Why GoHighLevel Users Emails Land in Spam (And How To Fix It) with Email Expert Matt Rattliff

There are folks that are sending well over a million emails a month that I've helped to do this. I really love to solve problems. If I could troubleshoot every single day in my life, I would be a happy person. I don't send email like I should, even though I'm an email guy. I just don't, and that's kind of a recipe that I tell people to use, and it works pretty well so far.

How's it going, everybody? Welcome back to another interview. Absolutely blessed to be joined by Matt Ratliff today from Tennessee. Matt, thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, um, you are making email deliverability sexy again. I appreciate it.

I'm doing my best, right? Yeah, educating the masses; that's that's what I enjoy doing. So that's great. I don't know if it ever was sexy or ever will be, but it makes money, so you know, at the end of the day, you're you're operating in a field that can literally change someone's business overnight, um, if they do it correctly. And the difference between good deliverability and bad deliverability is sometimes bankruptcy or not for businesses, or shutting down or not. So excited to dive into that today with you. Um, tell us about your story. How did you, you know, when you were 10 years old, did you dream of becoming an email deliverability consultant?

No, quite far from it. Although when I was, um, if we're going back that far, man, when I was growing up, I was really into uh computer gaming, right? So uh my very first computer was an IBM PS/2; kind of speaks to my age a little bit. But um, I fell in love with uh computer games, and then um, fast forward, and up until about the end of my high school era, I was interested in pursuing a career as being a maybe a pilot. I wanted to become a pilot, um, just uh it wasn't in the cards, so I couldn't make that happen. So the next best thing for me, since I loved computers, was to go into computer programming. And so I went to a community college, um, and got my start there. And then from that community college background, um, did all sorts of really cool things with um programming, and then that morphed into me uh actually landing a a a help desk position on, you know, a team uh with a corporation. And then that continued to blossom. I got my certifications, and then ultimately became a really solid network engineer, um, and I've done things across the globe. I've traveled across the globe to set up networks, to, you know, troubleshoot networks, build them, uh, all sorts of things. So my background is in um computer network engineering; that's that's what I've done, um, a lot of Linux background, uh, a lot of things with Linux, um, Debian, if there's any IT professionals out there, Debian is my Linux flavor, so to speak. Um, but yeah, that's um that's kind of what happened um with my background.

Cool. And how did you get into the email side of things?

Well, um, I started um the Funnel Techie business. I kind of was morphed into um what it is now from lack of me not um, well, didn't really have a lot to do on my day-to-day career, um, you know, I landed a job as a senior network engineer; there wasn't a lot for me to do, um, so which is quite cool. I had spent, um, I landed a job in 2017 as a senior network engineer, and as the more that I've kind of climbed that ladder in the networking world, I found that there was is a lot more time on my hands, which is quite cool, because anytime that there is a network issue, I'm the last escalation point, so people underneath me take care of the problem. Well, that lends its hand at having a lot more free time. So knowing that I had always wanted to start my own business, and so I, you know, started following Russell Brunson in 2015, 2016, you know, got the books, and then come 2019 or 2018, um, Stan was speaking on stage, and that kind of gave me the epiphany for Funnel Techie. You know, no one spoke to the fact that people were having trouble with their backend tech stack on, you know, just creating funnels. And so Funnel Techie was born from that idea of helping entrepreneurs around that aspect that um my name got out there, people knew that I kind of knew my thing around that, and it was easy for me to do, which was awesome, you know, made me some money. And then around 2020, and you were building like landing pages or were like connecting stuff, like connecting to whatever else.

Yeah, a lot of migrations from other platforms, you know, had to build those pages, getting their DNS record set, um, you know, little snippets of code that needed to be done on a on a funnel page, perhaps things like that, stuff that people just didn't want to spend their wheels on; they just want to pay for it and have it done. So that's kind of what I, you know, came in and fixed and did, um, and that grew. And then through that process, um, got to know a lot of people, a lot of beginning folks, which was great. And then someone that I was helping asked, "Well, Matt, do you do you know anything about email deliverability?" And this was around 2020, I think. Um, "I need help; my emails are landing in spam constantly, and I desperately need help. I've got a warm list; these these emails should be landing. Can you help?" And had never really done email deliverability, although my background served as, you know, some sort of a foundation, because early in my career, I used to um build Microsoft Exchange email servers for companies, built a lot of Linux, sendmail mailboxes, you know, a lot of MTA type platforms. So I knew a lot of how email worked on the back end, so I sort of dove into the process, and I fell in love with it, with solving the email deliverability piece; that that's really now all that I do. And even though my brand is still called Funnel Techie, maybe it should be Email Techie now; I don't know. But uh, so that's something I'll figure out eventually, but I do all email deliverability now.

Cool. Yeah, and you've helped some of the the biggest names in the space go from being blacklisted to making millions with their email list; is that right?

Yeah, and I continue to do that, and um, which is a blessing. And so um, I really love to solve problems. I love troubleshooting. Uh, if I could, you know, troubleshoot every single day of my life, I would be a happy person. Um, but I love that process, and I've kind of on the email deliverability side, I've got um just a proven recipe that I use over and over again, and it and it works very well. And um, a lot of my clients of late, just within the past two months, um, I'm I'm helping a lot of Affiliates on HighLevel side, and um, I've got a proven formula, and there's a lot of people that have been showed um showcased on the most recent stats dashboard that are my clients that are doing quite well, and their open rates um for what they're doing are above 70%, uh, across all inbox providers. And um, that's amazing. And these guys are sending, you know, 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 plus emails per month.

Wow. Um, so just so people know, like, you know, maybe they're not their list isn't that big; they're like, "Does this conversation actually apply to me?"

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Why is email deliverability so important? Can you give us a couple examples of like real-world, "Hey, this is what was happening before, then we fixed the deliverability problem; this is what happened after?"

Yeah, well, you know, before, um, I can kind of speak to a very different uh to two different sides of this. Before February of this year, you know, um, we saw the requirements that Google and Yahoo were coming out with, you know, they were pushing that, you know, there needs to now be domain alignment. Um, the purpose of that was, you know, to cut down on spam. A lot of folks were, you know, just basically standing up a generic sending domain with some platform, whether that be Mailgun, SendGrid, you know, it doesn't matter the platform, but uh they would be sending through that um sending domain, but their from display field was some other domain. So now there's, you know, there's two different pieces; they're not aligned. And so that was a common practice before the beginning of this year. And of course, you know, those rulings uh those requirements didn't um become um a true requirement till much later on, but February was kind of the start. Well, um, that uh the purpose of that was to cut down on spam complaints and just abuse in general. Um, so it was real easy before, and then um a lot of the requirements came to, "Well, we need to also add a DMARC policy across the board." So now Google and Yahoo are pushing for domain alignment, and then we also need need to enforce what's called DMARC. Um, and I don't know if you want to get into kind of the weeds of the technical aspects, but having all of those DNS records sort of solidified uh was a part of the other equation of sort of cracking down on some of the spam that was happening; not that that's, you know, not still happening. We there's spam still happening; a lot of spam tactics still happening. Um, but um the the one thing though that folks need to remember is that anytime that you're in a provider, whether that be if you're using Mailgun, SendGrid, or LC email with HighLevel, it doesn't matter, um, you might you've got a deliver um what is it called, a delivery score, and it's a percentage. So delivery is much different than deliverability. Deliverability means that your emails are landing in the inbox or at least the secondary inbox, and that would be promotions. Um, so those two things are completely different. So delivery just means that the inbox provider accepted it; maybe it landed in spam, maybe it landed in the inbox; who knows. Uh, deliverability just truly means that it's landing in the inbox. So those are the difference between those two terms, so I want to make sure I provided that if there's any confusion around it.

Yeah. Um, but uh the reason all of this is super important is um, you know, there's a lot to the email world, um, there's a lot of things to sort of remember um about how to keep your domain healthy. And as long as you're doing things correctly and you're a good sender, um, everything's in place the way it should be, and you know, you're not abusing the system, then you're going to be rewarded, meaning that those emails are going to land in in the inbox. But of course, you also want to be sending emails to contacts that are receptive to your messaging, so that's the other gauntlet to get through. And for the most part, email deliverability can be super easy; it really is. Uh, there's just a few things that people need to know about, especially if they're just getting started, whether it's a small list or even if you've been doing this for quite a while; maybe you're moving from ActiveCampaign to HighLevel, perhaps. Um, you know, a lot of folks um that are kind of in that world where they're migrating from a different system to HighLevel, they run into problems, um, which we can kind of get into in a moment if you want. I can talk to that.

Yeah, I do want to get into that. Can you give us like some like a a client you've worked with, a couple examples where you met them, XYZ was going on, and you after working with them, this is what was happening, or or the result?

Yeah, so in the email world, there's um in order for you to get into the inbox, there's um some some criteria. First, there's got to be, you know, positive behavior on your contact base. So if you're sending um emails to a set of contacts that are just not super receptive to your to your your messaging, then that's going to lower your reputation score, and that's going to have problems. One way to solve that is to um make sure that uh you're tailoring your messaging to the right audience, you know, they make sure that you've got segmentation properly aligned. If maybe uh I gave this analogy recently, I think on the HighLevel session, but um if a contact comes into your world and you're selling um I don't know, pet items, right? Maybe that's one segment of your business, and then another segment is maybe you're selling scuba diving gear. Well, you don't want to take an an email that's tailored to the scuba diving gear to the person that just purchased pet items, you know? So we want to make sure the messaging is aligned to the contact of what they're interested in. Um, I do see some of that, um, but some other issues that I see is that um going into the tech side, um if you've got a good receptive audience, um and it's a warm list, and you've been doing everything you should be doing, maybe maybe there's some issues where you've not properly aligned your domain; maybe the SMTP envelope. So if you go with LC email with HighLevel or you set up a Mailgun domain and uh you've got that established and that's your SMTP envelope, well, if you go under the email and on your from display line where it says this email is from who, what's your email address, where are you sending this from, while you're putting in a domain that may not match the SMTP envelope, that will cause some issues, and that will be be um an authentication problem, and that's going to cause problems with deliverability. So that could be one thing. The other thing is that, um, and this is very useful for people to know about, if you have a list size that's quite small and you can't get a dedicated, a sending IP for your account, uh you're at the mercy of a shared pool of IPs. So maybe there's two shared IPs that are part of your account, and there's going to be other folks that are also sending email from those same sets of IPs. Um, you can't control what they're doing. So maybe eventually, well, so let's say that from day one your emails um are landing, and everything's solid, right? But you notice maybe four or six months down the road something drastically changed, and you're getting emails from your uh customers or your clients and saying, "Hey, your emails keep landing in spam; I just want to let you know." Well, that's a red flag, you know, we don't want that to happen. Well, what could it be? Well, it could be that those IPs that are being used um have been tainted by someone else without you even knowing, and it's going to be very critical for you to know about what those IPs are and how to view the data associated so that you can get it rectified. Um, so it could be that those black those IPs are on a blocklist; that's a common thing that I see. Um, the other thing it could be that, um, maybe you don't have an embedded sunset policy over time, and maybe people that have stopped engaging with you simply have not unsubscribed, but they're still receiving your email; they're either not opening it or immediately deleting it, and that's a negative signal to the inbox provider. So that could be also another problem to look into. But those are two of the most common problems that I see among folks that have a um

Very cool. Yeah. Um, so I feel like there's two sides to this world in my, you know, the people that will be listening to this, and the one is, "How do I get my emails to be delivered?" And then the second one is, "How do I get my clients' emails to get delivered and streamline that onboarding process with SaaS?" I'd love to to dive into both of those, um, and I know this for those listening, like this can get pretty technical. Uh, if you're listening on a podcast platform, maybe consider going to um the YouTube video because we'll try to put up some visual aids here. Um, but yeah, just give us like the the 101 of how do I set this up correctly for me? First of all, I'm a HighLevel user; I want to build my own subaccount that I'm sending marketing-based emails for people opting in for my product or services. How do I make sure that's set up and maintained correctly if if I'm already good, I'm not, or sorry, I'm starting from scratch; I'm not blacklisted yet; I haven't done anything wrong yet; I just want to make sure I do it right.

Yeah, sure. Let's talk about that. So what we'll do, so let's start out and we'll use my domain as the example. I can talk to that. So let's say that um you're new to HighLevel and you get a sending domain attached, and let's assume that your domain is funneltechie.com. Okay? So let's break it down. Funneltechie.com is for me attached to Google Workspace; the root domain; that's my business inbox. So me and Keith, we can communicate via that one-on-one type scenario with from Google Workspace. What I don't want to do is is go into HighLevel, um, and create a domain and tell my email to send from matt@funneltechie.com, because now that's a different channel; that's a different flow; and I'm sending my emails to a completely different audience, perhaps. What's going to happen there is that, and I'll break this down even more in just a moment, what's going to happen there is that if over time I get some low engagement, um, people have stopped engaging with me, or I get a very high spam complaint rate for whatever reason, what that could potentially do is that now if I go into my Google Workspace account and send Keith an email, it's possible that that email now will land in spam, which makes me look terrible, right? It doesn't have a doesn't have a good feel, right? We want to make sure that we hyper-protect that. So the way that we do this is that we want to create different um flows of email and identify those flows of email with a particular subdomain. So what would I do? So I've got funneltechie.com attached to either Office 365 or Google Workspace; leave it there; don't touch it. Go into HighLevel, um, whether you're using LC email or Mailgun; I prefer Mailgun, perhaps, more so than LC email; this is just my preference. Um, but we could talk more about that in just a moment, too. Yeah, what I would do is create a subdomain, so maybe email.funneltechie.com for my marketing. Uh, me specifically, I use m.funneltechie.com for my marketing efforts. So um, anytime, and this is super important for everyone to know about, we want to send from the actual subdomain. So we get uh email.funneltechie.com established through Mailgun or LC; that's now going to become your SMTP envelope. So now when I go in and either go into marketing and create a campaign or go into workflows and create an email action, in that from address field, okay, so if you can remember what that looks like, we want to make sure that that is reading, you know, for me it would be matt@email.funneltechie.com; we want to put in the subdomain in that field. The reason again um that's important is because we want to hyper-protect that from the root domain. I don't want to ever associate my marketing efforts with my root domain, because in the event that something bad happens, I don't want that reputation data to be migrated over to my route, and now it's going to have problems. So now that's going to cause a twofold problem: I can't get my emails delivered from G Suite or Google Workspace, um, and then second, if I want to spin up a new subdomain for like maybe if I'm doing newsletters and I want that to come off of a different subdomain, or um some other flow that's going to inherit the same reputation that my root domain carries, it's going to be bled over into the new sub, and now I've got the same problem from from day one. That's why we want to create these um tiers of isolation with with flows of email. And for anyone who's wondering like what should I do as my subdomain, it doesn't really matter; just make it short and something that you can personally keep track of and doesn't look sketchy. So it could be a single letter; it could be a word like mail. Um, I don't see people doing very long subdomains; I wouldn't recommend that, but it's just just pick something and run with it; it's not a big deal.

Exactly. Yeah, the naming does not matter, just as long as you're using it with a a particular flow.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so isolating things there from day one; what's the next step? So you've isolated it now; so now what happens? Uh, we could take it from um let's look at from the perspective of someone migrating to HighLevel. So they've they set the SMTP envelope with the subdomain, uh, let's say they're carrying over a list size of I don't know, let's say 10,000 contacts; they export it from maybe ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, whatever they got, and they import it into HighLevel, and now they're desperate; they need to get an email out today. Well, what we don't want to do is send an email day one to your entire list of 10,000 contacts, because what's going to happen there is that all of the inbox providers, even though your newly created subdomain has a high domain reputation with every inbox provider, if you massively send out a bulk email on day one, all of these inbox providers have no real history on you, so they don't know exactly what to do with those emails. So now they're going to send some emails to the inbox, watching the contact base on their platform to see how users react, while they may send others to spam, and then progressively over the day or over the allotment of time, things are going to be adjusted from your domain reputation. So they may shift you from high to medium to low. Um, there there's going to be all of this shifting of reputation that reputational information for your domain over time, and so that's going to burn you. Everything's brand new; the domain's new, uh, the DKIM, SPF, which is what the um reputational information is built from, and then um the IP that you're sending from is also new. So all of this is new from um from your environment to these inbox providers. So instead of confusing them and causing problems from the get-go, so that right there, even though you're sending it to a warm audience, you might get lucky and be okay, but it's rare that I see it, although it can happen because I've done it by accident, and luckily...

Everything turned out to be okay. Um, we want to make sure that we take a gradual, methodical step to this, and so the best way to do it in that scenario, and even if you, um, well, yeah, from a migration standpoint, we want to basically create, um, maybe three emails. These three emails can be value-packed emails or whatever you want to do, but basically, we're going to use these three emails to slowly warm up your new infrastructure in a high level.

The way that I do it, the way that I enjoy doing it, is maybe on day number one, maybe send it to anywhere from two to 500 contacts from your list. I choose 200, uh, just because I take a very, um, methodical approach. I'm very careful; uh, I don't want to press the gas too soon. I want to get some information back from those initial 200 emails that I send. Um, and it's very easy to do this in high level. Uh, I go into workflows; I'll create an email action, then I'll wait action. I'm waiting maybe 24 to 48 hours, and then another email action, a wait, and then a final email action. And those are three emails, and they're all separated, you know, 24 to 48 hours.

And so I choose my contact list size of 10,000, assuming that's your list size, and I put them into a drip, and I drip it that way. So 200 emails every day for the first week, leave it be, and we're watching metrics. So if you got inbox IQ embedded, which I hope to guide you to do because it's easy to track, uh, if not, um, go into, um, whatever tracking tool you've got, maybe a Mailgun directly, but just kind of look at those stats. We're looking at the standard open event; that's all we care about for, uh, for the short term. That's all we care about; we just want to get, uh, the inboxes to trust us. And as long as your open rates, um, holistically across the board, are around 40% or above, then that's a good place; things are training in the upper direction.

So now remember we've started out at 200 for the first week; we're at maybe a 35-40% open rate holistically across the board. Coming into the second week, what we can do, we can go back into that bulk action inside contacts; we go click on bulk actions, and we click edit. Because now that's still processing your 10,000 contacts; we've not exhausted that list yet. There's no way we can go in and edit that and then change that number, that 200 number to 400, and then we will start doubling that each and every day thereafter. And that's kind of a recipe that I tell people to use, and it works pretty well so far. Nice.

And so even though you're technically going to start sending more than 200 a day because you'll be sending in like day two's emails, will be sending to the initial cohort as you send cohort two's first email, yep, that staying under around, you know, 600 total per day, uh, during that first week should be fine. Yeah, exactly. So the automation is automatically going to double it anyway, but from a bulk, um, importing standpoint, then you can go into the second week and start doubling that flow to massively increase it even more. Got it. Yeah, and if someone doesn't have a list right now, now they don't really need to worry about warming up; just start building the list, send a sequence or two, and send a broadcast even if it's only to 10-20 people. Yeah, if they're just now starting out on the on the platform, then things should happen pretty organically.

Um, Mailgun will give you, um, they've done better over the years, you know, I've watched how they've grown and the processes that have changed, so, um, hoping that you start out with a good set of IPs, which I'm seeing that more and more, uh, then you've got a really good chance of, um, everything working quite well so organically speaking. As long as you got, um, your domain alignment set, you've got a DMARC policy set at at least none, um, then yeah, everything else should be pretty, pretty good. But the key there, um, even from that standpoint, you certainly need a sunset policy; everyone, everyone needs a sunset policy system in the background that's watching things so that you could take advantage of the data.

Yeah, and that's something, set policy that you mention, you mention a little bit earlier, but this is basically saying, hey, we're going to end our email relationship, right, if, if that per getting them to raise their hand again and say, hey, yes, I do want to get emails if they do or taking them out of getting emails if they don't. Correct. Yeah, exactly. And yes, and something that you could do is that, uh, the system that I've built, what it does is it will, uh, segment the list. So let's say that you're, you've got a, I don't know, maybe a 30-day sunset policy. Um, a 30-day sunset policy is ideal if you're sending three emails a week, um, so a two emails a week would be ideal for a 60-day, and then one email a week is ideal for 90. That's just a quick example. But what happens is that the list on day 31, if your sunset policy is set to 30 days, on day 31, if, um, contacts have not opened any of your messaging, then what will happen, it will add a tag so that they're segmented, and then you could also allow it to, uh, D and them so that you don't accidentally send to them. But what will happen is that, um, you can now take this segment, this newly created segment, and put them into a reactivation series, maybe a couple of months down the road to try to win them back. If you can't win them back during through that approach, if you so choose, then it's best to either purge them or just leave them indefinitely set to do not disturb. Got it.

And that reactivation sequence, give us a small example of what that might sound like. Well, the reactivation series could be exactly the way that you would conduct the warmup, and I would, um, do it kind of the same way because you would treat this list almost like you would a cold audience. So now these guys have not shown any interest in the past; they not, they've not unsubscribed though. So what you would do is treat them exactly how you would an initial warmup, maybe drip this segment into this workflow that you've created for the reactivation series and drip them in, uh, even though your, your domain has been properly warmed up, we don't want to run the risk of, you know, sending a massive amount of email to a, a list that sh has shown not, not to be engaged. Yeah, we don't want them to bring down your stats, so we want to be careful too here, and we can take our time because we're just trying to win them back, and if we can't do it, that's perfectly fine. Yeah. But as far as the content of those emails, what does it typically sound like?

Yeah, so it can be anything. Well, uh, still value-packed, you know, we're trying to give them, uh, useful information, things that they could use immediately to gain that trust back, to, to get them to at least the messaging, right? So that subject has got to catch their attention, so we, that's going to be key. And hopefully once they, once we've caught their attention from the subject line, then we can get them to continue to read, um, and hoping that maybe they will click on something to indicate, yes, they're interested to continue, um, you know, it could be something along those lines that ideal.

Now, going back to the Mailgun versus LC conversation, my understanding is that Lead Connector is totally fine as long as you're not sending over 100,000 emails a month, but above that you should probably get a dedicated IP with Mailgun. Yeah, that's that's true of almost any platform. So I would say where I like to see it is north of 150,000. So, um, if you've got a, um, if you're sending, yes, over the past 30 days, if you can meet a threshold of 150,000, and this is defined by me, um, some people are higher, some people are lower, but I like seeing 150,000, and then if you're in that boat and your sending cadence is is quite regular, um, then that's, uh, that's going to be, um, beneficial for you to look, at least look into, to getting a dedicated, the CBATs here to be, um, this, um, over time. If you've got a really good solid list and it shows that people are engaging with you, you could ideally be on the same shared pool of IPs and definitely not worry about it, even though you've got a large list size and you're sending well over 150,000; you could get by with that. The reason I say that is because, um, and I've got this directly from Mailgun, is that they and LC uses Mailgun under the hood, um, is that they will shift your sending IPs to better and better tiers over time, so that's a positive.

But in my world, if I'm, if I've truly own my list and my sending cadence is good, I know that I've got a really solid audience, I've got a solid product, I'm always given value, uh, I would want to, um, make things better by giving, you know, allowing myself to get a dedicated IP. When you get a dedicated IP, what's going to happen is there, it's going to boost your overall score because now you've got an IP that only you own; no one else is tainting it, um, they're not causing havoc on those IPs, so that's one positive. Second positive is that, um, from a, um, a reverse IP lookup and a forward reverse or a forward lookup on that IP, it's going to match your domain. So you would want to, um, get those DNS records in place; you work with Mailgun or your provider, uh, to get them to match the domain on their side because they're the owner of the IP, so they've got to put a record in on their side as well as your side. So now those domains match; it's in alignment with your own brand; makes you look more trustworthy and makes things even better. Um, there are folks that are sending well over a million emails a month that I've helped to do this, and it's make things perfect for them; it's make things nice. That's great.

You have a couple of tools that you use, one of which you mentioned the Inbox IQ, um, not, not just that you use that you created. So tell us about Inbox IQ: what is it, why should people have it, how much is it, and then the other one is your Snapshot, which, um, has a lot of stuff in it, but yeah, explain both of those tools and how, why, why they're important and who they're for, like at what level of sending should people be using these tools. Hopefully you guys can see this, um, very well. So this is, um, this is Inbox IQ, and this is a, um, basically, it's a monitoring system for your platform. So it embeds directly into HighLevel; you can see here it's called Inbox IQ, and it is now available on, um, well, not officially live on the app Marketplace, uh, but you can install it from the app Marketplace. So I would imagine that it should be approved literally any day now, um, so I'm waiting for that approval, um, everything is, is working beautiful. But anyway, so, um, this right here allows you to have a complete snapshot of what's happening from your email infrastructure with HighLevel and a single pane of glass, and there's quite a few things to look at in this first box. Uh, you can see that, uh, we can see how many emails we're sending over the past 30 days. So the time range is going to default through the previous 30 days, so it gives you a snapshot of how many emails were sent and how many of those were delivered. And remember, delivered does not mean deliverability; it just means the inbox provider accepted it, and it could have went to spam; we don't know, uh, and there's no way to really monitor that, um, deliverability unless you're doing a seed list test, which, you know, we certainly can talk about, but that's all that is, um, so we can kind of see the email sense; we can see our frequency of, of cadence or frequency and cadence of the email, and this is represented in a, in a graph, and then these spinners. So you'll notice that some of these have a red percentage while others have a green percentage. Well, what I've done in the platform is that based upon my best practices that I've defined, if you're outside of the best practice range, it will turn red just to indicate to you, hey, there's, you know, this is now in red; just take note of it; let's see if we can do a little bit better. If it's in green, then it's in a best practice range, and so for the most part you're good. So I've got my deliverability spinner, my open spinner, uh, unique opens, um, this client, um, that I'm showing you here, they're using SendGrid, so Inbox IQ works with Mailgun, SendGrid, and Postmark, um, LC email stats are coming to the platform as well as campaign level stats for each of those, um, email service providers. Nice. So that's being worked on. So as we move down, we can see total deliveries per provider, um, it's hard to, uh, see which provider this is because I can't hover over it, um, but I'll show you a little bit more about this; it's going to basically show you, um, where most of your emails were, which inbox provider your emails are landing in most or going to most, um, that's useful from a troubleshooting perspective, and I'll show you a little bit more data about that as we move down. So we can see our bounce percentage or spam complaint percentage and our unsubscribe percentage, and then this right here goes kind of hand-in-hand with total deliveries per provider, but email provider stats; I'm able to give you a per inbox breakdown of what those stats look like. Beautiful. Now, if you are curious what your, you know, Google or Gmail stats, well, this person has a 73% open rate with Google, uh, 42 with Yahoo, with Microsoft, which is very tough in the very beginning to, to get them to trust you, uh, that's going to be Outlook, Live, Hotmail, MSN, uh, but they've got a 72% open rate, so on and so forth, and you can see that there's pages. So wherever you're sending emails to that inbox will show, and you can go look at what those open stats are. Nice. And then, um, there's a suppressions dashboard at the bottom, uh, which I apparently didn't add to the slides here, but that's, uh, you can also see your suppressions. So, um, you know, Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, they're all going to keep suppressions. So if anytime you've got a hard bounce with a contact email address, if maybe that contact fat-fingered it, maybe it was fictitious to begin with, that's going to be recorded as a bounce, and that will be recorded as a suppression under the bounce category, um, same thing with spam complaints, um, all of that's going to show at the very bottom in another table inside of Inbox IQ. Okay.

So the next box here is the IP associated field, so we can actually see the sending IP that we're using, uh, with their email sends. This person has a dedicated IP; they're actually using SendGrid, um, but basically what the reason I provide this is, first of all, so you can know what sending IP you're using, second so that we can go to a, a Talos intelligence report, we can view report, we can actually see what that sender IP reputation looks like. If it's neutral, that's okay; this is strictly just based upon a Cisco Talos report, um, they've got data points all over the globe, so it's kind of useful for us to get that insight. So, uh, sender IP reputation, so it shows neutral, uh, that's okay; we want it to, uh, be neutral or, um, or good. So to show neutral or good, this is okay; we don't want it to show bad. U, if it's neutral, that's fine; if it's good, that's perfect. Spam level, we always want this to, to show none, and then more importantly here, the, um, block list, so these are all of the major spam block lists that we don't want to be a part of, um, if you ever show on any of these, then that will be problematic for your email sends, so we certainly don't want to do that, uh, but the, but Inbox IQ will have a link for your IP, so you can go and view the Cisco Talos report on that. So in general, Inbox IQ is going to be, um, just a ton of data aggregated in one spot that allows you to troubleshoot that you're not able to find easily any other way. Yeah, and that's the reason I built it; uh, initially, it was started out as helping me, uh, but then I realized that people could take advantage of it and be useful for them, so yeah, exactly right.

And tell us a little bit about your Snapshot as well. Yeah, so the Snapshot, um, let me go back to my slides, I'll share that, uh, this is going to be, uh, useful for that sunset policy. So let me get this shared here. So whenever we're, uh, talking about a sunset policy, um, I built an email engagement system, uh, it's, done from a, uh, linear, linear set of workflows instead of HighLevel. Now there's, um, two pages worth of workflows that was used to build the system, uh, it's very involved, a lot of time spent, months and months of development to make sure that it works, works well with, um, LC email; it works well with Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, any of those. And basically what you do, this is all delivered in the Snapshot, and what happens is that basically you, um, get it installed inside of your location, turn all of these items on, and then that's it; you just let it run; it'll collect data; there's nothing else for you to do. And what this is going to provide you is basically, um, data, and you can see from this client's perspective, there's a ton of information that's flowing through it, um, so you turn that on, leave it in the background, and that will allow you to basically, um, create, uh, large pools of, of different type of data sets with using smart lists. So we can look at our, our 14-day active list, which could consist of just opens or clicks, um, or you could do a combination of all, so opens, reply, or opens, clicks, and replies. So we can create a smart list for 14 days, uh, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, um, the engagement system is built all the way up to a 90-day perspective, but it can be extended to do, um, months, um, further on out, which I'm going to probably be adding here very soon because I've had some clients come to me to ask for that, um, basically what's going to happen is that, um, whatever you decide to use has a sunset policy, um, whether it be 360 or 90, um, what's going to happen is that the system will automatically, you know, shift them over, and that's going to keep your email reputation healthy because now we've, uh, taken that segment of your audience that has stopped engaging with you and they've been migrated off; we can't email them until we want to do it again, but now they're going to, um, allow, that's going to allow your open rates to, uh, continue to rise and this remain healthy. And that's been, uh, every time I have a premium client, they automatically get this; if you get Inbox IQ, it comes with it, uh, but this has been a very key strategy and something that I wanted to, uh, give the public. And I also worked with HighLevel's development team, uh, on this project because there were things that they were doing that I couldn't touch, you know, behind the scenes, um, I worked with them; they fixed their problems behind that, and now it, it's, it's perfect. Beautiful. And the thing I love the most is that you literally just turn it on; there's nothing worse than a, a snapshot that requires a million customizations. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, purpose. Yeah, I wanted to make it easy; just turn it on and let it, let it do its thing. Yeah, uh, so along those lines, you're privy to what's coming next in HighLevel's ecosystem, and I, I want to get to the, the SaaS and multiple sub accounts question that I mentioned at the very beginning. Yeah, for those listening and waiting for that, we will get to it, uh, but I'm curious what you know is coming down the pipeline, um, and what are you most excited for when it comes to email sending through HighLevel?

Well, um, so now that I've been using HighLevel for, for a while now, um, I, I like it the best for emails just because it gives you so much control, and the control that it gives you is something that people are kind of foreign to at the moment, but it's going to catch up, and so I'm trying to teach everyone what this is about, what you can do, and so that's the beauty behind it, uh, people just aren't familiar yet or maybe they're not quite ready. But what's happening behind the scenes is that, um, some of the cool things that are happening, um, I'm trying to push HighLevel in, in the direction of, uh, within a single location to have the use of, uh, multiple domains. So, um, a use case behind this would be that in my world, I use two locations. So, you know, if someone were to come through and buy Inbox IQ, uh, the email engagement system, those emails are going to be sent from my transactional subdomain. So I can only attach one domain, uh, within a, within a HighLevel location, even though LC email, they have it structured where you can have multiple domains, but it's not, uh, set closest to the email action. So you can have, you know, however many domains inside of LC email, but they're specific to certain things within different functions of HighLevel. I'm telling them not to do that; instead, we need to, if we're inside of workflows, we need, if we're going to have email actions inside of, of a workflow, under settings, we need to define the actual sending domain for this workflow. Yeah, the, the domain needs to be set closest to the email action, no matter where we're at inside of the platform. They know about it; they're going to be moving that direction at some point; I just don't have an ETA on it, but that's one thing that I am pushing them for, uh, and that will give us all the ability to properly set up our transactional-based, um, domains for any type of purchases, uh, password resets, you know, what have you, and, and then also be able to control it from anywhere. And then, um, you know, somebody could unsubscribe from marketing emails but still keep getting emails from that, from the transactional side. Yeah, if you need to, for password resets or very useful, whatever. Yeah, so that's kind of the plan. And then they're also going to be making some, um, heavy changes on the unsubscribe method. Uh, we met together; I met with their Dev team for the purpose of, um, helping them, uh, get around that, the unsubscribe process, uh, where their system is so customizable, it's kind of hard to nail that down, uh, but we spoke at length about how to do that and kind of the things that I'm doing on my own for my clients, uh, they took those notes and they're going to run with it, and they're going to make some major improvements. So that's, that's also coming down the line. Very cool. Unsubscribe, it's just so exciting, right? Glad we have someone like you to, uh, tell them what to do because app, you couldn't pay me to sit in that meeting, right? Yeah, I enjoy it though; that's, that's what I enjoy doing. Yeah, that's what I like about you. Um, all right, so let's talk SaaS for a minute. What's the most streamlined onboarding process you've seen, uh, to get the highest deliverability rates for people bringing on multiple sub accounts per week? Oh, um, okay, so this one is a, is a big one, um, I've spent lots of time developing other tools, uh, one in particular is that, and not that you have to have these tools, you can certainly do this all on your own. The key with your onboarding, um, you want everyone to have their own custom domain, uh, if they maybe don't have their own domain yet, you could sort of give them, um, a generic one that you've created for them, but it still needs to be unique for them. Okay, just understand that, and that would be like a, another like, for example, my software, Streamline, it would be like clientname1.streamline.com, to keep

Their alignment in order, so yeah, so you could do that. The other thing is that if you're using, uh, if you're not using LC email, um, maybe eventually, um, there's some endpoints that I could take advantage of. But if you're using Mailgun in your onboarding, I've built a system, uh, utilizing Cloudflare where, um, you onboard a client, everything happens behind the scenes, uh, using a Make scenario that I've created.

Um, basically, you can onboard the client with a custom domain. So they fill out a form; once they get everything submitted, uh, the automation takes place. It goes in and adds all of the necessary records to Cloudflare for their domain. And then once all of those records are created, um, their domain is then added automatically into HighLevel, uh, for their location. If you want any custom values to be, uh, to be set from for their from display line, you could do that.

Um, this automation, again, I've spent tons of time on, and it's something that I do. There's quite a few big agencies that that are using it, and it it works really well. Um, you could also define your own if you got someone that can build some APIs through Cloudflare and through HighLevel. Um, that that does it work. If if their domains are purchased on another co-bat, there would be to part of the process would be to get them to move to Cloudflare. So Cloudflare is that um missing piece. So everyone, or the prerequisite would be that you have to be using Cloudflare. As long as you are, they can onboard easily without you having to touch anything, and it's all done in less than a minute and a half.

Got it. Yeah. Um, that's amazing. If they don't want to migrate them to to Cloudflare and use that system, um, would the best way? I mean, HighLevel's made it very slick in the last year where you just hit go, it adds the the name servers or the DNS records automatically, uh, just like getting on a call with them and basically having them do that, and it takes five minutes if you as as long as they have their credentials and they're there there to do the two-factor authentication, etc. Yeah, make them aware of what they'll need for the call. So you're going to do an onboarding walkthrough call, you know, maybe a 30 minutes to an hour, uh, that's going to be very useful. So make sure they know ahead of time, and that makes things so much easier. So now everything's ready; they've seen the email; they know what they need to have up, uh, and then you go through that just within a few minutes.

Great. Yeah. Um, beautiful. So I want to close out with a kind of pragmatic discussion about, I think, most people's issue with email, which is that they're just not consistent enough. I'm guilty of this; like I I enjoy making YouTube videos more than I enjoy writing emails, and so I just don't send enough emails.

Yeah. Um, for a person that's struggling to come up with a strategy, they just don't know what to send, or uh, they feel like they keep building a sequence and then the next week they need to, um, um, sorry, my my wife's just yelling; my baby just started crawling. Um, the just making sure we didn't need to go to the hospital; it sounded like I couldn't tell if was good or bad. Um, where was I? Uh, yeah, so for those people who are struggling to oh yeah, okay, or they're coming up with sequences, welcome sequences, soap opera sequences, whatever, and then it seems like 3 weeks later they have to change it again, and they just sort of reach this point with email where nothing's actually getting done. They know they should do it; they know there's so much revenue that can be driven from it, but uh, they're just sort of laxidasical about it. What advice would you have for somebody in that position?

Yeah, so I don't send email like I should, even though I'm I'm an email guy; I just don't. Um, so I'm kind of in that the same boat, but um, one thing that I would one thing that I would say is that if having trouble, um, try to back away from, you know, getting a full soap opera sequence in order to immediately start using, um, couple of things there is that you don't know how that's going to perform; you don't know how people are going to take to it. What I would do is start with sending one email a week. You can do that; send one email a week to kind of see how things go. That builds sort of a, um, a regular cadence for you; you know, gives you plenty of time to develop it. Those emails could be value-driven; you could do some, you know, promo emails, um, you know, just start with one email a week just to kind of test the waters, because you've got to understand your audience; you've got to send that data so that you get some data back to understand what's happening. Once you understand it, and the more that you do this, then and the more data that you got, um, then that should start, you know, um, give, you know, allowing you to understand what you need to do going forward.

Um, that's really my the best advice that I can give you. I would I would start slow; you don't necessarily have to come up with a soap opera sequence just yet. In fact, I've got some clients that, um, have these extraordinarily long sequences, and um, sometimes I've looked at these, and sometimes there's really good use cases for doing that, while too often than not, uh, sometimes it's just a little bit too much because the same message is being emailed over and over again. So I see that pretty often, so just kind of be aware of that, uh, which seems to be kind of obvious, I guess, but just kind of be aware of that. So, um, make sure that uh, don't make it too long, um, but I certainly don't continue to send the same type of email over and over again communicating the exact same thing. But it's also all right just to have a single welcome email and then send an email once a week until you feel like you know what the next step is. Yeah, like with me, you know, I might send one every couple months or something, which is bad, I know, but um, I just don't have time to always focus on that side, but um, you know, with the email call, I'm still, um, it's very lean; it's just me and my wife and a couple of developers, um, so, um, yeah, so I I need to do better, but yeah, so I'll send it whenever I do it; I'll send 500 emails at a time and break it out between, you know, several hours during a day; that's what I'll do.

Got it. Uh, just to not break your list when you do it every yeah, just overly cautious; maybe I don't need to, but yeah, I do that. Yeah, okay. And some of these big clients that are sending, you know, millions of emails a month, what have you noticed in terms of their flow with their copywriter and approval processes and things that that make that system work? Because my concern is always like I can hire someone, but they're not going to speak like me; they're gonna say stuff that I don't want them to say, and so it ends up falling on me, and then you know I don't send as much as I should.

Yeah. Um, so I don't write copy, but what I've seen is that, um, I see a lot of people taking advantage of, uh, spreadsheets or Google Sheets, right? So, uh, the copywriter will, um, get an understanding of what the owner wants. So the owner will have written copy in the past or have given the new copywriter their, you know, emails of the past. And through that process, what will happen, the copywriter will actually create those subject lines, add it into a spreadsheet, uh, do the same thing with the body copy, and now, uh, those new line items are now going to trigger an automation to the person that wants to, uh, is is the approver. And that's kind of the process that I've seen. The, um, the person that needs to approve the emails will go in, look at everything; if there's any adjustments that need to be made, that person will go in and do it on the fly within that spreadsheet and then mark it approved. Once it's approved, and then once it's approved, then whatever sort of, um, you know, sending frequency or cadence has been defined, then that cues it up for the next addition into HighLevel for for the next email send. Um, that's typically what I see; I see on that type of scale.

So as we close out here, uh, give us a pitch again. So we have, I think we've mentioned four things we can buy from you today. We've got I'll I'll just go one by one, and you can tell us where we can find it and the price. So InboxIQ. Yeah, InboxIQ. Uh, if you just go to funneltech.com, there's a navbar at the top; you'll find my or you find InboxIQ. Uh, InboxIQ is broken down to an agency license; it's $199 a month for unlimited location. Uh, if you want it just for one location for yourself, it's $47 a month, uh, but you also get the email engagement system with that purchase. If you want the email engagement system, go to funneltech.com; navbar, you'll see the tool listed. Um, if you want it a la carte, uh, the email engagement system is a one-time fee of $297.

Great. And these links will all be below in the show notes and below YouTube as well. Um, and then the next thing you mentioned was this Mailgun SaaS Juggernaut extraordinaire system with Cloudflare. Yeah, that's a good that's a good name for it; I probably should name it. It's a beast of a system; I don't have it um listed on anything public. Whenever I do a call, I list it out, but um, let's let's test it out; I'll give you the link, and I'll let you showcase this to your audience.

Beautiful. So if they're interested, um, and then of course, you know, any of my services, uh, anytime that anyone needs to take advantage of that, um, I'll make a special link for Katon so that you guys can take advantage of, and there'll be a bonus for that.

Yeah. Yeah, that was the number four is consulting, and then you also have like a a fully managed service where you'll send all the emails every month, right?

Yeah. Well, monitoring deliverability and helping with that, so work very closely with uh your team, uh yourself on keeping everything jacked and keeping it delivering. So yeah.

Great. But you still write all the copy; you're just the the tech, uh?

Yeah, they write the copy; I do the yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I I'll get stuck in the weeds if I do copy.

Awesome. Um, Matt, thanks so so much for coming on. This was knowledge, and even if we just implement one or two things from these uh pieces of advice today, guys, you will make more money. So appreciate it, Matt, and we'll uh see you next time.

Sounds good. Take care.