Following Up Without Looking & Feeling Like a Dirtbag – Mike Taber – MicroConf Starter 2018

0:00[Music] [Applause] so what we're gonna do today is my talk is about how to follow up via email without looking and feeling like a complete dirtbag so we're going to start off I've got a little intro to go through here for you we're gonna talk a little bit about why you should be following out via email some of the different situations what happens when you send an email and the people on the other end what it is that they are thinking about reasons why we don't follow up why we don't send those follow-up emails even though that we know that we should and then some follow-up strategies that actually work

0:45so a little about me I assume that most of how many people here listen to the podcast because I was behind the stage I couldn't see all right so good number of you so I run the I'm the co-host of the start of cirrhosis podcast I'm also the co-host and co-founder of micro cough and I have a book called the single founder handbook I have a couple of copies of it over here we'll give away those two the first couple of people who asked questions at the end and then I'm also the founder of bluetick so I have other things in my past which we try not

1:15to discuss in a public setting but these are the things that are kind of known for as I said we don't talk about the other stuff so when I'm talking about follow-up emails I want to make sure that I make this extremely clear because the vast majority of this talk is really not about cult email and I know that most people when you say follow-up emails most people's brains immediately go to cold email so these this is not cold email and I want to reiterate that follow-up emails are not necessarily cold emails and this is not about the cold email so first thing why is it that

1:53we follow up why do we have to send these follow-up emails and the fact is that you want to know what's going on you want to be able to send out those you want to know that the emails that you've sent out were acted on or decided upon or you're essentially trying to figure out what is going on so you want to know first of all was the email that you sent receive a series of four different things that you're trying to find out when you send out a follow-up email was it received did they understand it did they make a decision and this is a key one because

2:25if you send out a proposal or a request for more information from somebody you send them an invoice did they get it did they understand it do they know what they're supposed to do there's lots of ways for people to get confused even though you may think that you were extremely clear and I said hey here's a set of instructions go make this payment on this bill and they still don't do it and maybe they got confused maybe they've screwed up their credit card there's all sorts of things that could go wrong and the last thing is did they inform you of what that decision was so

2:55if you send a proposal are they gonna talk it over with their team do they have to wait for their boss to get back there's lots of things that can go on and the reality is that what you're trying to do here is you're trying to close that loop you're trying to figure out what it is that you sent out that email for whatever the reason was did they make that decision did they understand the email - they get it did they talk to their vault to their team to their boss do they come to a conclusion and the last piece of it which is the most important is did they

3:24tell you because that's what you're really trying to figure out here you're trying to figure out what is what is it that you need to do in order to get them to that next step because otherwise what you're essentially doing is you're sending off this email out into the black into a black hole it's a nebulous void you've got no idea what's going on and that right there's your email and it's having a great time so in this email black hole there's four different reasons four major reasons why people don't reply to your emails and there's lots of other ones as well but these are probably the the main ones the

4:04first one is that they did not receive it so again we're gonna walk through like that they may have mail server issues and that's surprisingly common I've worked with a product that has that or works directly with people's mail servers and it is shocking how many mail servers have problems on a very very regular basis I have servers that I will see that go down every single day between two o'clock and four o'clock every morning and it's because they're doing backups or whatever but for whatever reason they're not getting emails at those times you could be sent into the wrong email address I won't go into that

4:38anecdote I can actually it could be getting filtered in spam you get out of offices or the person's out on vacation they could be at a conference for example and then they just don't get to it and they say oh well I'll come back to it later and then they just really never get around to it the other ones they received it and then they just decided to dismiss it they're like they may have email filters or rules in place personally I know this to be the case I know there's other people who fit into this category as well but I have like 50 to 75 different email filters on my

5:07mailbox I still get upwards of a couple hundred emails a day and a lot of them I don't need to pay attention to a lot of them I can just categorize in a certain way some of them are newsletters some of them are updates or things like that and I don't need to know what exactly like I don't need to know all the information I may just want to review it on a daily on a weekly basis or a monthly basis or something like that but I still want to get the emails they could also just get you may have a irrelevant subject line they may look at and say oh this isn't

5:35actually for me another common thing that I've seen is that if you send an email to a group of people and you want somebody to do something about it you're probably not going to get them to do it you need to send it to one person because if they see that there's three or five other people on that CC list oh somebody else will do it and then they don't have to it's a great way for them to dodge responsibility they skimmed it made a wrong decision that's very common if you're not real clear if you send lengthy emails I'm known for that sending for really long emails they're

6:02long would it people just say yeah click done gate keeper says no the the if you send it to somebody not everybody manages their own mailbox so it's very common and very easy to have your email picked up by that gatekeeper and the gatekeeper says oh well I don't I don't need to do anything with this and I've had that happen to me personally with people who I know very well who have gatekeepers and I've still not gotten by them sometimes and as I said that that wall of text that I'm I'm well known for the third one is that it was received with the best of intentions

6:39they meant to why and this is the probably the most common one working or traveling remotely the check it on a mobile device I check I'm notorious for checking emails in my phone just to see what they are to see if any things you know on fire or anything like that this is my daughter by the way nice little Microsoft decision she's so cute but the the when these emails come in if they get pushed down a little bit they end up dropping off of your radar you know something in the business could be on fire too so if not just the previous one previous slide

7:14there's also a guilt that some people have if they receive an email and they don't respond to it right away and let's say that it goes two or three days and then two or three days quickly becomes four or five then you've got the weekend and now all of a sudden you've evolvers or you've already waited a week to reply to somebody what I see a lot of times is the people will not reply to those emails because then they feel guilty they feel like they have to apologize for waiting so long to reply to that email and it's surprisingly common I've Eve yeah even heard conversations about this

7:49exact situation here at micro comm over the past couple of days a nice side effect or benefit of sending those follow-up emails is that actually gives them permission to reply when they've waited for too long it's like oh I meant to do I meant to write back to this side and I just I didn't get to it and it's a popular misconception to think that if it's important that other person is going to get back to me and this can happen in even with people that you know even people you have worked with before or done business with before even if it's something important like an invoice

8:24I've sent you know ten eleven thousand dollar invoices before and likes they just keep being pushed when I used to do consulting I used to do it at an enterprise level and some of these invoices were surprisingly large and they just get pushed because either somebody says oh I'll take care of it and then it gets pushed by a week pushed by a week somebody delays there's a meeting that's got to happen and you don't know that any of that stuff is true until you ask for that you ask for a follow-up and you ask what's going on and the fact is that the whole idea or concept that if it's

8:55important is complete and under nonsense is absolutely not true how many people here know who Patrick McKenzie is most of the audience so if you won't listen to me listen to Patrick McKenzie and he says but really busy people are busy people the overwhelmingly most common reason for non-response is not active disinterest or even passive disinterest it is didn't organize affairs enough to have enough bandwidth to action the email follow-up more than feels comfortable it works but the thing is a lot of us still don't do it and the reason is that we don't want to be lumped in that category of people or sending these follow-up emails and are

9:40just simply ignoring whatever the responses they're automated and we're afraid and here's what we're afraid of we're afraid of what this is being the response on the other side we're afraid of being lumped in that category we're afraid of being pushed like promoted on Twitter as the person who's sending terrible emails there's even a hashtag terrible terrible cold email so you can go out and look look for on Twitter and there's a surprising number of people who are contributing to this and posting screenshots and we do not want to be made an example of who here thinks it's a good idea or something that they aspire to to be you

10:16know hosted on on reddit on a reddit forum and made an example of who here wants that anyone I I didn't think so so what are the underlying reasons why we're not actually following on because obviously we don't want to be made an example of but what are some of the other things what are the the little things that are not allowing us to make that step to hit that button and the first one is that we have a incorrect or a disassociated value association between when we click the button to send the email and when we get a response and it could be an hour it could be 10 hours

10:55it could be 10 days or 10 months and the problem is that it's better than two places the value of that email is measured in two places it's measured when you send that email and when you get the response and the larger the distance of the time period between those two things the more difficult it is for you to understand or to conceptualize what the value of that email is and what this what's sending that email is going to mean and it doesn't matter what the value of the the actual dollar amount is but in your mind it's very easy to not correctly compensate for those so because of that

11:32delayed feedback loop that's a major reason why we don't send these these emails another one is because it feels like busywork if let's say that you have an email sequence where you want to send out you've got five different emails you send out you wonder send out one a day and you've got a list of a hundred people but you don't want to send a hundred emails all in the same day because quite frankly that sucks but so you send five of them and then the next day you have to send ten because if you're spacing them out one day at a time first on Monday you send out five

11:59Tuesday you send out five of the first email and but then the people who didn't respond you have to send out five of the second one so now you're sending ten emails by the third day you're sending fifteen by the fourth day you're sending twenty and it's not even just sending twenty emails because you could almost say well let me BCC these or something like that but if you were trying to send them in as personal emails remember this is not cold email you want to make sure that they look like they're being personally sent make it make it look like the you are it's actually taking a

12:27little bit of effort and when you don't take that effort obviously you're not gonna get the results that you want but there's a lot of effort that goes into even just copy and pasting between templates between a spreadsheet or you know a Google Doc or something like that just saying oh well this person that the third staff this person is that the second staff and going through them it feels like that busy work plus we've got a lot of deadlines that we're working on and how do we feel about deadlines deadlines are actually quite awesome they make cool sounds when they go flying by but really I mean your

13:01emotions are going to get the most of you in these situations it's emotionally painful to send these emails it sucks you feel like you're repeating yourself even if that second email or that fifth email is going to somebody completely different than the first one the variable rewards schedule sounds like a good idea it's it's actually in in situations like this the site psychology will tell you that a variable reward schedule is good thing but the problem is that those types of studies concentrate on situations where there's actually a reward when you're sending email there's an Associated negative consequence that could also happen you sent an email and

13:44somebody says hi I'm not interested at all and because that reaction is negative those negative results count a lot more than the positive ones that you get back so it's very easy to avoid doing it because you don't want to be made to feel guilty or feel bad about sending those emails so that disproportionality between the positive and the negatives of it will really weigh on you when you're trying to do that and as I said the biggest reason why we don't is because we're afraid we don't want to be made into that example so the big question before you dive into this is this following up actually work

14:24because you know why would you listen to me if it doesn't actually work so I'm gonna give you a couple of antidotes and some data to back it up so this right here is a tweet from a guy named Sam neter and he shows you essentially a series of emails that he sent out over the course of several months set a lesson in persistence six ignored emails since November finally get a reply in this potential customer is now using a demo of Mason which is his software product a non-response is not a no keep going until you get a no and you can see there that according to the dates he

15:00sent it over the course of several months and interesting love he's also a bluetick customer so that was not necessarily intentional I did not go and say oh well which of my customers has had the most success lately like I just happen to go on Twitter and find that it was him that was doing it so I did want to just close that that is a bluetick customer so who wants to play a game now yes we've got one awesome so we got one player so I have a question for you and we're going to talk about some of the stats so what I've done is I went into

15:36the backend of blue tick and I analyzed 70,000 emails that have been sent from blue tick blue tick is sending in the neighborhood of anywhere between 600 and a thousand per day accepting that one time it sent way too many because of a bug to one person that was a bad day for me and the customer did not cancel that's actually a completely slide anecdote my customer did not cancel even though one of his users one of his contacts got a thousand emails they were all exactly the same so if you ever feel bad about yourself not only did somebody approve making a movie with sharks and tornados in it but

16:13I didn't lose a customer over that so open rate of 26.7% is it at the best the average or the worst open rate now I would do want to caveat this the vast majority of my customers are using blue tick in a variety of different scenarios but most of them are using it for do I want to say that I'll hold off on that I'll wait till afterwards so best average or worse how many people think that 26.7% is the best open rate ok handful of you how about the average how many people think that 26.7 is the average okay so that's most of you and

16:51how many think it's the worst like five it is actually what is actually the worst as the worst open rate if you look 94.1% is the best open rate I have several customers who are getting over 90% open rates alright so I kind of figured that you know people wouldn't quite get that right so I'd asked decided to ask another question reply rate of 5.9% is this the best the average or the worst how many people think that if the best one - okay how about the average how many people think that that's the average all right now the worst lots of you okay so we'll dig

17:37into that it's actually the average sorry kind of figured kids get that wrong too so the best reply rate is third Ouma 30 almost 30 percent so the majority of the customers that I have are using this in warm email scenarios which is interesting because it means that if you're using it in a warm email scenario and you're still only getting the best response rates are only 29% for individual emails what does that say it says that if you don't send those follow-up emails you're probably not going to get a response and these are from people that they know they presumably have some sort of a business

18:11or financial relationship with if you're not getting response rates on a regular basis even after sending some of those those follow-up emails like you have to send more you need to be able to close that loop so since most of you got in the last two questions wrong so far I'm gonna ask you one more so and this is a multiple choice you're gonna have to pick one of these things and this is the percentage of people who are blocking tracking pixels now the way that I tracked this was what I did was I measured the emails that got a response where the tracking pixel was blocked and

18:50I can see that you know if an email sent did they open the tracking pixel or not and was there a reply and in cases where there was a the tracking pixel was blocked there was zero opens and it got a reply though that's that's what I counted here so the percentage of people that are blocking tracking pixels how many people think that it's sixty two and a half percent okay handful of you how about eleven point three percent another small handful I almost wanted like divide you guys into the different parts of the room three point one percent all right good chunky now how about zero percent oh all right

19:29so this was a trick question I kind of lied a little bit but that was an effort to help you out because all of you all four of these are actually correct I didn't really specify in the question about the weather was the best average or worse like each of these numbers is one of those so the highest tracking pixel blocking percentage was sixty two and a half percent that meant that there is at least one customer I have where they get replies but the tracking pixel is blocked 62% of the time then there's average and then Louis and then there were three lucky ducks who

19:59got 0% the emails that they were sending nobody was blocking their tracking pixels so let's take a look at what an email sequence looks like when you start drilling down and you start looking at the different steps so this is a view from inside an email sequence inside of bluetick you can see that there's a number of people who have gone through a particular sequence that top one is the top level stats and then the next three are individual steps step one step two and step three performance and what you can see is that the replies from step one to step two step one has about a

20:29thirty one percent response rate step two has a thirty thirty percent thirty percent response rate and then the step three has about a twelve percent response rate and those things add up obviously like if you start adding up those percentages you see at the top level the sequence itself has a 78 percent is that 70 70 percent response rate but each individual step along the way only has a small much smaller percentage associated with it so what that tells you though is that sending that first email if you're only to get a thirty percent response rate but then you send a second one you get a thirty

21:02percent response rate from that these things start to add up and that's where the value of doing the follow ups really comes from it's not from that first email it's not from the SEC's second email or necessarily the third it's the collection of all of them that's where you're getting the value that's where you're able to close that loop so let's talk a little bit about follow-up strategies and specifically ones that really do work so the first one is that there's four different things that you need to keep in mind when you're doing follow-up email so you essentially have to design how this is going to work in

21:36your environment when is it that you're going to do it it's important to know when it's worth it for you to send an email follow-up and when it is not because sometimes it makes sense and then there's other times at which it doesn't second thing is you need to define clearly define an action that you want that person to take do they need to schedule call do they need to reply you need to be really really clear what you want them to do next because if you're not they can easily get confused and then they just decide to not do anything next one is personalization you

22:11need to use their name you need to make sure that you are making it appear to them as if the email is being sent directly to them and then in terms of automation behind it you want to make this as easy for you to send it out at scale as possible so one of the things that you might think about is like as I said when is an appropriate time and that's when you make first contact with that person can you guys see this well is that in German I've been told I give this talk in Germany I was told that if somebody was gonna give me one of their

22:41books they said well can you read German and I said no and they said we'll just read it he's really loud and in an angry voice and you'll be fine so well I I guess we'll go on to the like the English version of it so when you make first contact with with a customer after they've made they've talked to you maybe had a conversation or demo you put them in an email sequence of some kind you want to follow up with them to get them to the next step that's an ideal place to have an automated system in place so that you can follow up with them to get

23:05them to that next step of your sales funnel next one is you want to schedule that call so if it's an actual call that you need to have whether it's a phone call or a webinar or a demo or something like that maybe you need to get the right people in the room another great place for an email follow-up as I said the the demo itself that's that's also perfect and testimonials if you have a bunch of customers who come through put them in into an email sequence follow up with them until you get a testimonial they're in for a couple of weeks I do love this particular image it's awesome

23:46you need to know what it is that they need to do or they need to know what it is that you want from them so making sure that they know what their the expectations from you are whether it is that reply whether it is clicking on a link scheduling that time and giving them a deliberate choice between even just one of two things like do you want to do this or you know would you like the red pill or would you like the blue pill when you get into personalization you have to be really really careful because especially if you're automating these things because if you try to

24:19automate something how many people have gotten a email this is high space comma or high F name because they're using MailChimp or something like that not because they have other phrases for you but the reality is bad personalization is way worse way worse than no personalization it can get bad and the thing is when you're sending these emails you have to be consistent about it if you're not consistent if you don't do those follow-ups you're not going to get those responses Ann Marie Forleo she runs a company out of New York City that basically helps women female entrepreneurs build their businesses but I mean she says that success doesn't

25:08come from what you do occasionally it comes from what you do consistently and if you are not consistent about these follow ups what can happen is that if you let too much time pass between one email and the next then whatever it is that you're doing is completely irrelevant this is a picture of some chapstick which has become irrelevant in my life which I actually did keep that around in my jacket it was I found it the other day so this is not that I'm just so again those four pillars of making a successful email sequence when to send it what action they need to take

25:51personalizing it and then automating it so let's go through a quick example here how are you going to design a follow-up process in order to get somebody to to schedule a demo so very first thing you've got the starting state you want to make a demo request of them and then the last step is you want to get them into that demo but in between you've got to schedule it or you want it you want them to schedule it put its own time on your calendar and you want to followup with them until they do because you need to close that feedback loop so step one

26:20you're asking them to get on a demo step four that's the last one get they actually have the demo but you ask them to schedule it and if they don't you have to follow up so let's take a look at an email sequence that I put together specifically for and this was back last summer when I was doing early access for blue tick and you'll see that there's blah blah blah purpose questions from user those are things that I filled in is kind of a template and then you'll see a link to my calendar link next thing is that the second email was sent on two days later

26:53after that first one if they did not actually schedule a time for the demo and you'll see here that this is an odd time three days later at 7:12 a.m. and the nice thing is that when I do demos for this I tell them brutally honestly like I do not get up at 7:12 a.m. for anybody's let alone sending you an email but I show that to them specifically because it lets them know how their customers are gonna be treated and it is highly effective not just because it is consistently being sent three days later but also because of the timing and the control that you have over that next

27:27you'll see five days later four days after that emails are automatically being sent that consistency is key to making this entire thing work to making it get to that nearly 80% response rate so let's take a look at a real life example of what this looks like on the other end once you kind of get through the kind of setup of the design of that so here you'll see I don't know how well you can read some of this text just cuz it's a little small but it says hi contact that first name and it's got a default for it but it basically just invites them to the demo and it has all

28:01of the text in there that I had before and this is what it looks like on the other end and I blurred out the name of this person but you see here that this email is heavily based on the previous template that you saw in the other and the previous screenshot so you'll see that at the very end would you like to get on a short call but that first step is highly personalized based on a form that this person had fill out and I looked at and said okay well what can I say to this person to try and get them to that demo so I customized it made it

28:29look like I'm specifically sending this email to her and trying to get her to a demo a couple days later next one goes out this says 712 or says 1212 p.m. because of the time that I took the screenshots I was in Germany at the time and so it's five hours and the other drug so otherwise we would say 712 a.m. but the point is that it's consistent that consistency about having it automatically be sent out without me having to go into my gmail or without me having to get a task reminder that says hey now you've got this thing to do you've got to go through and send us

29:03email out to this person who didn't remind you in by the way you suck because you did they didn't reply to you yet so it avoids those negative feelings those negative associations and why should you have to worry about it if that if you can automate that stuff and get it out of your life that's a much better way to approach it and then at the bottom here you what you'll see is that it's replying to a previous email I would highly highly recommend that if you're sending out emails to people and you're doing follow-ups go back into your mailbox and reply to the previous email that was sent and if you do that

29:33there's a couple of things that happen one is it proves to the other person that you actually did send a previous email it shows that you took the effort to say huh this person is probably kind of important to me and let me go through and I want to make sure that I follow up with this person to verify that are you interested are you not just closing that feedback loop with them and making them feel like they're they're special to you again several extra steps after this I won't dig into the rest of it you can see that there's other timings and stuff associated with it most of these are all

30:10templated I don't touch them after that very first step it's just a sense these out and basically tries to get them to click on that first link in the first email and once you've done all this once you put it all together that's when you've unlocked that achievement you've figured out whether or not they've received it if you do if you are getting those responses you know that they've understood it you know that they've made a decision and you're getting the feedback that you need now if they don't respond in any way shape or form at some point you have to make the decision do I

30:39continue to try and follow up with this person and it depends on a lot on how warm your leads are depends on where they are in your sales funnel why they're in that situation if it's an invoice you probably want to followup with them until the end of time if it's a cold email probably not so much after four or five emails you probably just want to say hey look it's not a great time why don't we move on and what this is does is it allows you to avoid that email black hole where your emails are having a fantastic time so with all of that

31:10said I do want to leave you with one last thing I have an email course that is on the bluetick website you can go there the link right next to try it there's a free course link says learn - how did you automate your follow ups it's a free six part email course talks a lot about what I just talked about in this particular talk and helps to kind of educate you on different ways that you can automate it you don't need to use bluetick you can but you don't have to there's a lot of different ways to automate your email follow-ups several other speakers have talked today the

31:42attendee talks earlier I think was Chris and Matt both talked about email follow-up strategies and this incorporates a lot of that stuff in there and microcon would not be complete without its traditions so of course you know we we typically have slides where we share pictures of our families so wanted to show one from 2016 and I do want to point out this little piece right here because if you zoom in he looks like he's having a fantastic time and I will say that over the years over the past couple years of running bluetick I will say that running a cold email system or warm email system and

32:23doing these these follow-ups if you're trying to do this stuff manually it becomes a roller coaster and it is emotional highs and lows and it sucks and some people don't learn that maybe there's a different way and I hope that that's not you so thank you very much if you have questions for me I'll take them now but you can also find me on twitter at single founder or you can just read out reach out to me directly for email mike and blue tick dot io thank you very much

32:56all right thanks Mike who has a question about email follow-ups all right over here I'm gonna run anyone else have a question put up your hand right now so Rob can see you nice and high excellent points thank you is it a good idea to send out a separation email if you don't hear back and should you send that out to warm leads or just cold leads so by separation email you mean kind of like a break I mean all right the last email yeah so it depends a lot on how you phrase that particular email so the typical breakup email if for anyone who's not familiar with it is

33:40you've sent them three four or five emails and then you say hey I haven't heard back from you if I don't hear back from you I'm gonna assume you're not interested and I'll never talk to you again so you're essentially trying to break up with them and convince them to take an action and what I don't like about that is it puts you in an awkward position where if you want to follow up with them in the future it's put you in a really poor position because now you're a liar if you actually come back to them and the other thing is that if they were trying to actively ignore your

34:06emails they're probably like oh thank god that person is gone they're never gonna email me again but if you've three months later email them now you're a liar however you change that around and say hey this is probably maybe this isn't a good time for you lemon let me follow you up with you in two months or in three months or in six weeks something along those lines and if you've automated that process to followup with them actually in six weeks because they haven't responded now when you do follow up with them in six weeks they're gonna say damn it now I have to actually respond to this because I

34:39didn't want to talk to them and now you get that loop closed for you the other thing is that it shows that person that you're committed and you are going to do what you've said that you will do so they're more likely to trust you assuming that they actually have the problem that you're trying to solve so I have very mixed feelings on the breakup email I do know that it does work I've used it myself in the past but it closes doors that you might not want to actually close I'd be very judicious about when you use it next question over here one one thing I worry about us

35:13specifically with automated follow-ups is like it'll follow up when they've already contacted me like a different way or something have you ever seen that happen should I just not worry about that how often do things go awry with automated things I will say that they can go awry a lot it depends on the tools that you're using that's also partly why I built bluetick in the way that I did so I looked into other tools that were built in various ways like Gmail API is notorious for missing things there there's also like at least like a 60 minute delay in certain cases for certain types of things but a lot of

35:48it boils down to what your call to actions are in the emails and if you are sending those emails out in such a way that the call to action is are like a phone call for example you probably want the ability to control when those emails go out to be a manual push so you essentially have to approve them at that point that's also built into bluetick so that you don't have to worry about it if it's based on filling out a form or a survey or scheduling a call BlueTEC has a pure integration as well so if they actually schedule a call it can close

36:19that loop and it can pull them out of the email sequence there's other tools that can do similar things but you really do have to be careful about that because once you've destroyed the illusion that you are personally sending those emails then you're much your response rates are going to go down because at that point they are seeing that oh you're using this automated tool to send those emails and they're less likely to take them as seriously when they get the second third or fourth email follow-up they're like oh well that's just a an automated system it's not really like sending emails and I've been accused of sending emails through

36:51bluetick when I haven't actually been doing I sense no individual real replies they're like oh this was something through bluetick wasn't it was like no I actually did send this so next question i I've got one more here I think we got time for maybe two more okay there's one over there so Phil's got a question here and then person over there hey Mike I don't know the laws around emails all that well but um I see a lot of in emails that I get unsubscribe links and I think those are may be necessary to conform to can spam or something like that so does this kind of

37:26tow does something like blue tick or any other kind of automated but very personalized automation does it tow the line between what's automated and what's I don't know the other term transactional do you have to include unsubscribe links and is that a tell it is a tell and it is toeing the line either way because even if you have an unsubscribe link in there does not necessarily mean that it's compliant to any given regulations but it is a tell and that's why blue tick by default doesn't include them so it doesn't look like it was sent by that it's also why I position it for warm email follow-ups

38:01and not cold email follow-ups because with cold email follow-ups you more likely to encounter the type of customer that wants to blast out large numbers of emails to people that they have zero relationship with so I tend to try and avoid that but it's not to say that I don't have customers who aren't using it for that in terms of the laws themselves there's three different classifications of emails there's transactional which is you just bought something from me and I send you a receipt so that's transactional then there's commercial which is where I'm pitching you something I'm trying to get you to buy something and so that's the second

38:31category and that's really where the can-spam laws come in to come into play and then the third one oddly enough the government has named it other so that's pretty much everything else and that's really kind of the area that not just blue tick but pretty much every automated email follow-up software falls into the reason that you find companies like MailChimp or Aweber or drip or any of those mass email marketing automations the reason that they include unsubscribe links is because they're trying to protect the sender reputation of their IP addresses it has nothing to do with spam laws it has to do with the fact that if they get enough outbound

39:07emails coming from one of their servers that get marked as spam then they could end up on a blacklist and your fifty dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month means almost nothing because they've got you know 50 hundred thousand dollars a month worth of customers that are also using that server to send out emails and they're trying to protect their own revenue stream which I'm not saying I disagree with I think that's very smart move but that's why they do it has nothing to do with spam loss hi Mike I have a question about follow up outside of email what is your take on

39:40following up by phone text or social as one of the touch points I think that's a fantastic idea that's the direction that bluetick is going to that there's a special name for it Rob you probably remember the South Africa it's multi say something marketing multi-channel and yeah that's a direction that blue ticks headed it's not there yet but that's on the radar but I do think that there's a lot of value in following up through different channels I have seen cases where I've sent people invoices before and they've ended up in spam which you know I guess I'd put it there too but it shouldn't be there but I I have had

40:18emails I've had emails where I've hired somebody and then three or four days later we start working on a project actually Adam Clark is here he did the blue tickets as the website design for blue tick and we started the project and about a week later he emailed me and said hey I emailed you this and I haven't heard back from you I was like wait I and I went in my email and the email from him to me had ended up in spam and this is a week after I'd hire him so you know there's that disconnect there like you don't know unless you send the follow-up email so clearly if

40:45I'm sent me the follow-up email but he didn't use blue tick so all right if we have more questions there's like two more but I think let's end it here and if you want to get Mike after you can do that I'm just a schedule Nazi I'm sorry everyone can we thank Mike for his time [Applause]