond to the first two one. So I like when you say when when Xania here say that as I mentioned, we are offering regeneration and business development services, right? So just a recap of what she mentioned in the previous emails. Right? And then obviously, she goes down into the value proposition, generate appointments without call calling her advertising spent, top of the final, you know, you can increase your top of the final by twenty five percent over the first three months. So she's putting some metrics there. Right? Or in the previous points, she puts that the team is at one four of the budget of the in house team. Right? So it's very important in your email to include not just developed proposition, but also you need to support your value proposition with some metrics, right? Like, are you saving time and are you saving or money or you're making money, right? But you always need to support that with your value with with your metrics, with ROI, or with with with with something that would tell me, oh, if I'm doing this, then this is how much money I'm making or saving, etcetera. And then Think about that whatever product or service you do. So we've worked with a lot of customers and we help them to repackage value by reposition because they are very focused on features on product descriptions, right, on the process, but not a lot on actual value, that can be measurable, and then can be scalable, and then can be predictable. Right? And if you have that or you can think about that, and you can put that in your email, then you're gonna see higher results of of that of that campaign. Yeah. I love that. And with this email, you have those specific tangible results, you know, I I like getting into the weeds, getting into the details. So I love being able to see those numbers. You know, immediate value, it jumps out at you. And the other thing that jumps out at me here is that first sentence, as I mentioned, you know, this is a micro reading into it very, very nitty gritty. But as I open that and I see that, I immediately get a little bit of adrenaline where it's like, as I mentioned, okay, there was something previous. Did I miss that? You know, that little shot of adrenaline gets your attention really focused if you're kind of multitasking, opening your emails. Now you've got a little bit more on it, and it brings them into the rest of the email. So I thought that was a very clever move as well. Way job, Sonya. Well, there we go. That's a a breakdown of some of the emails in the drip campaign. Hopefully, a lot of good specific learnings that our audience can take away in terms of building out their structure and some of tactical points that they can build into their emails. Now I know we're getting a little later into our conversation, but I do really wanna talk about deliverability. I wanna talk about how you make sure that your emails kind of get to the intended recipient. Could you tell us a little bit about the strategies you employ there? Absolutely. So as I mentioned when we started our conversation, Terry, that email durability is a very important factor of success if you're doing any type of an in the outreach. Right? And when I started my my company back in twenty sixteen, I could pull a list of a hundred names and set called emails and all of them will be delivered. But every next year, Google, Microsoft, and all other ESPs, they've been struck cleaning their processes and policies to the immotability and then the AI that they are using are serving more and more sophisticated, so that's why you cannot just simply go ahead and send a call out which, you know, drip campaign in twenty twenty three without damaging your reputation. So here's what you think, guys, what you I want you guys to have or to to think of, when you do a new grip campaign. So first, always set up new websites or I would say like domains that will be connected to your email service provider. Right? And then always warm up your domain, your domain, your mailboxes that you are using for your outreach, but the trick here is you always warm them up with the actual sequences that you're gonna be using for an Outreach. Because the first mistake that the companies are doing, they are warming up their domain or their mailboxes with some random messages with some empty emails, whatever, and it doesn't work. You actually need to use the sequence that will be used in your drip campaign to build up the reputation for the wording there. Right? So it means that if you're if you're sending a sequence, then you don't just use the first email to the warm up, but also warm up the second and third email. Because as I mentioned, when you generate the negative engagements for that sequence, it's going to lower down your reputation So by warming up your domain in your mailboxes with the exact content you're gonna be using, you're increasing your reputation for the time being balancing out the negative reputation you will be receiving and and and having and having more time to actually have a successful grip campaign. Now the second thing is you always adhere to the natural limit of every ESP. So, every ESP have their own limit in terms of how many actual emails you can send per day, and usually the tools that you are using don't have that information. So you need to Google research and talk to a specialist about what is my limits if I'm using G Suite, or Outlook, etcetera. So for example, for if you're using Google Workspace for cold emailing, right, then on average, mail box has a limit of under two hundred emails per day that can be sent out of it, so it means that, but it's a it's a natural progression. You start off with ten, then you increase to twenty, fifty, a hundred, the next week, a hundred fifty, and then So it takes you one month to build up the traction to a two hundred to then have a healthier reputation, right? And that ties into warming up your inbox or having an aged inbox where you have your email, and we'll see it where, you know, even here with a newer employee versus a legacy market scale team member who's been here for a long time, will have different send limit. On emails that we can send out. And so just to, you know, give a brief intro to warming up the inbox, this is using one outside of the one you're using for work every day so that you're not getting that that flag. But instead, you warm it up by sending those emails from a new email address, a new new inbox, and basically being able to get positive responses on those ones so that they're getting delivered. Yeah. This process is already automated. So we actually built platform called fold early. It's one of our products. It's a email success platform that is actually used to build up the reputation So all of those features in terms of the monitoring, testing, you know, warming up, building the traction, building the reputation, you know, telling what to do and how to do is already automated. So, you can check out faldalie dot com and you can actually have that process in place. Now talking about the other, the other best practices here, it's also important to mentioning that the quality of the list that you're using. Right? I always say that as long as you have a high quality list of with leads, right, when we talk about the list building, then you can be more successful and then for you to have that list, right? You you shouldn't use your old database you shouldn't just export leads from your CRM or just buy an outside provider. So there are two approaches about that. So you can either build your own list and then you have someone on top of that list, or if you have an old list, you need to verify contact information well as verify whether those people are actually still holding their jobs to that moment while while we're sending them out. So, verifying and cleaning the list would be one of the, you know or not doing that would be one of the roadblocks for a successful outreach campaign that will definitely get you banned. And that's to say that if you're sending out an email drip and the first email goes out and you have, you know, let's say a crazy number of dead email addresses on there where you're getting a bounce back. You know, let's say you've got forty percent. You've pulled your full CRM from, like, you know, the start of your company until, you know, start a COVID to do a basically a a list build of old prospects. What's the impact of that? Like, how does that play out when you hit send on that email? If you have forty percent you are done, your domain will be blacklisted, your mailbox will be backlisted. So fifteen percent is a lot. Fifteen percent, ten percent is a lot. Five percent is like we can live with that. But if you get it to one percent, that's when the first start. Because the one percent means that you have a clean list, then the data is fresh, that the leads match your ideal client profile, that people still on their jobs, so then you can expect much higher return or investment of that campaign. But then if you have if you have it a list that you are sending and then you are higher than ten percent bounce rate. So it just means that you need to look at the list because I wouldn't expect a very high return on investment on that campaign. Now I'll connect this to a very practical application for the b to b world. A lot of companies that we work with focus on trade shows, that's a great area for making a lot of connections. You scan a lot of badges. You make a lot of new contacts. Leaving a trade show and then creating a follow-up campaign. You know, what would you recommend in terms of taking that list from your now CRM where they're all housed? And then setting them up for a drip campaign? That's a great question, Terry. So I think that what I would do, if I have a list from a conference, I would approach this from the omnichannel standpoint first, So instead of just sending a drape campaign with email, what I would do, I would first reach out to those people in LinkedIn, connect with them, And then once that are connected, I would verify their contact information with them. Hey, is this still your most accurate, most recent email address that you use, and only then I would do the redeem campaign. In this way, I can build a rapport with them on LinkedIn put my name in front of them, and then send them a more detailed email communication. Because I receive so many follow-up emails after the conference that I didn't answer, not because I didn't want it, because I just didn't seem to recognize the person that was emailing me. But if people reached out to me first on Linkedin and I was like, oh yeah, I remember I talked with that guy. Right? Then I can respond to email. That's awesome. I love that. You have the multi touch. You build, you know, kind of awareness and you build up a a good working reputation you know, by having a couple forms of communication and reaching out there. Well, that is a great place to end us because it connects the emailing into the larger world, you know, this is a great platform and great medium to utilize, to do some of this outreach, but as you just called out, Michael, you know, it lives in the larger ecosystem of building a community ultimately. When you're sending these emails out, you're hoping to drive people to a meeting or engage with your website. So engaging with your content, gaining education, maybe downloading a good video or round table that you have on the site, So it's really cool to do a deep dive into this piece that becomes part of the larger marketing ecosystem. That's so true, Terry. I always say that we really mean the time of only channel marketing, and you can be successful with one channel but not for a long time. But if you want to be really successful, marketing should be one of your main investment because it's, you know, is about the product, right? But it's not about just the product anymore. Like Terry, you mentioned about the threats, right? It's about the go to market strategy it's about to get in eyes on your platform. We don't we don't know whether threats has the better product that Twitter Right? We don't know that. But be sure that threats has a damn good marketing. Mhmm. They have certainly captured the attention and I think that's a fantastic point to leave this conversation. I think we could probably go through about fifty more emails before we got bored reviewing them. But Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here today to share your expertise on this topic. Thank you so much, Terry, for having me, and thank you guys for tuning in. Everyone, thank you for joining us and for watching. We'll be back next week. We've got a really exciting guest. Who's coming from the NFL and sharing kind of his persona, his charisma, his ability to learn and share information with the business world It's gonna be a really interesting interview. So we'll tune in or everyone join us tune in on Thursday next week at three PM central time look forward to talking with you then. Bye now.