{"id":3234,"date":"2017-11-13T13:52:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T13:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/?p=3234"},"modified":"2017-11-13T09:53:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T09:53:26","slug":"ooops-i-screwed-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/ooops-i-screwed-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Ooops… I screwed up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Man, I totally screwed up, and I’ve only been doing it for a decade!<\/em><\/p>\n

You’d think that after ten years experience it’d be hard to make a huge fundamental error.<\/p>\n

But the truth is… sometimes you do.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s because I’ve been a bit ill. Maybe it’s because Max has been a bit ill. Maybe it’s because I was tired, or was thinking about other things.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, the mistake was made, and the good thing is…<\/p>\n

…I made it with my own business.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I sure as heck won’t make it again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So here’s what happened…<\/p>\n

I’ve recently moved SMTP servers for sending emails. An SMTP server is a server that purely sends emails out, it does nothing else.<\/p>\n

The reason for the move is to get a consultant on board who can improve our delivery.<\/p>\n

And everything was going pretty awesome.<\/p>\n

I was getting inbox rates of 80% and sometimes higher!<\/strong><\/p>\n

My emails were going into the inbox on every major ESP (Email Service Provider), including, *gasp*, Microsoft domains.<\/p>\n

But then, whilst helping one of my clients setup a similar service, we realised that the SMTP server should be located in Europe rather than the USA as it significantly increased the speed.<\/p>\n

So we moved it.<\/p>\n

The issue was, how do I check the speed?<\/p>\n

Simple, I think to myself.<\/p>\n

I’ll make a bunch of fake emails and send a couple of blasts to them, which will give me an indication of the speed of send.<\/p>\n

So that’s what I did.<\/p>\n

Idiot!<\/em><\/p>\n

Because here’s what happened next…<\/p>\n

The domain michaelwilding.com got a bad reputation for sending emails to a load of email addresses that don’t exist.<\/p>\n

Which meant my inbox rate went from 80% or higher to 25%.<\/u><\/p>\n

Balls, balls, balls, balls, balls.<\/p>\n

What should I have done?<\/p>\n

I should have made a fake domain, and told the SMTP server to simply discard those messages.<\/p>\n

Which is what I did for my client.<\/p>\n

That means the emails actually never get sent, but we can test the speed. Simple and effective.<\/p>\n

But…\u00a0it was too late for me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now I’m in the process of re-building the reputation of michaelwilding.com.<\/p>\n

My email open rates dropped from nearly 20% to 2%<\/em>, primarily because the domain that has given me the bad reputation is Google, and the majority of my email list is Gmail.<\/p>\n

Balls (again).<\/p>\n

However, here’s the upside…<\/p>\n

It’s mistakes like this that make me good at what I do.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I make them on my own business. They cost me money. Nobody else. Everybody else gets the benefits of my mistakes.<\/p>\n

Ultimately my reputation on Google will repair itself, it’s just going to take a bit of time.<\/p>\n

Which means…\u00a0I need you to click on the ads in this newsletter ten times more than you would normally \ud83d\ude09<\/em><\/p>\n

After all, only a fraction of the people who normally read my newsletters are reading them at the moment.<\/p>\n

Whatever you do, don’t make the same mistake.<\/p>\n

Michael<\/p>\n

P.S. Luckily my primary businesses haven’t been affected and are still getting inbox rates of 80% or higher. Phew.<\/p>\n

P.P.S. I’m going to show you how to send emails from your own host, for a fraction of the cost, and with much better deliverability, than anybody autorepsonder company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man, I totally screwed up, and I’ve only been doing it for a decade!\nYou’d think that after ten years experience it’d be hard to make a huge fundamental error.\nBut the truth is… sometimes you do.\nMaybe it’s because I’ve been a bit ill. Maybe it’s because Max has been a …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,57],"tags":[190],"location":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3234"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=3234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}