Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth How To Increase Email Response Rates About this episode Jay Schwedelson, founder of Subjectline.com, discusses email marketing tactics on the martech podcast. He emphasizes the importance of engaging subject lines, such as starting with numbers, capitalized words, or emojis, which can increase open rates by 20%. He also highlights the need for frequent, relevant emails to avoid spam filters and suggested using first-person call-to-action buttons to boost click-through rates by 25%. Schwedelson advises against relying solely on pop-ups for list building and stresses the value of personalized subject lines based on job functions or company names. He also debunkes the myth that marketers send too many emails, advocating for quality over quantity. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss email marketing tactics. Joining me today is Jay Schwedelson, who is the founder of SubjectLine.com, which is a free, leading subject line rating tool that has tested over 15 million subject lines to help organizations enhance their email marketing. Their credibility stems from being ranked as one of the top 1% websites in the world. And Jay is also the host of Do This, Not That, which is a top 10 marketing podcast in the United States. And today Jay and I are going to answer the question, how can you increase your email response rates? All right. Here's my conversation with Jay Swendelson, the founder and CEO of
1:58 Speaker 04 subjectline.com. Jay, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:02 Speaker 05 I'm excited to be here. I'm a longtime listener, so this is going to be a lot of fun.
2:06 Speaker 04 What took so long, man?
2:07 Speaker 05 I'm lazy. I don't know, but here we are. We made it happen.
2:11 Speaker 04 You do podcasts, I do podcasts, you write emails, I write emails.
2:15 Speaker 05 We're basically related at this point.
2:17 Speaker 04 Hey, come on over. You do Christmas, you do Hanukkah. What's your, what's your thing? We do both.
2:21 Speaker 05 I do everything. I will celebrate any holiday that involves food and me not working because why not?
2:26 Speaker 04 Okay, if you like fried potatoes, come over to my house. They tend to be around every holiday. So we'll do some of that. All right, let's start off the top here. Email marketing. What could be sexier?
2:36 Speaker 05 It is the sexiest thing. Here's my argument as to why email marketing is very sexy. There's no other marketing channel on planet Earth that for relatively no money, basically no money, okay, that you can communicate with your entire audience. You want to go and run a TV ad and spend a boatload of money? That's expensive. You won't reach your audience. You want to run a paid social campaign or an organic social campaign? You'll reach nobody in your network. It will cost you a lot of money. Search is a lot of money. Email is the only game in town to reach your entire audience whenever you want to reach them for no money. That's why it is sexy.
3:07 Speaker 04 I want to fight you. We rely a lot on email marketing. The truth is, I totally quit it all this year. We did cold email for years and years. We started targeting people that were sponsoring Martech conferences and asked them to be on the Martech Podcast as a sponsor. And we would just always cold emails flying around. Hey, you want to start a podcast? We've got a production company. Let's change our subject. The whole deal, this year I quit. I quit. I'm done. I don't do cold emails anymore. I got tired of it. And the truth is, you'll disagree with me, hopefully. I don't think it works anymore. So talk to me about the landscape of email marketing. I am on one end saying, hey, look, we all got to find other ways to reach our target market. I'm assuming you're going to disagree with me. Give me the stated state.
3:52 Speaker 05 So cold email, if that is your primary use of email, then that's not going to work. The world of cold email really is sort of dead because you can't just go and keep pounding and pounding and pounding your database saying, let's have a call, you should buy this for me, you should check this out, you should download this for me. That doesn't work. What does work is knowing that the littlest things that get people to open up emails, to engage with emails and to really leverage your marketing emails, your newsletter emails in a really effective way that is crushing it. And then, once in a while, you sprinkle in that cold email and that recipient has become so attuned, so accustomed to liking your content, thinking of you as a thought leader, loving your brand, that when you sprinkle in that cold email, it actually works.
4:37 Speaker 05 But if your go to market is just pounded with cold emails, that is a losing path entirely.
4:42 Speaker 04 But isn't everything going into the spam filter now? Like, didn't Google make this crazy? Like, you can only send a certain amount of emails? And the prerequisites for showing up actually in somebody's inbox have totally changed over the last year. What's going on with the spam filters?
4:56 Speaker 05 That's really a great topic. A few things, yes, Google changed the rules a little bit. And if you send out garbage and you get a lot of spam complaints, people saying this is spam, then they're going to dump the overwhelming majority of your stuff into the junk folder, into the spam folder, and that's a problem. But here's the game. The weirdest thing about email now, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, the way that you stay in the inbox, as opposed to going to junk folder or spam folder, you actually have to send out a lot of email. This is the irony. People think, oh, email's not working for us, we're sending out too much. And they start sending out less. That's horrible math, and that's not the way it works. People think that the reason you go to the junk folder or spam folder might be because you put the word free in your subject line, or use an emoji, or an exclamation mark in your subject line, or something ridiculous like that. That is information from 10 to 15 years ago.
5:41 Speaker 05 You don't go to the junk or spam folder for the content and the words and the symbols that you're writing. You go to the junk or spam folder if the percentage of people that you're sending email to, if there's not a high enough number of people opening and clicking and interacting with your email. You actually need a lot of engagement, and that is the way that all the receiving email infrastructures, whether it's Outlook, or Gmail, or Comcast, or whatever, that's how Know if you are a sender that they should keep in the inbox. So the irony of email is that you need to send out at least once a week, if not more, to generate enough opens and clicks to actually stay in the inbox. But the game is you need to send out relevant stuff. The problem is, is frequency and relevancy, they're married together. You can't just send out a lot
6:23 Speaker 05 and it be garbage. So it's got to be stuff that is valuable to the person receiving it. They like getting it. They're interacting with it. It's not just these cold solicitations that wind up going to the junk folder and it's total garbage.
6:35 Speaker 04 Stop me if you've heard this one. Your email database is your company's most valuable asset.
6:40 Speaker 05 Yes, I say that all the time.
6:41 Speaker 04 Sound familiar. I actually think I'm quoting you. Thanks for the great podcast. I listen to it all the time.
6:46 Speaker 05 Appreciate it.
6:47 Speaker 04 If you have access to people's email address, if you're collecting them in a logical way, then you've got a valuable asset that you can continue to market to people, but you have the relevance struggle. If you don't have a large enough email inbox, email doesn't seem to be a very relevant channel. So let's kind of like, we're talking to the VPs of marketing here who are like, all right, how do I know what my email relevance is, what the cadence is? Should I be telling my teams, send more, send less? Should I be focusing on collection? Should I be focusing on relevance? Should I be focusing on harvesting email? Let's take a B2B example. I'm a mid-market B2B company. I've got thousands of people that are on my email list.
7:30 Speaker 04 They've been there forever. Who knows if they're still at that company or not? Am I sending more emails? Am I sending less? What am I doing?
7:36 Speaker 05 Well, it's not necessarily by sending more or less. It's what am I sending? So let's back up. I believe that attribution in general in marketing is garbage. It's no longer, oh, I did this search ad. I got this customer from that search ad. Or I did the social post. I got this customer from that social post. Or I sent this email and I got this customer. It is, marketing is surround sound. That you need to be in front of people and they need to think positively about your brand and about whatever it is you're sending out. So when they are in market for your thing, they think of you first. And that's email. What I mean by that is what you are sending out. If you're that mid-market B2B company, you need to have a newsletter. And your newsletter can't be this piece of garbage wallpaper that you check a box that, yeah, we got out our newsletter. Now we got to get out another one next week, which is what everybody does.
8:21 Speaker 04 Hang on, but nobody gives a shit about my newsletter.
8:25 Speaker 05 That's the problem. They should. And here's the thing. If you have an amazing subject line, the subject line said 71% of people are now doing this for CFOs or whatever, and that's your market. And the person will open up, oh, my God, what is it? And then you open up and the headline is, these three new things are the game changers for CFOs. And you have three articles linking to the most important things that CFOs need to know this week. And nowhere in there are you saying, and please sign up for our webinar this week, and please download this other piece of crap that we're promoting this week. No. All you're doing is giving value to those people that you are sending that out to. These are the three most important things you need to know this week. All of a sudden, every time you hit send on that newsletter, all those people in your database are gonna be like, wow, this is
9:07 Speaker 05 really valuable. And then you sprinkle in, and by the way, another email comes in that says, we're doing this thing. You got to check it out. You got to download this guide, check out this webinar. And it's the ability to send out stuff that's not for you, but is for them, with really exciting subject lines, really exciting headlines, short content blocks, get them engaged, and then you get to hit them up. Everyone just follows each other. Like, when you get a webinar invitation, without me, who cares what companies? You know what exactly what it looks like. It's gonna have like, two little circles of random people's heads. You don't know who the hell they are. The VP of whatever company you've never heard of, with some boring button that says, register, a content block that no one's reading with like, 20 lines of text, and no one's gonna react to. We're all following
9:49 Speaker 05 each other like idiots. You just need to step out and do something a little bit different, and that's how you win. I get very excited about this. I could tell. I love it. Hey, one podcaster to another. You're doing great. Keeping the energy. Can I ask you a personal question? Yes, please. How many email newsletters do you actually read? I read a lot. So I probably read on average about 10 a day that I skim. Some of them are like, consumer oriented, like the skim, or the hustle, or morning brew, and things like that. And then again, some nerdy AI ones, email ones, whatever. But I know which ones I read and which ones I don't read. I skip over a lot of garbage ones. So your newsletter is table stakes. You need to have a newsletter. And then you need to also be pumping out other thought leadership along the way.
10:31 Speaker 04 Your personality is dictated by the five people that you're closest to, or some, I don't know, making up stats, but we've all heard some version of that. You're a combination of the closest people to you, five, six, how many ever it is. I feel like there's a similar stat with that with email newsletters. You're the culmination of the three to five email newsletters you actually read. Like, that's the stuff that you spit back out of the world is when you're sitting there with your morning coffee, maybe before your kids come in and try to wake you up. I got the morning brew, I've got my AI newsletter, I've got some sports stuff. What else is there? But I'm not doing a lot of B2B marketing newsletters. Do people actually read these? That's, to me, the big question. We're, we all need this
11:16 Speaker 04 newsletter, and you need to have a newsletter, and you need to stay relevant, and present the relevant thing. But who the hell reads these things?
11:21 Speaker 05 The biggest trend, I think, in newsletters, and email newsletters in general, is not to have the newsletter actually come from the brand. What everybody's really doing, which you should be doing, is having, call it an internal celebrity. Okay, not a real celebrity. Not everyone's going to be Gary Vee, or Seth Godin, or somebody that everybody knows, but an internal celebrity where you build up this persona around somebody in your company. And the newsletter should not come from Salesforce.com. It should not come from Acme.com. That's epically boring. Nobody's really going to open that. Nobody cares, because it doesn't feel like you're connecting with anybody. So the biggest trend is these newsletters, doesn't matter if you're an enterprise company, or a tiny little company, whatever, but it's actually coming from a human. And it could either be the person's name, or
12:02 Speaker 05 it could be Jay from Acme, and literally, you're right, J-A-Y-F-R-O-M-A-C-M-E, in that from name, right? And then you open it up, and it's written in this human tone, as opposed to being written in, oh, there's no person behind this thing. And that's what's really working now, because you feel more connected to it. So, yeah, that actually works really, really well, because people are able to read it and feel like it's not just something in the ether out there that I can't connect with. And if you're not doing that, I think you're leaving a massive tool on the table from an engagement standpoint.
12:36 Speaker 04 So what I'm hearing from you is the marketing strategy here is your newsletter is not your company newsletter. It's a newsletter from an influencer within your organization.
12:45 Speaker 05 A hundred percent. And don't be nervous that that person leaves. Everyone's like, well, I can't do that because the VP or whatever that was coming from, when they leave, that leaves with them. No, nobody cares. You change it from Bill from Acme to Suzie from Acme. And you're like, hey, now it's Suzie and blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone stays excited. Doesn't matter.
13:01 Speaker 04 It's funny. I was going to ask you, who's the influencer? Is it your head of marketing? Is it your CEO? Is it a marketing manager who's responsible for the newsletter? Who's the best personal brand within an organization to use?
13:14 Speaker 05 It really also depends on who you're marketing to and what people believe. So if you are Charles Schwab, no one actually believes that if they get a newsletter from the CEO of Charles Schwab, that that CEO has anything to do with that newsletter. It's just too big of an organization. It feels ridiculous, feels disconnected. Whereas if it's the VP of whatever, you're like, oh, okay, this person's probably really involved with the newsletter. Now, if you're a small company or a 10-person company, it can't be your director of operations because that's really weird. Why do you even have a director of operations if you're a 10-person company? It should come from your CEO or founder or something like that. Or if you have a really dynamic founder, like, for example, the founder of Airbnb, he does a lot of stuff from himself. Everything is from him. He's a celebrity into himself.
13:57 Speaker 05 If you have somebody like that in your org, absolutely. Or if you're like an association, right? A lot of times the executive director, everybody knows that person, the members know that person. You really have to think about who in your org makes the most sense.
14:10 Speaker 04 So all you do is you get some sort of influencer within your organization. You give them a chat GPT prompt, you have them look for a couple of links, they summarize it, and now you got a newsletter. Is it that simple?
14:19 Speaker 05 It's that simple if you want to have a half-baked one. I mean, nice if you added some personality to it, some humanity to it, some real thought to it. Like my own newsletter, okay? We send out this newsletter, it comes from me, it's got marketing tips. And at the end, we add a section called, since you didn't ask. And I literally have stuff in there, what I'm watching, The Real Housewives of New York, I just finished Dune 2. And I don't like double dippers that when I go to a party at somebody's house, it's disgusting. And we put that in every newsletter and we talk about, and I always have that section. And amazingly, we get more of a reaction to that section than anything else we write about the marketing tips. So inserting humanity into whatever you're doing is the world now because AI has created this tidal wave of absolute garbage.
15:04 Speaker 04 I can't let it go. If you dip the carrot into the hummus and you take a bite and you flip the carrot over and you dip the second half of the carrot that hasn't touched, but not the parts that you bit, are you a double dipper?
15:14 Speaker 05 100% unacceptable. I'm gonna tell you why. Because what happens is somebody watches you and they turn their head for a second and they don't see you do the turn of the carrot and they just see you go back in for it and they go, oh my God, that person's disgusting. And then they avoid the hummus because they don't know that you did the slight turn. So you're turning people off even though you think you're doing the right thing. That's my take.
15:35 Speaker 04 I appreciate it. You're not wrong. Yeah, it's a little too hard to track. There's an attribution problem with the double dipping of the carrot.
15:43 Speaker 05 There's always an attribution problem. It's not last touch attribution. That's the thing.
15:47 Speaker 04 You can only have first touch carrot attribution.
15:50 Speaker 05 Exactly right.
15:51 Speaker 04 Let's get back into emails and newsletters. You gotta have a newsletter and then eventually you're gonna put in some sales shtick every once in a while. What to get people attuned into following a newsletter. You gotta have some humanities. What makes it good? You gotta a personal section in there. Talk to me a little bit about subject lines. Nobody's opening without your subject line. What makes it good?
16:10 Speaker 05 Everybody has it backwards in the world when it comes to email. They spend all this time, I got the greatest newsletter. I've got the greatest promotional offer, legal approved, the links are working, whatever. And then it comes to the subject line, oh yeah, what should we make the subject line? They spend three seconds, which is ridiculous because if the email doesn't get opened, who actually cares what's in your email? Now, what should you put in your subject line? Everyone's like, how many characters should it be? Should it be less than this? Nah, it's irrelevant. Here's the story. Nobody actually reads the whole subject line. They don't. You could write Jay's a big loser. At the end of your subject line, nobody would see it because nobody reads the whole thing. What we do is we look at the first few characters and that's how we decide whether or not we want to go further. So literally what you put as the first few characters will change everything. An example,
16:53 Speaker 05 if you put a number to start your subject line, the three pitfalls to avoid, the seven things small business owners need to know, the three hottest fashion trends for the summer, you literally start with a number, your increase in open rate goes up by about 20%, then if you don't. Why? Stands out a little bit when you're doing that social scroll in your inbox, right? It's authoritative. You know you get out of it. Numbers are win. Start your subject line with one to two capitalized words. The word new, each letter is capitalized, N E W, or just in colon. They're all capitalized, whether it's a business or a consumer offer. Again, it makes you stop for a second. You see it and then you read the rest. Emojis work great at the start of your subject line. What you don't want to do is start your subject line with something that's epically boring.
17:37 Speaker 05 That's a boat anchor. So what do a lot of marketers do? Let's say you have a webinar you're promoting. They will literally write the word webinar colon, and then they'll say what it's about. Why don't you write boring colon? In general, you don't want to be promoting the vehicle. You don't want to be promoting webinar, ebook. It's not the vehicle, it's the topic. It's the seven things you need to know, the three most important things, blah, blah, blah. It's not the vehicle and that's where we lose people. Or you write the word reminder to start your subject line. That's like a vomit. So think about the start of your subject line and not just the whole thing. And the other thing you could do also that works so well, which I've been testing this a lot, brackets. Love brackets at the start of your subject line. If consumer or business offer, you put right in there, again, just in or just released.
18:22 Speaker 05 And you put it in brackets, crushes it. And no, nothing you're putting in the subject line, doesn't matter if it's a business or a consumer offer, is the reason you're going to the junk folder or spam folder. About 20% of all email, doesn't matter if you're Salesforce, the NFL, Amazon, Apple, will go to the junk folder or spam folder. And it's not because you put the word free or use an exclamation mark or anything like that. That's information from 1985. And then the last thing is the promotions tab is a good place to go, not a bad place to go. And stop trying to get out of it or even worry about.
18:54 Speaker 04 I want to hear more about the last one, the promotion tab. It seems like a horrible place to me. It's who opts in to be like, you know what? I feel like I want to get sold to. Somebody quick, tell me all the offers. Who goes to the promotion tab?
19:05 Speaker 05 The promotions tab is a wonderful place and I'll tell you why. So first off, in the Gmail environment, less than 25% of Gmail users actually activate their promotions tab. And for listeners that don't know, in Gmail, there are these different tabs. If you activate them, all of the promotional offers will go into this tab called promotions tab. Less than 25% of Gmail users actually activate it. Now, here's the thing that people don't know. First of all, the promotions tab is part of your inbox. It's not the junk folder. It's actually part of your inbox. Okay, so if you go into promotions tab, you're in the inbox. But the kicker is, which people don't realize, on average, people that have their promotions tab activated, 50% of them check it every day. Let that sink in for a second. What does that mean? When you go to the mall, you're in buying mode.
19:49 Speaker 05 You're not like lost, you're like, I'm in the mall. I'm going to buy something. When you go to the promotions tab in your Gmail inbox, you're not lost. You're not like, what am I doing here? Why didn't I click on this? You're actually looking for stuff. You're looking for webinar offers, discounts on socks, whatever you want. 50% of those people are going in there every day looking for the thing. They're looking, they're in that mall. So you don't want to get out of it. And we have seen no performance drop for emails that go in the promotions tab versus those that don't. So everyone's got to chill.
20:18 Speaker 04 I don't disagree about the chill part. I do need your help wrapping my brain around all of what you've just said. So let's package this up neatly.
20:27 Speaker 05 Yes.
20:28 Speaker 04 If you had to give me the only three tips that every marketer needs to start doing today, right now, to improve their email marketing performance, what are your three tips?
20:40 Speaker 05 I'm going to give three tips that anybody could do on any platform that costs no money and take less than five minutes. Number one, do not send your emails out on the hour. Here's what everybody does. You go into your email system and you go, all right, let's get this email out at 9:00 AM, at 5:00 AM, at 2:00 PM. No one ever goes in there and says, set it up for 2:17, 11:12, 10:19. You do not want to send your emails out on the hour because all promotional email lands in those first 10 minutes. When you don't send it out in the hour, instantly, your emails show up with all the real emails and your actual open rates go up by just doing that. One little thing, which is kind of ridiculous. Now, your subject line, you want to be testing
21:21 Speaker 05 everything I just said, and you also want to be testing things like a question subject line, or ending your subject line with three dots. The four things you need to know, dot, dot, dot. You need to have five to six of these crazy things that I mentioned in your quiver, and be rotating them all the time. You do not want to allow confirmation bias to set in where, oh my God, that's worked so well with the question mark. Every subject line we send out has to be a question. That's when it becomes wallpaper. And then the third one that I would think about is now they've opened up the email. Great. They're thinking about clicking through. You have your call to action button. You have that long rectangular button inside your email. Everyone just doesn't think about it. But believe it or not, if you write your call to action button, the rectangular button, if you write it in first person, you will see your
22:06 Speaker 05 click through rates rise, your click through rates rise by over 25%. What do I mean? So let's say you were promoting that webinar. Everybody always writes, what word? Register. Register is for me, the sender. It's not for you, the recipient. But what sounds better? Register versus I want in. Register versus save my spot. When you write in first person, it gets the person a little bit more excited. Or if it's a consumer offer, is it buy now or get my 25% off now? When you write in first person, your click through rates rise. Every little thing matters in email. There's no one thing that you're going to do. It's a series of little things. So when someone says email doesn't work for them, it's because they're not paying attention to the detail.
22:45 Speaker 04 That was good. Hey, you've done this before.
22:47 Speaker 05 Thanks, man. Appreciate you.
22:49 Speaker 04 I want to move on. We're going to go on to our lightning round.
22:53 Speaker 05 Oh, no. Go faster.
22:55 Speaker 04 Oh, God. I'm going to ask you a series of martech questions related to our topic, which is email marketing. And I want you to answer them in conjunction with the topic. So try to stay in line here. Are you ready?
23:06 Speaker 05 Oh, no.
23:07 Speaker 04 Okay. Well, we're going to do it anyway. Here we go.
23:09 Speaker 05 Okay.
23:10 Speaker 04 Toss up. Would you choose to invest in list building activities or content marketing to build your email database in today's landscape?
23:19 Speaker 05 List building activities because on an annualized basis, your database will shrink by about 20%. You have attrition, the email addresses get old, people unsubscribe, people remove themselves. And if you are not actively growing your list every day, then you will have no list. So being intentional about list building activities, you have to do it or else you're done. You have no email list.
23:39 Speaker 04 What actually works with list building today? Is it all just sign up for my white paper still?
23:44 Speaker 05 Well, first of all, pop ups are the greatest thing of all time and people have it backwards in marketing. They're like, I don't like pop ups. They're annoying. I can't use pop ups on my site. That is the dumbest thing of all time because when you go to Nike's website, let's say you've never been there before. They do a pop up. It says, hey, you want 10% off on your sneakers? Give us your email address. Now people will say, oh, I'll never use a pop up. It's terrible. But when you get that pop up from Nike, do you give their email address? Or do you get really angry, say, I hate this thing. And you hit the little X in the corner and then you go on to the website. But nobody ever is like, I'm leaving the website. I hate this thing. I'm never coming back. Believe it or not, 5% of people will actually fill out that pop up and give the information. And a lot of times for marketers, people go to their site and they have nothing to show for it. So having a pop up, you're getting that information, you could then market to them forever.
24:29 Speaker 05 So marketers need to get out of their brain when they don't like something. Because guess what? You need to grow your database and pop ups are a no brainer.
24:37 Speaker 04 All right. So pop ups are a way where you can capture email and you have to have some sort of value exchange. And e-commerce, 10% off your first order. When you're not in some sort of e-commerce, if you're in a content business or if you're in a sales business, where you're not going to provide a discount, what are some of the ways you can capture emails?
24:56 Speaker 05 Anything list related is great. Fear is great also. You know, the 10 biggest pitfalls to avoid in the retail sector. The five things that all marketing professionals need to know about AI. Lists are no brainer. Checklists do great. We all love checklists. Download the checklist for the Q3 blah, blah, blah. Anything like that, that's simple to digest, what doesn't work? If you're promoting an infographic, good luck to you. That's like 1994 threw up on you. Nobody downloads a white paper because they can't read it. They don't understand it. And ebooks have become really, really, really tough. So I would think about lists, checklists, blueprints, easy to digest content.
25:32 Speaker 04 How are you using your content, going back to the original question, hey, should I be focused on creating more content or capturing more emails? How do you use your content to then capture more emails?
25:43 Speaker 05 You should be making short form content like these lists all over the place. And then you should also be doing it on social media. That is the biggest no brainer in the world. You know, the whole point of social media should be to get them off social media. Your social media is you're growing that to then say, hey, you want this piece of content? Great, drop me a DM and then send them to a form. Or if it's on Instagram, use something like ManyChat where instantly send them the link to the form. If you are just trying to grow your social media following to either A, have a vanity metric, which is really weird, or think that when you put something out there, a lot of people are going to see it, you are wasting your time and energy. The entire point of social media is to get them off social media and onto your list. And using these content pieces is how you're going to do that.
26:23 Speaker 04 All right, moving on to the next question, buy or sell? Are you buying or selling the notion that AI-driven personalization is the key to customer engagement in email today?
26:33 Speaker 05 I'm selling it, but I'll say it with a caveat. Personalization is the key. I don't think that AI personalization is that important. And when we say personalization, people are like, oh, I don't have a sophisticated platform to do all this mumbo jumbo. Let me give you some tips on personalization that crush it, that you don't need a platform, and it's too easy. So the worst that you could do is use first name personalization in the subject line. That's not personalization. That actually does not work anymore. So you do J comma, check this out in the subject line, you're a loser. Don't do that. So what does work in the subject line in terms of personalization? The sooner you can tell somebody who they are, the faster they want to engage. So on the business side, if you personalize that subject line, for example, with the person's job function, just for marketers, right? CFOs need to know this, and that's who you're promoting to.
27:18 Speaker 05 The sooner that somebody can see themselves in that subject line, wait a minute, I'm a CFO, I gotta check this out. Job function, the subject line actually lifts open rates by over 30%. Company name in the subject line crushes it in terms of personalization. Is acne at risk? Is acne keeping up with this competition? All you do is dynamically slug in the company name of whoever you're marketing to. Instantly, they want to look at that. Now, on the consumer side, you know, it's just for golf enthusiasts, for new homeowners only. This is popular in Miami. You take the elements that you have, you tell the person who they are, not their name, whether it's their interests, their geography. This is for luxury homeowners. This is for people that are great investors, whatever it is. Tell them who they are in that subject line. Instantly, they engage.
28:02 Speaker 05 That's the type of personalization that works and you don't need AI to do that.
28:06 Speaker 04 What is AI actually good for when it comes to personalization?
28:09 Speaker 05 Listen, if you at scale uploading data and it's able to create these segments for you that you didn't know existed, and now you could all of a sudden do a personalization token based on all this stuff that's in your databases that would be impossible for you to pull out, great, have a good time with that. You don't need AI right now to really dig into all that. I just think today it's a little bit of a waste of energy and time.
28:33 Speaker 04 Moving on, trend or trash? Is using a formatted email template trend? Or is it trash and you should just be using a plain looking Gmail?
28:42 Speaker 05 It's trend and trash. And that's a good question because here's what happens with templates. It's so funny to me. So there's a million tools out there, make the greatest template. And every template that you find, whatever tool that you're using, it will check every best practice box. So picture's in the right place, the headline's the right size, the right font, whatever. And here's what happens in your organization, you switch to a new template. Oh, we got a new template. Great. And then you hit send and guess what? It does great. It does great for the first few sends and you're like, high five, our template is amazing. The only reason it's working is because it looks different than what you were sending. It's not because you have the holy grail of templates. That's not what happened. You did something different. You shook it up a little bit and then the confirmation bias sets in. You're like, okay, great. Our template's perfect.
29:24 Speaker 05 And six months later, your performance is in the garbage because you're using the same template. So the game is not templates or no templates or this format, that format. You need to have like five or six different, radically different formats, letter format, different templates, different colors, different things to keep that level of excitement up. Because if not, it literally, you could print out, there are certain brands in my mind right now, if I print out all their emails, it would be wallpaper, right? They're always the same thing. So it's not templates or not templates. It's you've got to keep mixing it up.
29:55 Speaker 04 God, you know, I've been talking about this and honestly, struggling with it for a really long time. We've done kind of a similar format with the Martech podcast for years and we've been trying to change it up. We're adding the new segments. We're publishing daily. We're moving to once a week. We're doing YouTube. We're all sorts of new experimentation. And it's funny that every time we try something new, it seems to work for a little while. And then all of a sudden, when we rely on it and say, okay, this is now the new way we're doing it, eventually it goes away. So it seems like the lesson here is you need to constantly be changing and evolving and that provides freshness, which is what actually creates the results. It's not that your template's any good or any different than before.
30:35 Speaker 05 You're so right. I mean, I always think about, so random, there's a brand called ALO, ALO. It's the clothing store that my 17 year old daughter swears by that.
30:43 Speaker 04 Very like monotone clothing.
30:46 Speaker 05 Right. But what they do is every month or two, they do a color drop. Oh my God, this light blue color of their workout outfit and it's only available now and it will be available, whatever. And then a month from now, it's going to be a different, slightly changed thing and whatever. And everyone goes bonkers. Every time they come out with it, it's different. It's not that you can't just go to the store and get the same thing every single time. And that's what the world that we're in now. We don't want the same thing over and over and over again. We want it to always, we want our brands, we want who we're interacting with to kind of be mixing it up. We want the newness. So yeah, unfortunately, it makes all of our jobs harder that we can't just keep going back to the well and doing the same thing.
31:24 Speaker 04 All right. Last question I have for you. Marketing Mythbusters.
31:27 Speaker 05 Ooh.
31:28 Speaker 04 Help me prove or bust the myth that marketers aren't sending enough emails.
31:33 Speaker 05 Marketers think they're sending too many emails. Marketers are sending bad emails, but the best marketers happen to also be the most frequent senders. Look at the best marketers on the planet. Look at Apple. Look at Amazon. Look at the absolute best marketers on the planet and go look at how many emails they sent. They're sending an incredible number of emails daily. It's not about how often are you sending necessarily. It's about are you sending good stuff? I would take emails from Amazon and Apple and the NFL and this one and that one every day, probably twice a day, because I know it's going to be good stuff. So frequency and relevancy are married together. So if you think you're sending out too much and it's not working, you're sending out too much garbage and I would just revisit it.
32:18 Speaker 04 So how do you fix the garbage problem? When you're struggling to send out good emails in the first place? How do you stop? Figure out what's good and then figure out how to send more of it?
32:28 Speaker 05 So the first thing I would say to you is, do you open your own emails? If you receive your company's?
32:32 Speaker 04 No, I wrote them.
32:33 Speaker 05 But let's say in your organization, they send out your newsletters, send out your stuff, and you just scroll past it yourself. Do you scroll past your own company newsletters when it comes in your inbox? And your own promotional emails when it comes in your inbox? If you do, then you yourself think that they're garbage. And to me, that is the lightbulb moment like, whoa. That happened with me and my newsletter, my company. I would get it. And I'm like, I don't know, that, that thing's garbage. Terrible. I know it's gonna be boring. And as soon as I did that, I'm like, oh, my God. This is terrible. If I think it's bad, everybody must think it's bad. And the other thing that people get confused about is email open rates. You can listen to 20 different podcasts and they'll say, well, open rates on emails are no longer a thing. They're irrelevant. Ignore them. And the reason people say that, and by the way, if you send out 100,000 emails
33:16 Speaker 05 and your system says 20,000 are open, you have a 20% open rate. The reason I say 20 podcasts will say to ignore open rates is that what happens with open rates now is it's an inflated metric. If you go in your email sending tool and it says you have a 28% open rate, you don't. It's not true. It's not real. And the reason it's not true and not real is that there's a lot of things like bots and Apple's automatically opening things. Everything is inflating that open rate metric. So people say, ignore it, which is the dumbest thing in the world. Your open rate is no longer an absolute metric. It's not true that 28% of people opened up that email that you sent. But it's a directional metric that's telling you a lot of important information. So you listen to this crazy podcast and Jay says, oh, I should test a number at the start of my subject line.
34:00 Speaker 05 And you do an A B test. You take 50,000 people and you put the number seven at the start of the subject line and 50,000 people and you don't put a number in the subject line. And you know what? The one with a number had a 40% open rate and the one without a number had a 30% open rate. Now, did 40% of the people open up that email? No, but you know the one with the number did better. You know, that's the rabbit hole to go down. So you want to be thinking about these little things like, what should I be doing to get my? Looking to see my benchmarks? Is it getting better? Am I doing better? And your open rate is one of those things that can tell you that.
34:34 Speaker 04 Fundamentally with email marketing, it's death by a thousand cuts. There's lots of little things, little nuance, little words, little what are you putting in the front of the open? How are you titling? What's your phrasing for your call to action? Every little thing matters. And when you start to get those things right, you come up with more compelling, interesting subject lines and topics. You engage people more. They start consuming the content. They get in the pattern of behavior of starting to actually enjoy what you're sending. And then you've got a valuable viable marketing channel that you can continue to use over time to try to drive your sales and other promotional efforts. But if you're not getting the basic blocking and tackling of finding something that is interesting for
35:19 Speaker 04 your list, you're dead on arrival. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Jay Schwedelson, the founder and CEO of subjectline.com. If you'd like to contact Jay, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can contact him on Instagram. His handle is Jay Schwedelson. That's J A Y S C H W E D E L S O N. Or you can visit his podcast, which is called Do This, Not That, or visit his company's website, which is subjectline.com. If you'd like a summary of this podcast, or if you'd like to be our next guest speaker, head over to martechpod.com. And you can also find our content on YouTube, Instagram, and on X. If you'd like to contact
36:03 Speaker 04 me, let's connect over on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Schap, B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
36:50 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.
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