Growth Stage by FastSpring

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, increase the value of their business. I'm your host, Jesse Paliotto. I love being part of the community, and I love bringing the best of the community to you here on the podcast. Today we have with us Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. I'm so pumped to have him here. Email marketing is often hailed as the highest ROI channel for marketing, especially in SaaS and digital businesses.

But what happens when your emails don't even make it to the inbox? So in this episode, we're going to talk with Hank. He's Director of Operations, but the email deliverability evangelist, more importantly, at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, deliverability impacts your bottom line. So we're going learn why deliverability is no longer a set it and forget it process and how to fix common mistakes that could be silently killing your campaigns and communications. Hank, thanks so much for being here today, man. I really appreciate it.

Hank Hoffmeier (00:59)
Yeah, thanks for the invite. It's exciting to be here and talk about email marketing and how it's a crucial role for any type of company.

Jesse Paliotto (01:06)
Absolutely. I know we were joking for a second before we hit record that it can sometimes feel like the dark art off in the corner of like, how does that all happen? So today we're gonna reveal the dark arts or whatever. I don't know. Something like that. ⁓ Can you just to get us kind of into it, can you talk a little bit, why is email still such a high R— ROI channel? If I can spit that out, especially for SaaS companies or digital companies.

Hank Hoffmeier (01:31)
Interestingly enough, I like to do videos almost every day on various social media platforms, short form, and I did one this morning and it was a, did you know, and it was, did you know that email marketing, the first marketing email was sent in 1978 and made $13 million. And I was encouraging people, it's Monday, but you might not make $13 million, but send an email. Yes, it is the marketing channel of choice by people that know what they're looking at when it comes to numbers. Just the most affordable, provides the highest ROI,

and most importantly, and this is coming out more and more, I've heard it over the last few years, but more importantly, I've heard it in the last few months at conferences is it's an owned audience. You own your audience. Of course you have to upload it to a platform to send emails, but you can take— it's portable. If you're on social media and you do something wrong or don't do something wrong, but you get reported, you can have your account suspended, banned, or killed. You just lost that audience. It's called rented land. A lot of people do marketing on rented land. On Facebook,

you know, if you're running ads and then doing posts and boosting your posts and you get your account suspended, you just lost that audience. With email marketing, Like I said, you own that audience. You could stay in touch with them. You can make it feel like a personalized one-on-one conversation through the use of personalization and merge data. And it just, to me, it's a no brainer to either just get started or go back and revisit what you're doing. If you feel like that has fell off of a cliff or something.

more more I have these conversations and get people excited about bringing email back into their platforms and their marketing efforts again.

Jesse Paliotto (03:06)
Yeah, I'm curious like, has there been any changes over the last few years? Has anything kind of modified or is it still the same game as it was from 10 years ago? And is there anything that like founders or marketers should be thinking about like, hey, this is how.

Hank Hoffmeier (03:23)
there's been changes and then there's a lot of fundamentals that people don't even know about. mentioned like dark arts and people don't know. And oftentimes I go to conferences and I talk about the basics and getting things set up and doing it right so that you are successful right away. And it amazes me how many people in the audience are new to email marketing or have been doing it for a while, but just don't know some of the things that I end up talking about. And when I started at,

Eye Contact, which is a sister company to Kickbox, both owned by Ziff Davis. You know, I went into account management. said, I know how email works, right? You get a list of subscribers, you create an email, you send it you make money. It's not that easy. You mentioned it. First, your email needs to get to the inbox. It needs to be viewed. And first and foremost, you need to have a valid email address to send to. And that's where Kickbox comes in is we validate email addresses.

Now lot of times people say, OK, I'll upload a list where I'll connect it to my HubSpot and validate my email addresses or HubSpot said, hey, my list is old, may have a lot of email addresses that are no longer valid, and they're going to recommend that I go to kickbox to clean my list. And that happens. And sure, by all means, do that. But the missing link, as I call it, is verifying it when it first comes in. Let's say you have a sign up form.

A lot of your audience probably have has a website. Maybe you have a sign up form or you're looking to add one. You should be doing that on the fly. If I fill out my the form on your website and I put hank at g nail dot com and I spell it with an N by mistake. I finger it right. The form, if set up correctly with an API, can say, did you mean Gmail and automatically allow them to correct it? Or if I type in Hank FG.

At gmail.com and I didn't mean to put the FG and it's an invalid email address. It'll say this is an invalid email. Just please try again. Custom like Citibank Major League Baseball and Reddit use us in that manner. Not saying only big companies can do that. We also have some partners that work with us to work with WordPress forms with gravity forms, small companies, and they're able to do that. You can use the API. Anybody can use the API, but first and foremost.

Validate your email addresses, then decide if you want to use what's called risky email addresses like disposable email addresses. Those are on the rise. That's one thing that's changing. Then there's role email addresses like admin at and marketing at now. Why is that dangerous? If somebody signed up for marketing at whatever company.com, maybe I signed up for your email using that email address. And then three months later I leave the organization and then you, Jesse, you're checking the emails because you got that new.

responsibility and you say I didn't sign up for this email. I don't remember it. You market a spam or you know unsubscribe from it. It's up to you and the type of business you're in whether or not that's important and it also depends on other things as far as your engagement rates. But those are things to look for. Disposables, the role addresses and then there's the free like do you want to accept Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft or do you not? Do you only want B2B domains? You might see that you may fill out a form and will say please provide a business email because you tried using a Gmail.

That's another thing that providers like kickbox and other ones that do validation offer is the ability to filter those out on the fly if you want to, or in a report. Next is email authentication. And a lot of people forget this and years ago, maybe it wasn't as important and you didn't really have to do that. What is email authentication? It is basically showing these email providers or the recipient servers that you are safe, secure and trustable.

Jesse Paliotto (07:05)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:06)
And I'm to go into detail here because the first one is SPF and it's not something you put on your skin to protect you from sun damage, right? It's called sender policy framework. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (07:10)
Yeah, bring it.

I wanted to ask you about this because I feel like these terms

get thrown around and I'm not sure people always know truly what they are. So yeah, do this. This is great.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:21)
Let's go through this and try to make it understandable. SPF is sender policy framework. This means let's say I'm sending emails from hankhoffmeyer.com, but I'm using MailChimp. The recipient server is going to say, this email is being sent by Hank, but MailChimp's actually sending it. Does MailChimp have permission to send us emails? What it's asking for. Now MailChimp and other providers, they're automatically going to do this SPF set up for you. And I contact our sister company who I worked for for 13 years.

Jesse Paliotto (07:43)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:51)
They do this automatically. Now you may have another provider or you have your own server. Just make sure you have SPF set up and that would be in say your hosting provider like GoDaddy. I always mention X it's well known. You go into GoDaddy and you go into your DNS. If you're technical, you know what I'm talking about. If not use chat GPT, right? Or ask your email provider. How do I set this up?

And then you're to go in and put a text record in and it's going to be the SPF record. It's going to identify, say MailChimp as a sender for me is what it's doing to dumb it down. Then there's DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Simply said, this means that the email has not been altered or changed during transmission. It hasn't been hacked. It hasn't been injected with malware. There's end-to-end encryption. This is something that your provider, email provider, or you need to set up. Most times your provider will send you this information or it'll be in your control panel.

Go to GoDaddy, whatever hosting provider you have, enter these DNS records and validate it and you can check it and make sure it's valid. And then the last one is called DMARC, Domain Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. That's a mouthful. Really, even though it's the longest acronym, it basically says, do you have SPF and DMARC set up? mean, DKIM set up. And if you don't, what do we do with this email? What I always recommend is setting it up and then there is pass, fail, and ignore, right? Kind of.

And I would recommend just doing ⁓ doing no, none ⁓ fail and quarantine is what it would be right. None, rejecting quarantine is the correct terms set up as none. What this does is allow you to see if anybody is actually spoofing your emails. Maybe some company from a foreign country is sending emails on your behalf, trying to steal information from people. You can actually see this.

Jesse Paliotto (09:20)
Yes, ⁓

Hank Hoffmeier (09:35)
And a fun thing is you'll actually see, Oh, it looks like the dev team is actually sending out a newsletter. We didn't even know about it. And, know, cause you could see that they're doing that and what email address they're using and what domain they're using, but then you can send it to quarantine or reject. And this is going to be something that's required. The reason why I mentioned these three is these are required right now from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail. If you don't have this pretty much your emails are going to going to go to spam.

Now you might have a listener that'll say, well, Hank, some of my recipients are still getting the email and they're replying to it. I know they're getting my email. What do you mean? Sure. If somebody is highly engaged and they're opening, clicking your emails, they'll continue to get the email. Now somebody going and going to your website and filling out a form and you're using authentication for a kickbox. Then what happens is they don't get that welcome email. They don't get subsequent emails because it's going to spam.

Another item you can add, and this is not required, optional, it's called BIMI, brand indicators for message identification. Now, if you look and say Gmail is the perfect way to describe this, you may see either a logo or like a K for kickbox in a circle, like a red circle. The reason why it would be a logo is because BIMI is set up. Again, you have to have SPFD, Kim, and DMARC. You do have to have a verified domain.

There's a couple options and it does cost some money anywhere from $800 to $1,500. You may need to have a what's called a VMC certificate and then to go through this process of verifying you own the domain, right? Which is critical for this. And really what that does is it provides a way for users to trust you in the inbox that your domain showing up. OK, this is Best Buy. This is their subject line. I probably can trust them. I'll open it. Whereas if it's just Hank Hoffmeier and Assistant H, can you trust that? Maybe, maybe not.

But those are the authentication methods and things that you need to worry about when it comes to sending emails. Right. And I mentioned Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail. like to call them "Yahooglesoft," but we can also say MAGY, which would be Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo, because Apple and I can mean my phones right here. And let's say I put it face down. I'm not even looking at it, Jesse, and you send me an email and I'm using the built in email

Jesse Paliotto (11:41)
Mm. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (11:54)
app from Apple, right? And I can use that with Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera. It's going to count as an open whether or not even looked at my email or not. I mean, never look at your email, but it's going to count as an open. lot of people like to look at opens as a metric of success. In other words, at 20, 30, 40 % open rate where that's kind of a almost a dead metric. It's still OK to look at it. Realistically, you want to look at clicks and make sure that people are clicking your email

Jesse Paliotto (12:19)
Well, let me let me let me go back a paragraph. I just want to make sure that I grabbed that, because that was a lot of sort of dense definitions. But I this is my simplistic way that I heard you. So a ⁓ the SPF is a text file. In your. Domain settings the. Or. It's the host and then.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:39)
or host that mostly most times is the host. But it could be

on the domain. It just depends on how your website set up nine times out of 10. It's the host.

Jesse Paliotto (12:48)
And the DKIM is an encryption that's running in order to make sure that contents are not altered during send, right? Okay, DMARC is essentially a policy that runs sort of if-thens, that if it sees these signals, do this with the email, either let it go through, possibly quarantine it, possibly put it into the spam folder. And then BIMI, in my weird brain, it's the blue check mark on Twitter.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:54)
It's making sure there's encryption, yes.

Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (13:15)
You're paying in order to get a brand trust signal that shows up right next to your message in the inbox. Is that Jesse's dummy dumbing it down? is that where? The clip notes version. OK, so this is ⁓ before the Apple thing on the 30 % is a really interesting thing. Let me ask you really quick on a sidetrack before we come back to that. What do you see companies messing up? That's that's too negative. What's the biggest opportunity you see that companies have when it comes to?

Hank Hoffmeier (13:16)
Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I like it. What do we call those Cliff Notes? Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:45)
getting what you just said with all those settings.

Hank Hoffmeier (13:49)
When it comes to getting the settings right is they're not actually implementing it. They don't have it. They don't know that they need to implement it and then making sure it's correct.

Jesse Paliotto (14:01)
Yeah. So just straight up awareness, just knowing that there's these pieces that need to be put into place. Is the obstacle. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:08)
Yep. And there's a tool. Let me, this is important about my dot email.

If you go there and you recently set up or you want to check your authentication, that's a good tool about my.email. It will tell you if you have SPF, DMARC and DKIM and even BIMI set up and set up correctly.

Jesse Paliotto (14:27)
that's a great tip. ⁓ if you're, you know, shout out to anybody that's new to the marketing team on the operations team, trying to get a quick read on things, you could go to there and get an immediate readout on your own or potentially even competitors or somebody.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:41)
Yeah, somebody could start in a marketing team and they're head of marketing and they were told, yeah, we set up authentication years ago or last month. You may want to verify that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:50)
Yeah, does it change over time? Is there anything that would alter ⁓ those settings or once they're set up they're permanent?

Hank Hoffmeier (14:57)
Maybe you change the, ⁓ the domain you're sending from or something like that, usually they're kind of permanent or maybe you moved from MailChimp to Constant Contact and you never updated your records, right? ⁓ that could be a huge red flag and cause it to fail. And then a lot of people tend to use Microsoft email still.

A lot of times sometimes it's hard to set up something with what's called IP lookups because every domain has one or more IPs and I believe that the SPF record holds only about 10. So in other words, if you use it in Microsoft, I think it automatically uses like six to eight, I think. And then if you're adding five more, it's going to put you over that limit and it will fail. And there's workarounds for that. We won't get into that because it's like highly technical.

Jesse Paliotto (15:42)
Yeah, interesting. And I know from my experience in SaaS companies, the entire company is often not using the same email platform. So you may have marketing team using MailChimp. You may be having the product team using Railgun or something to shoot out ⁓ system messages. You could be having sales team using other outreach techniques for outbound. So I would say that's the thing that also strikes me with that is

It's not just validating one system. It should be across the company, I would guess.

Hank Hoffmeier (16:14)
Yeah, and if you're using many platforms, make sure you're synchronizing your unsubscribes because you don't want to get in trouble there.

Jesse Paliotto (16:20)
Yeah, that's ⁓ interesting. Yeah. Okay, let's go back then. Thanks for letting me kind of like circle around for a second there. ⁓ Can you get us back into, so Apple with ⁓ open rates, you're, and this is going, I've seen this in a number of articles, people will talk about this, that your open rate as a metric is no longer as meaningful as it was because your phone is auto opening anything it gets. ⁓ So what do we do with open rate?

Do people still quote benchmarks and say, oh, know, if you're in this type of business, you should be having a 40 % open rate? Or do you even think about that, or do just throw the whole thing out?

Hank Hoffmeier (16:56)
You can eyeball it and it's a good way. You know, if your list isn't holistically changing a lot as a, you know, an informal metric, you know, if you're steadily in the twenties or going up, then you're doing well. But if all of a sudden there's a big drop or a big spike, you might want to look into why that happened. Um, you know, if you added a bunch of, uh, people that may be using Apple, then you obviously know there be some jumps, but most people don't usually steady grow over time because you should be.

using permission based email marketing. In other words, never buying a list and adding your million email addresses that you purchased because there's a lot of issues there because not only does Yahoo Google soft require that you have this authentication, they're also looking at your spam complaint levels. If they're over 0.3 % or 3 % per thousand of each of these domains, not overall, you will be dinged again. And also

cause what's called IP or domain reputation damage. The same thing with your bounces, right? And that's why kickbox is important and validating emails. If you send too many emails to too many emails that are invalid and they bounce again, that hurts your ⁓ reputation as well. And what I'm talking about here is every time you send an email, let's say I'm using hankhofmeyer.com and I send to a hundred Gmail subscribers. I like to use Gmail cause they're the most strict with their algorithms, et cetera.

And then over time, 50 % or 50 of them are either bouncing, mark me a spam or worse unsubscribing and even ignoring my emails. That is a bad signal and people don't realize that. That's why list hygiene is important. If that starts happening and my credit score is 50, again, I'm going to run into trouble and Gmail, Yahoo, whatever server is going to say, Hank's not a really reputable sender. Let's send more and more of your emails.

his emails to the spam folder and that's what happens. And you mentioned like, what is the biggest thing that marketers either have an opportunity for with authentication, but the biggest overall opportunity is value, right? Making sure that you're sending emails that your subscribers want that they opted into that's. Educative, informative or helpful in some way, not what you as a marketer saying, I have the best email in the world and I love it. Everybody else should love it too.

Jesse Paliotto (18:56)
Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:16)
Make sure you're sending relevant emails and testing, know, split testing. A lot of these platforms have ways of taking a portion of your list and testing it to see if it's going to do well because yeah, authentication is important. Verification is important and your IP and your domain reputation is important. I don't mention IP a lot because usually smaller senders are going to be on what's called a shared IP like MailChimp constant contact. They have a bunch of IPs that all their customers share.

Jesse Paliotto (19:38)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:43)
But if you're a huge center and you're sending millions of emails a day, it might be worth looking into what's called a dedicated IP, having your own IP address, then you're holistically responsible for the reputation of that IP address. And how I meant like to mention this is years and years and years ago when spammers would sign up for a service, they would send out spam and it would be the IP reputation that made it an issue, right? Okay. They're on this IP address. They're sending spam. Any emails coming from this IP leads block.

Jesse Paliotto (19:51)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (20:12)
Then they would just say, okay, well I'm leaving this ESP and I'm gonna go over here to this one now and burn their IPs. Then they burn those IPs and they go somewhere else. What happened is there's been a change. Number one, these providers start blocking people. And then two is the powers that be said, well, let's start looking at the domain. Okay, if they use this provider and they're sending crappy emails, that domain reputation is gonna follow you over to this other provider. And that's what's happened over time.

Jesse Paliotto (20:40)
Oh, interesting. Thank you. That was a helpful summary because I know I've looked at that in the past and tried to track like, why did this reputation, you know, why did it persist? Can you talk a little bit about list hygiene? Because I feel like this kind of gets us into like, if I've got 10,000 member list or 100,000 or million, it doesn't really matter. And I want to make sure that what you're describing isn't happening, that people aren't ignoring, spamming, just throwing in junk.

then know my I've heard that you know well you want to clean your list and take away people that are actively not engaged but I'm getting false signals now from my phone or from their phone rather that are auto opening that how do I approach ⁓ hygiene on my list in light of all of that.

Hank Hoffmeier (21:25)
And the advice can be generic and it could also depend on what industry you're in and how many times you're sending an email. If you send an email once a quarter versus once a month versus once a week, your timeframes can be different. let's say average, you want to look at six months. If somebody hasn't opened and clicked an email in six months, it might be good to put them into a sequence and asking people if they still want to receive your emails.

Now I've seen this done well on people that are in our space because we all know marketers know what's happening. And there's a newsletter I belong to that every now and then they'll say, Hey, we all know that Microsoft Yahoo and all these other providers want to see engagement. Please click this link if you want to still receive our emails. I actually got one from a well-known brand doing something similar saying, we noticed that you may not have engaged with our emails in a while.

If you still want to receive our emails, please click this link to let us know to keep sending you emails. Now that was great. Wonderful. The thing I think the mistake they made is I clicked on the link and I went to their homepage. That's it. Like just dropped on their homepage. You should have a, think in my opinion, have a specific landing page. That's simple. That just says, thank you for clicking on the link in the email or thank you for letting us know you still want to receive emails from us. Now, if you want to put an offer on that page or put something else, picture of a clown, whatever you want.

Jesse Paliotto (22:31)
Yeah, missed opportunity.

Hank Hoffmeier (22:48)
Just make it so that, like I said, it's valuable, right? Don't just drop somebody to homepage and maybe they're gonna buy something or you were just lazy to set something up. Maybe you do something where you sell something that people don't buy too often. Like you sell, I used to work with a client that sold reading glasses and also regular glasses. I don't know if you wear glasses at all or not, but I do. How often would I buy glasses? Maybe the most once a year. Why should I be sending somebody an email once a week, which is what this client was doing?

Jesse Paliotto (23:13)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (23:17)
We moved to once a month, but then we also started limiting how much promotion was in there. Started providing information like blog posts about organic health for your eyes, how to clean your glasses, repair them, gave them more value to stay in touch with them. So basically my, guess I want to give some advice. Like if you don't send the emails too often because you say we only send once a quarter because that's the industry we're in.

find ways to keep in touch with them and send them an email a little bit more often so that you do have that data and those metrics. And then you use that sequence of emails, send them one email asking if they still want to receive it, waiting a week, two weeks. If they didn't open that first email, send them a second one. It's kind of like, are we breaking up question mark, the first one, right? Then they don't open that. The next one's like, here's the divorce papers, right? And then you have some information in there. And then the last one, if they didn't open the previous two is,

Sign sealed and delivered. We will remove you from now. Hey, maybe email is not your thing. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on LinkedIn. You know, whatever you want to do. Try to promote that as well, because maybe they're getting them or they got that last one and they opened it, but they still don't want to engage with your emails. Maybe social media is their thing. Then follow through and then you can use automation to automatically remove them or manually remove them. The beauty is folks, you can add them back at any time. That's the thing is they can come back at any time. Some companies just

Jesse Paliotto (24:37)
Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (24:41)
Some marketers want to hold onto those email and say, they're going to open up at some time and we need to be in their inbox even if they don't open. Because now we also have the AI summaries where Apple is automatically summarizing these emails for you as well. You have to fight that battle too.

Jesse Paliotto (24:56)
Can you talk about that for a second? What does that look like for people that may not have experienced that?

Hank Hoffmeier (25:01)
Right. And there's no telltale way as to exactly how it's going to look for each individual person. I can look at my phone right now and any emails that I've gotten while we've been talking, it would summarize it for me. And it can even summarize that one specific email if I open it at the top. Play around with your copy. Your copy is more important than ever, making sure it's concise and valuable. This way the summary is going to reflect what you have in your content.

If you're using a lot of fluff words and you're not really getting to the point, keep in mind that that could be pulled into the AI summary. And, you know, there's a lot of jokes going around because some of it's kind of funny or, know, there's always there's been like two I've heard where somebody had a death in a family and the summary was just hilarious. And it's still a work in progress and they're not going to be perfect, but that is something that we're all going to have to learn together because it's kind of newer.

Gmail starting to summarize emails now. If I gave you my work email address and you're sending me emails, it's going to summary at the top. Make sure that you're optimizing for that. It's almost like SEO and almost.

Jesse Paliotto (26:08)
Yeah, the AI summary with the death of the family, which is very, I mean, it was probably tragic for the person experiencing that. It reminds me of the story from years ago of, I think it was Target's auto coupons, where I think it was the woman was pregnant and that coupon or something showed up, said, looks like you're pregnant. Do you need these products? And the husband or somebody didn't know and that's how they found out. And it was just like the system is trying to be so smart.

you've got to, it can follow you up, you've to be smarter than the system.

Hank Hoffmeier (26:42)
Exactly.

Jesse Paliotto (26:44)
The ⁓ with sending. I'm curious because I've read recently around long form being making a bit of a comeback and a lot of different channels. Have you seen that with email? know kickbox probably has access to a lot of data. I'm not sure how much of that you can share, but do you have any insights on like in terms of getting engagement so that you do have a list that stays good and people are excited to or at least accepting of receiving your emails?

Is long form back for email marketing or is that largely other content forms?

Hank Hoffmeier (27:18)
It depends. It depends on what industry you're in, your audience. I do a monthly newsletter and it's tools I found that made me productive. If I'm going to be speaking somewhere or takeaways from conferences I've been to another blog posts I've read, that's a little bit more long form. And I find that people tend to like that. But if it's something where you're selling a product and service and it's you only sell one or two products and service and not like Macy's where you can put a bunch of products.

Jesse Paliotto (27:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (27:48)
It's not worth having long form. It's not worth

putting a full product review in an email, maybe put the first two sentences and getting the click to get them to read more. I still think that FOMO wins out, especially with email because we have to get that click through to show engagement, right? Whereas we're not looking at opens much anymore. ⁓ You could say, Hey, we recently wrote a blog post with the top three ways to whatever.

Right. you can say number one, number two, and then say to read number three, head over to our blog and get them to go over to the blog. Right. You're giving them the summary, not AI summary, your summary, and then click here to get the third one, which helps with that engagement. I think that people are willing to do that. But to specifically answer the question, it really depends. And also make sure you're testing and finding out if that's what and I'm always a fan of polling your audience. Do a survey once a year and ask people.

Jesse Paliotto (28:32)
Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (28:39)
Hey, do you generally like longer form content or shorter form content and let them decide. And people tend to say, Oh, well, we know what our subscribers want. No, you don't. And a lot of times you might get mixed. Then what you can do is say, okay, 50 % of our audience or 49 % of our audience wants long form and 51 want short form. Then you split that audience into two and you put them on two different lists and you react accordingly.

Jesse Paliotto (29:03)
Yeah, testing is always the answer. Like asking and testing. Yes, 100 percent. ⁓ I wanted to ask for a second about regulation or changes or anything you may see coming up in the market around this. I GDPR has been with us for a long time. For those who may not be aware of it, that's the Europe started ⁓ legal process or not legal process, legal requirement.

For people to opt in and not get spammed to their CCPA, which is the California one which has been more recent I'm curious if you see any other kind of changes standards or whatever else coming down the pike for the world of email

Hank Hoffmeier (29:40)
I think it's all going to move towards like what GDPR is. And I would just ⁓ plan for that. And the best advice I've ever heard from somebody on a legal team was always follow the most strict there is, even if it's not in your country. In other words, follow GDPR because then you're covered for CCPA. You're covered for, you know, Castle Now and, ⁓ and all the other ones that are out there and every state can come up with theirs because the thing is

I can market to someone in the European Union without knowing it. And then I'm on the hook for that same thing with California is if you're emailing somebody that resides in California and you didn't follow the CCPA, you can get in trouble. And the punishment's pretty serious. I would say just make sure you're doing the right things and make sure that you're getting those options. I mentioned in beginning, don't ever buy a list. And more importantly to not more importantly, but also important if you go to say a conference.

and you sponsored the conference and they say, we'll give you a list for $2,000 of everybody who's attended. Now, how many of those are going to actually come to your table if you have a table? Not all of them, right? But then you do have the ability to email all of them. But did they specifically opt in to get your emails? Probably not, unless the conference is doing it right. Then you run into the they don't know who you are. They don't remember your brand.

They may mark that message as spam, ignore it, or, you know, and all those things and it may bounce. It may have provided a bad email address. That's why it's always good to make sure that you have the best possible quality list you can. And with those folks that you meet at conferences too, most times what I recommend is emailing them one off or reaching out through LinkedIn and asking if you can add them to your email newsletter. Not every marketer wants to hear that if they've been going to shows and collecting lists of hundreds and hundreds of people.

Jesse Paliotto (31:22)
Mm.

Hank Hoffmeier (31:28)
⁓ I did a talk in Birmingham, UK, and I got the list of people who opted in. I sent them a personalized email video and I personalized each one, 120 people that I got the opt in from. And I just said who I was, gave them the key takeaways and a copy of the deck and a recording of the session afterwards. And I asked them, I have a newsletter. Would you want to sign up for that? I asked them to stay in touch. It was a one and done. And I asked them to stay in touch.

I'm not saying everybody wants to do that, but that is a good tech.

Jesse Paliotto (32:00)
So those were folks that they, because you were a speaker, the event had probably had something that said, you know, if you tick this box, maybe we pre tick this box, you're giving permission for our sponsors to email market you. But you said, I want more permission than that. And so I'm to do this video tag.

Hank Hoffmeier (32:16)
Yes.

Cause I mean, if I just said, thank you for coming to the IREX conference, the name of the conference, wanted to follow up and tell you more about what kickbox does. They might not remember all that. They may have came to my session, sat in the back and been on their phone the whole time. And they probably might not have remembered me, but majority of them may have. they, and I got a lot of replies, you know, saying it was great and all this, and he appreciated the followup, but there will be those handful that.

Don't remember who you are. Don't care who you are. And they're going to market a spam, unsubscribe, ⁓ ignore it, which hurts your domain reputation, which is what we mentioned. That's what you're looking out for most first and foremost, staying legal price. You don't get fined and then making sure that you are keeping your domain health in check so that your emails get to the inbox.

Jesse Paliotto (33:03)
I love that in the sense that or in multiple sense one is just that it's true permission marketing because once somebody says actively yes no I want to hear from you I'm going to be more likely now to open your emails because I kind of made this mental decision that I want to hear from you. Also I feel like SaaS companies digital product companies are so many venues where you get that you know when you somebody registers for ⁓ filling out a review they fill out a trial they fill out they attend a trade show they do something where they're kind of.

kind of giving third party sponsors permission to market to them, but they don't really want it. And so there's so many scenarios that, you know, a company may find itself where they technically have GDPR opt in, but do they really have the actual buy in to not get burned in the relationship? And so I really respect, you know, kind of going out and doing the hard work to confirm the relationship.

Hank Hoffmeier (33:54)
Yeah, I like to always say, know, if you're using a purchase list or using these conference lists, of course you're to get the flash in a pan moment, right? You may get some sales, you may get some opens, but you're hurting yourself for the future. Your domain and your IP reputation and your brand reputation is going to start to sink in. Your email marketing efforts will slope downwards and you might even start wondering why, unless you're listening to this episode, you know why, but if you didn't, you'll

Jesse Paliotto (34:01)
Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (34:20)
It will start saying, why are open rates so low? Why is nobody clicking our emails? It's because they're not getting them.

Jesse Paliotto (34:25)
Yeah. OK, this is a big question. So you can answer to the extent you want. If you could wave a magic wand ⁓ and fix kind of one thing with how most SaaS software, digital companies, do their email, what would that one thing be?

Hank Hoffmeier (34:41)
It's going to be looking at the program and making sure you're providing value while sending authenticated emails. That's simply what it is. And it's not one simple thing, but yes, just making sure you're looking at your program and you're set up correctly as far as setting yourself up for success. First thing is authentication. know, I'm not, mean, sure. Verification is important, but authentication is the king. And then your content and the value you offer is going to be the queen. And after that,

Hopefully everything just goes smoothly after.

Jesse Paliotto (35:14)
Yeah, I love that. ⁓ I think you can we talk for a second. I think you've got an offer for the growth stage audience today. We were just chatting for a second before we hopped onto the call. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

Hank Hoffmeier (35:27)
Right. People that come to kickbox and they sign up, they get a hundred free test credits. What I'd like to offer is using growthstage as a coupon code. When you go to purchase credits, maybe after you use the a hundred, if you want to up to you, I want to offer 1000 free credits. In other words, especially if you're a small company, it would take you a while to get through a thousand free credits. You can test out our integrations, our API upload list. There's a way to do one. We call it single verification. You can go in and just do one at a time.

Test it out, but yeah, use the code growthstage and get 1000 free credits. I have that set through the end of the year, which is the end of December of 2025.

Jesse Paliotto (36:05)
Awesome. Thank you, man. So much for doing that for the audience. And just to kind of poke at a little bit, because I haven't used Kickbox yet, although now I'm going to have a thousand free credits to do. The credit is the API validation of the email. So somebody is filling out my free trial form and it double checks. This is a legit email and all of that. that's actually especially for some for a company that may be either smaller or on the B2B side where there tends to be less volume of lead generation. Yeah, that's a that could be a substantial runway to get somebody

testing this whole methodology, right?

Hank Hoffmeier (36:36)
Yeah. And we don't charge for unknown results. There are some servers that may be temporary issues, servers down, or they just flat out refuse to talk to us. It's called unknown. We don't charge for those. We also do email deliverability consulting. And if you feel like you have a domain reputation issue or you you think your authentication is not set up correctly and you feel like majority of your, or you know, a majority of your emails are going to spam. We can provide a success plan and strategy to get you back on track.

Jesse Paliotto (37:06)
Man, that is so valuable and I'm not just buttering you up because you're on the podcast. I've just been in numerous scenarios where ⁓ like email deliverability for the marketing operations or sales team can be, you never think about it till it's wrong. And then all of a sudden it's a fire and you're trying to figure out how do I put this out? And so that's a great shout out for folks that may run into that in the future.

Hank Hoffmeier (37:32)
Yeah, think of it like the credit score, right? You tank your credit score. It takes a long time to come back, right? It takes a while to get down to a low level and it takes a long time to climb back up that mountain. Same thing with email deliverability. Once you know there's a problem, it's hard to get back on track again.

Jesse Paliotto (37:37)
Mm-hmm.

That's so good. Where can people catch up with you, Hank, if they want to ⁓ try and catch you somewhere online after this?

Hank Hoffmeier (37:56)
I always like to say if you search Hank Hoffmeier on Google, I have really good SEO. I show up probably for like the first two pages of results with everything that has to do with me, all my social media channels. The only thing I ask if you're going to connect on LinkedIn, just make sure you personalize the invite. I have this rule where I don't accept blind invites, but I'm a marketer, so I will reply and ask you if we've met before because I have a bad memory or I'll offer to have a call with you. ⁓

And what's funny is I keep track of that and I think the metrics still around. I only get a 40 % response to that. In other words, it's just a lot of salespeople trying to pitch me. I even get responses to my reply saying, thank you for accepting my invite. Here's my sales pitch when I didn't even accept it. But if you reach out and you say, I met you on the show, I still may actually want to have a call with you because I really covet having a valuable network where I can help you. You can help me and we can have a wonderful LinkedIn.

relationship together. Otherwise follow me on TikTok, Instagram, all the social channels. I'm always putting stuff out. It's not all related to email. I do a lot of tips around digital marketing. I'm still trying to get my podcast going again. Hank's Marketing and Business Tips. There's probably about almost 300 episodes that are there historically. I hope to definitely get that back up and running and Jesse I'll have you on too as well.

Jesse Paliotto (39:15)
Oh, I would love that, man. Well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thanks everybody else for joining us, for being with us here on Growth Stage. Again, Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. Really glad to have him here. I'm Jesse Paliotto. I'm your host. I get to be a part of the digital product community by doing this today, and I'm so pumped about that. And I hope you all have a good week, and we will catch you next time on the Growth Stage.