How To Increase Email Response Rates

Summary

MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth

Episode Title: How To Increase Email Response Rates
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Jay Schwedelson, Founder and CEO of Subjectline.com
Release Date: February 24, 2025

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1. Introduction

In this episode of the MarTech Podcast™, host Benjamin Shapiro engages in an insightful conversation with Jay Schwedelson, the founder and CEO of Subjectline.com. Jay brings his extensive expertise in email marketing, particularly focusing on subject line optimization, having tested over 15 million subject lines to aid organizations in enhancing their email campaigns.

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2. The Current Landscape of Email Marketing

Jay underscores the enduring allure of email marketing, deeming it "the sexiest thing" in the marketing domain due to its cost-effectiveness and broad reach. He contrasts email with other marketing channels, highlighting that unlike expensive TV ads or ineffective social campaigns, email allows direct communication with an entire audience at minimal cost.

Jay Schwedelson [02:36]: "Email marketing is very sexy. There's no other marketing channel on planet Earth that for relatively no money, basically no money... you can communicate with your entire audience."

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3. The Decline of Cold Emails

Benjamin shares his recent decision to abandon cold emailing, expressing skepticism about its effectiveness in today’s marketing environment. Jay agrees, explaining that traditional cold emailing—blasting out messages without prior engagement—is largely ineffective and often leads to emails being relegated to spam folders.

Benjamin Shapiro [03:52]: "I don't think it works anymore."

Jay Schwedelson [04:05]: "The world of cold email really is sort of dead because you can't just go and keep pounding and pounding your database."

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4. Navigating Spam Filters

The discussion delves into the challenges posed by modern spam filters. Jay clarifies misconceptions, stating that it’s not merely the content or use of certain words that triggers spam filters, but rather the lack of engagement from recipients. High engagement rates help ensure that emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

Jay Schwedelson [04:56]: "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."

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5. Building a Valuable Email Database

Benjamin emphasizes the importance of an email database as a valuable asset, yet questions its current relevance. Jay advises that instead of merely increasing the volume of emails, marketers should focus on the quality and relevance of their content to maintain engagement and avoid being perceived as spam.

Jay Schwedelson [06:35]: "Your email database is your company's most valuable asset."

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6. Crafting Effective Newsletters

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the creation of impactful newsletters. Jay advocates for newsletters that deliver genuine value, such as insightful articles tailored to the recipient's interests, rather than being filled with promotional content. He suggests personalizing newsletters through internal influencers within the organization to foster a more human connection.

Jay Schwedelson [08:21]: "What you are sending out. If you have a newsletter...assist your audience with valuable information...give value to those people that you are sending that out to."

Jay Schwedelson [12:36]: "You need to step out and do something a little bit different. And that's how you win."

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7. The Importance of Subject Lines

Subject lines are pivotal in determining email open rates. Jay shares actionable strategies for crafting compelling subject lines, such as:

• Starting with Numbers: "The three pitfalls to avoid..." increases open rates by approximately 20%.

• Using Capitalized Words: Initiating subject lines with words like "NEW" or employing emojis can capture attention effectively.

• Avoiding Boring Prompts: Steering clear of generic terms like "Webinar:" or "Reminder:" which fail to engage recipients.

Jay Schwedelson [17:11]: "Numbers a 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."

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8. The Promotion Tab in Gmail

Jay addresses the misconception surrounding Gmail's Promotions tab, explaining that it is a legitimate part of the inbox and not akin to the spam folder. He reveals that a significant portion of users actively check this tab, presenting a valuable opportunity for marketers to reach engaged audiences.

Jay Schwedelson [18:58]: "The Promotions tab is a wonderful place... On average, people that have their promotions tab activated, 50% of them check it every day."

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9. Best Practices for Improving Email Performance

Towards the end of the episode, Jay provides three concise tips to enhance email marketing performance:

1. Avoid Sending Emails on the Hour: Staggering send times prevents emails from getting lost among bulk promotional messages.

2. Diversify Subject Lines: Continuously test various subject line formats (e.g., questions, ellipses) to maintain engagement.

3. Personalize Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons: Using first-person language in CTAs (e.g., "Save My Spot" instead of "Register") can boost click-through rates by over 25%.

Jay Schwedelson [20:40]: "Number one, do not send your emails out on the hour... number three... write your call to action button in first person."

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10. Lightning Round: Quick Tips and Myths

In a rapid-fire segment, Benjamin poses several questions to Jay, addressing topics such as list building versus content marketing, effective list-building strategies, AI-driven personalization, and the use of email templates.

• List Building vs. Content Marketing: Jay recommends prioritizing list-building activities to counteract annual attrition rates in email databases.

• Effective List-Building: Utilizing pop-ups with value exchanges (e.g., discounts) and offering digestible content like checklists and blueprints are effective methods.

• AI-Driven Personalization: While personalization is crucial, Jay advises that current AI applications may be overkill, recommending simple yet effective personalization tactics instead.

• Email Templates: He cautions against over-reliance on templates, advocating for continuous variation in email formats to sustain engagement.

Jay Schwedelson [23:19]: "List building activities, because on an annualized basis, your database will shrink by about 20%."

Jay Schwedelson [26:32]: "Personalization is the key. I don't think that AI personalization is that important."

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11. Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Benjamin and Jay conclude the episode by reinforcing the notion that email marketing's effectiveness lies in the meticulous attention to numerous small details. From crafting compelling subject lines to maintaining high engagement through valuable content, each element contributes to successful email campaigns. Jay emphasizes that frequency and relevancy are intertwined, advocating for consistent, high-quality communication to cultivate an engaged and responsive audience.

Benjamin Shapiro [34:34]: "Fundamentally with email marketing, it's death by a thousand cuts. There's lots of little things."

Jay Schwedelson [32:18]: "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."

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Key Quotes for Reference

• Jay on Email Marketing's Appeal [02:36]: "Email marketing is very sexy... you can communicate with your entire audience."

• Benjamin on Quitting Cold Emails [03:52]: "I don't think it works anymore."

• Jay on Spam Filters [04:56]: "You actually have to send out a lot of email... send out relevant stuff."

• Jay on Valuable Email Databases [06:35]: "Your email database is your company's most valuable asset."

• Jay on Newsletters [08:21]: "The newsletter should not come from salesforce.com... it should come from a human."

• Jay on Subject Lines [17:11]: "Numbers a win. Start your subject line with one to two capitalized words."

• Jay on the Promotions Tab [18:58]: "On average, people that have their promotions tab activated, 50% of them check it every day."

• Jay on Best Practices [20:40]: "Do not send your emails out on the hour... write your call to action button in first person."

• Jay on List Building [23:19]: "List building activities... your database will shrink by about 20%."

• Jay on AI Personalization [26:32]: "Personalization is the key. I don't think that AI personalization is that important."

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a deep dive into the nuances of email marketing, emphasizing the importance of strategic planning, continuous testing, and authentic engagement. Jay Schwedelson’s expertise provides actionable insights that can help marketers refine their email strategies to achieve higher response rates and drive business growth.

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Connect with Jay Schwedelson:

• LinkedIn: Jay Schwedelson
• Instagram: @jschwedelson
• Podcast: Do This, Not That

Stay Tuned with MarTech Podcast™:

• Website: martechpod.com
• YouTube | Instagram | X (Twitter): Follow us for more insights.

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Produced by I Hear Everything Podcast Network
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Transcript

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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 iheareverything.com.

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.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. 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.

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 you technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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 Subject Line.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 Swindelson, the founder and CEO of Subjectline.com Jay, welcome to the Bartek Podcast.

[Jay Schwedelson]

I'm excited to be here. I'm a longtime listener, so this is going to be a lot of fun.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

What took so long?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Man, I'm lazy. I don't know, but here we are. We made it happen.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

You do podcasts? I do podcasts. You write emails? I write emails.

[Jay Schwedelson]

We're basically related at this point.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Hey, come on over. You do Christmas, you do Hanukkah. What's your thing? We do both.

[Jay Schwedelson]

I do everything. I will celebrate any holiday that involves food and me not working because why not?

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I want to fight you. We rely a lot on email marketing and 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 ask them to be on the Martech podcast as a sponsor. And we just always cold emails flying around, hey, you want to start a podcast? We 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 state of the state.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 from 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. But if your go to market is just pound away with cold emails, that is a losing path entirely.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 consumer marketer, the way that you stay in the inbox as opposed to going the 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 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. 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 vs. 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 they 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 it's frequency and relevancy. They're married together. You can't just send out a lot 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Stop me if you've heard this one. Your email database is Your company's most valuable asset.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Yes, I say that all the time.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Sound familiar? I actually think I'm quoting you. Thanks for the great podcast. I listen to it all the time.

[Jay Schwedelson]

I appreciate it.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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 team, send more, send less? Should I be focusing on collection? Should I be focusing on relevant? 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. 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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Well, it's not necessarily am I 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 this 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 gotta get out another one next week. Which is what everybody does.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Hang on. But nobody gives a shit about my newsletter.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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's gonna 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 going to be like, wow, this is 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. It looks like it's going to 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 going to react to. We're all following 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I could tell. I love it. Hey, one podcaster to another, you do it great. Keeping the energy.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Take it.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Can I ask you a personal question?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Yes, please.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

How many email newsletters do you actually read?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 Skill Skim or the Hustle or Morning Brew and things like that. And then I get into 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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 all need this 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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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, what you should be doing is having call it an internal celebrity, okay? Not a real celebrity. Not everyone's going to be Gary V 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 it could be J from Acme and literally, right, J, A, Y, F, R O M Acme 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Your organization, 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 Susie from Acme and you're like, hey, now it's Susie and blah blah, blah, blah. And everyone stays excited. Doesn't matter.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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. Cause 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 and to himself. 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So all you do is you get some sort of an influencer within your organization. You give them a chatgpt prompt, you have them look for a couple links, they summarize it, and now you got a newsletter. Is it that simple?

[Jay Schwedelson]

It's that simple. If you want to have a half baked one, it'd be 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, comes from me. It's got marketing tips and at the end we add a section called since youe Didn't Ask. And I literally have stuff in there. What? I'm watching the Real Housewives in 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 that 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, I can't let it go.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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 part that you bit, are you a double dipper?

[Jay Schwedelson]

100%. It's unacceptable. I'm going to 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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.

[Jay Schwedelson]

There's always an attribution problem. It's not last touch attribution. That's the thing.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

You can only have first touch carrot attribution.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Exactly right.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Let's get back into emails and newsletter. You got to have a newsletter and then eventually you're going to put in some sales shtick every once in a while. Once you get people attuned into following a newsletter, you got to have some humanities. What makes it good? You got 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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Everybody has it backwards in the world when it comes to email. They spend all this time, oh, I got the greatest newsletter. I've got the greatest promotional offer. Legal approved it, the links are working, whatever. And then that comes to the subject line. Oh, yeah. Which 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, that'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. 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% than if you don't. Why? Stands out a little bit when you're doing that social scroll in your inbox.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Right?

[Jay Schwedelson]

It's authoritative. You know, you get out of it. Numbers a 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. 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. We've been testing this a lot. Brackets. Love brackets. At the start of your subject line. Consumer or business offer. You put right in there. Again, just in or just release. 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 it.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I want to hear more about the last one, the Promotion tab. It seems like a horrible place to me. It's a.

[Jay Schwedelson]

It's.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 the Promotions tab. And for listeners that don't know in Gmail, there's 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 in the 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. 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 did 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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. Yes, 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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 9am At 5am, at 2pm 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 on the hour instantly, your email 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 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 works 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 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 it 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 details.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

That was good. Hey, you've done this before.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Thanks, man. Appreciate you.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I want to move on. We're going to go on to our lightning round.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Oh no. We're going to go faster.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Oh, no.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Okay, well, we're going to do it anyway. Here we go. Okay, toss up. Would you choose to invest in list building activities or content marketing to build your email database in today's landscape?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

What actually works with list building today? Is it all just sign up for my white paper still?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 say, 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, they have nothing to show for it. So having a pop up, you're getting that information, you can then market to them forever. 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Okay, so pop ups are a way where you can capture email and you have to have some sort of value exchange in e Commerce at 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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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, you use something like manychat where it instantly sends 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

Today 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 thing you could do is use first name personalization. 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 could 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. The sooner that somebody could see themselves in that subject line. Wait a minute, I'm a cfo. I got to 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 Acme at risk? Is Acme 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 interest, 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. That's the type of personalization that works. And you don't need AI to do that.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

What is AI actually good for when it comes to personalization?

[Jay Schwedelson]

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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Moving on. Trender Trash is using a formatted email template trend or is it trash? And you should just be using a plain looking Gmail it's trend and trash.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 pictures 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 cents. 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

That's not what happened.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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. 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 are not templates. It's. You got to keep mixing it up.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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.

[Jay Schwedelson]

You're so right. I mean, I always think about so random. There's a brand called Aloe Alo. It's the clothing store that my 17 year old daughter swears by that very like monotone clothing. 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. And 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, last question I have for you marketing myth busters. Help me prove or bust the myth that marketers aren't sending enough emails.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 send. 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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?

[Jay Schwedelson]

So the first thing I would say to you is, do you open your own emails if you receive your company?

[Benjamin Shapiro]

No, I wrote them.

[Jay Schwedelson]

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 to your inbox, if you do, then you yourself think that they're garbage. And to me, that is the light bulb moment. Like, whoa, that happened with me and my newsletter in my company, I would get it. I was like, I don't know. 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 a hundred thousand emails 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 tools 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 the number at the start of my subject line. And you do an AB test. You take 50,000 people and you put the number seven 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 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.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

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 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 jschwedelson. 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 me, let's connect over on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjschaf 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.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Foreign.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.