| Hey, it’s our 200th episode of Tarzan Reads Her Emails! Listen to me read this email on your favorite podcast app. Gluh! |
I was excited to get out of promotion-mode and go back to talking about my favorite subject (myself), but a lot is happening on the email front, so we have to talk tech for a bit longer.
My next email will be nothing but sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, I promise (or in my case, candy flipping, the German pianist Olga Scheps, and my latest kink: people who understand proper use of the Oxford comma).
But back to those Gmail and Yahoo updates.
I wrote about this in last week’s email ← read that first if you didn’t already.
The best place to get more information on this is from your email service provider (ESP). Every ESP is unique, and, in many cases, they’ve already handled at least some of the work for you.
According to these new rules, you’ll need:
1) A verified sending domain – which means your emails have to be sent from [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]sbusiness.com (rather than, say, convertkit.com)
Your ESP should have a convenient way to set this up. Check there first. If they don’t, I guarantee they are currently scrambling to improve this process for you because they’ll lose customers, and their deliverability will plummet rapidly if they don’t.
2) A DMARC record that is set to at least p=none
DMARC prevents spammers from sending email pretending to be you, so it’s kinda important, which is why it’s now a requirement. Check out DMARC Record Wizard to learn how to set this up. It typically happens with your web host.
As Sandra says, “Just hearing those words can be scary for people who don’t know anything about tech. If you edit a record wrong, you might break something, which is fixable but can still be scary.”
Here’s the truth: when you edit records on the backend of your website, you could break something. But in this case, you’re just adding a new record, so the worst that happens is you add a record, and it doesn’t work.
Sandra says you can probably do this yourself without hiring anyone or taking a class.
If you think you need a class, Cheryl Rerick has a super affordable offer going right now to help people solve this problem for $200 (affiliate link).
3) A spam rate that is less than 0.3%
You can monitor your spam rate using Google Postmaster tools. It’s easy, and it’s free.
But this begs the question: what is SPAM?
In most cases, it has nothing to do with Nigerian princes wanting to wire you their inconvenient inheritance. SPAM simply means email that people don’t want, which could include people who once consented to get emails from you but have since lost interest.
>> That’s why list scrubbing is important.
>> That’s why consistently offering clickable links and asking people to reply is important.
>> That’s why opt-out links are important, as is building an interest list for your paid offers.
>> That’s why sending ENGAGING and INTERESTING emails is important (which is what I teach in Email Stars, FYI, and it’s coming back in Q1 – click to get on the waitlist)
And that concludes today’s lesson. A reminder that the deadline for complying to these new regulations is February 1, 2024. You can bet I’ll remind you.
Now for a more important item of business:
Surprise! I am blond now.
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First time in my life. Other than that one time in college when I used a drugstore box of hair bleach that turned my hair candy-banana-yellow and immediately dyed it back, also with boxed dye because it was college and I was a jazz musician living on a $4/day budget.
Not sure yet whether or not blonds have more fun. Will check back in summer 2024. But one thing I can say for sure about blonds is that they probably have MUN-NEY.
Being blond costs about the same as:
♀️ Taking five friends to a Taylor Swift concert once per year (including hotel and Go train tickets)
A monthly loan payment on a modestly priced Kia, amortized over five years
Maybe that’s where blonds get their reputation for not being very smart? Dunno about that either but everywhere I go now, I look at blond people and think to myself, “Pretty sure the economy is doing just fine.”
That is just my professional opinion.
Sincerely,
Tarzan “Blond Economist” Kay
