When you think you’re doing everything right but what you were told before has hidden painful consequences.
In this video we look at the results of a recent test and how you could be killing your sender reputation by doing what you thought was ‘right’.
Run time: 8:33
Hey, Kevin Polley here with a quick training video for you that will show you why some of the time the forms that you’ve got out there are doing more harm you list building efforts than you will believe.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that based on the tests that I’ve done, if you’re doing this kind of thing, and you don’t make a couple of simple changes, and do a couple of simple things at least once a week, you could be killing your delivery rates totally.
Now, what you’re looking at here is the results of tests that I did at the beginning of July. Some of my clients were coming to me and saying “Kev, we’re getting lots of signups, the money we’re spending on the advertising is working great. The opt in forms’ working great. We’re getting all of the signups but we’re not getting the open rates. We’re not getting the click through rates, we’re not making any money, what is it that we’re doing wrong?
So I asked them a very, very simple question. When was the last time you looked at your list?
Now think about that for a while.
It is a fundamental part of a professional email marketers job to look at the list every now and again and see what is happening.
What you’re seeing are the results of a test. Now let me just show you what it was that I was testing.
This isn’t the exact form that I was using. But it is something really, really similar. So What you see on the screen now is a simple landing page or opt-in page with a place to enter your email address and the button to say Sign me up.
So what you’re expecting to happen is for your prospects to come to your landing page, put an email address in, then they’re going to hit the sign up button. And you’re going to get these people on to your list.
Now… Look at this. The Name field. Do those look like real names to you?
The email addresses are real email addresses. As you can see here within the #V2 software that I’ve got. I’ve been checking every email address and they are live, active valid email addresses, but what’s with the name?
So Where did those numbers come from?
Well, this is the result of the tests that I did. I had a page which was a landing page. This is something that I bought up some time ago. And I’ll show you that page now. In fact, this was back in 2016 when I first noticed the problem and the things that I done to actually combat this industry wide problem actually increased the signups that I was getting by 17% and make some money.
What was the backstory?
The main story was, and this is the important part, I noticed that Infusionsoft had been listed in Spamhaus which meant the Infusionsoft customers who were sending emails was a pretty futile exercise because none of the emails were being delivered because Spamhaus had decided that Infusionsoft were spammers.
Now, they’re not spammers. But the problem was there was something called subscription bombing that was going on.
What subscription bombing is, is there are bots out there and also some people that are putting in other people’s email addresses. Back then it was government email addresses, they were put into a signup forms by automated means. And the email address owners were getting thousands of signup emails per hour, because this was a bot that was going around looking for forms, filling in the email address, filling in whatever it got.
And Bob’s your uncle, you suddenly send an email if you’re a legitimate marketer. That is, you know, using best practice, you’re going to send double opt in.
Now, I know that email marketers in the make money online niche have been told, just ask for the email address. But that was the problem.
With this sort of subscription bombing, people were getting the welcome email. “Would you like to sign up to my list” type mail. They were getting thousands of them a day, and they could not work! And … this is still going on :O
How did I find out? Well, there’s the email address, there’s the button… And somewhere around here, if I click on that, and I show you the Element Properties, It’s a form field. Okay.
This is, as I say, just a hidden form fill now. But it is a place to capture a first name.
If you’re a real person, you’re just going to put your email address in and hit ‘Sign me up’. If you’re a bot, you’re going to fill in all of the form fields that you can get.
What do you get? You get these different numbers that are also generated, simply because the form field is there to be filled in, that are tied to an email address.
So what’s happening is, all of these real people with real email addresses, they could potentially be getting your email, which they don’t want, they never really signed up for. And they’re going to be marking it as spam.
Man, it’s going to hurt your delivery rates. It’s going to hurt you later on when you try to send more emails. And if you’re using one of the monthly autoresponder services, like aWeber, for example, all of your emails, which you think are good emails, because it’d be a list building, they’re actually useless, because the real people didn’t put them in there and bots did.
The only way you’re going to find this out is if you actually spend some time once a week to go and look at the results of the work that you’ve done. And check your list. Check the email addresses, check the name.
You might just be wanting a first name, I can’t tell you how many of my clients that I look at their list, where the first name is Fred Smith, or Dr. Marion Smith, or whatever, you should clean this up.
If you’re using a first name tag, it’s going to look really ugly when you send an email to “Dear [first_name]” or “Hi [first_name]” … expecting it to go “Hi Fred” And it’s going to “Hi, Fred Smith“.
It doesn’t look professional.
Spend some time after you’ve spent the time to build your list to improve the quality of your list. And If you see things like this, then you need to do something else.
And the answer is in this post, which is on https://blog.arpreach.com . Search for “capcha”.
It didn’t hinder the signups at all. In fact, the perceived extra element of having to sign-up to say you’re real, increased signups by 17%.
So ask yourself, after all of the effort that you’ve put into creating a form, do you really want to have useless emails (that have potentially been added by bots or an automated means), when with a little bit of extra time, you could improve your list quality by removing obvious bad email addresses?
And spending a bit of time maybe getting your outsourcer to separate people giving you their full name, into the separate first name and last name fields.
I hope this helps you. I hope this training has been useful. I’ll See you in the next video. Thanks for watching.