Email Deliverability

0:00 these uh videos because I can't see all my slides. Okay, here we go. Um so uh email deliverability. I think it's important just to define like what we mean by we say that. And so this is the ability for Check Cherry or email any email service provider to um get emails to the inbox, right? Like that's the most important thing. Um so if you have good email deliverability,

0:26 emails go to the inbox. If you have bad email deliverability, email don't go to the inbox. And so, let's take a look here. So, our goal at Check Cherry is to offer best-in-class email deliverability. And we also understand that we'll never have 100% email deliverability. It's just impossible for us to offer. Um, that being said, we'll strive for best-in-class and

0:54 um, kind of continue to help you understand kind of what's going on and tips and so on to increase the chances that messages get to the inbox. Um, so good email deliverability help all customers. So, have I watch? Hey, Matt, could you mute? Uh, I don't think I have permission. Yeah, that's probably like it's not a little [ __ ] Chris Smith.

1:22 I wonder how I thought I made you a host. That's interesting. I think I am of the next one, but okay. Sorry. Okay. Um, good e. So, good email delivery helps all of our customers, right? There's a lot a lot of important messages that go out from Check Cherry and we want your messages to hit the inbox. If we had a magic wand, we would have 100% email deliverability. It

1:47 would be awesome. Um, it's really really important component of our service. And so I think it's important because some we have a variety of uh technical knowledge with our customers. And so I think it's important to understand that you know kind of the process of email deliverability and how some of this works. But um you know long long ago email deliverability was rather simple

2:06 and it's not like this anymore where you would basically send a message and there's a protocol called SMTP and the person would receive it and you know it was pretty straightforward. Um and you might even manage your own mail server, right? Like I could email Matt and he could email me back and we wouldn't pay anybody. It would be all free. Um and so that was cool. But we all hate spam and

2:27 depending on how old you are and how long you had an email account. I mean there was a period where people um were like scared to give out email addresses like it was like I don't want to get caught and you know my email to get out there and then I'm going to get spammed. And a number of things have made that a lot better. Um people don't seem to fear giving out an email address

2:48 like they they once did. Um, one of them is the prolif, you know, the prolification of email service providers and email service providers help people send and receive mail. And so we all use them and spam filtering is a feature of a good ESP. And so I would argue even if you were, let's say you were using Gmail and they weren't very good at filtering spam out and you were getting a

3:10 lot of spam, you might even go so far as to cancel and leave. Um, and I think Gmail has some of the best spam filtering. Um, you know, I've been happy with it as a user, but it's really really an important feature for the email service providers to offer good spam filtering and it's got to be accurate obviously. Um, but some examples of email service providers, Gmail, Outlook 365, Yahoo Mail,

3:32 Send Grid is more of like a infrastructure email service provider. We actually use them at Check Cherry. Mailchimp would be an example of somebody who's going to help you send me mass mass email, right? You're not going to do that through Gmail. they're they're going to allow you to send maybe to 500 people a day or something. Um, and so Mailchimp comes in as a specialist and

3:52 Check Cherry in many ways. Um, it acts as an email service provider, particularly if you have the feature set up where there's reply tracking and all the emails get logged to the booking even if you and the client are logged in at Check Cherry. It's a really great feature, but in many ways, Check Cherry is also an email service provider. These are stats from Check Cherry over the past

4:12 90 days. Um, and these are mailbox providers. So, this is where our customers are sending email basically. And you'll notice there's only a few players here, right? There's Gmail, which is the personal side where you get a free Gmail account. There's Google Apps, which is the business side where you can have your own domain. There's Micros Microsoft 360, Yahoo, and everybody else. And,

4:35 uh, Google, Gmail account for 67%. And so for the presentation, I'm going to more or less focus on kind of how they operate and they they work. Um, but a lot of the principles will apply to, you know, other like Microsoft. It's kind of the same game, so to speak. Um, so let's say I send a message now and let's say I'm using Mailchimp as my, you know, sending I'm send them email blast.

5:02 um you know that's going to go and that's going to go through Gmail spam filteralgorithm and they're going to determine if that goes to the inbox or maybe that goes over to their promotions tab or maybe that goes to spam. But they have an automatic algorithm that's going to define what where that's going to get placed. And I think it's with Gmail specifically, I think it's

5:24 better to think of it as not a spam algorithm, but more like this idea of like a placement algorithm. um they're trying to be helpful and to put messages in places that makes sense, so to speak. Quick question, uh one quick question. Um we had a question of what is Google Apps if it's not just Gmail. So it's basically what Google Apps will allow you to do is you pay per month per

5:48 email address, but instead of having at@gmail.com, you can have atyoudommain.com. So it's kind of like a a whitelabeled uh gmail, so to speak. So, uh, if I'm in Gmail, like here's like the sidenav, right? And so, uh, for the Gmail users, this is going to be really boring, but not everybody uses Gmail. Um, or the web UI, but there's your inbox. They even

6:12 automatically classify messages as important, which is interesting. And then there's also things like the promotions tab, and there's spam, which of course we would expect. So, here's some docs from Gmail, and I found this interesting. So, they have incoming mail, and they basically classify it as spam or inbox. categories. And so you got spam, which is where we don't want to be. This is

6:34 not good email deliverability. And so, yep, there we go. We don't want to be there. And they even have uh this is for Gmail Google Apps users, so to speak, to say, "Hey, look, like if Gmail is sending emails from people, you know, to spam, you can do things, right? You can remove the email from spam. You can add the sender to contacts. You can create a filter. They've got

6:54 some tools, so to speak. And here's an example of a spam message that I received. And in the web UI, they even have this button to say, you know, don't report this as spam. And this is, you know, clearly this is spam, right? Like we can all just look at this. It's really easy. Get funding, apply now, all kinds of fonts. Yeah. Uh percentages, discounts, prepaid. I mean, you name it. So, um

7:18 and I've never heard of them, of course. Um so, there's also the inbox categories. And so one thing that is uh interesting is like in Gmail's mind or Google's mind, primary social, promotions, updates, and forms are all considered inbox placement, right? Um and so here's an example there right up at the top. So I've got inbox selected on the left, and you

7:43 can turn these on and off. There's settings, but they're on they're all fiber on by default. And you can turn them on and off um as you see fit. And so here I'm in the forms tab and this is was just today and QuickBooks uh their newsletter is in the forms tab and it was kind of confusing to me. So I don't use this. I use Macmail and then I cook up you know hook up to you know Google apps

8:04 and I didn't have this turned on. Um but that's kind of how that works. And then the what's really confusing or what's I guess what's surprising is like if I think people think of inbox and primary. So if I click inbox and I'm at primary like that that's my inbox. But all tabs according to Gmail are all inbox if that makes sense. Um but most I think most you know people are like if I click

8:27 inbox that's going to be my inbox not the other tabs. Um so how is this classification like done you know what are some insights and so this is from Google docs or Google's you know documentation and they basically apply machine learning and who the email comes from and so that's in part check cherry right our IP addresses um the domain it's also you the business the

8:49 sender um it's also the type content that's in the message so is this a you know um a proposal is this like hey pick a template is this a a 10th email to are you going to hire me to a lead and then also how they've interacted how Gmail users have interacted with similar content. So not just not just the um the specific Gmail user but as a as a whole. So this is like the whole

9:16 idea of like big data and uh machine learning at play. And so they've kind of got their um you know magic going to help place things and combat spam. And I overall it works pretty well. I can say as a user. Um, one thing I found interesting is in the promotions is deals, offers, newsletters, and other call toaction emails will show up in promotions. And I found this interesting because

9:41 like what are other call to action emails? Well, check I mean potentially um a call to action to choose a template, a call to action to accept a proposal, something like that. um that could fall under uh their promotions uh algorithm and be placed there and it would be intentional, right? Um and then here on the forums you'll see they have uh discussion boards

10:04 and mailing list and so I guess that's why um the QuickBooks uh email uh came came in there and that was an announcement from QuickBooks about feature updates. And so there's also user level settings that can come into play. So um basically they say that they take a lot of you know things into account but the most important one is the direct input from the actual Gmail account user.

10:27 And so Gmail account users can move messages from one tab to another. And so that can have a role in terms of you know a message that goes to one Gmail user goes to this tab and another Gmail user goes to another tab so to speak. So email delivery rates will be dependent on both check cherry and you as a sender. So um the things that we do and I'll cover this in a little bit

10:56 but like you know the protocol best practices that thing um other customer sending habits will impact all customers but also you as a sender um will have will it'll impact your delivery um and also the deliverability you know I guess if you were sending uh spam outside of checkerry could also impact your deliverability from checkerry based on kind of their machine learning and stuff they do.

11:17 So how do we at checkerry ensure inbox placement? So one we do like proper email authentication and so these are things that basically you're telling uh email service providers that receive email like hey I am authorized to send this message basically and SPF is one way to do it. DKIM and Demar you don't need to worry about um what these are but they're just configurations that you need to

11:42 to set up to ensure that email is properly authenticated um and that you can send on behalf of your domain. It's important to note we don't allow one to impersonate other domains or senders without permission. This is called spoofing. And this is uh why checkerry all of Czecherry emails come from at checkerry-mail.com is because it ensure it basically allows us to ensure that

12:02 everybody's email is authenticated all the time. And so another one is the IP addresses that we use. And so there's like things like reverse DNS lookup that we have. And the IP addresses we use are only shared among Check Cherry customers. So the plus side is like we're not using shared IP addresses that other companies or anything of that nature would use. But other Check Cherry

12:22 customers could impact your deliverability, right? If somehow like a big spammer got on the platform and got a million messages out would just really damage everybody's deliverability. So spam rates are really really important in the messages that come from Check Cherry. So we regularly monitor spam rates and postmaster tools. I'll show you some of that a little bit later. Um, we offer

12:42 spam and unsubscribe features that are kind of native to Check Cherry um to help basically gather other data and help make it easy for people to get off email list. Um, you know, with the automated messages, we have some customers that are that can be uh more aggressive than maybe I would be in terms of following up with emails or leads, that type of thing. And the unsubscribe feature

13:02 is a great way for uh the recipients to kind of opt out. um we address problematic senders and we've done that in the past where we see you know somebody's got some habits that are not good or whatever and and we've never had to cancel an account. I think overall we have people that are um good senders um and we have some mechanisms in place that prevent you know new accounts from

13:23 just getting on and sending a lot that type of stuff. So, we do have internal controls uh set in place, but these are uh the tools that Google gives us. And so, here's the checkerry uh-mail.com domain. And here's our spam rate. And you'll see um there are spikes where it gets above half a percent, which is not ideal. That could impact deliverability. Um overall, the spam rates are

13:46 very low. Many days there are no spam complaints. Um, you know, it's just the volume of messages we send is not that high. Um, so I would say I think we're over 100,000 messages in a given month that you guys are sending through Check Cherry. Um, but you know, compare that with QuickBooks and how much they might be sending on their mass email, for example. Um, so those spikes, you know,

14:12 do happen depending on sending volume. Um, but there's many days that there's nothing. Here's our IP reputation. So again, past 60 days, all green, they do have days that they don't show data. They've always done this as long as we monitor it. I'm not quite sure why. Um I don't think in I I've ever seen yellow or red or anything in in this um and if I have, it's been long ago. Um here

14:35 is the DKIM SPF demar success rates, you know, 100%. We configure this. We monitor it. We pay for a service to monitor demark stuff. Um and then the domain reputation stuff and I've never seen this be anything but high. So the tools that um Google gives us do don't doesn't really you know it just seems you know like things are good um and that we monitor pretty well. We also

15:02 have internal monitoring. So this is the spam reports and when we see this stuff you know it's like one out of two the most you know one out of 223 messages you know marked as spam. I mean like there's not really much to to address. And um sometimes we see the weirdest messages be marked as spam, like a payment receipt for example. And I don't know if users in accidentally

15:24 mark it or what. I'm not quite sure. But um it's important to know your sending practices will also impact deliverability uh for your account. And so a customer example um you know this was a blocked message, but we had a customer who said, "Hey, I'm getting this blocked email." And he chatted with us and um oh no, let's take a look. you know, it's an Apple uh mail and that type of

15:47 thing. And we looked at the article and and uh basically Apple, this is again similar to what Gmail is doing, but basically um they track a sender's reputation. So again, that's Check Cherry and also the sender would be your business um and then run content checks and user feedback and then make a decision. And so we looked at um all the Apple mail um domains and this was the only

16:08 rejected email for Macmail, me.com and iccloud.com um in the past several days. And so um however the reporting however went back um so we didn't see anything. So it's it's really interesting. It can your sending habits and your customers um actions um can impact your deliverability. And so no other customers were impacted, just this one. And when we looked at his account, um,

16:34 he was sending a daily email like, you know, after somebody booked for like 30 days or something with tips and tricks or something like that. And I suggested, hey, maybe it's a little too much for people. I don't know, just rethink it. Um, so what are some tips for hitting the inbox more often? Um, you can also increase, you know, inbox placement. So some of the stuff that Gmail

16:52 mentions is not to mix different types of content in the same message. So for example, don't include promotions in a sales receipt message. I didn't know that one actually. And that's one of their things. And I I suppose that's because they want to um get their tabs right. Uh don't mark internal messages as spam. So if you know if your staff's getting uh lead emails and they're marking them as

17:13 spam because they don't want to see them anymore, that's going to damage your reputation. Um and could negatively impact like future messages. Um so that's another thing. Uh don't purchase email addresses from other companies. And I would even argue don't purchase them and send them outside of Check Cherry because you know they're monitoring uh content as well. Um, and

17:30 don't Can I uh hop in on that, Jud? Um, the So, if you do not have opt-in permission to send an email to somebody, you are spamming according you are not in compliance with uh can spam law. Yep. You absolutely have to have uh opt-in permission to send an email to somebody. Um, so just something to keep in mind with, you know, if you get a list from a a wedding show or

17:57 something like that, make they absolutely need to have that permission. Um, and just be careful on those. That's what we see most often is somebody will come through and they want to upload a lead list, which is something again we do features that we don't allow such as you can't bulk email from Check Cherry. Um, and that has everything to do with email deliverability. And

18:15 you also can't bulk email upload leads because why would you want to bulk upload leads if you don't want to send to them? basically. Um, and I, yeah, you're right. The most common example is, hey, I was at a wedding show, you know, and they gave me a list of everybody who attended, but those people didn't show up at your booth, right? Um, they don't know you, and so you're basically

18:34 going to damage your email deliverability. You messed me up, Matt. Oh, yeah. Don't nag via email. So, um, this is also like Check Cherry makes it easy to do automated messages. And I think it's just important not to nag too much, right? You want to be helpful. Um, it's fine to do a a touch, you know, one, two, maybe three, but if they're not responding via email to select

19:01 a template or, you know, purchase your services, it's unlikely they're going to respond to other emails and you're probably damaging your deliverability. Um, don't overwhelm people with email. You know, it's not it's easy to send email. It can be like you put your sender hat in your business. It's like, hey, I mean a lot of, you know, it's really common. Hey, can I automatically

19:21 send an email to get upsells? Can I automatically send a mail to this? Can I automatic, you know, and maybe it's not so helpful. Basically, um, don't send imageonly emails. So, that's another tactic uh that will probably land in spam uh like a flyer or something. you know, somebody like you have a graphic designer create something as an image with text and do this and that

19:43 and you send that's the only thing you do. Your messages should have a balance of text and images. Don't send spammy looking emails. I mean, the email I showed earlier with the different fonts and all that stuff. I mean, I think it's possible somebody might not even read it. Just mark it as spam, right? Like it's entirely possible, but I think that also that

20:00 that content might not go well for you. Um, some of the things to use, don't use CSS, HTML and CSS to hide the content in your messages. Now, I don't think any of our customers would do this. I haven't seen anybody do this, but they do list this as a thing to and this the example would be like you have text that's like the same color as the background so that you can't

20:19 see it and you're trying to like fake out um, you know, the algorithm. Web links in the message body should be visible and easy to understand. So, like basically people should know what to expect when they click, right? they're using uh AI to help identify things and make it, you know, message subjects should be accurate and not misleading. And so I think this is often forgot about that,

20:42 you know, your message subjects are important um to your messages and to email deliverability. So, you know, sending like a hey subject line, you know, do you still interested in hiring me? You know, that might go to spam, you know, um a typo there. I guess I got some other things. Yeah, don't send spam looking different colors. Um, and I think like really importantly is just

21:05 to consider your recipients, right? Respect their inbox. Like I think that that's going to really help your email deliverability overall. So when sending emails, aim to be helpful and respect your recipient's inbox, right? Email deliverability is dependent on checkerry your sending patterns and recipient actions. And so that's I think this is really like where we don't

21:26 have full control over the situation, right? So, we can't offer 100% inbox deliverability. It's just impossible. Um, and so we can do our best practices and education and monitoring and all that stuff. Um, and email placement algorithms are consistently changing and never 100% accurate. And so, um, I would, and I would even argue, um, the chances that email, um, placement algorithms

21:51 are changing is more likely than the type of messages that are going from Check Cherry are changing. It's pretty consistent what we see over time. And I've got one more section. Matt, you don't know this, but corporate, school, and government deliverability. And it deserves its own section. Um, because I feel like this is like the most common, you know, hey, my email

22:12 is not getting delivered. And when we ask, hey, can I get an email address? It's like typically like corporate, school, or government. And I feel like this is kind of, you know, it's like your proposal is trying to get delivered and like the IT/PAM settings at corporate, school, government, you know, aren't allowing it basically. Um, and they might even just be they might even be

22:31 like blocking it. They'll still accept it. It just might like vanish and be quarantined somewhere else in the IT department's, you know, spam setting and so on. Um, and so again, it's the most common feedback on deliverability. Um, the short of it is they tend to hire dedicated services to mitigate spam and I've seen like AI services and they basically you set your MX records up and and

22:54 so on. Um, they do have overly aggressive settings at times I would argue. Um, I don't have evidence to back this up, but I would suspect also that if you have staff and, you know, complaining about, hey, I'm getting spam and you're the IT guy, like what's the obvious and easy solution, you know, to ramp up the spam settings, so to speak, just kind of slide that thing up. And um, that

23:16 will then have an impact on all email. And I they're just overall harder to reach um, you know, in general. And I think there's a lot of internal communication and that type of thing. But um corporate school government is you know a tough most common feedback we get on deliverability. And I you know it's my belief that it has more to do with the spam settings um than anything

23:38 that Check Cherry can necessarily do. If you ever have feedback, you know, um, let us know. If you ask, if you talk to somebody, if they have any insights, I mean, if there's something we can do, you know, we would love to, uh, have action items to improve deliverability at Check Cherry. Oh, and I guess that's it. And so, I guess I can stop sharing and we open it up to questions. So, you

24:00 can raise your hand. And we've got one from uh, Kirk. I don't know if if uh Kirk if you're there if you want want to ask it out loud. If not I can read it. Yeah. Thanks. So um we have uh so we just sort of have had we're new to Check Cherry. So we have a form email that we save in a Google doc and we just have uh a hyperlink to our Check Cherry booking page and a couple of people a couple of

24:35 customers have said that they didn't receive it. So does um you know putting a check cherry link just into what is otherwise a plain text email sent from our business Gmail to their you know uh inbox does that affect deliverability? I could see I so um if it's just a link and you've never communicated with them from Check Cherry I would say you want to have more content in there right

25:00 is that even if it's from our even if it's from you know the sender is you know joybox photo booths atgmail.com to Jeff Smithgmail.com I I I yeah and I don't know so that in other words it's outside of Czech cherry right uh what is the email is not being sent through checker's mail servers correct Yes, I don't see any reason that that would particularly, you know, a check cherry

25:25 link would have anything to do with, you know, there's a service where and I can send a link afterwards, but where you can check whether a website is safe, so to speak. Um, often it's used for like WordPress, you know, sites that have been hacked and that type of thing. Um, but is it just a link? There's no content in there at all. Yeah, it's just, you know, it just it just says

25:47 book your booth and then it takes us to our Yeah, I mean I think that's probably um I would probably have some more content and see if that happens. Also, you know, when you say a couple of people like out of how many, right? Like, right, it's a small sample size. We just and so it's just tough to say. And I'm a fan. And I'm sure no one else and I'm sure no one else has ever

26:10 had the issue where a potential customer said that they didn't get an email and what they really meant was they just didn't look very hard. Well, I mean that's it's tough for us, right? Because we don't we don't see or know what happens. And somebody could say, "I didn't get an email." And it's in the promotions tab for all I know. I mean, I we don't know per se. I mean, all we can see

26:28 is what's going on on our side with IP addresses, spam rates, and so on. And one one of the things we see too on those um on links in general is um basically like like having a a raw link, you know, where it's just http colon whatever um seems to kind of get penalized versus like if you can kind of make it like a you know a pretty link where it says click here for um click here for

26:54 text and um in in that or you know click here for more information things like that. uh for whatever reason they seem to prefer you to have it have it be some you know some words rather than just just a raw uh link is kind of what we've seen. So uh Dan, thanks guys. Um so I have a comment and a question. I would argue that coming from a Gmail to an organization looks spammy because businesses

27:23 do business with other businesses. They usually don't do businesses with customers. Okay. Okay. So, if he's sending from an atgmail.com versus an a Google apps, you know, Fair enough. Yeah, sure. I don't This is one of the frustrating things is like we can like guesstimate all day long, you know, but like what's going on over there with their algorithm is like it's Yeah. Everybody I

27:45 tell you what I I do for my work, but not not them, right? Yeah. Yeah. Dan, you know about some some spam, huh? Some spam. I know stuff. Um Okay, let me just share my screen. I get this all the time. It's um I think I asked you guys about it and you probably gave me the answer, but like if I whenever I reply in an email to check Cherry Y it I get an email back from from

28:09 Google. Yep. I guess I don't know. It's saying that somebody is so Yeah. So like how do I stop this from happening? It's so annoying. A couple of things. Um have you reached out to Google about it? No. I would ask them, but the short of it is what they're doing is they're trying to be helpful and they know that your business is go photo booth and they know that they're your email

28:37 service provider and they know that somebody who's not your email service provider is sending you an email with the go photo booth. So they're like, whoa, don't transfer any money. This is not from Tom in the accounting department saying transfer a million dollars. I get it. That's what they're trying to do. But why am I why am I receiving it? Like I'm assuming because I'm getting a like

29:02 it's also sending a copy of this email that it's sending a copy of my reply to the admin which is me is and then Google's flagging it. There is a setting in checker where the sender can be checkerry and not your business. And so you could try that. That should work. Oh, that's very familiar. Where do I do that? And so let me share my screen. Let's see here. So, basically, um, and

29:24 this is a common question that comes up a lot, and you know, they're trying to be helpful. You think they would catch on after the 10 millionth email, but they don't. Um, but when you're editing your automated messages, you can change who your sender is. And so, by default, you know, we generally, you know, we we figure those messages are probably going to go to your customer. Um, so

29:48 we'll we'll say the sender is is you, you know, your your business contact email. Um, but you can change that to Check Cherry and then any messages that we send to that address are going to have Check Cherry in the name and Google shouldn't have a problem with that. But you would only typically want to do that for messages that are going to your business. Yeah, you wouldn't

30:09 want to do that for messages to your customer because your customers don't know you as Check Cherry. They know you as as Go Booth. So, um, and that's kind of why we don't do it automatically because we don't necessarily know who's, you know, um, you know, we we may try to be a little bit more smart about this in the future and have maybe an automatic setting or something, but

30:28 um, but that's kind of an option. Let us know how that goes. You have the a white list set up, I'm assuming, for the domain would be another option. Um, I don't think how you can go to like filters and whitelist domains and stuff and say, "Hey, any email from at checkerry mail, always put it in the inbox." I guess that's not the issue, though. The issue is throwing an alert. I think

30:52 I tried doing that before. Yeah. And so, um, you know, you know what? Like I do pay for Google mail, so that comes with support, so I will harass them and send. Yeah. I mean, and if you find out, let me know. But I don't, this is where for us it's like there's we don't have full control over the situation. Yeah. Okay, thank you sir. Good question. Comment. And we have a a question from

31:12 um aid. Um if I Okay. Hey guys. Uh quick question. Uh I noticed lately though uh when I receive a lead from a Yahoo account and like I do the normal automation stuff, they don't get delivered. I've noticed like at least for four to five different leads that I've had in recent time and I'm like, "Okay, why is this lady not replying back?" Then when I check, he's just going to show delivered.

31:42 So in my head, I know it's going to spam. And luckily, I called a lady last week, like literally a day before the event. I was like, "Hey, we have like this beautiful conversation. Are you still interested?" It's like, "You never sent me an email." And I'm like, "Oh, you know what? Just go to your spam, you know, search." But I've noticed that a lot for Yahoo. Is that something um okay

32:01 I don't but the thing is so couple of things. One is we don't get um reporting back on whether an an email gets to the inbox and that's obvious reasons that they're not going to give that right because then spammers can basically use that information to circumvent their settings. So we never know. We know if a message is delivered or not. I mean that's basically what they do with it. don't

32:28 know. Um, so I unsure in terms of, you know, the the um whether it went to spam. I've also had people where they, you know, who is it that was, you know, they didn't, you know, it was there was there was a delay on um, you know, I'm sorry for not getting back to you. This was in my spam folder type thing. And so maybe I don't even know like is it even in there or is that just an

32:52 excuse? I we don't know. Yeah. And as far as some action items, um really uh the main thing you can do is kind of experiment with with the content of your message. Um you know, we we do we do send a lot of messages to Yahoo. I I know a lot of them do get through. Um you know, I know they don't all go to spam. You know, I'm sure various things, you know, affect which particular ones do, but um

33:18 but it it unfortunately it's a lot of just kind of experimenting with your content. you know, going back to some of some of the things Jud said about um you know, if you've got different font sizes or too much going on or if you have a really plain um email with nothing, you know, nothing but a link, you know, um in general, kind of what you want to do on those emails is make them look um you know,

33:43 unique, custom to your business. You know, include some some context about about your your business. So just have a a simple link with, you know, um try not to make it look too automated, too, you know, generic. And then um you know, avoid big images. Um avoid images with text in them. Um some of those things that that Jud was was mentioning. And then um the other thing that we see too

34:12 is uh certain words tend to be problematic. So if if you're talking about free or discounts or right anything like that that tends to be, you know, it's kind of like that that message that that Jud was showing up in the spam in his spam folder where, you know, it's saying, you know, hey, five to 10 billion funding. And that that kind of goes back to if you have dollar amounts

34:39 in in your email, sometimes sometimes they pick up on that and say, oh, this is, you know, they must be trying to raise money. You know, I've seen um emails before with with PayPal and Venmo and things like that, you know, instructions for payment, which is great for making it easy to pay, but the problem is um you know, if they see a bunch of Venmo links or Venmo uh text or things

34:58 like that, uh it just it just looks too spammy to them and it's more likely to look too similar to something else that that's getting um that's getting flagged. Thank you, Matt. Um, Marissa has her hand up. I was just going to comment that um, with Gmail and Yahoo, they don't like each other. And I work, my full-time gig is at a college, right? So, the whole thing about messages going to

35:26 spam, it is very common for Gmail messages to go to the spam folder when you're sending to a Yahoo address. Funny. Um and so both from my personal Gmail to a Yahoo and from a Yahoo address coming to the business Gmail account at the college. It goes to spam and the only thing that we have been told is to um ask people to add us to their address book um and then to click on the trusted

35:56 sender. Um those are the only things that we've been our IT department has told us. Yeah, it's really it's it's tough and you know, you find something that works for a while and then you know and then the rules change. So, um and then Anna has a really good uh comment I think you know in the chat. Um if a corporate or government um point of contact has strict spam filters, but I tell

36:20 them to email me first and then I respond with an invoice, right? Likely to receive an email, right? And I think that's a really smart idea, you know, where um you know, and we do see for the most part um what we tend to see in our, you know, when we when we look at specific messages is that the first message sent out is tough. Um it's unprompted. You know, they don't they don't

36:44 have any history of of um of activity between you and so responding to that I think is is very, you know, to if it's an offer to get money, right? The other thing we see is, you know, you'll be chatting back and forth and everything's great and then 20 emails in all of a sudden one gets dropped. And that's tough. You know, that that comes down to um you know, basically just either

37:05 they don't like something about the content. You know, you sent a design email and it's got a really big image and they're like, "Oh, this is you know, can be something like that." But it can also be um just the uh frequency of messages can can play a role too. um you know if they see you know maybe they'll two or three messages they're fine and then if they see 10 from you all

37:29 of a sudden they're like oh this is too much you know and um so less is definitely more I think on email um you know avoiding avoiding lots and lots of follow-ups and avoiding um you know too many emails I think is is something that can be as well And then I don't Dan, are you Is Dan's hand still up? You got more? No. Oh, he put it down. Um there's also Go ahead. No,

38:00 please. Yeah. Well, I was going to have So, a couple of alternatives to sending email. Um, I'll just mention, um, you know, we do have, uh, you know, if if you're having problems with a message going out, um, you know, we do have, uh, pretty much any any page on Check Cherry that you would send somebody to, you can generally just, uh, get a a link you can share with them. So, on

38:26 the top of the proposals, there's a copy link and, you know, you can feel free to copy that and send it via a different email client. you know, if you've been going back and forth with somebody that you know and um you know, it's it's quite likely, you know, you might have better luck with with your personal Gmail or personal, you know, corporate account than possible, right? Um

38:45 you know, and so copying and pasting that um I'll mention that we do allow sending via SMS. So if you prefer to um you know, send send SMS, um that does require a Twilio account. So, if you get connected with um if you get a a Twilio account set up and and linked over um you can send anything basically anything you can do via email you can also do via

39:08 SMS. And then um one thing I'll you know I I think I would say that we've seen email deliverability become more of an issue in the you know last year or two. I think as as we've had um you know a lot of customers switch over from other platforms and early on in Check Cherry um you know we were really focused around online booking and what we're going for with that is avoiding a lot of

39:38 that email and and propose you know collecting emails and and sending them proposals and things like that. Um so you know the the best way to to not have to worry about email deliverability is to not have to send an email. So, um, you know, if you do have an easy way to to, you know, get, you know, uh, book online, right? It's a good point, right? Because there's more people

40:02 Yeah, proposals are a big deal and we're going to have some cool stuff coming out with proposals because a lot of people use them. But that that proposal email seems to be probably the most problematic when we look into somebody saying, "Hey, my email is not getting delivered." And it's also common like, "Hey, none of my emails are getting delivered." Hey, send some examples over.

40:19 And then it's like so not justice, you know. So, um, but you know, feel free to reach out anytime obviously via chat. Um, you know, Dan, let us know what you find out on that and we'll be one thing about the email delivery is that you guys do give the ability to see if the customer read the email or not. So, if they haven't read it, they probably it's probably in the spam. So, then you could

40:43 probably follow up with the phone call or it could be in promotions if you're a Gmail user. Yeah. they're not checking it. I mean, that's where I think um I don't think a lot of people are checking those tabs is what I would say. And like I say, according to Gmail, I don't necessarily agree with this, but they they would consider any of those tab promotions to be inbox placements.

41:00 So, you could have perfect email deliverability and you're sending an email, right? And it goes to promotions basically. And that's like desired by them. They're trying to be helpful. And I don't know like that's not when I click inbox, I expect to see all the emails in my inbox. not in my inbox in the priority tab or primary tab. Yeah. Any other questions out there? So, we'll record

41:28 this and we'll send it out to everybody who couldn't make it. Um, our next webinar is just going to be a general Q&A. So, what we've noticed is when we do the webinars, people want to ask questions and so we thought, well, hey, let's just have a Q&A. you know, I don't know exactly how we'll do it. We'll open it up and people can ask questions about, you

41:48 know, check cherry or hey, I want to do this or whatever and we'll see what that does. Um, and then we'll get back to more topics. Um, but it's just really common that people will want to kind of hop in. Hey, well, I got you. Let's answer some questions. So, we thought we'll do a Q&A. Um, it'll be uh two weeks from now, same time. Um, it's already on the website. We'll send an email

42:07 out. Um, we hope you join us and if you ever have feedback on the webinars, ideas, chat with us, respond to an email, whatever it may be, just give us feedback. Um, we're open to it. We're happy with the, uh, turnout and we think, you know, there's a lot more opportunity here to help people. Like I say, one of the most common pieces of feedback we received when we were at

42:28 the last trade show when we talked to customers in person was, "How do I get the most out of Check Cherry?" And I don't know exactly what that means or how to get there, but I think, you know, the webinar is a step in the right direction. Cool. Well, hey everybody, thanks for joining. Um, we ended a little earlier and appreciate it. And chat with us uh anytime you have need help. So,

42:50 thanks for coming. Bye guys. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.