Totally Professional Support Podcast

Totally Professional Support Podcast 001   Sonia Caprari and Chris Dabbs CHRIS: Well hello there and welcome to Totally Professional Support’s first podcast ever! My name is Chris Dabbs and I will kind of be your host and with me I’ve got Sonia Caprari, say hello Sonia. SONIA: Hello. CHRIS: Hello. I’ve got Sonia Caprari who is basically the person for Totally Professional Support who deals with all sorts of things and helps lots of small businesses to be able to accomplish their administration tasks properly. So I’m sure I didn’t do you justice there Sonia so do you want to explain exactly what Totally Professional Support does? SONIA: Yes I will. I will start by saying that I’m a virtual assistant and a lot of people as soon as you say that sort of go, “Huh, what does that mean?” CHRIS: Exactly, what does it mean? SONIA: Well I can provide you with administrative support sat at my home office so I don’t have to come to your office, I can do everything that needs to be done from my desk at home. CHRIS: So hang on a second, so I am an employer and I need some – well obviously you will go into what sort of administration tasks you perform – but I need some whatever done and you will be able to do that for me from your own office and not have to come to my office. How does that work? SONIA: There are so many things online now, the software doesn’t really get installed on your computer at work, it can all be done remotely. So that’s how I manage to work from home because all my customers use software that I can access from anywhere. CHRIS: So what sort of software are you talking about there? SONIA: Well predominantly I use email management software which means… CHRIS: So like…sorry, is that like Outlook and things like that? SONIA: No Outlook is completely different. Email management software such as Mail Chimp and A-Webber or Constant Contact, they are the three systems that I can use. And what we do is we use them to send out bulk emails, so things like newsletters, people do e-zines, they send out reference emails or emails that they want their customers to read that contain information that is useful to them. And obviously sending out offers, high value gifts – things like that so you’re engaging with your client, you’re engaging with your customer on a constant basis. CHRIS: Okay, so what you’re saying is like…I guess it’s sending out newsletters to your client base. SONIA: Yes. CHRIS: Oh right. So when I get a, I don’t know, an email from Microsoft or something saying that I subscribe to Microsoft products, would I like to buy another product or we’ve had a change in a product or something like that; they send that out to tens of thousands of people I guess and you manage that for other companies. SONIA: Yes I do, that’s exactly it yes. CHRIS: That would be useful; I think I could do with a service like that actually, to be fair. I’ve got loads of clients and I hardly ever email them properly and that’s completely due to lack of time. SONIA: Well…oh sorry. I was going to say that this is the problem that most people have, it’s a lack of time to collate the information, to get your emails in one place and then to be able to sit down on a regular basis and work out what you’re actually going to send to your customers – so what is it that they want to read from you. There’s a fine line between bombarding them with information and being there on the outskirts so if they ever need you they remember who you are. CHRIS: I think that’s one of the problems, I mean i unsubscribe – I guess this is the kind of thing you are talking about as well about mailing lists – is that I unsubscribe from so many emailing lists because I get three or four emails a day from some people. And I suppose that is not something that you would become involved with I guess that is your client. Okay, let’s have a chat then about how your particular email services or your email management services have helped people. I mean I’ve looked at your explainer video as I say the one that is on your website, which is really great by the way, it just looks so cute. Looking through all the services, you talk about Mail Chimp which you mentioned earlier on, so what happens with that then? I mean so I would, as an employer, would say to you, “First of all here is my account details, you can log in there” and what happens from there? SONIA: Well I can have a login as the client or I actually do have my own Mail Chimp account, I can actually go into the clients email account and set me up as part of their account. So I don’t actually have to log into their own specific account all the time, I can actually access their account through my own. CHRIS: Okay, like a management account or something. SONIA: Yes so you don’t have to leave out passwords and things, especially in my case, if I have another VA that’s working for me I don’t want to give my client’s details to her so I set her up in a different way through her own mail chimp system and therefore she never sees the client’s password. CHRIS: That was a question I was going to ask because you know the privacy of all of these email accounts is paramount, isn’t it, because isn’t there a problem with data protection or something like that? SONIA: Yes you want to make sure that, if you have people working for you, you protect your client and make sure your client’s customers – your clients information – is well protected. CHRIS: Yes I think the penalties, if I remember correctly, for letting your information leak are quite severe nowadays aren’t they? SONIA: Yes. And Mail Chip has a policy anyway that anybody on a list should be there because at some point they’ve given you permission to be on that list, you can’t just spam people. CHRIS: Exactly. So the list, if I remember correctly, whenever I’ve signed up for things I put in my email address and that sort of stuff and then the system – whatever system it is I guess – sends me an email to verify that I have actually requested to be part of that mailing list. SONIA: Yes, Mail Chimp doesn’t actually do that, A-Webber does but Mail Chimp doesn’t. CHRIS: Oh okay, does it not? SONIA: No, Mail Chimp actually believes that you have put these people onto a list because at some point they may have subscribed to a product or a service or they may have filled out a lead page and given you their details. So you are clicking a button in Mail Chimp to say, “Yes, I have permission from this person to use their details.” CHRIS: Oh okay. SONIA: But as I said, A-Webber works in a slightly different way and it does send out a confirmation email. CHRIS: Well it would be interesting, for our next podcast perhaps, to talk about the differences between Mail Chimp and A-Webber you say? Is that the other one? SONIA: Yes. CHRIS: …the differences between those and any others that you think are relevant to our listeners. Okay, now I suppose one of the things that I’ve noticed, we’re talking about mailing lists and all that sort of stuff here, is that there’s some big change coming up – immediately I think there is isn’t there? – in terms of being able to use a return address or something complicated like that. What’s all that about? SONIA: What it is is it’s actually taken effect now, I’ve been telling my clients for months to sort out their email address. So what’s happened is that Gmail and Microsoft have made a policy change, which means this policy change affects the deliverability of your emails if you’re using email management software. So for example, if at the moment you have yourcompanyname@gmail.com... CHRIS: So totallyprofessionalsupport@gmail.com? SONIA: Yes, for example. And you use that email address when you set up your list in Mail Chimp or A-Webber – this will be a policy that is going to take effect throughout everything. CHRIS: So InfusionSoft and all those sorts of shopping carts and all that sort of stuff I guess? SONIA: Yes, anything that is sending out bulk emails to people. So if you’re using as I said, totallyprofessionalsupport@gmail.com, what will happen now is that it’s not going to like that email address because all of these domains…I don’t want to say to people it’s not going to work, your email will be delivered to your clients but they can’t guarantee that it will be delivered to every client. This policy changed is called DMARC and what it does is it looks at the email address that it’s coming from and if it’s not coming from a proper domain name, so I have a domain name that is totally professional support, if it’s not coming from that domain name and it’s just coming from a Gmail account or a Hotmail account or a Live account, it looks at that and thinks it could possibly be spam. CHRIS: Okay, why would they think it’s spam? SONIA: Well in reality if you have a company, you’ve set up a business, you’ve got a website, why are you not using an email that has the same branding as your website domain name? Why are you not doing that? So in reality I’ve got a Gmail account but it’s my personal Gmail account, so I use that for personal emails which is fine because sending an email from your own Gmail account is not bulk sending, you’re just sending emails to whoever you’re sending them to. but I am talking about business accounts, I’m talking about people who are sending bulk emails through a particular email management system, the email management system will look at those email addresses and think they’re spam – that is really what it comes down to. CHRIS: Oh okay. So basically, if you use one of these email management systems and you set it up where it is joeblogswidgets @ gmail.com and that is the address that people see in their email – Outlook or whatever it is. When they receive the email it says “From: joeblogswidgets @ gmail.com” the chances are, what you’re saying is Gmail, Microsoft and all those sorts of people, that email that arrives from that address – in other words from a free address like Gmail – is going to be put into the spam folder and therefore you could end up with your clients not receiving your message at all just because of that. SONIA: Absolutely yes because up to now a lot of spam emails have been created, haven’t they, through Gmail accounts or Live accounts or AOL accounts, Yahoo… CHRIS: Hotmail. SONIA: Exactly, how many people have received an email from a friend with a Yahoo account and it turns out to be a virus? So what it’s trying to say is, “Well if you’re running a legitimate business you should have a legitimate email address.” So you cannot now send bulk emails using a free email address that is really what it comes down to. CHRIS: And you can help, obviously, your clients to make sure that they’re not going to fall foul of this new system by auditing their Mail Chimp setup. How would you go about that? SONIA: Well with my current clients obviously I’ve alerted them all months ago to this and slowly, slowly they’ve been changing their email accounts so they’ve actually got a proper domain name email that can be used in Mail Chimp or whatever. If you haven’t done that yet you need to go back to wherever you purchased your domain name because more than likely you’re given a free, or number of free email addresses anyway when you sign up for your domain. And I think the problem people have is they don’t understand this bit when they set up their website so they end up going to Gmail or somewhere, creating an email account because it’s much easier than doing it through their actual domain provider. CHRIS: Yes I know what you mean because obviously putting in all the settings and all that sort of stuff can be a real pain in the…well backside really I guess because it can be quite complicated. You’ve got IMAPs and POP3s and all that stuff so I can see why people would go to a free service like Gmail or Hotmail or Live or whatever it is to do that. So I can understand that. But you would be able to guide somebody through setting up their email, what is it, server or an account? SONIA: You need to obviously…I don’t know how many people I’ve spoken to who said, “But I don’t know how to get into my domain” uh well I can’t help you there I’m afraid, if you can’t remember the login and password that is a bit of an issue. CHRIS: That’s true, they would have to go back to their domain supplier and request a new password and stuff. SONIA: Yes they would. But if they don’t want to do this themselves then I could certainly do this for them but they would have to give me their login details so that log into their account and then I can have a look from there to see whether they do have a free email address or whether they have to pay to set one up. CHRIS: So really, this could be pretty much a nightmare couldn’t it for people? SONIA: I think it could if you don’t realize the policy has changed because what will happen is a lot of your emails are going to end up going into spam boxes and your customer will never receive the email. CHRIS: Which of course they’ve slaved and worked really hard to make it engaging through the content, through the design and everything else and then it’s just completely wasted and they’ll be scratching their heads thinking, “Why does no one respond to my emails?” SONIA: Well yes and I am going to start looking at people’s stats over the next month, this has only taken effect within the last week, so in the next couple of months I will have a look at that for my current clients and see whether it has gone down with the people that haven’t changed their email addresses yet. CHRIS: So you can actually check out the response rate and the open rate… SONIA: You can see who’s read them, you can see whether they’ve clicked them – there is a little bit of data you can collect from that. Looking at what we’ve done already and looking at what will happen after the first of July it will be interesting to see where the customers have changed their email addresses versus the customers that haven’t changed their email addresses. CHRIS: Yes absolutely. So what is this called again, DMARC? SONIA: It’s called DMARC; the point of it is that…a lot of providers did this a while ago, so people like Hotmail it did actually happen a while ago. It’s Gmail and Microsoft, the two biggest, who have now said, “Right, that’s it” 30th of June it actually to effect. And that’s it, it’s done, it’s happened. CHRIS: Right. And all of this is to stop people from sending spam out really because, as you said before, it’s easy to pick up a Gmail address, easy to setup an account of this, easy to pick up a mailing list of people – which you shouldn’t be doing of course, really you shouldn’t be using any old email list, you should have people who’ve subscribed to your own list – and then they just send out lots and lots of spam, millions of emails a day. SONIA: If you look at your own inbox, your spam box, and I look at mine, I can see the amount of rubbish that goes in there. And unfortunately sometimes people do have a free email account, you don’t receive their emails and the reason for that is because they are being thrown in the spam box, especially if they’ve sent a lot out in the course of day it’s quite feasible for them to end up in a spam box or be stopped because of maybe an attachment that’s in it or something that has been put into the email. So you have to be aware that it’s all very well and good having a free email account but I would only use that now for personal use. If you have a business you should be using your branding for sending out emails so people can recognize you instantly. CHRIS: And actually if you think about it I guess this will help people to understand the implications of your emails being marked as spam and what you can do about that as well. Is that something that you can help people with? So in other words designing their text in their emails and their subjects for the email, which I think also has an impact on this stuff doesn’t it? You know, so that it’s not picked up as spam by whichever email client someone’s using like Outlook or Outlook Express or whatever. Can you help them with that? To make sure that it’s all friendly for the email clients? SONIA: Of course yes. We do try to put relevant subject lines in and not ones that are going to cause an issue. CHRIS: So what sort of ones would cause an issue? I mean I always think that if you see an email that says “Open this!” or “Watch that!” or “This will be great” or something like that, they’re always going to be picked up as spam because who would normally write an email like that? And who would normally put the subject like that? I think that would be a bit strange wouldn’t it? Am I right in thinking that or are those things okay? SONIA: I usually say to my clients if you’re going to use a subject line with such a big exclamation mark at the end of it like “Open now!”, then you should maybe follow that up with the name of your company or you start the subject line with your company name and then you put “Open this now!” CHRIS: So that would make it easier…that would make it more sensible, or sorry, the system would look at it and think, “Okay well that’s probably real because why would there be that name in there.” SONIA: I understand why people want to use a subject line that has that impact because you’re hoping that the person that receives it will actually open it, but yes I think that the subject line is important. CHRIS: Okay, so let’s have a think about exactly how you can help your clients or potential clients or existing clients or whatever, to make sure that their emails aren’t being wasted. You know I know from my own points of view, I work very hard to create my mailing list, I make sure my website’s good, I make sure that all the communication that I send out is interesting and people join my mailing list because they want to know more about me, they want to know about the services I offer and it’s hard. You build up all of these people one by one and then this DMARC comes along and potentially throws all of that out of the window just over one simple mistake that I could make. So can you explain how your system, or sorry, the Totally Professional Support’s system would make sure that that doesn’t happen for somebody? Does that make sense? SONIA: Yes it does. What you need to do is you need to login to your email management software and you’re going to have to make some changes to your lists. CHRIS: This is in Mail Chimp or A-Webber or something right? SONIA: Yes because as you’ve set a list up and you’ve added subscribers to it over a period of time, your list will already have the email address that it’s going to be sent from. So if you need to change your email address because of this DMARC process then you need to go to every single one of your lists and change the email address to a new email address that is part of your branding. So don’t forget, you need to go and log in to your email service provider and check to see whether you have a free email account that you can actually create yourself an email account if you don’t have one already. CHRIS: Based on my domain name already? SONIA: Yes, based on your domain name already. And then once you’ve done all that you can then go into Mail Chimp or A-Webber and change the email address from the old one to the new one. CHRIS: What happens if I haven’t got time for that? Can you do that for me? SONIA: Of course I can, of course, just give me a call. CHRIS: See now this is the power of a virtual assistant because I can call you, you don’t have to come to my office to do all this do you? You can do it from where you are you said earlier on. SONIA: I can, I can do it sat at my desk. CHRIS: And not in my office so that’s a good thing. So basically I save, I’ve got to think of all this from an employer’s point of view; I save money on your travelling, I save money on having a desk space for you to use whenever you come in and there are all sorts of things. And of course, because you’re a contractor, I would also save on any employment costs as well – PAYE, that sort of thing, insurance costs and things. SONIA: Exactly CHRIS: Alright, okay. And how do you charge? Do you charge like hourly or weekly? How does that work? SONIA: I can charge hourly, it depends on the job that I am being asked to do. Most of my customers are on retainer packages which means they buy a package of hours from me and that makes it a little bit cheaper for them to use me. CHRIS: That’s useful I guess, but also, if someone’s away on holiday or sick or something like that and their tasks need to be covered – and I suppose depending on what your skillset is – you could cover those tasks. SONIA: Yes definitely. CHRIS: Oh that’s interesting. I have to talk to you about some other bits and pieces; social media management I think is something that really is something that causes me a lot of problems because there is so much of that social media that needs to be managed in terms of Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus and Pinterest and whichever other ones there are. But is that another service that you guys provide? Please say yes! SONIA: It’s certainly something we can help you with yes. CHRIS: Excellent. Okay well Sonia I tell you what, tell people how they can contact you – you know your telephone numbers and emails and all that sort of stuff – and we’ll go from there. SONIA: If you want to email me its sonia@totallyprofessionalsupport.co.uk, my website is the same www.totallyprofessionalsupport.co.uk, my mobile number is 07526 992 184 if you want to call me. CHRIS: Fantastic. And I guess that if people go to www.totallyprofessionalsupport.co.uk they can sign up for your mailing list so they can get more details and obviously be told when your podcasts are coming out and so that they can subscribe to those. SONIA: That’s right yes. CHRIS: Well everyone thanks very much for listening and we hope that the DMARC system is now completely explained to you. It’s quite an important thing if you want your emails to get through to your clients or potential customers that you fought so hard to build up in your mailing list. You really need to make sure that you’ve changed your from email address from a free one that you may have set it up with. So in other words bill @ gmail.com or fred or bellinda or lucy or whatever @ gmail.com, change it from that and change it to your own domain name’s email address. So in other words change it to bill @ totallyprofessionalsupport.co.uk, otherwise you run the risk of your emails not being delivered to your recipients and that can’t be a good thing. Now Sonia I hope I got that right, is that right? SONIA: You did, yes you did. CHRIS: Hey I’ve learned something, fantastic. And also, the thing I’ve learned is that if I need any help with administration tasks, you guys are the people to call. Okay so thanks very much for that, as I said, my name is Chris Dabbs and that was Sonia Caprari from Totally Professional Support and this is Totally Professional Support’s first podcast. Join us for Sonia’s next podcast where she’s going to be looking at something else that’s really relevant to small businesses and how they can really push forward their marketing by using a virtual assistant like Totally Professional Support. So thanks very much Sonia, is there anything you want to add at the end? SONIA: No thank you. CHRIS: Okay, well thanks very much and bye-bye. SONIA: Bye-bye. www.totallyprofessionalsupport.co.uk www.thepodcaststudio.co.uk