I got a scary call this week

This email is a warning.

I spoke to a friend outside of ecom yesterday who does cold outbound. He works with 8 & 9-figure companies that somehow manage to slip through spam filters into your inbox. Mostly B2B sellers.

There’s a lot to learn from this space. I see it as a canary in the coal mine. And that canary’s barely hanging on.

Here’s why.

While speaking to my friend he hit me with a crazy update:
“I’m no longer using link & open tracking in cold campaigns.”

He can't track open rates. He can't track click rates.

My immediate reaction: “Wtf dude, why?”

Because spam filters are cracking down hard on even the slightest hint that someone is not meant to be in your inbox.

If they see suspicious tracking links in an email from a person who's never heard from you before... 💨poof💨 you're in spam.

And he’s not stopping there. He’s stripping all of these out of his clients’ cold emails:

• Images

• Links

• Click/open tracking (technically also links)

• Spammy words (free, offer, credit, etc.)

So what’s left of the email then?

Text. Just a plain old school email.

You're probably wondering... "uh, how does he optimize?"

Short answer: he doesn't.

Long answer: reply rates.

Replies are all he can judge performance off of. And because of how few events you get with replies in tests, things like content testing & subject line testing have become VERY hard for him to do.

And this is where it gets interesting for you.

Since he can’t really run any meaningful micro tests to isolate variables, most of his decision making comes from… gut instincts.

He’s basing all his sends and testing on past knowledge. Experience running thousands of tests in the past and knowing more or less what works.

He’s merging these best practices with what his gut tells him is good copy, and hitting send on a small set of variations. Some sends will yield insights, but most won’t. Iterating and improving takes A LOT more time than it used to. Not to mention it’s much higher stakes for new people coming in.

It’s funny because when most of us started with email, we thought “wow, a platform with so many variables”. But very quickly, email is resembling traditional TV campaigns in that you can only really test one or two big things at a time.

As we move toward this promised AI world full of data and opportunity, what we’re actually seeing is aggressive tightening of what we can do with email, not more.

And truthfully, this gets me excited.

Why?

Because the best creativity comes from constraints.

The power in email is shifting toward folks with experience, copywriters and designers who want to put in the work to put out A+ content.

What does this mean for my brand?

There are a few takeaways here:

Deliverability matters more than you think: Do everything in your power to stay clean. Avoid shady apps that hurt deliverability, avoid cheap giveaway lists, etc.

Hire great copywriters & designers: Google is scoring the quality of every image & word behind the scenes.

Test with intention: Have an AB testing plan & document your learnings.

Test your email health over time: Tools like GlockApps, Bouncer, Omnivery.

So… should I use tools like BlackCrow, Customerdotai & Retentiondotcom?

Pros

• You recover revenue from customers who wanted your product, forgot about it and would have never come back (revenue bump)

Cons

• You email a ton of fake or incorrect emails with your product (deliv hurt)

• People are creeped out by your emails and spam report you (deliv hurt)

• People who would have bought anyway are creeped out and don’t purchase (rev hurt)

• You pay these companies for attributing a lot of orders that would have happened anyway (cost hurt)

• You now have a ton of emails you need to clean (cost hurt)

I think you can see where I am going with this…

I’ve seen brand operators claim these identity resolution apps contribute anywhere up to 10% more email revenue for them. I already have so many reservations about email revenue attribution as it is, so a maybe +10% to me in exchange for possibly nuking deliverability just doesn’t seem worth it.

Yes, you could do some weird stuff with separate domains, but Google is cracking down on that hard. Domain history & reputation matter. If you spin up a fake domain just to blast cold emails to customers, Gmail will flag you real quick. It’s not sustainable.

The cold email guys are stripping everything from their emails and behaving as safely as they can. I’d urge you to consider doing the same.

What I’m testing right now

1) Despite my rant above, a lot of our agency clients are still asking us to try tools like BlackCrow.

Almost every client asks me to set it up. Most change their mind when I share the pros and cons.

The amount of data out there on true incrementality is pretty disappointing so I plan to run some tests across clients and share it with y’all eventually. It takes a lot of data & client tests to make a call on this so maybe something I share in Q1/Q2.

A warning: a lot of these apps have affiliate deals with agencies and ESPs. If you’re wondering why your account manager wants you to test these apps so bad OR maybe you’re already using them and your agency stopped reporting on their performance, ask them what their affiliate cut is 😉

A lot of brands & agencies read this newsletter. If you have interesting data to share on identity resolution incrementality, let me know! Happy to credit you in the newsy or keep it anon.

2) Email content size testing

We used to send unique mobile & desktop image-based designs for all clients to maximize responsiveness. We’ve recently started AB testing mobile-first designs (one design for both devices, optimized for mobile).

The user experience is only slightly worse on desktop, but there is an indirect bump from sending smaller emails (less mb) into the inbox. So far, I have not seen a negative impact - we’ll probably switch all our clients to mobile-first design by year end.

3) GlockApps inbox testing

For our bigger clients we’re getting hit with more and more weird events that hurt deliverability. Some of these events are unpredictable (scammers trying to attack their site with fake emails) and some are more predictable (using tools like BlackCrow that harm deliverability). With this tool, we can monitor how well our emails are inboxing with different providers over time. Worth noting: I’m not a GlockApps affiliate.

One last note: stop doing this

Please stop re-sending campaigns to all non-openers.

You are destroying your deliverability. Seriously. Stop.

Stay safe out there this BFCM 🔒

Meme of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

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