C (3:44)

We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a taking the BS out of business for over 6 years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

E (4:01)

What's up guys? Welcome to right about now. Hey, I like talking marketing. You guys know that. That's why a lot of you the originals, the OGs listeners came. You stay for the good stories, but.

D (4:12)

We got a good one today.

E (4:13)

We like to do this and not that. That's what my good friend and guest Jay Sweddleson says on his show do this, not that.

D (4:19)

And he's the founder of Guru Media Hub. What's up Jay?

B (4:22)

I'm fired up to be here. I've been listening forever so this is going to be really cool. Thanks for having me.

E (4:31)

We've hit this world where you can get knowledge from a lot of different places. And I love what podcasting does for sort of knowledge enrichment. And I think you're a big part of that.

B (4:39)

We try to keep it kind of 10 foot level. Stuff you could implement really fast, really quickly. Kind of stupid proof because that's what I am, a little stupid. So it works out well.

E (4:47)

We like to chase the shiny objects. Everybody gets excited about what's new. But damn email and direct marketing still fucking work, I'll tell you that.

B (4:54)

I spend a lot of time in the world the email, like email's legacy emails, dead emails, old school. But you know what? That's only if you're not doing it right. And I'd like to see everybody just get rid of their email address, not have an email account anymore. How many people really willing to do that about zero, it's crushing it.

E (5:09)

Let's tell a little bit of the J Story and building to kind of where we are today.

B (5:13)

I've been at this for a long time. Over 25 years I've had an agency when my agency was getting rolling. We do everything in my agency. We do email, direct mail, digital media, print media, all this crap. And I would go into these pitches to try to get business. And I would go in there with these PowerPoint decks that were like 50 slides long saying, I do everything great. I'm awesome at all this stuff. And almost every time I'd walk out of there, get no business, and I would bang my head against the wall. I'm like, I'm going to go out of business. What the hell is going on? I can't get any business. After a few years of really driving myself nuts, I walked out of this one meeting. This guy said to me that we were pitching to. He said, you know that stuff you were talking about, email, if you had just kind of doubled down on that and just focus on that, you probably would have gotten that business. And then after you that maybe you would have gotten our other stuff. It was like a light bulb moment for me. I was like, what the hell? I go, you know what? I'm trying to be known for everything. And I believe that when you're known for everything, you're known for nothing. So that night, literally I was sitting on my couch. I'm like, I gotta be known for something. I said, screw it. Email was just getting going in a big way. This is like almost like 15 years ago or so. It was really starting to explode in terms of marketing and using it for sales. And so I sat on my couch, I went on like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, whatever the hell it was called. And I bought a URL. I found subject line.com. i could buy it. It was 500 bucks. It was like a premium domain. I was like, screw it. And my idea that everybody has a subject line. Why don't we put up a site where you can go and put your subject line in. It'll tell you if it's good or bad using whatever information we had. And we'd keep it free. And in order to use it, you just give us your information, but you could test out your subject lines. And this was my idea. It turned out to be a decent one because people started using it. And you fast forward now. We've checked about 15 million subject lines on that site. And I became known a little bit as this emailed guy, which is fine. Not that I'm just an email guy, but it was an entree point into my business, which once you come into my agency, then, you know, we torture you. We do all this other stuff for you. I've learned that putting a flag in the ground saying, yeah, this is me. This is what I'm about, then people are willing to learn more about you over time if you don't suck at what you do. So having that vehicle, whether it's subject line.com or whatever it is forever business that you're in, as a listener, I think it helps to define why people should work with you. And that's kind of how I got rolling.

D (7:13)

I also like to say if you.

E (7:15)

Don'T become known for something, then they get to make it up themselves. You can help define and shape it, or they're going to kind of shape their own opinion. A lot of it is like, if you're not known by lots of people for the same thing, then it's kind of like getting a million impressions for a hundred different products. Well, that's great, but what's it driving.

B (7:32)

To when you're not in the room and your name comes up? You already know what they're saying about you and what the topic is that your name's coming up for. Because then you could build your business around that. If it's just generic and just all over the place, there's nothing there. You have nothing. And you could then grow from there. That's everything. Look at Starbucks. You go there for coffee because that's what you think of. But more than half their business now is nothing to do with coffee. Go look at your iPhone, Apple. The majority of the revenue is coming from all sorts of stuff. Not just their phone or it could be anything. Could be Tommy John Underwear. Yeah, you buy your underwear there, but now they sell all this other crap. You need an entree point in whatever your business is. That's kind of the secret sauce.

E (8:07)

It helps when you've got a great tactic. Subject line.com was brilliant. Yeah. Coming back to that a bit. 15 million. I like to pause on numbers and, like, say them again for people. Because in today's data world, between the news, everything else, we kind of get lost in the numbers. Like, oh, like that sounds like a lot. But like, people also throw around making a million dollars. Like, that's just easy to do or something. 15 million times it's been used to check a subject line. That's incredible, man.

B (8:32)

It's funny because then we look at what are the most common things that people are doing right or doing wrong. And the thing about subject line, the thing that gets me excited about it, it's one of the tactics in marketing or in sales outreach that literally it costs you nothing. It takes five seconds. And by changing a few words, a few symbols, a few things, you can change the outcome of your business. And it's just knowing what those little things are. It gets me excited to be able to share what some of those quick wins are all the time because it changes everything for you. And that's kind of fun.

D (9:00)

We got to savvy audience.

E (9:01)

But I mean everybody's listening is always trying to improve some facet of their marketing. And even if they don't specifically oversee email, they can pass some learnings down to their colleagues or otherwise. Talk to me about some tips for that.

B (9:13)

The thing about subject line, whether it's a sales outreach email or a marketing email, you don't send an email without wanting it to get open. Hello. That's why you send the email. And what people don't really realize is nobody reads the whole subject line ever. You could write Jay's a giant loser at the end of your subject line. No one will ever see it because all they're doing is they're doing kind of that social scroll in their inbox and you got to grab their attention and they'll. First half of your subject line. What really is the most important thing are those first few characters, literally the first few characters, your subject line. Where for example, if you start your subject line, I know it sounds ridiculous with an emoji, all right? And people think emojis are stupid, but there's a million emojis. You don't have to use a smiley face. You can use a calendar or check mark or whatever. It gets people to stop and open up the emails. And just by using an emoji and you start your subject line, it will lift the percentage of people opening up your email by over 20% just by doing that. Or if you started with a number, the three pitfalls to avoid the four things you didn't know about. Whatever, it grabs that attention. Attention. People want to see what it's about and they don't realize that it grabs their attention, but it does. Or even capitalizing the first word like it might say new. Like the entire word is capitalized, not just the first letter of the first word. And it grabs that millisecond attention. And you know what people don't necessarily understand about email anymore? Is it used to be that the words that you put in the subject line, like free, okay. Or if you put a dollar sign the subject line. It used to be that would cause you to go to the junk folder of the spam folder 10, 15 years ago. But technology has changed and that's not the reason you go the junk folder spam folder anymore. So you liberate yourselves and use the words and the symbols and capitalization that you want to use. Because the reason you stay in the in the inbox now has everything to do with how often you're getting your emails opened and clicked and all that stuff you want to be using, all the stuff that you probably were avoiding in the past. So that's why I like email. Even though it seems legacy, it's always changing and there are little things like this that can change the outcome of everything.

E (10:58)

Some of what I heard you didn't use this word, but I'm going to use it for you is just being human. Like how do we text people and how we do things certain ways. It's kind of applying that to the subject line.

B (11:08)

Humanity in marketing, especially in email, is everything now. Especially with AI. The problem now is we have this tidal wave of garbage that's coming at us with AI in terms of content creation. Using AI to write better subject lines or better emails or better social posts or better whatever. And what AI recommends by and large is generic. We just did a study where we found two of the words at the start of your subject line that are increasing the percentage of people opening up your emails more than any other two words are the words and. And the word. But literally starting your subject line with the word and like and you need to see why or but you didn't realize this. And the and in but are doing so well in the last 90 days is because I would never recommend you to start a sentence with and or but it's like the most UNAI thing ever. And that's the crazy world that we're in now. We have to say, okay, what will the robots never recommend? So that way we stand out and seem more human. And it's like you need the worst grammar possible in order to stand out. Which is great because I sucked at that in high school. So it's perfect.

D (12:04)

I love AI.

E (12:05)

I'm embracing it. We use it. But there is some just garbage repetitive content coming out. And being someone so heavily in the spoken word of the written word, I love hearing your perspective even a little further about what's the good and the bad and the ugly with AI so.

B (12:18)

Far today I love AI also. AI is incredible for so many things. But the problem with AI when it comes to your content, if you're writing a newsletter, a blog post, social media posts, content for your website, emails, there's two pieces to it, there is a technical problem with it and then there's just kind of an engagement problem with it. The technical problem it is is that for example Google, Google scans all of our websites, right? And that's how they're determining the ranking when someone searches for something. Google is very at being able to identify content on your website that's been written by AI versus written by a human. And what Google wants. Google wants human written content. So because they're able to identify AI written content, they're actually now depressing rankings for those websites who have more than half of their content that's actually being able to identify as AI written from a technical perspective, you actually getting dinged negatively by just using AI to write all your stuff. So you can't just have AI do that. You will lose because of that now terms of an engagement thing. The other issue is that like our email newsletters for example, a lot of people are using AI to write their email newsletters. And what we have seen from all the data and we send out about 6 billion emails a year, we have seen that those email newsletters that are predominantly written by AI, AI, content generated newsletters, their click through rate on their email newsletters is about 40% lower than those that are written by a human being. Because we feel it when you're interacting with a blog or an email or social post, you could feel when there's a person behind it versus when there's just a robot behind it. You should be using AI to edit things. Maybe it's a little bit of an idea, kind of kick around starter thing. It can't be your content creator because for a variety of reasons it's going to hurt you.

D (13:58)

Jay, talk to me about getting back.

E (14:01)

To maybe some of the core like email marketing things that are happening real time today in the field, maybe knowledge.

D (14:08)

For our listeners for how and what.

E (14:10)

They should be considering and how to do it better.

B (14:12)

The biggest change with email marketing right now is Apple. You have your iPhone and on your iPhone you have a mail app. Apple's utilizing AI, what they're calling app intelligence. And in real time as we receive our emails using this AI, Apple is going to be bucketing all the emails that we receive into four different buckets. There's going to be a bucket for primary tab bucket, a transactions bucket, an updates bucket, a promotions bucket. And depending on what the emails are about, is where they're going to fall in these buckets. Now, it goes without saying that if you are marketing something, you're trying to do sales outreach, you don't want your email necessarily going in that promotions bucket, because how often are people going to check that might not be that often. Understanding why an email may go in the primary bucket or the update bucket, those are the top two that you want to be in as opposed to the other buckets, is going to be a really, really important thing. And what we're seeing is, just as this is starting to roll out, is that there are going to be certain trigger words that if you use in your emails that you have a greater likelihood of going into the buckets that you want to go into. So, for example, if you have the word, let's say preview or confirmation, these are trigger words that are like, oh, telling the AI this email's important. It's not just selling some garbage. Let's move it to the update tab or the primary tab or something like that. As this unfolds, really staying in tune with what trigger words that AI is looking for in order to stay in the buckets that you want to stay into is going to be a game changer because email is evolving a lot.

E (15:36)

Talk to me about where everybody can keep up with what you're doing. The show, all that good stuff.

B (15:40)

I'm all over LinkedIn. I post way too much garbage there. But please connect with me. Hit me up on LinkedIn with my horribly long last name. You'll find me my show. Do this, not that. For marketers. It's a pink square. You'll see it again. That's kind of fun. And give subject line.com a try. It's 100% free. It's kind of fun to do. You could check that all out and you'll find me. I appreciate the opportunity. I love the show and can't wait to have you on mine.

E (16:01)

I love it. I'm gonna go to subject line.com go check out Jay's show. You know where to find us. Ryan is right. Dot com. We'll have all the highlight clips, the full episode from today, and go to our YouTube channel to check it out, all the interactive content we've got going on over there. And of course we'll have links to all of Jay's stuff in the show. Notes. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time.

D (16:20)

Right about now, this has been right.

C (16:23)

About now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.