EP177 - How to Get Your Emails Delivered First Time… Every Time with Ben Fielding and Ian Luckett

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we're going to help you get your emails delivered first time every time.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP's scale to 1,000,000 in if already there get to 5 and go fast at the end of the day. Isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN

So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today I am honoured to be joined by Ben Fielding, who is an ex-MSP business owner and an e-mail deliverability expert. We're going to help you to unravel some of the myths. Some of the complications, they're constantly moving landscape about how to get emails delivered. So Ben, welcome to the show.

BEN

Hi there Ian. Thanks for having me.

IAN

No problem whatsoever. First things first, Ben, we've had a few conversations about e-mail deliverability. As many people know, I'm not technical and I don't profess to be technical. And after this call and the preparation for this call, I am certainly not technical, but this show is really going to help you guys understand what's the difference between the SPF, the DQ and what we need to do, what can affect e-mail deliverability. Because like it or love it and how many emails that you get e-mail marketing and e-mail, the importance of emails in your business is not going away. Absolutely not. So we've all been in today who's been become a great contact of ours, great friend of ours, now at the Growth Hub to help us unravel this subject. So, Ben, before we get cracking, do you just want to explain who or what you do, who you help, why are you on the podcast today, Ben?

BEN

So a brief history lesson, failed graphic designer, fell into IT or was it a passion for marketing. But technology was definitely my strong point, bounced around a few corporate some big brand names, and finally MSP, about a decade ago was in it full time for about the last six years and then set up my consulting business last year where I help people is around tech strategy, but my tech superpower is getting emails into inboxes. I work a lot with marketing companies, anyone doing marketing, being very popular in the recruitment space as any of you know, in your inboxes, recruiters, sending that emails about new jobs. So you can really properly... there.

IAN

And we came across you and I'm not quite sure how now, but we met over LinkedIn though the Tech Tribe something like that and we got chatting, I just... It's really funny. I just want my emails to get to the inbox, right. But the passion that's going to come out in this podcast for you on the excitement about, you know, getting the right SPF record and getting the DKIM records right and everything like this is, is unwavering. And I and I'm not going to, you know, extinguish it at all. Because I absolutely love it. And when you love what you're doing, then you know what, just great to see an expert who's that passionate about school, has the expertise and in the MSP space as well, which is cool.

So Ben, talk to me about the e-mail landscape. You know, we've, you know, obviously had the pandemic, which has changed the way that people work, changed the way that people operate, you know, at the post office didn't work for a little while. I don't think during that time. What's happened in this change of, you know, working from whether it be from the hybrid, the online space, the hybrid space and you know, the last five years, what have you seen in the e-mail landscape? Are people using it more, they're using it less, is it getting more complicated? Obviously the hackers are trying to get in there as well. What kind of state of the nation with regards to e-mail? I would say e-mail marketing. So I think this is just e-mail deliverability end to end, isn't it?

BEN

Yeah, exactly. Every five years, we here in the tech industry, email's going to be dead. It's getting replaced with the latest, the greatest, but and the cold hard facts are, e-mail is not going anywhere. It's a massive tool use for everyone. When you do your Amazon shopping and they tell you where your shopping is, how far away. It is from your house through to the newsletters you sign up to the proposals you send the client to day-to-day interactions with customers and the MSP space ticket updates, getting information out to your clients issues, updates, problems. Email's not going anywhere. So I work a lot with recruiters. They love a WhatsApp, but e-mail still the king.

Absolutely, we don't always use e-mail in the right way - our emails about sharing information. It's not about having conversations. I'm a big fan for moving cnversations into collaboration platforms like teams and WhatsApp, slack, whatever it might be, but you can't beat e-mail for sharing information with people. If we just kind of go back to the beginning of e-mail in the history of e-mail, back in the day, you could send an e-mail as anyone to anyone, anywhere. There was no real restrictions in place. No one ever thought about, hold on a minute... How do I stop people sending an e-mail as me?

So over time we've had these new technical tools come in to try and protect you as the owner of your domain, so SPF was one of the early ones. This is this is a record that says hey World, I'll only send emails from these places and nowhere else they come from anywhere else probably wasn't me probably down to the receiving e-mail server. What it does with those messages, but it was a good first stab at this. The problem was you could say I trust Google. I trust Microsoft. I trust HubSpot. I trust whatever else it might be. And there's sometimes it weighs around that. And yeah, a lot of people say SPF isn't infallible. So, we started to get new tools and new capabilities coming out to try and protect you as the sender is really the key here. But then as a receiver, knowing that you're getting valid emails, so SPF has said was a really good first stab at this and it's got his lovers and it's got its haters and it then comes out DKIM. So this is essentially an authentication method to prove that a message has come from not just the domain but from the server that sent it. It's like a little two way and say that happened. Yeah, this is definitely a valid e-mail. So this is another massive step forward in trying to protect you as a sender and protect people receiving. I think amongst all of that, people have tried to take the fight out to everyone else, so e-mail filtering, introducing e-mail filtering solutions as a receiver to go. I don't like to look at this. I don't like the look of that. This feels a bit spammy. That looks a bit spammy and this is all about spam and volume and trying to cut out the crap that you don't want. Then we started to see John said phishing attacks the fake emails with the fake links and clicking things and this is where these e-mail filtering tools come into their own of scanning links, looking for dodgy links, looking for, you know, bad domains that are out. There and again, if this was a bit of coming at this problem from 2 directions from the people sending and the people receiving, I want to protect myself from being faked and other people I want to protect myself from the fakers basically.

And then comes along the DMARC. A fantastic tool for you to publish the set of rules to the world that if you receive emails from my domain and they fail these SBF or DKIM, this is what you should do and a great place to be is if you got emails from me that fail these checks, I want you to reject the message, don't even accept it. And it's great as long as everyone is on board with DMARC. And as we see with Google with very, very public in the last 12 months to say, hey, all, unless you have a DMARC record, unless you have an DMARC, DKIM, and SPF you're not coming in. Basically, if you're a bulk senders especially.

IAN

Wow, so, if you're still with us, we basically said like you know, this is me who I am. We've now got a two way handshake now. We've got something that's now making some intelligent decisions about it and everything like that. This is around e-mail security, isn't it? You know, talk to me about the fundaments of e-mail security that you've just gone through. You know, kind of what the tools are there. And what the things are working, but how do we get these emails through, do you have to have everything set up, do you need to have a PhD in in your back end Coding through your hosting platform? What does every MSP need to know about e-mail security.

BEN

So this is where my life gets difficult because in the IT space, I'd say probably only 10% of people I work with really understand this stuff fully. I've worked with some seasoned engineers with great experience from networks to internal DNS to virtualize in the world, and then you sit down and you go through these things and just something doesn't quite connect and it's hard for people to kind of take this stuff on board. Or people have misunderstood it and they get it to a point. I think I know it. I think I know it and all of a sudden now you've trust me, and there's a variety of content on the Internet that tell you one thing or the other stupid stuff, right? So when you set up a new domain on Microsoft 365, everyone is listening, probably done this. You're going to add in, you have to add an SPF record and you have to add a bunch of other DNS records in there to let the domain be valid in 365. It doesn't force you to set up a DKIM record, you have to go and find the little widget that does that and go off and do it. It doesn't force you to do it. There's no guide of now you must do this Google workspace all the way around. You have to set up DKIM but it doesn't tell, you need set up. So they both still got a little bit to go on this journey, but good, you look at some marketing tools out there, things like HubSpot just as an example or or Mailchimp, whatever might be using, they've generally got pretty good guides that say yes you need to set up DKIM and yes, you need to set up SPF and some of them are starting to say, hey, you should probably have DMARC as well. The challenge is with all of this stuff. That there isn't, well, until fairly recently, there hasn't been a way to evidence that you are sticking to a standard. Yeah, you know, like a seal of approval, a rubber stamp to go. I'm a great sender. I've got SPF nailed, I've got DKIM nailed and I've got DMARC all enforced and super strong. Then comes out this new one called BIMI. So it's quite a new not everyone's heard of this brand indicators for message identification, why everyone calls it Bibby. Essentially, if you've ever looked in your Gmail in your Gmail app, in your browser, or your mobile phone and you see like the Amazon logo on the list of emails and some brands have got logos there and some haven't. They're using BIMI to do that. And again, there's two different ways to do BIMI, one's really expensive, one costs you nothing so I guess what a lot of people do, the one that's pretty cheap.

Google want you to do the one that's expensive because, yeah, Google are just making life hard for everyone, but essentially you can't have them. Without enforcing all the other things, so it is a bit of a rubber stamp approval, another tick in the box, and that's what we're looking for when you're trying to get emails into inboxes, you're looking for these ticks. Have you got an SPF record tick? Is it enforced another tick? Is it valid? Are you sending from somewhere that's trusted another? Nick, have you got a Deakin record tick? Did it pass yet another tick? Have you got a DMARC, yet another tick? Have you got BIMI yet another tick? And getting through these e-mail filters, getting through the spam settings, which ironically a lot of these MSPs have been setting up for their clients and now are struggle to get emails into their clients. I know a lot of MSPs. When they set up a client, they log into the back of their e-mail filter and white list all their own domains as an MSP to make sure they don't hit the junk filters. Well, you're doing it right. You should need to do that, but I get the point, right? You want to make sure you're hitting those inbox?

IAN

Yes. So is it simple for the MSP to make sure that literally all those ticks that you've just talked about are all green and that you've got, you've got all your records in place to make sure that that's all right. Because you know with all of these filters that we've got people that everybody's kind of got set up in different ways is, when these filters and all these criteria I guess are not set up that it's finding it hard to get these emails delivered. What's the biggest cause for emails not getting through these days?

BEN

I've run a report on everyone over speak to... It's become a bit of a habit, you know, anyone I speak to even a passing conversation and then go home and look up their domain and go. Oh, I can see they've got a problem here. So there's some brilliant platforms out there for you to go and assess your own domain. There's loads of these demos monitoring platforms. I'm sure people out there are reselling like DMARC, power DMARCs all these other ones. And there's great tools in there that can show you technically that you've got things set up great. I've got some green ticks, I've got a score, my domains getting because SPF looks right, DKIM looks right, DMARC looks right, BIMI looks right to TLS, which another one that one looks right, which is more of a security setting. If you're on 365 or Google Workspace, it's using TLS, but I'm not going to get into too deep techie with the MSP. They know this stuff already I'm sure, but what it doesn't tell you is that kind of well, hold on a minute... that tool doesn't know that you're trying to use another platform necessarily, doesn't say well you I can see you're trying to use MailChimp over here and you might have put the leak in record but you haven't put in your SPF. These tools don't necessarily add that layer of intelligence other than when you're doing DMARC monitoring and every MSP should be monitoring their own domains, using a DMARC monitoring tool and pretty much all the tools that are out there. They will show you every single day the emails that are coming from your domain, here's where they're going... these ones are passing the checks, these ones are failing, is that, have you set up a new tool? You forgot to tell your domain about, and that's that intelligence. And you get someone in one of our marketing guys to start using another platform. They've got access to the DNS only set up half right. I need to go and finish the setup here. And and as all MSPs will know, this is all about change control. If you're going to introduce your system, if you're going to make some changes to your DNS, it's got to be looked at, peer review checked. Is this the right thing to do and then test it. And this gets onto some of the great tools at MSPs, can use to be testing the delivery of their emails, not just the DMARC monitoring, but what's actually happening to messages that land in Inbox. You can go and pull the message header out of wherever you sent it to get that e-mail sent back as attachment, or you sent it to your own Gmail account as a test, look at those message headers through mean Microsoft great Message Header analyzer. That's where it's come from. I can see it pass and SPF see it passing DKIM and there's another brilliant tool. Absolute golden tool for assessing E-mail deliverability.

There's a platform called GLOCKAPP. So this does e-mail delivery testing plugs into 50 plus mailboxes from providers all over the world and it will show you that's what they thought your e-mail it went into spam, it went into promotions tab, it hit the inbox. It never turned up at all. Here's what I think of your content. Here's what I think of your links. It gives you insights and I think and again there's other platforms out there like DMARC, there's a hundred tools that you do DMARC monitoring. There are other e-mail delivery platforms out there that block apps is the absolute golden geese. And it's really visually engaging as well. So if you're doing this with clients, you're great. Great reports, great insights. You don't need to be a tech Wiz to understand where the problems are.

IAN

So this the headache that I'm now, you know, it's just starting in my head is similar to that one about where you start with cyber security. So, I'm an MSP, I'm listening to what you're saying. You've just fire hosed us with a whole load of stuff that you need to do to get your emails through, which is like, which is great really, really useful, particularly that blocker, but what is the most effective way you know, bearing in mind most people listening to this techies and they love all this kind of stuff? And how is this going to work and they're already logging on to block apps before they've even finished. They've finished this show. This could become a shiny ball for many people. We got to go and check our DMARC setting. What's the best practice that you would recommend an MSP should be using on. Let's just start about their own Domain. I think there's another podcast to be having here about what they need to be doing for their clients, but should they be checking it every day? Is it every week? Is it an administrator's job? Is it a manager's job? Is it someone in the service desk should be setting up tickets? What would you consider to be best practices? For e-mail, I guess it's e-mail cleansing e-mail you know making sure that your hygiene is in a good place for the deliverability. What does that look like for you?

BEN

So step one is the DMARC monitoring. So go and get yourself a DMARC monitoring tool. If you've not already got one, get your domain or you might have multiple domains. Get them all added in. Set the strictness of it to one. The guys will know when they're setting this up and monitor. Watch it for a few days couple of weeks, see what's going on and validate your actually, these are all the messages I'm sending, they are or they aren't passing SBF or DKIM. What I need to go and fix SPF and DKIM, using SPF validator tools, have I written this correctly? Is this correct? Making sure your technician get him right if you're not sure, get somebody knows really good at it to have a look at it and just double check what you what you do once you've got that data now you can start to kind of tighten things down a little bit. So right, okay, I'm confident now that I'm sending from these platforms and they're passing all these SPF objects. I'm now going to change that DMARC from none to quarantine. It's basically beyond junk was 11 customers called quarantine. So you're telling the world if it fails his checks. Stick it in, you know, stick it in jail. Basically, someone could still release it and then eventually you get hard and fast. You get into reject and say just don't accept messages from me. This is just step one. This is just the technical side of getting stuff through. If you want to look at BIMI because you want to start to kind of push the boundaries of how you're going to look in front of your customers, not that it's fully supported across the world. Yeah, spoiler alert. Look at that as well, you can set it up very, very low cost for some basic basic kind of settings. Then you need to start to think about do people want their emails that I'm sending them, and then we starting to get their order marketing. I want to get engagement with the messages I'm sending MSPs. This is gold right. Ticket updates are brilliant because clients click on the links they reply to the messages you're building up. This domain authority of back and forth flow between you and 365, yeah.

IAN

OK. That's really important then that you're getting, you're getting those emails back. So great for your service desk, but also just as important for your marketing, if they don't want to get that e-mail because you're because it's not an interesting title or you might be spamming them. That's going to have the same, you know, impact and value, I guess as it would be on the e-mail authority chain as you've got with your clients.

BEN

Really, the biggest problem I have when I work with non-MSPs around e-mail deliverability is, what's the engagement? What's the call to action here from the client, the algorithms out there, and the Microsoft and Google, Yahoo, AOL, everyone else World is a people deleting these emails straight away. The worst of them, marking it as junk. You don't want that. You also don't want people automatically deleting. What you want people to do is have it open for a while, be putting in a folder, replying to it, forwarding it to someone, clicking on the link, engagement teachers, those algorithms. Actually, you've got a really, really valuable domain that people want to be engaging with. So, some kind of call to action content that's absolutely key getting engagement and then the audience when you're doing your e-mail marketing is getting your audience right, there's no point sending out a 10,000 e-mail mail shot if only 1000 people are the right audience. Because probably only 10% of our audience are going to think that they need you the first time they read that e-mail, it's only 10% of them we're going to do something about it. So one out of 1000 people is pretty good for some kind of engagement on e-mail. Believe it or not, one out of 10,000 is not good. So yeah, beyond just the tech stuff, it's about engagement content. When I talk about content, we're trying to stay away from spammy phrases, not putting dollar signs and percentages and really long subject lines not having brightly coloured text on dark backgrounds. That triggers all these spam filters like crazy. Yeah, thinking about the links you've got on it, so a lot of e-mail marketing tools have got tracking links in and that's fine, but you need to be deploying these things in a way that you're not fooling people and looking like a scammer. It says microsoft.com, but it's actually going to go to the MSP growth hub tracking.com whatever it might be. If you can put a tracking link, but don't put it on a website, you can put on a button or just some text, little things that that when you think about it, you know. Ohh yeah, I'm most complex. It's sent. Why would this blocked or let's overlook at the message if this was a scam message or potential scam message that one of my clients says, hey, is this real or not? I might have a look at it and look at some of the links might open it up in a link checker go. Oh, yeah. These don't look right. I think it's, I think it's an e-mail you want, but it's just been put together really badly. And think about what that means for your business.

IAN

I know, you know, we did some work together, didn't we? We still are actually working on our e-mail deliverability and there was some, really obvious things that you could see. It's like a code whisper actually, aren't you been, where you know where you could see straight away? Well, hang on a minute. That's coming in from you know, it looks like this, but it's actually going out from another domain and it was like how was that happen? And it was just something that was just sitting in the back of the system and you just don't know how that impact is unless you've got these monitoring tools and then you've had someone kind of like experience. Look at the health of your e-mail service to see what it is. It's all very well, could have it all ticked, but that can change, can't it? Quite quickly with, you know, as and when I guess all of the tools that are protected because this is we're all talking kind of like about outbound at the moment, aren't we? And you know, everyone else has got these other tools that are trying to protect you from sending the emails to protect their own domains, aren't they?

BEN

Yeah, yeah. And it's. There's definitely an interesting place to be as an MSP. Yeah, you're reselling platforms like e-mail filtering might be Barracuda, Mimecast 10, other ones are available. What you remember about those, some of those platforms is they're algorithm algorithmically learning from each other, Mimecast is really good slash bad at this, depending on what angle you come at, what they learn about one customer or a number of customers about their engage with the domain affects how other customers interact with that domain. It's not about going on a block list, you know going on the naughty step as being a really bad center, it's just people are just marking it spam because they don't want it, but actually other Mimecast customers do want those emails and it's learning how to kind of do that dance, one thing we've not talked about is people setting up brand new company rebranding. The worst thing you can do is go and buy a domain off of GoDaddy tomorrow to pull it into your business the day after and start sending emails, highly likely you're going to be hitting all the junk filters anything under 90 days is generally seen in the tech world as a new domain that's starting to kind of in some situations.

Seeing on the algorithms cost anything younger than six months as a new domain. So if you're thinking about setting up a new business, you're thinking about rebranding, you want to buy some additional domains for some new products and services. First thing you do is buy the domain. Not the last thing. Just make sure we can get that brain locked in and then get it set up. Get the SPF, set up the DKIM, the DMARC, all these bits getting all set up, all your monitoring. Get them added in, start getting some movement with that as well start. There's loads of e-mail, warm up tools you can use to start to generate fake kind of engagement, but just start using it just.

IAN

Start getting it and then you know With that then and it's just like, again, it's it goes back to that monitoring, doesn't it? It's constant monitoring on what is going on. What's going out? What's been blocked? What's the health of our domain looks like, you know, using some of those tools that you mentioned earlier on, would you get one person in the in the MSP to monitor this or would you create this as a task so everybody could learn kind of how it works, what’s your view on that?

BEN

So the interesting position I have is that, I feel I sit between refereeing. Sometimes between what sales want what the marketing team would like to do and what the business really needs. And then the last one of that is what the tech team are doing well, and there's a bit of a so... who's responsible for this? So if you think that within MSP, have you got someone doing your someone externally or internally doing your marketing, should they be responsible for that? Is it so from a delivery and brand perspective? Is it the tech team from a security perspective that should be monitoring that? Is it sales and visibility that to understand what, how their campaigns are working, what might be affecting like the campaigns they're trying to run and as a business owner as the owner of that domain that's spent money and love and passion building up this brand. Is it your responsibility to make sure that that domain is in good health as well? And the answer is it's everyone's. I sit in the middle, I try and join the dots. Now, good DMARC monitoring platform will allow you to have multiple people logging in and we'll be able to generate and send out reports. So yeah, weekly is probably about right, daily doesn't tell you a lot, but weekly reports coming out with the basic headline again, this is what it's about. So I love working with recruitment companies. You go into recruitment office, they've got boards across the walls, sales numbers, sales targets, deals done, phone calls made, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And another good dashboard. I'm starting to see up is at domain health is our marketing rate. It's our DMARC position as well. So it's starting to become part of people's general business dashboard. I'm looking at good MSP is going to be looking at their numbers probably on a weekly basis. Service desk performance, sales targets, marketing performance. Dropping your domain as well, right? It's just another slide.

IAN

So your domain reputation needs to be one of your KPIs is what you're saying.

BEN

Absolutely. If you had a phone number. And all of a sudden that phone number when you started to call out was just not being picked up by people because it came up and like your Google phones. So it did spam caller. You'd soon fixed that, wouldn't you? You'd be panicking about that. You don't want to know that phone numbers where we were inbound leads come from so much business for MSPs coming through referrals, that phone number is absolutely gold.

IAN

Yeah.

BEN

But what we're seeing is a big shift. We're seeing more businesses not even bother with phone systems anymore. It's fine. We'll just give everyone a mobile phone, wherever it might be. I've seen that in a few businesses, MSP probably says it's a harder sell for phone systems these days. The e-mail is becoming more and more important that that domain reputation, the reputation that domain for the clients marketing campaigns is more important to them and people messaging online than it is ringing a main line phone number to get through. So where you'd be as passionate and protective about those phone numbers in the past. It's the domain that that the case is becoming the golden goose here, and as soon as you change your, if you burn your domain, we get this happening. In some businesses, they've burnt the domain, they've been blackballed by Google Workspace, they've been put on the naughty list with Mimecast. They're just struggling to get through DNS has been wrong for years. They've broken all the rules and we'll just spin up a new domain. I've got an old one. We've never used it, but let let's plug that in. I mean, what have we got to change? You got to change everything your landing pages, your business cards, your website, your, the, the list is endless.

IAN

Ben, it's been absolutely brilliant. My head's blown a little bit. It's not as much as it was when we first met, but really interesting subject because you get this wrong, you must don't get through and it will affect your bottom line. There is no doubt about that. You know, whatever. So this is really important that this is a bit like nailing up your letterbox isn't it? Back in the day when you have post, do you remember post, that was an interesting thing, did it back in, today? Anyway, Ben, thank you ever so much for your time today, putting the show together. It's been absolutely great. Here's with a bit of a summary. What's the things that MSPs need to take away from this show?

BEN

So first and foremost know you're getting this stuff right, don't just think you're getting it right. So it's not just the tech lens on this, it it's understanding stuff and you can do that by testing the systems and evaluating where you are, and support all of that by educating your teams on the importance of getting DNS settings like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and reading the data and doing something with it.

IAN

Brilliant stuff. And finally, just a bit of an awareness for everybody if they've been interested in in what we've been talking about today and they want to have a chat with Ben, how do people get in contact with you and have you got anything there to offer them to help them understand? And you know where they are with their e-mail deliverability and domain reputation journey, well, that was a mouthful, wasn't it? Anyway, we'll go for that for a minute. How can I get in contact with you then?

BEN

So from me on LinkedIn, Ben Fielding, there's not many of me or hit my website quinsetconsulting.com, ask for a free e-mail delivery report. I'll send your report, give you some headlines with some insights as well. And then if I can help you any further than that, then just book some time with me.

IAN

Great stuff and we'll put all of those links in the show notes as well. So you can click through and have a look at that at your leisure. Really key subject, Ben, thank you very much for your time, getting the show together and also recording it as well, wishing you all the greatest success with your MSPs and other clients that you've got. Catch up with you soon.

BEN

Thanks, Ian.

IAN

See you soon, mate. Take care.

OUTRO

So I hope you enjoyed the show if you did, I'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to know more about how to take your MSP to a million or if you're already there go faster. Then come and join Stuart Warwick and myself in the scale with confidence Facebook group the link is in the show notes. You go enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to connecting with you soon.