This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Pierre Pignault of MailSoar. We’re proud to announce we’ve launched a new website at adultsightbroker.com. This attractive new site is easier to navigate and now includes this podcast inside of it. Check it out at adultsightbroker.com. The first sellers or buyers to us at adultsightbroker and our affiliate program ASB Cash will pay you 20% of our broker commission. This can amount to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Check out ASB Cash.com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on us. Go to thewaronporn.com and check it out. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at adultsightbroker. We’re proud to offer a strip chat white label site that’s growing rapidly. The revenue and profits went up over 50% in 2024. The average user spends 24 minutes on the site. There are 20-30 free signups daily and 40-70 rebills. Most visitors are from the US and other tier 1 countries. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on adultsightbroker.com is Pierre Pignot of MailSore. Pierre thanks for being with us on adultsightbroker.com. I thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. It’s my pleasure. Pierre is a seasoned email deliverability and security expert with over eight years of experience in optimizing email communications. As the CEO and founder of MailSore, he leads a dedicated team that enhances email infrastructure to maximize return on investment for clients worldwide. MailSore’s expertise encompasses auditing email infrastructure, setting up new campaigns and implementing deliverability best practices. The team’s technical proficiency extends to SMTP protocols, mail servers and DNS configurations ensuring optimal email performance and security. Before establishing MailSore, Pierre held various roles in business development and sales across the United States in various startups in California and my home state. These experiences have equipped him with a comprehensive understanding of client management and product market fit. Pierre is also an active contributor to industry discussions, having participated in panels and summits focused on the future of email deliverability. His insights have been featured in various industry publications, reflecting his commitment to enhancing the best email deliverability and security practices. MailSore is a premium email deliverability agency that helps businesses improve their email performance by ensuring their messages land in recipients inboxes instead of spam folders. The company specializes in deliverability audits and optimization, analyzing email performance, identifying issues and improving inbox placement. So Pierre, what key factors determine whether an email lands in the inbox or in that dreaded spam folder? So there’s multiple factors, obviously it’s not a single mechanism to decide, but there’s mostly I would say in 2025 we’re looking at two different really important things, right? You have your technical details which are authentication and these needs to be properly set up. So it’s usually ugly letters like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but they’re now required and they’re fairly simple and once you have them set up, you’re good to go. The most amount of work that we have with our client is going to be on the second kind of important item, which is your sending behavior, right? And it might sound like a little bit weird, but essentially as a sender, you have metrics that your traffic exhibits and the metrics that you’re showing are going to help spam filters make a decision on whether your traffic is relevant or not, whether it’s a good email box, spam, promotion, get blocked. So a lot of the spam filters are essentially becoming behavioral based, more than stable metric based, which means that what we work on with our clients is mostly trying to make sure that they manage the audience, that they manage their own sending behavior in a way that makes sure the spam filter knows their email is wanted and they should put a mailing box. So I mean, what would make an email go to spam generally? Likeable authentication or sending practices or list acquisition practices. Content is a white subject. However, it’s not as important as it’s been depicted in the last few years, right? I always say in 2025, it’s not really about what you send. It’s about who do you send it to? And to give an example, we work with several adult brands, which deliver very explicit contents. These brands have outstanding delivery because the subscribers are very engaged and they manage their audience very carefully. They craft interesting messages. And so when that explicit email gets sent to their audience, it has high open rate, high click rate, very low unsubscribe, very low spam rate, then spam filters recognize that whatever this email is, it’s wanted. And so they’ll place it in main e-bots. So I hope it makes it a little bit more sense into why I say that content is not that much of a big deal. Interesting. And because I had a personal experience with this, I used to send HTML messages all the time. And it was suggested to me by a guy I had working with me to try a text-based message. And it’s been like magic. I send text-based emails now in my newsletters and in my email blasts, and I get such better response and opens. Why is that? So there might be multiple factors playing here. First of all, I don’t know exactly the quality of your HTML. Maybe there was some problems in the rendering. Rendering can affect your open rate. It can also affect your click and your response rate. Sometimes rendering issue can look almost like the delivery issue, but the email is still going to main inbox. It’s simply not rendering properly, so you get less interaction. There’s also a trend, essentially, to try to stand out from other emails by just doing plain text, very concise emails. And that works. We’ve seen e-commerce brand that used to have image-heavy emails, tipped toward more of a plain text, people email content, because they recognize that at the end of the day, you don’t really want people to hang out on your emails. You want people to click on the links and go to pretty landing pages. Essentially, email is a gateway. It’s not necessarily an end place. And so it really depends on the brand. What I’m saying is that whether it’s HTML or plain text, you can deliver an email to main inbox. It’s not preventing you from doing that. However, with your newsletter specifically, again, I’m not aware of the exact factor, but it might have just been a better rendering and simply a better marketing strategy for you to send these simple emails, to stand out from competitors and the rest of the inbox messages. Absolutely. Yes, it’s actually worked really well. How about links? I mean, do the number of links matter? Number of links could potentially matter if we’re talking about excessive amount of links, like 100, 150 links. If you link to questionable places, it could also affect your deliverability. Obviously, you want to make sure that you have the SSL on, like HTTPS destination, you don’t link any HTTP destinations. Links, in my opinion, are more of a factor, especially for Gmail, of whether you’re going to land into main inbox or promotion. I think you might have heard about the tabs that Gmail enabled a few years ago. Like there’s promotion, social, a lot of people that I come across are having issues with their email landing and promotion, but it’s usually a factor of like they have very, very lengthy email, image-based email with a lot of links. And if you simplify, then you go more often to main inbox. Okay. Okay. I’m talking about 10 versus 20, that kind of thing. No, again, if you have reputable links, there should not be any problems we have. We work with several newsletters, which have different, you know, like 30, 40, 50 links in their newsletters. Again, there’s a work to pre-test and kind of like quality ensure these newsletters, but once it’s done, they go to main inbox. Okay. Great. How do internet service providers evaluate sender reputation and what can senders do to maintain a good reputation? It comes down to having the basics. So your SPF record, your DQ record, your DMARC record, like all these kinds of authentication records, it also will boil down to your sending behavior and the way that the given audience from the ISP reacts. So like Gmail will assign you, for example, a reputation based on how their user behaves with your emails. And so again, it’s a case of favoring positive engagements and minimizing negative engagements. So positive engagement, we’re talking about open rates, click rates, and negative engagement is fairly simple. It’s spam rates. Like the spam rates are really what’s killing your program. Yeah. Well, obviously, if the spam rate is high, then you’re going to be in trouble. Well, I mean, what about when you get like returns and things like that where the address is? Yeah, bounces, right? That was a word I was looking for. Thank you. Yeah, bounce back notifications. If there’s a lot of them, could it back to you? So especially in valid email addresses, the reason for it is because if you generate high bounce rates, we’re talking about two, three percent or higher, your traffic looks like you potentially purchase lists with a portion of the list being outdated. And you’re sending out two lists that you purchase and not opt-in contacts. So yes, having a high level of bounce can be detrimental. And we typically see that a lot of the senders needs to do periodic cleanups just to make sure that they keep that rate. Ideally, we look at something below 0.5 to 0.2 percent. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and that comes from SES and all of those people. Yeah, the thresholds are very similar across the industry on what they’re looking for. What are most common mistakes businesses make that will hurt their email deliverability? It’s about their sending behavior, usually. I would see number one businesses that do not segment out non-openers, meaning that if they started their business 10 years ago and they started harvesting emails 10 years ago, then they keep on mailing to that list over and over again, regardless of the engagement. So what happens is it creates a large portion of people not opening their email. It artificially lowers the open rates of their email and spam filters will see low open rates as a problem because it will look like the email is not relevant. So the number one reason why people get to go to spam is lack of dynamic segmentation, lack of audience management. I also would say as a second and third, probably equal, I see sometimes bad advice is given by support. Some of the email service providers out there have outstanding support. Some of them have less than outstanding support. We’ve seen support pushing for dedicated IPs, for example, when it shouldn’t be the case. And then the last one would be, I mean, the last one, the third one or second one, depending on when we look at it, would be migrations. People really handle very poorly migrating from one platform to the other. They don’t necessarily do a warm up. The support of the new platform doesn’t necessarily give all of the information to start properly. So part of our work is also to help people migrate. It’s quite often a mission that we have because people damage their delivery when they do a platform migration. Right. Yeah. I went through all that when I migrated. So I actually had somebody doing this stuff for me and I can’t tell you how much it meant to have that kind of help. I didn’t know you at the time, but I had an individual that did this and had a very high cost and it worked out extremely well for us. So what do you think the best way is you were talking about somebody emailing the same people that they emailed 10 years ago? What’s the best way to manage that list or scrub that list on an ongoing basis? It’s a simple mathematical calculation. Your healthy email program will typically exhibit open rates higher than 35 or 40% unique open rates. Open subscribe rates will typically be below 0.5%. Spam rates will be minimal, like about 0.1% on average. So the idea is to segment your list based on recent open to make sure that you meet this kind of mathematical constraint. It’s essentially an equation. You want the highest possible, you want the widest possible audience while making sure that open rates are above 35%, unsubscribe rates will be below 0.5% and spam rates are minimal. So typically what we do is we start by segmenting the list like 120 days opener, six months opener, something like this. We see what kind of metric we get and then based on these metrics, either we restrict or we widen the segment. The point is we want to get to what we call the sunsetting point, which is the place where your audience become too disengaged for you to reach out to them as often as you do with your more engaged audience. So you define that kind of reachable audience. Let’s take your example. For example, you send like, I don’t know, one newsletter per week or something like that. You’re sending that newsletter to your reachable audience once per week. Then after that, you get to your kind of like re-engagement, right? Where you kind of want to get people a chance to reopen the email to click or to do something that shows that they still want to be part of the list. And then after that, if they really don’t show opener, click or any kind of engagement with you, you need to stop mailing them. That’s plain and simple. Like you need to protect the deliverability of your engaged audience by not mailing to your disengaged audience. Interesting. Interesting. So for instance, we send out, I’ll put it exactly how we do it, we send out a newsletter every two weeks and we send out our mail blasts whenever we have a new listing or a new price or whatever. Maybe I would send the new listings to the people who are most engaged and the newsletters to the ones, to those people and also the ones who have been less engaged. It’s difficult to tell you what to do because I haven’t seen your metric, but I mean, is that an example? Yeah, it’s a fair example. The idea is that both for your listing email and your newsletter email, you get above 35% open rates and you get low negative engagement. So unsubscribe and subscribe. As long as you meet this criteria, then what you’re doing is good, right? The question is essentially how far back do you mail people and is there any opportunity for you to mail even further, to have a wider audience and have a slightly better efficiency. However, what we typically see and what’s very, very important and I repeat that to the clients very often is that there’s always an 80/20 thing where like 80% of your revenue or 80% of your email efficiency come from 20% most engaged people. So it’s not worse risking the delivery of your top 20% subscribers just to get like 1% more of disengaged people that maybe will do something. That’s also sometimes where people get in trouble, right? They just try to, like they go too far. They kind of like, they go too far in terms of engagement and then they hurt their delivery. Yeah, I’ve never heard it put that way. That’s awesome. Good to know. Can you explain the importance of authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC and deliverability? Yes, the way I explain it during audit presentation is by taking the example of travel, right? Let’s say you travel to another country. Let’s say you come to France, for example, very good decision, by the way. And when you come to France. If you must say so yourself, right? Exactly. So you come to France, you need to bring a passport and you need to bring some kind of visa or visa maybe. The reason for this is because immigration officer and police officer at the border, they want to understand who are you, what kind of travel history, what kind of criminal history do you have and whether you’re an element that we can let in the country or whether you’re something that we need to take. I’m screwed. You know, take whatever we need to take specific measures for you or anything. Well, that’s why we do the interview online, right? Because we come to it in person. So essentially for an email, it’s the same, right? The SPF and DKIM are going to be the passport and the visa of the email. It helps the receiving server makes proper determination on whether you’re an element that should be let into main box or not. But DKIM especially is very important. DKIM is a cryptographic key that essentially is unique to every sender and that it essentially proves that the emails comes from someone with DNS success, which we assume to be the rightful owner of the domain. Reputation, domain reputation especially is heavily aggregated around the DKIM key. So that’s like basically they’re looking at that key and that’s the way for them to register your travel history and know if they want to let you in or not into their mailbox. Very good. Very good analogy. How do brand indicators for message identification impact email deliverability and brand trust? So you’re talking about Beami, Beami logo in a very short sentence? It doesn’t. It doesn’t impact your deliverability. Beami is a security authentication and it’s kind of a fancy marketing authentication. So Beami requires several things. First of all, and it’s very important, Beami requires a trademark of your logo. Like you need to actually legally own and have a paperwork that says like, hey, I own brand A and the logo that’s associated with brand A. Otherwise you can’t have a Beami certificate. The second thing and it’s also very important is you need high domain reputation and you need a D mark. So you need a security spoofing record in reject. So essentially to get Beami, you need a trademark and you already need really advanced deliverability practices and you need to have high domain reputation. So Beami is not a way to increase your deliverability. Beami is a way to make your email as legitimate as possible when you’re already quite an experienced sender. So it allows you to do two things, right? And you might have seen that on some of the bigger brand emails or even on my emails, I hope, because we have Beami enabled for mail store. It shows the brand, the logo, and it shows that blue little check mark beside the sender that says this sender has verified that they own whatever dot com. Blue check mark. Did you get that from Elon Musk? No, we did not get much. I had to throw that in there. No, no, no. The Beami process is a pain. It’s not a pain. It’s not difficult technically. There’s just some paperwork that’s associated with the Beami where you need to get a VMC verified mark certificate. I cost a little bit of money. So the reason why Beami was created is to make sure that emails from a brand were easy to identify for subscribers. And that this brand was the only one to be able to use the logo and have this blue little check mark. So it’s a security factor. It also became a marketing factor because obviously if your emails are more legitimate, then they get more open and more pleased. We did a study on actually an adult sender that we work with that enabled Beami back in December 2024. And we have seen open rates about 12% higher. So again, not 12% more like the guy didn’t go from 40 to 52%. But essentially he had 40% open rates. He went to like an average of 44 something. That’s still a lot. That’s still a lot. Yeah. And we saw click rates above 8% higher. So again, like 8% of the value, not an 8% increase. That’s still really good. That’s still really good. Out of all of the senders which have enabled Beami, none of them have reverted back to a non-Beami situation. However, as I said, it does require your brand to be trademarked. Some of our clients are still waiting for their trademark. I think in the US it takes a while. Some brands have been waiting for it for a year and a half or two years because the office of trademark is very under a lot of pressure to say the least. And so yeah, but some other countries it’s a little bit faster. Like in France, it will take about three months. Right. What role to, and you alluded to this before. What role to dedicated IPs versus shared IPs play in deliverability? And when should a company consider switching to a dedicated IP? Again, in a very short sentence, it doesn’t. Like you could have very good derivative IP on shared IP. You can have very good derivative IP on dedicated IP. The shared IPs are more tailored toward smaller senders. So, for a dedicated IP, we usually start to potentially recommend it above 400,000 emails per month. And the reason for it, the reason why we need such high volume is because you need to print reputation. You need to actually deliver enough emails to these spam filters that they can actually make a case for you on whether they want you or not. Because if you don’t deliver enough emails to these spam filters, they’re going to make very wobbly decisions. And usually they’re also going to take a lot of precaution. Like if they don’t have enough data on you, they’re going to place you in spam almost preemptively, just because they don’t know you. So, dedicated IPs are for bigger senders that already have established practices on shared IP with good reputation, good derivative IP. The worst, and that’s what I was telling you in one of the reasons why people go to spam, is sometimes people go on dedicated IP. Because they’re running into delivery issues on shared IP, like 99% of the time, when they do that, they crash faster. Because on a shared IP, you’re mixed with a thousand other people. So, whatever bad behavior you have is going to be diluted across other senders. When you’re on dedicated IP, you’re the only one, so you’re very visible. So, the benefits, because there’s some benefits to having a dedicated IP still, like, the benefit that I would see is essentially you don’t have the volatility of a shared IP. Like shared IP pool, they can be good some days, bad some other days, depending on what kind of emails are sent through it. You’re dedicated IP, you’re the only one. So, if, again, if you have really strong video quality, really strong practices, you already have a history of successful email delivery with shared IP, moving on to a dedicated IP can make it a little bit more stable. But I have seen senders with 20 million emails per month, and they’re on shared IP, and they want to stay on shared IP because they’re sending unscrupulous emails, they’re creating spikes of emails, they don’t want the trouble to go to dedicated IP. And they’re very happy on shared IP. But with a shared IP, don’t you risk someone else screwing up your reputation? Email service providers have compliance team. The job of their compliance team is to manage IP pools and especially manage the senders that are assigned to a given IP pool. Their work is to make sure that bad senders that could potentially impact you negatively are not part of the good IP pools. So, you know, they’re protected. The kind of like the basic philosophy is that the most compliant sender will get the best IPs and the non-compliant senders will get worse IPs. Actually, in real life, most like the really non-compliant senders, they sometimes even get permission of service. They just don’t, they’re not able to mail through some SMTPs because they just don’t want them. So, yeah, there’s a compliance team that’s supposedly, you know, depending on the ISP, they’re better than others, but they’re supposedly watching out for you to be to be placed with poor senders. But again, that’s, there’s some flaws into this and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. So, again, like your big senders, you’re already super successful on shared IP. You’re sending a million emails per month, you’re sending regular volume and all that. You want to go to dedicated IP. Yeah, that’s potentially something that we can think of. Got it. Got it. How do engagement metrics such as open and click-through rates influence email placement in inboxes? It’s very simple. If you have a lot of positive engagement, then your emails are seen as relevant by spam filter and they want your email in main inbox. Because at the end of the day, the only job of a spam filter is to make their user happy, which means unwanted emails go to spam, wanted emails go to main inbox. So, positive engagement contributes to making sure spam filter knows that your emails are wanted. Right. What strategies can businesses use to re-engage inactive subscribers? We talked about this a little earlier, without damaging their sender reputation. It’s usually a strategy based on percentage. Let’s say, for example, in your case, you send some newsletter every two weeks. You want to use your newsletter as a re-engagement tool. You want to balance the amount of non-engaged subscribers versus engaged subscribers so that you still meet the number constraint that we talked about. So, for example, 35% open rates. You still want to meet that while targeting as much engaged as possible. So, maybe it’s like an 80/20. Maybe 80% of your audience is going to be your six month openers. And maybe 20% of your audience is going to be people that didn’t open the last six months so that you can re-engage them a little bit. So, that’s one way to try to re-engage your list. The second way is more of a passive automation approach where you set up an automation in your mail system and you define some criteria. For example, to get into this automation, you need to not have an open in the last 365 days. And then you run them through like a one or two step sequence and then you discard them if they don’t open that sequence. That’s one way to do it kind of passively. And again, normally, that should be a fairly low amount of emails if you have a healthy email program. One thing that’s super important, you cannot re-engage anybody if you have the early t-shirts. That’s something we get into this case where they want to re-engage them. Like, yeah, you’re going to spam. Who are you going to re-engage when you’re going to spam? So, step number one is get back to main inbox. Step number two, make sure you have stable segmentation, stable processes, something that essentially works and doesn’t require adjustments every single day. And then step three is use your deliverability to re-engage people which have missed your emails. That’s, yeah, if you mess up that order, it’s not going to be efficient. Yeah, they can’t respond to an email that they don’t get. Yeah, they can’t see and respond. It depends. Not everyone wants responses on their emails. But you can’t re-engage someone by going to spam. It’s just not efficient. Yeah, very true. Not everyone is like me who looks at their spam religiously because you just never know who’s going to end up in spam. I try to be intelligent about it and realize, especially in this industry, that a lot of people are going to go to spam. And you’d hope everyone would do that, but people are busy. And a lot of people don’t even have time for email. So, they’re certainly not going to have time for spam. Yeah, that’s why we get more... So, how should companies warm up a new domain or IP to ensure high deliverability? Two things to look for. A slow increase of volume and targeting a very engaged audience. So, you essentially want to kind of show the best side of yourself as a sender. So, you want to use, for example, your top tier subscribers, your most recent subscribers, the most recent openers. And then, so you want to show the best side of you and you also want to show it slowly. You want to introduce yourself to the spam filter. You don’t want to start and set 100,000 emails on day one. The spam filter is not going to accept 100,000 emails from you because he doesn’t know you. So, you start by sending a couple of hundreds, then a couple of thousands, and then you increase that slowly. So, they get to know you, they get to know that you have amazing traffic because you’re segmenting your audience. And so, you start building up the reputation, you go to main inbox, and you have a health-seeking email program. So, that’s how you need to warm up your email channel. But that’s also how you need to migrate, by the way. When you migrate to another place, essentially, you can take it as like a new warm-up. Yeah, I understand. So, let’s say you’re ending up in spam traps. Okay, what should these people do if they’re hitting them? So, if you have signals showing that your emails are hitting spam traps, it means that you have questionable list hygiene and/or questionable list acquisition. So, you need to do... First of all, I would say you need to do a cleanup of your lists, just to use these tools like Bouncer, Neverbounce, ZeroBounce, all these tools available on the market to run your list and removing valid emails and spam traps. However, it’s very important to note that these tools are never going to be 100% accurate on spam traps. They’re actually going to be very far from 100% accurate. And by the way, most of the spam traps that you hit, you never know about, right? Because they’re not marked, they’re not going to tell you, hey, a spam trap, right? So, first thing, clean your list. Second thing, review your contact acquisition practices. Like, how are you acquiring contacts? Are these 100% obtained? If they’re 100% obtained and you still get a lot of spam traps, do you have a recap chat on your site form? Or are you getting some stupid bot signups? Do you have possibly a live email verification software that essentially prevents people from signing up with invalid emails? So, you shouldn’t hit a lot of spam traps if all of your data is opted in. Most of the cases of hitting spam traps are going to be people with old lists that keep on mailing them, or people that don’t do opt-in, or don’t do only opt-in. They also acquire lists and share lists with partners and stuff like that. So, yeah, list acquisition and clean up, list acquisition review and clean up are going to be the two steps you want to take. Okay. What are the biggest compliance risks related to email marketing and how do regulations like GDPR and Can Spam impact deliverability? So, the question is a bit of marketing, a bit of derivative IT. I’m going to answer on the derivative IT side because I’m notoriously bad at marketing, so I can’t really give the answer on the marketing side. These regulations usually are positive for derivative IT. First of all, spam filter is not a lawyer. He doesn’t actually really care about whether you’re following the local practices or not. What he cares is that you meet the kind of the setting behavior constraint that he wants to see to go to main inbox. That’s it. The second thing is these GDPR and Can Spam and like California, whatever, you know, in the US have specific stuff depending on the state, they usually tell something along the lines of saying like, "Hey, if you didn’t get the permission of this person to mail in, then you shouldn’t mail in," which is good, right? So, these regulations are more going towards forcing email senders to get good quality obtains. So, I think they’re beneficial to derivative IT overall. Okay. How is AI changing the way ISPs filter emails and what should senders do to adapt? AI in email filtering have been around for decades. Maybe I would say 20 years. Well, AI has been around for a long time. Large language models have been made popular by changeGPT and all that, right? But AI has been a thing for the past 20 years. So, what we’re seeing with the AI is really a shift toward more behavioral based filtering and less filtering based on table metrics such as IP reputation, for example, right? Your IT reputation, especially if you’re in a shared IP pool, you don’t fully control that. So, spam filters tend to put the exercise on variables that are really unique to you, like your domain reputation and your domain reputation is built from what? It’s built from the sending behavior and the audience management practices that you have. It’s built from the appreciation that the spam filter has from your emails going to their users. So, yeah, the content built by AI is another thing. It’s not a problem to build content through AI. It doesn’t really penalize you in any way, at least for now. But the real big change is the fact that most models are now able to intake a large amount of behavioral data and make good decisions based on that. Okay. What emerging trends do you see shaping the future of email deliverability in, say, the next three, five years? Well, I think large language models are going to be helpful in giving out basic recommendations and essentially automating the, like, simple level of consulting. We’re already using AI to provide sometimes reports, analysis, and instant feedbacks to some of our clients. I would say that the next also big change, and I don’t know if you saw, but Microsoft actually, like last week, made a bit of an announcement that they were now requiring authentication protocols. And so a big shift is, you know, Gmail, yeah, who did that in 2024, where essentially their policy was no authentication, no entry to the mailbox. And I think most providers in the planet are going to move toward the same model. If you’re not authenticated, you do not get in the main inbox or you do not get at all, even in spam. And then again, like, as I said, the fact that the quality of the behavior analysis of users is going to get only better and better. This is going to make sure that the filtering gets more personalized, right? Which means that based on your behavior, one person might get the email in spam, but one person might get the email in main inbox at the same provider. It’s already kind of the case. Like, if you take someone at Gmail, if you take someone that has placed you in spam, obviously you’re going to go spam. And if you take someone that hasn’t placed you in spam and you have good domain reputation, you’re going to go to the main inbox. But what we start to see as well, is that even without placing the email in spam, if you just haven’t opened the email and they’ve been mailing you like 300 times, Gmail is going to start to say, "Look, I’m going to help you out." And that sender, which you do nothing with, I’m going to start placing you in spam. So, yeah, I believe these are kind of the emerging trends. So, like, better authentication, requirements for authentication, and more behavioral based approach in the way that emails are getting filtered. And for marketers, it also means that your marketing program must be more dynamic, which means, you know, more interest based, more cohort based analysis needs to be on like, "Okay, what kind of interest level do these people have?" And I’m going to mail these, the content that they expect based on their behavior and the interest that I’m assuming that they have. Interesting. So, make it more personalized. Yeah. Okay. Now, if you had one piece of advice to give to a company struggling with their email deliverability, besides call you, what would it be? I would say that it can never hurt to target recent openers. It’s not good. It might not solve the situation, but in many cases, if people just targeted a little bit more and segmented their list a little bit more, they would avoid massive problems. So, that would be my advice. Like, target segment more, and then again, like, if this is becoming like a nightmare, then call an expert, me or someone else, but just call someone that actually does this for a living, because, you know, we do 400 on Xperia, right? So, we see a wide variety of things, and sometimes we see interesting cases, and we’re just going to be a lot more efficient than anyone else. Sure. And since it’s not what you do every day, which has always been my philosophy, when you’re in need of something, hire an expert, I don’t fix my own car, God knows I don’t, my toilet breaks or my sinks clog, I call a plumber. I mean, so I think it’s a matter of your time investments and your skills. It’s like some people have the skills, because email delivery is not rocket science. It’s just a matter of understanding, and some people would be able to fix it, but also their time is better spent doing something else. What they do, you know, doing what they do, doing what they do to make money, and anything that takes away from that, I think is a negative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they can be CEOs, they’re very busy, they can be marketing managers with, you know, amazing, amazing talents at crafting messages and all that. So, I always say to my clients, when we do an audit and when they want to work with us, the last reason why I want you to work with me is because you don’t understand. If you don’t understand, ask me, make me repeat. We’ll write down more recommendations. We’ll make sure that you understand. I don’t want anybody to work with you because you feel like it’s complicated and you don’t understand. I want to work with you because you feel more comfortable having an expert, and you know that your time is spent better doing something else than handling your dirty vanity. Makes sense. Pierre, I’d like to thank you for bringing our guests today on Adult Site Broker Talk, and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. My broker tip today is part 10 of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week, we talked about what information to give a potential buyer and what determines the value of a site. We’ll continue that today. If a site hasn’t been monetized, then it’s all about the amount and the quality of the traffic. If a sale is based on traffic, it will be a multiple of what the traffic would sell for on the open market. What are the sources of traffic? Direct traffic, search engine traffic, and review traffic are the most valuable? Tube traffic, the least valuable. Is the traffic reliable and sustainable? What is the traffic history? In a rare case, the valuation will be based upon revenue. The same factors apply to that as a profit, but of course the valuations will be lower than those of profits. How old is the website? Is the domain a dot com or something else? Dot com is still king. How many inbound links are there? How much staff does it take to run the site? How many email addresses do you have? In the case of a dating site, this is very important. Another factor can be the reverse engineering cost. How much would it cost to build a site from scratch and drive the same amount of traffic to it and how much time would be involved? What is the lifetime value of a customer on the site? Next week, how to buy a website. And next week we’ll be speaking with elite companion, Leijla Foss. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, I’d like to thank my guest Pierre Pignault of MailSoar. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [Music] [Music]
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