If your email list is shrinking faster than it’s growing – or people stop opening your emails after just a few weeks – it’s not your imagination. Email marketing has fundamentally changed, and most practices are unknowingly working against the inbox instead of with it.
In this episode of the Health and Wellness Marketing Show, I was joined by Evan Samurin, world-class email deliverability expert and co-founder of EmailSmart, to unpack what it really takes to get emails delivered, opened, and engaged with in 2026.
This conversation goes far beyond technical fixes. Evan explains why inbox placement is driven by human behavior, not hacks – and how trust, relevance, and engagement now determine whether your emails land in the inbox, promotions tab, or spam. If email used to work for you but feels harder than ever, this episode will clarify exactly why – and what to do next.
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Welcome to the health and wellness Marketing Show, the podcast dedicated to helping health and wellness practitioners elevate their brand, grow their impact and make more profit in their practice, hosted by Uli Iserloh, this show draws on his 20 plus years of experience in business strategy, branding and digital marketing to equip you with the right strategies, systems and support.
My email list is shrinking faster than I can grow it. People stop opening my emails after 45 to 60 days. It used to be 18 to 24 months. I'm publishing more content than ever, but engagement is down. Is this email deliverability? Is it content fatigue? Is it both? I'm super excited to welcome Evan Samarin, world class email deliverability expert, and one of big boost strategic partners on really everything regarding email marketing.
And Evan is the co founder of email smart helping businesses turn their email list into reliable profit engines, and with more than a decade of experience, Evan is really the go to guy for special fixing, inboxing issues, storing email reputation and uncovering the hidden revenue most companies and practitioners leave On the table. So Evan, welcome to the show.
Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to see you. It's like I'm meeting you for the first time, every time, even though you and I are constantly on calls with clients, and my wife always says you're the dude that I have a man crush on, because I know I really love what you do, how you help clinics get out of the email spam filters. So let's start the show with when a practice owner says, my email marketing isn't working like it used to.
What do you see as the top three root causes historically and maybe even more specifically, throughout 2025 oh gosh. I mean, there's where to begin. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, you know, and deliverability isn't a word. It's funny because it's what I do, but it's not a word I love is because it creates a lot of confusion. Most people don't know what deliverability is. They don't understand it. If they do, they have some lots of misconceptions.
So I think one of the big core problems there's this misconception around and what email deliverability is and who's responsible. The starting point is realizing that it doesn't matter so much what tool you're using today, if you're using a good quality tool, the impact of that tool is not massive. Now, there's a little asterisk there. Things can go crazy sometimes, but generally speaking, it's not the tool anymore. It's about you as a sender, and it's all about reputation.
And what always got me Oli is that, you know, when you talk to businesses about the reputation, we've got all our reviews. We're monitoring everything, because people's reviews is a reflection of how you are as a provider. Well, in the world of email, there's reputation, and the reputation is all based on how you are as a sender. So when you start looking at things, we people aren't looking at it that way. They think, Oh, my platform that handles deliverability, all I have to do is write messages and they'll make it well, that's not the case.
So that's the first piece. The second piece is, there's a lot of changes that have happened in email in the last two years. Really strange. And I know a lot of people aren't going to believe this, but for the first time in the history of email, the big four, which is Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple, are all following the same rules and guidelines. They are all actually following this aim things, and that never happened before. They weight things differently in their algorithms, so the filtering is still a little bit different, but they're all looking at the same things.
And one of the biggest mistakes a lot of businesses are making is with authentication. It's one of those core fundamental components of things, and all of the mailbox providers, and when I say mailbox providers, that's Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc, they require your authentication, and if you don't have it set up properly, it's kind of like trying to board a plane and your boarding pass says one name and your IP says another. And if those things aren't the same, they're not letting you on the plane. Authentication works the same way.
Now there's three authentication protocols that you have to have. We're not going to dive into them today, but if they're not set up properly, for every system that you send email froms you're going to have spam issues. So I literally just had a client today. They just signed up. They came to me. They didn't even talk to me. They just paid me like your reputation precedes you. Please go. You. And they're like, we're switching our system because everything's going to spam for the last nine months now, and it's just the platforms horrible.
And it wasn't the platform they didn't have DMARC set up, which is one of the three protocols. And it's kind of like, remember back in the day, you'd go into a restaurant, you see the sign, no shirt, no shoes, no service, no authentication, no service, and that's what hit it. I love those analogies because it's like so obvious. And again, these are some of the things that are really by now, the basics of 15% of email inbox, deliverability, that's technical.
And for the rest of this episode, we're really going to talk about the other 85% what's the behavioral the psychology aspect? You're totally geeking out. But just to be complete, in 2026 What does getting into the inbox really mean? And one of the most common reasons a legitimate practice ends up in promotions or spam. And I think you taught me something that years ago, people thought that there is sort of one spam filter for Google and one spam filter for Microsoft.
And what you taught me is that every inbox has its own spam filter that's really based on how they interact with the inbox. So there is no one spam filter for Google, Apple, etc. It's like billions. And so you can't play cat and mouse and try to game the systems. No, you have to practice good foundations.
You do, and that's it's almost like there's a few tiers of things that you have to do, because math and email funnels. When it goes to an inbox, and there's really, once you hit send, there's two checkpoints an email goes through.
First one is, are they going to accept the email or reject it? And that's looking at authentication. It's looking at your overall reputation, and that's what kind of gets you in the door. Then once you're in the door, where in that in that mailbox, are you got a land now, predominantly you've got your inboxes, and I'm going to talk about that in a second. And I say inboxes as plural purposely, so you've got your inboxes or you got your spam folder.
Again, they're looking at authentication. They're looking at your reputation, they're looking at your content. They're looking at where you're linking to. One of the big things that drives your reputation is are the people you're mailing interacting with your emails or not, and if they're not interacting with your emails, it's an interesting phenomenon. The Mailbox providers and the spam filters. If you mail someone, let's say you send them 10 emails in a row, and they don't interact with you. The spam filters see that as, ooh, my user doesn't like this email.
They're not engaging with it. They consider that spam now, they don't consider it a spam complaint, but that AI filters job is to keep things in front of you so you can be focused in your inbox. So it's watching your behaviors. It's watching what you interact with, how you interact with things, and it moves things dynamically based on that. So interaction is key. There's positive interactions and there's negative interactions, and you have to manage that level of engagement, because, if you're not more emails go to the spam folder, more emails that go to the spam folder, more negative signals go to the to go to the main reputation, and then everything tanks.
So what's what's weird, though, is in 2020 late, I see now, and into 2026 getting to the inbox is easy. Driving interaction from the inbox is where things are a challenge. And before we talk about that, I want to go back to the word inboxes. And now, when I say inboxes, I'm not talking about three or four different email boxes. Talking about there's an inbox that has a primary folder, a promotions folder, dates folder, a social folder, some of its other depending on what mailbox you use, all of the main providers have different categories in the inbox.
Here's your Newsflash, all of those categories are the inbox. Promotions folder is not a punishment. It doesn't hide things. So if you look at a 24 hour window from send, the primary tab, which everyone thinks is the most important place to be, has a 22% average open rate, read rate. Commotions tab is 19 to 20% read rate. So not that different, really. The Dates tab is 28% read rate in first 24 hours. So the tab is actually getting you more engagement.
You. Now here's where it gets even more interesting, and I'm trying to not go too deep in stats, but only 50% of users actually have Gmail tabs enabled, only 50% so the people that have it enabled want it enabled. They want promotional emails to go to promotions. Now, as a business owner, I want front and center, but you know, what was that song Rolling Stones? You can't always get what you want, but you'll get what you need. And that's the mindset you got to be in. And the data backs it up.
So when you look at a seven day window from an email send, the promotions tab actually outperforms from a click perspective, the primary tab and in wider testing, higher revenues are generated from emails that landed in promotions than that landed in the primary inbox, because the people that are looking for the specials and the deals, that's where they look now, is it something that in the email signature, if it says unsubscribe here and the gmails of the world the mailbox providers, is that what they use to direct something into a promotions folder? Or is it really the content of the email?
It's the content of the email based on how that user has interacted with emails that looked like that, whether it be from you or from someone else. So we were talking earlier, and you're like, you were bringing up an example from someone. You're like, I've seen that content from hundreds and 1000s of other providers out there. There's no difference. Well, Google sees that every time an email set, it leaves a digital fingerprint behind.
So if it sees things that it's seeing elsewhere, it associates with that and treats it in a similar way. That's why having your own creative building your own content, is so key, and there's some really big clues to that and things that you really need to be looking at. So the main point I wanted to make here is there's a lot of people that worry about the tab that they land in. Got it that is the inbox, and that's where you want to be. And promotions is not a death sentence.
There are, there's lots of companies out there that claim to be able to cheat the system. Systems don't like it when you try and cheat them. I live in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has the little black book that gamblers don't want to be in, and because if you're in that black book, you're not getting in anywhere. And email works the same way. So when you try and game the email system, like some of these people promote, it may work in the very, very, very short term, but if you do it more than once or twice, it's going to have negative effects carry over and actually do more harm in the long term than they do any sort of good.
So don't game it. And if you want to get out of the inbox, you have to write your way out of the inbox. It comes down to how you're writing your emails. If your emails are all, buy my stuff. Buy my stuff. Click this link. Do this, download this, go this. That's a promotional mail. Sounds like a duck, looks like a duck. It quacks like a duck, and they're going to treat it like a duck. So you can shift your thinking about how you're writing emails. Be more conversational with your emails keep them shorter and sweeter.
I was on a call with was it the Yahoo postmasters, and they were talking about the length of email and driving engagement. Their sweet spot is between 100 and 150 words that that length of email drives the most engagement out of everything that they receive and and track now, I love what you put out so far, and you obviously alluded to that email deliverability is shaped by human behavior. So can we pivot into that? What behavior signals are email service providers watching that most practice owners don't even realize they're sending and maybe related to this.
Let's talk about, why do people emotionally check out so much faster now than maybe two or three years ago? I mean, you've been in this business for 15 plus years, so you know, you've seen it all from the good old timeI had hair at one point, so yeah, why do people check out so much faster? And what is it the kind of signals that when you write an email you're unconsciously sending to the email service providers that you know shape where you end up? Gotcha?
Well, I think I'm gonna amend that last bit. It's it's not what are the things that you're doing that makes the email provider check out. It's what are the things that you're doing that makes user check out, because the user checking out is what drives the email providers to check out. So it's all about the user. There's a few things to it. Number one, email is dramatically changed. Businesses have dramatically changed, and the way people are buying.
Things have dramatically changed, and the way people can find data today has dramatically changed. So number one, covid really messed up a lot of things for everybody in a lot of ways. And when covid, Business got very transactional, people's why people would make decisions changed, and it was about where can I solve a problem at the best price? Business got very transactional, and as covid has cleared up for what it was, business decisions have shifted again.
And it's not just where can I solve my problem at the best price, it's more now I want to do business with people that I feel like I know, that I like and that I trust, and if you look at most people's marketing, it is not building those three things. So there's really three pillars that you've got to pay attention to with your email today, and it's trust, relevance and engagement. Those are the big things. And a lot of that comes down to, how are you segmenting your lists?
Are you sending the right message to the right people? If you're a healthcare clinic, and you've got people that come to you for weight loss, and you've got people, let's say, that come to you for like, Botox injections, things like that. The people that are coming to you for weight loss probably don't want to hear about your Botox injections. But most businesses aren't dividing their database. They're not sending relevant information to the right people, and because of that lack of relevance, people tune out.
You look at the world today, look what's going on in society, the cancel culture. Cancel culture is very real. It is a very quick decision people make, and they're not always making it based on facts. They're making it on what they see. So we see people getting canceled for fake news all the time. Well, do you think if you send an email that someone reads that has absolutely no bearing on them whatsoever, they're not going to stay with you.
They're not going to look at that email and go, Oh, that's relevant to me. I'm going to I'm going to interact with that. If they're not interacting with it, they're going to go, oh, that's just noise. And then psychologically in their brain, they are now associating your brand with noise. So the next time an email comes through, they might not be as open to checking it as they would before. So how much of this list fatigue is AI content, sameness that, oh, I've seen this before, and how much is just overall attention overload that people are now inundated with so much content, whether it's in social media or email. What do you see among your clients?
It's a little bit of both. You've got to stand out, which is why relationship building is so key. I had a call with a client. She works with women who are having pelvic floor issues, and she was talking about her program, and I'm like, Listen, you can't just solve the problem. It's not just about that, because I can go on chat GPT right now, and I literally did this exercise with her. Says, I am a 55 year old woman who is having incontinence and intimacy issues, and I need to strengthen my pelvic floor.
Can you create a 30 day workout plan for me to help strengthen my pelvic floor to solve those symptoms, and in three minutes, I had a 30 day workout plan to solve a problem. It's easy. Information is easily accessible. It's question of, Do they like you and do they trust you? If they like you and trust you. They'll go with you. They don't they can just go online now. So to your point, AI is impacting it's impacted search.
You got to change the way we go for that. It's changed the way people consume things. So we have to stand out. And again, the standout you really have two choices. Are you going to stand out because you're discounting and you're pricing yourself down to attract them? Or are you working on a relationship with people? Build the relationship that is the key relationships staying relevant. If you are building a relationship, you're providing relevance, you're going to drive engagement high engagement drives more trust you sending the right messages to the right people drives more trust with the brand.
So we have to look at, how do we build trust, relevance and engage with the individual, and then what does that impact to the mailbox providers for our reputation? So it all interconnects those three pillars, you cannot miss one, because if you've got trust and engagement, without relevance, you're going to lose the trust, which will then drop the engagement. If you've got relevance, you have engagement, but you haven't established a level of trust with people yet they're not going to take an action. So it all connects.
Is that no answer that for you that makes total sense, and the thing that comes up for me, and what I observe, is that health content is evergreen. So how do you keep it interesting week after week? How do you actually foster trust, building relationships that then drives engagement? Because my observation is, in 2025 a lot of rank and file practitioners have really up leveled their content marketing. They're now using AI to create content. But I think what they inadvertently did is they looked at the 2020 playbook, or the pre pandemic playbook.
Hey, let's emulate Dr Mark Hyman stuff. We just replicate that. That's what they're put out. And all I'm getting in my email inbox is, like, good, solid, robust information, but it's educational only. It's not necessarily building trust. It's not building relationships. And so this is why it feels so interchangeable. And I assume that's the problem when it comes to health, unlike in marketing, you and I, we can talk about the latest changes in marketing, and it's always interesting.
We're always evolving. We're always moving the goalpost. But for somebody that's like in health, they're saying, hey, it's about eating right, sleeping right, etc, when the underlying information doesn't change, what is it that is the differentiator? Well, I think there's a few pieces to it. I think most people are in this constant promotion cycle, like their marketing doesn't change. Oh, it's every three weeks they run the same promotion to the same list, and it eventually hits the point where you're almost marketing like you're you were taught Einstein's the theory of insanity, like Einstein's Einstein's theoretical marketing, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
If someone opts in, you've got to have a good, solid funnel, because there will be people that that convert right off the bat, and then when people stop converting, got to start thinking of it, should they get promoted in the three more weeks when it's right, from a business owner's perspective, like, Well, they didn't buy, but they registered, so they're interested, so I'm going to keep sending it to them until they buy.
Not the case, because if you flip it around and you're wearing the shoes of the person looking help if you're seeing the same thing every three weeks, how are you going to react to that? That's the big question, and that's kind of the big thing. It's like, how would you feel if you read the email that you're sending like, step out of John or Jane, the practice owner, and you're now John or Jane, the person who's struggling with X, trying to achieve y. How would this make feel? And that feel question is the biggest
This is the litmus test I have everyone read through when they're telling me, oh, my content is perfect. Do me a favor. Read that email out loud, and before you do. You are no longer Michael the business owner. You're Michael the prospective patient, yeah. And when they read it out loud, watch their face. Have them look at themselves in the mirror. Watch it, record it, and you'll see them almost cringe many times, like I would never say it like that. That's not right.
That's way too this. It's way too that. So if you don't feel right about it, how do you think someone else is going to feel when I work on content I love to I've got a process that works great for me is I'll write what I want to write, I'll build it in my email program, and I'll send a test to myself, and then I'll walk away, maybe for 20 minutes, maybe for a day, then I come back and I read it out loud, and when I read it out loud, I'm looking for a few things.
Number one, do I stumble on any words? Do I trip on things? If I trip on it, it's poorly written, and it's not going to flow, right? So we want to make sure that there's a flow and there's a continuity to it. But also I look, Does anything make me cringe? Does it? How does it make me feel? And the word feel I'm using very specifically, we there's two parts of the brain that control decisions only. There's our neocorserlombic brain, and then our neocortex.
The neocortex is responsible for language. It's responsible for our rational thought. Our limbic brain is responsible for all of our decision making, but our limbic brain does not have context for language. So when you're reading an email and all of a sudden you kind of like cringe on it. That's a feeling that is the decision center of your brain. Say, in Houston, there's something not right there. Most of the time we don't pay attention to that, and that's how we should. We need to, and for your marketing, got to trigger an emotional response. James Cole.
They're set great in atomic habits, a decision will never happen unless an emotion is triggered. And that is spot on. And that's not psychology. That's biology. It's how the human brain works. So what can you do to your marketing to drive more behavior? And a lot of it is realizing kind of the emotional filters behind every decision. And there's really three emotional filters you got to look at. Number one, relevance is this actually for me? The next is trust.
Do I believe this person has my best interest in mind and then reward. What will I be gaining by it, or what will I be moving away from? See, when it comes to making a decision, if you're relevant and they've got trust, they're making a decision for one of two reasons, to move towards a shiny, happy future, a better place, or away from a problem or a pain. Now, most marketing is towards we're going to take you to a better place.
You're going to wear a size 28 pin. You're going to look down and not see a belly and see your toes, whatever the case may be, and people are moving towards most marketing is very positive. Problem is that's only talking to 20% of people. 80% of people make decisions to move away from problem or a pain, so you've got to sometimes the reward doesn't mean it's a positive or at least positive language, sometimes that reward is moving away from that pain. So relevance, trust, reward is it triggering emotion. And if you're doing those three things, you're going to be in a better place.
So then, if we put on our very practical hat. You look at a blinking cursor on screen. We're putting an email together before the show. We talked a little bit about story led emails. And you said, Hey, that actually worked great in the past. It's not necessarily working great now, or not as well anymore. So what insights do you have that you're saying, hey, what we currently see as we're ending 2025 moving in 26 what type of emails should people write?
Again, we have these general themes of trust, relevance and dealing with these emotional triggers, but from a very practical perspective, when somebody says, okay, don't write these types of emails. Write those types of emails. What would you say there? I think it's utilizing a combination of different things. And think if I was say, hey, storytelling doesn't work at all. That's just not true. Every audience is a little bit different. Let's so let's start there. You got to really know your audience.
You got to know your people. How are they coming in? You might notice, ooh, people who come in through this lead magnet behave one way. People that come in through another, different lead magnet perform another way. I've got one client where people come in and they register for her weekly tips, and then there's another segment of her list, where they've come in through an 81 question quiz. They communicate very differently, and they respond to different types of emails.
Now most businesses aren't looking at it saying, Ooh, I need to have two different emails, one for this segment, one for the other. They're just going one to many, and then wondering why people are disengaging. So the first thing is, identify who you're speaking with, tweak it up. If you're doing all storytelling, people get lost in that. Sometimes. If you're doing all short transactional mails, that's good, but a pattern interrupt works great.
So I've got a lot of people that you utilize. They'll go like depends on how many emails a week they're sending. But let's say they send three emails a week. They'll do two short and sweet and a storytelling. And that storytelling acts as a pattern interrupt and it talks to people differently. I've seen other people where they'll send a longer storytelling email on a Monday and then on Wednesday, for people that didn't click, they send a shorter, more concise, more relational they see.
So you're having that same conversation in different ways. So I wish I can give you that. Here's the silver bullet. There's not a silver bullet because you have to understand how your audience but generally speaking, what I'm seeing shorter works better, more relational, more more casual works better. But it's also kind of shifting. People love to use email to do all the work. Email does the sale. All people go to the landing page for is to buy and can. People aren't spending enough time in email anymore to do that. The average time someone spends in an email today is 8.3 seconds.
That is the average. Only 29% of people that actually open an email are spending more than 29 seconds, or, sorry, 8.3 seconds in it. The majority of people, about 42% are skimming an email. They're spending between three and eight seconds skimming that mail. Do you think they're going to read the story on that? No, they're going to read your CTAs. So your CTA language is really important. They'll look at Do you have any bullet points in that? How is your email formatted? Where do your eyes draw to how do you interact with that?
So there's a lot of things, from a design standpoint, from a formatting standpoint, and then language. What are we doing in our CTAs? A lot of people love the click here, go here, download. Now, that's great for the people that already know they want to do that, but for people that are skimming and may not know, click here for what. What's in it. For me, there's that acronym with them, W, i, i, f, M, what's in it. For me, when you're building your CTAs, you got to think about that. And it's not what's in it for you,
Uli is the sender of email. It's what's in it. For me is the person who's clicking.
What's the value of me taking an action? So instead of click here to download, it's learn how to fall asleep quickly. Yeah, stop. Learn to fight the cravings for hunger. That way, if someone's skimming, ooh, fight hunger cravings. Yeah, I need that, especially after seven o'clock at night, and now you're starting to stand out to people. So there's lots of little formatting things, but shorter and sweeter typically works better.
Bullet points, formatting that brings people's eyes in certain ways do that. Now a lot of people love to do emojis inside of the emails for that I've actually found that to be distracting. So utilizing standard punctuation, standard formatting, bullet points or numbered bullets, 123, that works better than the little emojis got it look. There's obviously a million question I could ask you, and I want to share your goodness, but let's talk about email frequency as one of the other things that affect engagement.
How much is too often, how much is not enough? Inconsistent, etc. And again, I sort of see a whole range. And I see, I would probably argue that people are, by and large, not consistent enough with their frequency. Whatever the frequency is, number one and number two, they're probably not emailing enough to really create recall that again, one email a month is not making you is not helping with relatability, not helping with relationship, building nothing for us, etc. It's a blip and so share, share.
What you see, what is a good frequency is three emails a week. Is that a sweet spot? And let's wrap
number one, you hit the biggest thing is you got to be consistent. Whatever you do, you need to be consistent for a few reasons. Once you stay front of mind. Two, the mailbox providers, they like consistency. They don't like seeing peaks and valleys and peaks and valleys.
They like seeing consistent behavior. So if you're only mailing 1000 people a week, and that you try to mail 10,000 people a week, red flag, if you're sending once a day for six months or once a week for six months, and now you try to send daily, every day for sick, that's going to raise a flag. So number one, stay consistent. I think people by how to say, Are people sending too much or too little? I think in general, people aren't sending frequently enough.
I'll see businesses that send once a month, that's a fail. You can't be doing that once a week? To me, is at a minimum. Now how much is too much? To me, it really depends on two things. What are the expectations you're setting when people are coming in the list? Because if they're opting in and you're telling them they're opting in for a daily health tip, then you've got the right to send them a daily health tip, but if they just opt in for this webinar or this thing,
and you're not telling them anything, well you're now leaving perception in the eye of the beholder, and they're going to dictate what is enough or too much. Generally speaking, though, I think two to three times a week is really good, as long as you're providing value, as long as you're providing value, say that one more time together as you're providing value, value, and that's the thing. Value builds trust. Trust drives engagement.
See that, yeah, I think, from my perspective, what I see with our clients at big boost. I think the general tendency is to just mail it in and not really think about email, even though email is one of the most powerful marketing channel that you own, versus all the other marketing channels are rented. So this isn't real assets.
It still is rented, though that's the, see, that's the thing people have for a long time. Email was easy. You didn't have to put a lot of thought into it. Send an email, you're going to get a 3% conversion to buy. It was very simple. Emails gotten harder. There's regulations about it. There's consumer behavior has changed, the volume of people sending there's a lot of things that have changed. And I think the reason a lot of people are struggling is because they're not putting the level of attention and detail to it as they do on other things, like, if they're putting out a print ad in a health magazine.
They're putting a lot of care into that because in their mind, that is a big price tag. And I got to hit home with it. Well, your email list is the same way. You're just not looking at it that way. And if you ship that thought and put that level of care and what's attention to it, it's going to be better quality. So your email list isn't just this thing that you built over years, and it's not just this lever you pull to make money.
Email is a relationship building tool. And if you look at it and say, Is this email building the relationship is it truly providing value, and you put a little bit more care and time into it, it's going to perform better, just like everything else that we do, I love it. Great words of wisdom, and obviously our listeners can tell that you deeply care about this. This is what I admire about you that you're so immersed you really want your clients to win, and I know you have a lead magnet that helps people sort of understand where their ability lands, etc, from a technical perspective.
So we'll put that into the show notes. But any final words you have for our listeners, what's, what's of one additional takeaway, or, Oh, geez, that's a big one. I'm sitting here doing one thing I need about the length of the show to figure that out. Well, you think knowing what metrics to look at and to sell, not to self promote, but that's why we created the email tool that we did. There's analytics that you can look at that really drive your health, and it's beyond what your opens or your clicks or your bounces or your unsubscribes or your complaints are. There's a lot more to it that you need to look at.
But the first thing is watching your metrics. If you're below a 30% 40% open rate, you got a problem. If you're less than a 1% click rate, might have you got some stuff going on. If you're at a 2% or higher bounce rate, you got problems going on. If you're if your complaint rates are above point 1% sorry. Point Zero, 1% one complaint per 1000 emails, you've got some problems. So the number saying big thing is, is pay attention. If there's one, pay attention.
Put more care into your email. Look at email is not, oh, it's just this low cost thing I can do for everyone. No, imagine you're sending, you're posting, an app. Put the care into that and watch your metrics. We could do an hour on what metrics are and how to watch them, but look for your consistent lines. I gave you the averages 30 to 40% 1% click. You want to be above those you're at or below. You either have problems. You have areas of opportunity to vast improve. You're at a 257, percent open rate. You got major problems, fix it, pay attention, put care behind it.
Build a relationship. Email was designed to be an extension of interpersonal communication. White email was created back what was it the 60s or 70s, to be an extension of inner community, interpersonal communication. Use it that way. Relationships, that's what I got. Thank you so much. And for those of you that are struggling with email stats, email deliverability, again, this is why Evan is one of our strategic partners at big boost.
He's helped lots of clients get out of the penalty box and improve things, to turn things around. So it's never a lost cause, just with health. And so if you need help in this area, I couldn't vouch for Evan any stronger than he is the man. He's been in this business the big companies hiring him, he's working with top names that he would probably recognize. So if you need help. Reach out to our team, go to the Show page. We have all of Evan's information there.
And finally, Evan, thank you for devoting your time to educating our listeners on everything email. This was super helpful, and we'll probably have you back later in the new year to sort of provide an update. But thank you so much, and for everyone listening. Thank you so much for paying attention and being here on the show. Pleasure, Willie. Thank you. And as much as Willie is singing my praises right now, you're listening to a great one as well.
So we have equal man crushes. So for those of you that follow on this podcast and follow Willie and big boost, stick with them. They're one of the good people out there. So thank you for having me. I'd love to be back and happy holidays. Enjoy, and we'll probably talk next year. Thank you so much. Take care. Awesome.
