Good morning and good afternoon to our viewers in Poland. Today, we have Radek from Bouncer, an email deliverability company. They help companies ensure that their emails reach inboxes and avoid bouncing. Without further ado, we’d love for you to introduce your company and tell us more about what you do. Company Overview Thank you, Andy, for having me. It’s a privilege and honor to be on your show. As you mentioned, we are an email deliverability company. We position ourselves as those who help people get connected and stay connected via email. We started with an email verification solution to ensure that communications with customers are accurate from the moment of entry. Later, we help maintain clean lists of recipients, customers, and partners. We understand the importance of keeping lists clean so that emails reach the intended inboxes. While email verification is our starting point, we plan to expand our offerings beyond this. Our goal is to help marketers, businesses, and enterprises stay better connected through the email channel. However, we may also explore other communication channels in the future. Challenges in Email Deliverability So, how are email sending and deliverability issues evolving for B2B companies? Many email providers like Gmail and Yahoo are tightening their rules, especially for cold email marketing. What are your thoughts on this? The challenges vary depending on the type of communication and the marketing strategies employed by companies. Each strategy presents different challenges. Email deliverability is complex, with many factors and changes in the environment. Basic principles have existed for years but are now enforced more broadly. It’s not a question of if challenges will arise, but rather when. Being prepared to mitigate these challenges is crucial. That’s why we focus on educating our customers and potential customers about these principles and key factors. With the increasing scale of emails and the battle between email service providers and spammers, it’s essential to avoid common pitfalls and address challenges proactively. Tips for Improving Email Deliverability Do you have any general tips for improving email deliverability? I usually answer this question in a philosophical manner, but I’m also happy to share practical tips. I believe email deliverability is the result of respecting both resources and recipients. From one perspective, it’s about not abusing someone else’s resources, such as email servers, with unpredictable email blasts. It’s also about respecting your own resources, including your reputation and identity. Ensuring proper authentication setups like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is crucial to protect your infrastructure from malicious actors. On the other hand, it’s essential to show respect and care towards your recipients. This means delivering valuable content and offers that meet their needs. Avoid the “spray and pray” approach; instead, segment your lists properly and understand your subscribers' interests. If there’s one key takeaway, it would be to practice respect. The Role of Cold Outreach Regarding B2B outbound email, it’s important to use work addresses rather than personal emails. Many people prefer to keep their personal and work lives separate. Cold outreach, especially email, serves as an equalizer. Small and medium businesses from around the world can market their products and services globally without needing huge budgets or sophisticated marketing funnels. However, there’s a temptation to automate outreach tools widely, which may lead to less effective prospecting. The key to success in cold outreach is an empathetic approach. Effective prospecting and maximizing the probability that your offer will interest recipients is crucial. Signals and Tools (09:40) When it comes to cold emailing, it’s crucial to look for signals indicating that a recipient might need your product or service now or in the near future. Good prospecting is more important than the technicalities like warming up your infrastructure or choosing specific tools. While tools like Apollo and Bombora can aid in lead generation and provide intent data, focusing on hitting your ideal customer profile and delivering an offer that addresses their needs and core expertise is key. Improving and Scaling Cold Email Marketing (10:16) Spray-and-pray tactics are outdated. For cold email marketing to be effective, it’s essential to have a strategic approach. To scale effectively, you need to ensure that your small-scale efforts are successful before expanding. This means understanding your value proposition, identifying your ideal customer and buyer profiles, and recognizing signals of interest. Scaling should be based on proven tactics. It’s important to confirm that your profiling, offer positioning, copy, and prospecting practices are effective before scaling up. Scaling should be a result of knowing that your approach resonates with your audience. Blind scaling can be harmful, potentially damaging your deliverability and reputation if done without a solid foundation. Quality vs. Quantity (11:23) I’m not a fan of scaling just for the sake of it. It’s better to focus on quality over quantity. Ensuring that your basics are solid—such as having a proven process—will allow you to scale effectively without needing multiple domains. If you’re ready to scale, maintaining a positive reputation with a single domain can be more effective than spreading your efforts thin across multiple domains. Business vs. Personal Email Addresses (15:30) When sending cold emails, it’s generally better to use business email addresses rather than personal ones. Personal emails often remain unchanged for longer periods, which can be tempting to use, but sending to personal addresses can be seen as an abuse of context. Business emails are more contextually appropriate for cold outreach and are less likely to be perceived as spam. Additionally, changes in spam policies by providers like Google and Yahoo primarily impact personal email inboxes, not business accounts. Spam Policies and Authentication (18:00) Google’s recent changes in spam policies, while significant, are more evolutionary than revolutionary. They mainly affect personal email inboxes, not Google Workspace or other business email accounts. The changes aim to protect personal mailboxes and enforce good practices. The key aspects of these rules are: Authentication: Ensure proper authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. This protects your infrastructure and confirms your identity to email providers, helping prevent impersonation and phishing attempts. Protection: These practices are vital to protect your domain and ensure that your emails are recognized as legitimate. Overall, adherence to these practices helps maintain deliverability and prevents your emails from being marked as spam. Importance of Authentication (19:56) Ensuring that malicious agents do not impersonate your domain is crucial. Authentication should be a priority because it helps email service providers like Google and Yahoo identify whether the email genuinely comes from you. Proper authentication makes it easier to resolve any issues that arise since postmasters from these providers will be more inclined to assist if they know the email is genuinely from your domain. Authentication has always been a critical factor, and it is now being enforced more strictly by major players. However, these changes are introduced gradually, with good communication from email service providers. This means you shouldn’t be caught off guard by sudden, drastic changes. Spam Rates and Best Practices (21:08) Another important aspect is managing spam rates. You definitely want to avoid having your emails marked as spam. Google recommends aiming for a spam rate of less than 0.1%, meaning only 0.1% of your recipients should mark your messages as spam. If your spam rate reaches 0.3%, you may encounter deliverability problems. To avoid this, it’s crucial to ensure that your emails are of potential interest to your recipients. This will help reduce the likelihood of them marking your emails as spam. Rules for High-Volume Senders (22:27) For high-volume senders—those sending more than 5,000 emails per day—there are additional rules. Such large volumes require impeccable email practices, including proper authentication. If you send fewer emails, this rule might not yet apply to you. For those sending over 5,000 emails per day, it's essential to implement a one-click unsubscribe option. Although this is not yet fully enforced, there is an intention to enforce it more strictly in the future. High-volume senders should also provide options like preference centers for unsubscribing. Future of Email Deliverability Rules (24:19) While the current changes are not revolutionary, they represent an ongoing trend in email marketing. As cold email marketing becomes more popular due to its low cost and ease of entry, we can expect further tightening of regulations. It’s essential for companies to build a solid foundation for their email marketing efforts from the start. Philosophically, you can’t build a house without a good foundation, and the same goes for email marketing. Looking Ahead (25:12) Predicting the future of email deliverability rules is challenging due to the rapid changes in the industry. However, it's likely that there will be more enforcement and development of sophisticated tools to identify and handle spam. Continued conversations and advancements in this area will shape how rules evolve in the coming years. AI-Generated Content and Email Identification (25:58) There are ongoing discussions about identifying AI-generated content in emails. Using AI and generative AI to create content is not inherently wrong, but major email service providers with the resources to develop technology for identifying AI-generated content are likely to use it to detect spammy practices. These spammers often generate a large volume of content cheaply and blast it out to recipients. We've seen various approaches where random content is sent to see if anyone responds, which is not a good tactic. This approach essentially uses spam responses as a gauge for potential interest in a legitimate offering. However, this method is problematic and can lead to negative perceptions of your email practices. Future of Email Deliverability (27:21) Despite these concerns, it's unlikely that there will be drastic changes in the next few years. Email service providers are primarily focused on ensuring their users have a positive experience. They can’t mark everything as spam, as some messages may genuinely interest their users. For instance, Gmail reports that 99% of emails it receives are categorized as spam, which means many emails are filtered out before reaching users. It’s beneficial that email providers are enhancing their anti-spam filters to protect users. However, legitimate senders might occasionally get caught in these filters. The goal is to target large-scale spammers rather than small businesses trying to reach out with legitimate offers. Perceptions and Practices (29:19) There’s a shift in perception, especially among email administrators and postmasters. Cold emailing is sometimes viewed as a spammy practice because if emails are not well-prospected and lack proper permissions, they can be identified as spam. The industry is evolving, and we need to adapt by observing these changes and adjusting our practices accordingly. For example, sending numerous follow-up emails to unresponsive recipients can be counterproductive. Respecting recipients' preferences and limiting the number of solicitation emails is becoming increasingly important. Why Companies Choose Bouncer (31:06) Companies come to Bouncer for various reasons. We serve a range of customers, from major brands to small businesses and individual operators. Our focus is on educating customers about the importance of email deliverability. Despite being a smaller company compared to some competitors, we strive to offer valuable products and a dedicated team. Our customers appreciate our caring approach and the quality of our service. Some customers are referred by email service providers or come to us after experiencing deliverability issues. They might initially be unhappy about the cost of email verification but often find significant value in our service. Proactive Email Management (35:18) More customers are now aware of the benefits of being proactive rather than reactive in email management. Instead of waiting for issues to arise, companies are starting to implement practices that maintain a high sender reputation from the beginning. This proactive approach helps prevent problems and ensures long-term email marketing success. Final Thoughts (37:03) Radek, it’s been great chatting with you today. Email deliverability is more important than ever. Companies should focus on cleaning their lists and building a strong foundation for their email marketing efforts. For long-term success, it's crucial to avoid short-term tactics and focus on sustainable practices. If anyone is interested in Bouncer, you can check out their website at usebouncer.com. We also offer a 20% cash back through NachoNacho's B2B SaaS Marketplace. We appreciate the opportunity to help businesses improve their email marketing success. Thank you, Ric, for joining us today, and I look forward to our continued partnership.