← Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
2025 MARKETING WINS REVEALED! 🔥 Email Strategies, AI Tools & Social Proof SECRETS 🚀
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Jay Schwettelson
Welcome to Small Business Quick Wins. Presented by Thrive, this podcast is exclusively designed for small business leaders like you. Prepare to get invaluable insights from every episode, equipped with actionable tips made for immediate implementation in your business. Tune in as we teach our firsthand lessons from fellow small business owners and thought leaders. I'm your host, Jay Schwettelson. Over the last 25 years, I've grown multiple small businesses that have generated over $300 million in revenue. Along the way, I've learned pitfalls to avoid and Quick Wins that can transform your business immediately. I'm excited to share it all. So if you're ready to win on Main street, let's dig into this episode. All right, this is exciting. We're going to have some fun. I'm Jay Schwettelson, and we are about to go through a lot of stuff. Maybe we could add the slides onto the screen. There we go. Like magic. Look at that. We're on our way. I talk really fast. I apologize. But the goal of this session, this amazing session that's brought to you by Thrive, is we've been gathering together Quick Win marketing strategies that you can head into 2025 that are going to change the performance of everything that you're doing that are easy, they don't cost you any money, they don't take any time. They're simple little things, tactical things that work. So before I jump into all this stuff, you're like, who is this guy? What did I sign up for? Why is he talking so fast? So my name is Jay Schwettelson. I have a marketing agency called Outcome media. We're about 100 person company in South Florida. We do email and direct mail and podcast advertising and digital media, all this stuff. We execute about 40,000 campaigns annually for business and consumer marketers. And then we have a research group where we gather all this stuff together and we're constantly coming out with the tactics that are working right now. So I hate when you go to any session and the information is from a year ago or two years ago that's not going to be now. We're going to share stuff from literally the last few months. And then part of my company, we also have things like subjectline.com, which is a cool free website where you could test your subject lines for your email campaigns. And I do a bunch of other nonsense. But that's not why you're here. It's not about me. But I wanted you to know where my information is coming from. And it is coming from real marketing campaigns. All right, so Thrive is putting out this index that's coming out really soon called the Small Business Index. And I got a sneak peek at it, okay? And one of the stats that really stuck with me was that for small businesses, specifically, 37% of small businesses expect to increase their investment in software in 2025. But here's the good news. While you may be thinking about increasing your software spend, you are already probably using a platform, especially if you use Thrive, that can do everything that we're talking about today. You don't need to spend an extra dollar. Sometimes people think, business owners or marketers think, hey, I got to spend more money, okay, to get the results I want. And that's not the case. So let's jump into it. Let's jump into what you don't need to spend money on to get results. The first thing is your landing page. Great. You did a social media post, you did a search engine ad, you send out an email, you did something. They went to the landing page, the page on your site that has the offer you want them to download, to subscribe, to buy, to inquire, to request a free quote. You want them to do something, right, you get them to that page. But on that page, there are very little things that you can be doing that can radically change the outcome of the performance on that page. What your conversion rate is one of these really small things. Okay, is the button, the actual submission button on the page, on your landing page. So somebody clicked through from Google, now they're on your landing page, they're interested in your offer, they're going to fill out those fields on your page. And now there's a button. Does your button say submit, which is the worst word in all of marketing, or does it say what it should say? What it should say? It should be a description of your offer. Again, in the button, right? So if you're trying to get somebody to sign up on your form to get some free quotes, maybe it's for your insurance offer, maybe it's for your home inspection offer. Whatever it is, the button shouldn't say submit. It should say get three quotes. Now, the button needs to reiterate whatever that offer is. When the destination page, your landing page, when that button, the submission button, describes the offer, submission rates rise by 17%. If you didn't spend any money, this takes three seconds to change. All you're doing is getting into the psyche of the person on your landing page, and this gets them a little bit closer to what they want. It's a reiteration of what they want. So just by thinking about these little things, it can have a massive impact. And that's everything I'm going to share over the next few minutes. Right? It's little things, big impact. In the world of marketing, it's never about just doing this one thing. Everyone thinks, I need to change my platform, I need to do this. No, little things add up to a big difference. Another one on your destination page, okay? On the page where you're taking all that traffic, that. That traffic from your emails, from your search ads, from wherever you want to stick social proof, either below or right next to that submission button, like you see here. When you have social proof, and that could be showing what your Google reviews are, that could be a testimonial, that could be an award. Anything that is social proof, when you put it right near that submission button, it increases conversion rates by over 21%. Why? It's that last vote of confidence. The person's on the edge, like, should I do it? Should I not do it? And then they see that social proof, they're like, you know what? I'm going to do it. And it's on the subconscious. It's not like anybody sitting there like, oh, my God, this is the greatest landing page I've ever seen. This is awesome. Nobody thinks like that, right? But they're moving very fast, and these little things give them that edge. All right, speaking of social proof, social proof is so valuable, but we're not really using it enough and we're not using it the right way. What do I mean by that? All right, here are a bunch of different websites. These aren't fancy websites. I didn't show you websites of, you know, Nike or Salesforce or this one or that one. These are local H Vac companies. Okay? Now what you want to do, what you see in all of these websites here, when you put social proof in a primary position on your homepage, it lowers the bounce rate on your website by over 25%. What does that mean? The bounce rate is when somebody goes to your website, they then leave. They're bouncing off of your website. Okay? You want to do whatever you can to lower your bounce rate. You want them to stay. They came to your site for a reason. You don't just randomly go to an H Vac company's website. You have a problem you're trying to solve for, and what you want to do is grab that attention as fast as possible. When you show social proof fast, people stay like, oh, I'm in The right place. Now, you may be saying to yourself, well, I don't have a thousand Google reviews. I can't do social proof, right? So. But you can, and here's why. Number one, if you do have reviews, great. Use those, right? As you see here, you know, we have 350 five star reviews. That's great. But let's say you don't. You can even just use longevity in business. And you see, with this dowco example, they made their own emblem and they say, we've been in business for over 20 years and they made a thing, and you know what you feel like, okay, they've been around 20 years. Cool. That is social proof. Anything that you could validate in the person's mind about why they should stick with you and not somebody else. This is how you win. Now, the version of social proof that is total and complete garbage, okay? Is generic social proof. Oh, let me take a pause for a second. I talk so fast, I'm all over the place. Hold on. Pause for the cause. Please dump in questions into the chat, um, if there are any throughout this entire session, because at the end, we're gonna leave time for Q and A. We'll see if we can answer any of those questions. So anything that comes up, any ridiculousness that you want to talk about, you could dump in the chat. And then afterwards, we'll grab all those and we're gonna talk about them. Sorry. All right, back to the chaos. All right, social proof. The problem with most social proof is that a lot of marketers, a lot of business owners, what they do is they use the wrong kind. They use generic social proof. They'll put up on their website or on their landing page or in their emails or in social media. The right, you know, great service said Suzy, happy customer. That's garbage. That doesn't mean anything. Okay? Generic social proof does not get it done. What does get it done is quantifiable metrics in social proof. So what sounds better to you? Great service or our energy bills dropped by 30% after the new H VAC installation? You're like, oh, that's the problem I have. I need to get my energy bill down. When you make it quantifiable, it could be anything. Could be about software. You know, this software increased our productivity by 20%. Whatever it is, when you can put in a quantifiable testimonial, it is a game changer. Conversion rates increase over 35% on landing pages when the quantifiable testimonial is used versus a generic one. This is game changer. But I don't have that. You need to be intentional about getting a quantifiable testimonial. So when you're asking for a review, when you're asking for, hey, will you give us a testimonial? And you don't need a lot. You can get one, two, three testimonials. Say, hey, listen, can you write something specific about how our product or service helped you? It saved you money, improved what your team was doing, improved your customer service, whatever. Can you give us something very, very specific that we can use? We really would appreciate it. And people, you'll be surprised, they'll be happy to do that. And that is how you win. And then you ride those quantifiable. You ride those quantifiable things to the finish line. One testimonial. You can build an entire business around that. All right, let's get into your emails. Newsflash. Sorry to say this, your emails are epically boring. They are. Sorry, that's life. What are you going to do? But let's make them less boring. How about this slide here? Did you read that whole number? I bet you didn't read that whole number. Nobody reads the whole number. Why? Because we're lazy. That's what we do. And you know what? It's okay. That's how email marketing works. Also, we don't read the entire subject line. We just don't. So why does that matter? People think, oh, I'm going to come up with this great offer. I'm going to come up with great creative for my emails that I'm sending out. I'm going to write the best copy ever. And then they don't really pay attention to their subject line, which is totally backwards. Because if somebody doesn't open up your email, who actually cares what's inside of your email? It doesn't matter. So we got to get your email opened. Now, the number one thing that gets your email open is your subject line, right? So. But we know from that last slide, you're not reading that whole number. You're not reading the whole subject line. Nobody does. They read the first few characters. So what you always want to think about with your email marketing is, what are you doing in the first few characters of that subject line? Because that's going to be the determining factor. You could literally write in your subject line at the end. You could write, jay's a big loser. No one would see it because nobody reads the end of the subject line. That's life. Okay, so you want to Think about what happens to the first few characters of your subject line. For example, if you capitalize the entire word or you capitalize the first two words like a phrase of your subject line, it will increase the percentage of people opening up your email by over 19%. And when I say capitalize, I don't mean the first letter. I mean the whole word. Like, it would say new, any W would all be capitalized or just in all capitalized or big sale, all capitalized. This increases open rates by about 19%. The other idea that you could test is starting with a number. An actual number. The three reasons you need to check this out, the seven pitfalls to avoid the five, whatever. When you start with a number in your subject line increases open rates by over 17%. And you're like sitting there like, wait a minute, these are all just gimmicks. These are all just ridiculous things. But here's the story. What are you doing whenever you hit send in your mind, this is what you need to say. What are you doing when you're hitting send to make my email get open and not everybody else's. And yeah, when you call them gimmicks, I call it marketing. This is how you stand out, right? And no, you don't go to the junk folder. You don't go to the spam folder because you capitalize a word in the subject line that's from 15 years ago. You also don't go to the junk folder or spam folder for words that you write in the subject line. Spam trigger words are garbage and they're a myth. You could write the word free. Okay, you can use emojis. You can do all of that. You don't go to the junk or spam folder anymore for that. That was from 10 years ago. And I don't care what you read anywhere. It's not true. And so, yeah, you want to test capitalizing that first word or phrase in that subject line. You want to test starting your subject line with a number. Why does this all work? Because we're doing that social scroll in our inboxes. And there's that millisecond when we're scrolling through our emails, right? We're like, oh, wait a minute. And no, you're not looking at that subject line saying, I love the number four. I am definitely opening up this email. No, nobody says that. But that millisecond, it grabs your attention. And then you read the subject line, then you want to open it. So this is what matters. So back to Thrive Small Business Index. That's coming out in a few weeks. I love the data coming out of this thing. And one of the stats was for small businesses. And 38% of survey respondents say that running their small businesses has gotten more difficult over the past year. You don't say. Right. It's getting harder and harder out there. Now. One of the things that small businesses struggle to leverage is AI. How do you really leverage AI? Okay. Instead of just having IT write something for you, is there something else you could do with AI? And, you know, whenever you hear about AI, you're like, it's some crazy new tool or platform you don't know how to use. You need a subscription. How do I do it? I need an expert. No, I'm going to show you some AI stuff right now that you can do the second you stop listening to me, which is probably hopefully for you very soon, because I'm very annoying. Okay? And you can try this immediately. And it's free and it's simple and whatever. And I made this meme. I make horrible memes. Welcome to the world's worst memes that I make. All right. By the way, we'll get you all these slides, all this stuff, whatever. All right, so what can you do with AI right now? Number one is let chatgpt shred you. Yes. This is great. You're going to love this. This is so easy. Now, what people don't realize about on ChatGPT, the free version of ChatGPT. So all you got to do is you go to chatgpt.com now, on chatgpt.com, there's that prompt bar at the bottom of chatgpt.com on the left side of the prompt bar is a little paperclip icon, which, as we all know, when you click on that, you can upload an image. So you can upload images to ChatGPT. I don't know why, but a lot of people don't use that enough, and you should. So here's what you want to do. And you could do this with your social posts. You could do this with your website. You could do this with anything visual. But for the sake of this example, let's focus on your email marketing. You could take your email, the latest email that you sent out, you make a screenshot of that email, and then you go to ChatGPT, and you upload the image of that email to ChatGPT. Okay, cool. Now you've uploaded an image to ChatGPT. After you upload the image to ChatGPT, write this. Write this prompt. If you Will. Right, I'd like you to review the following email marketing message and provide back actionable feedback on how to improve it. Please consider elements like clarity, engagement, call to action, effectiveness and overall persuasive power. Additionally, provide at least five very specific critiques and test ideas I can try based on what you find from this email specifically. And also provide suggestions on improving the subject line provided here as well. And then you plug in the subject line. Okay, now what happens after you do that? After you do that, ChatGPT will give you a complete breakdown as if it is the greatest email marketing consultant on the planet. And it will tell you everything based on all the data it has on things that you should consider that you should test, that you should not do all of it. And this is really, really important because now you have ideas for the next go around as opposed to just winging it and seeing what happens. Using ChatGPT as your kind of marketing consultant is a no brainer. Takes two seconds. It's 100% free. Okay, now let's get into another thing on ChatGPT that you can do. You know, and I see there was comment that came in and I want to address it. That's important, right? That these are kind of trendy tactics instead of the fundamentals. And here's what I would say about that. The problem with email marketing in general, when people say about email, say email doesn't work for us, I hear that a lot. And the reason email marketing doesn't work for an organization, okay, is that there's the littlest things that can have an impact. Now the thing about these little things is that they are literally always changing. And yeah, they may seem trendy, but if you're only stuck with, okay, make sure that your emails are short and make sure they go out at this time and they go that time. I don't buy into best practices. I think in general best practices overall are garbage. And I know I may get heat for that, but I think they're garbage because by the time they become best practices, everybody's doing them and that is the recipe for failure. So you need to have the little, we can call them trendy tactics that allow you to stand out from everybody else. Right? So sometimes to me, yeah, fundamentals, you want to clean your list, you want to get the opt in, you want to do all that stuff the right way, but you need the trendy stuff to allow your emails to penetrate through that psyche on that, that, that your inbox, that's so cluttered. So back to all this. But A super fair criticism. And again, please put any questions you have in the chat for anything. Now, the other way to use ChatGPT, which I think is super cool, is not. And this, again, this is not just related to email. You could do this with social media posts. You could do with versions of your website. But we did something that was super wild. ChatGPT can actually pretty accurately predict the outcome of your marketing. What do I mean by that? Again, you can go to ChatGPT and you could upload images for the sake of. What we did here was you can upload an A and a B version. Let's say you're between two different things. You want to send out two different emails that you've created. Or maybe you've made two different social media posts that you've created. You want to like, which one should we use? Right? And you could upload images of both. And then you can do this and you'll be blown away by the accuracy. You can upload images of two different versions, an A and a B version of whatever your marketing program is. Maybe it's the homepage of your website and you could write this. I have two different email marketing messages that are designed to generate leads for our sales team. I would like your analysis on which email is likely to perform better based on factors such as clarity of message, call to action, effectiveness, design, engagement potential. Additionally, police provide suggestions on how to improve each email to enhance their performance. And here are the two emails. Now, what's amazing about this and the reason I think you want to consider this for again, your website, your social post, your email, for anything that's visual, what we did to see how good is ChatGPT at predicting the right thing to use. So from my agency, we took 200 campaigns. We did this for email, where we knew the outcome of the campaign already. We had already run the campaigns and we had, in these campaigns, we had done an A and a B test. So we know which version A or B, which one won, did the best. Okay. For each of these 200 campaigns, we then uploaded those 200 campaigns to ChatGPT and we said, hey, ChatGPT, which one of these is going to be the winner? We didn't tell ChatGPT which one was the winner. We already had the winner. ChatGPT got it right 88% of the time. Okay, that is unbelievable. So I don't think that enough of us are leveraging the idea of uploading images to chatgpt enough. You could take URLs, you could take. Okay, let's say you're an accounting software and you can say, okay, the URLs put in QuickBooks.com and put in FreshBooks.com and whatever else and say these are three different accounting software websites. Can you please turn this into a table and tell me all the best aspects of their software their go to market, their pricing, the industries they're in and please analyze these websites and put it in the table format. And ChatGPT will do that. You could do so much with ChatGPT, the free version, that a lot of marketers just aren't leveraging. And you could actually upload up to 10 things all at once, which is pretty cool. All right, let's talk about other areas of email marketing. Now this is an area that I think almost all marketers are sleeping on that probably is the biggest game changer in the world of email marketing in the last two years. And that is leveraging the from address and viewing it as the start of your subject line. What does that even mean? Okay, so when you send out an email, okay, there's I'm going to jump ahead one slide, then come back. When you send out an email, there's the email address and then there's the friendly from the email address. Like my email address is jaysorpwd.com that is my email address that I send email from. But I've set the friendly from otherwise known as the alias to be my name. We all do that. So when you get an email from me, you don't see my email address, you see my name. Right? Now if you sign up with Nike, you don't see their email address unless you look for it. After you open up the email, when it shows up in your inbox, you just see the word Nike because the friendly from or the alias that they put on their email address is Nike. So it's called the friendly from, it's called the from name, it's called the alias. All three of those are the same thing. Why does that matter? Who cares? Whenever you hit send on an email, okay, doesn't matter what platform you use to send your email, you have the ability to change that from name. We're not changing the email address you're sending from. No, no, no, not at all. But you have the ability to change the from name that friendly from that alias, if you will. Every time you hit send. It's a field that you can change. It takes five seconds, it costs you nothing. You could do this on any platform that exists. Now, what we have been seeing in the last year to two years. Is that that friendly from name, right? When you see Lenovo and they're selling computers, they're not just writing Lenovo anymore, they're writing in what the offer it is that they are promoting in the from name and they're changing it every single time they hit send. Why? Because when we look at our inbox now, the from name really is the start of our subject line in many ways. So tying in what your offer is or tying in whatever your email is about in the from name when the email goes out, it radically increases the percentage of people opening up your emails. And I'll give you the stats in a second. So here you see Lenovo 72 hour sale or you see things like Daniel at Fortinet. You'll see that a lot these days where you're seeing the person's first name that's coming from and then they write in their brand that is doing really well or Ink Top 10 or or eMarketer retail daily, right? Utilizing the from name that alias, that friendly from as real estate for your marketing is a game changer. And so what you see here, so when you have for example brand plus industry, maybe you're a business, a business marketer, it might say, you know, ultimate software HR sector up 17% opens your increase to your email open rate brand plus offer, right? You might be AC Central if you're an H Vac company. AC Central 30% off brand plus offer increases your open rate by over 21%. First name plus brand 24%. All of these things. If you're not testing right the from name, you're leaving a lot on the table. You know everything I'm talking about today you're like, all right, this guy Jay, he talks really fast. He's all over the place. What's he talking about? And it's not about, oh, Jay said we're gonna get 17% open rate increase. That's not it. It's about testing. Everything here is about testing. What I talk about today is not gonna work for everybody. Not, not by a long shot. But If I say 10 different things, okay, and you test them all and three of them work, awesome. This is the name of the game. How do we get our emails opened a little bit more? And you see it here, right? When you go back to your inbox, you're not going to see it on every email, but you're going to see it on the most successful emails are utilizing the from name. Okay? To do this. And where you see this is when you're setting up your email campaign and you'll see it right above or below where it says the from address field. It will say the from name field. And right now, if I had to make a bet, I would bet the overwhelming majority of people to hear today, it is just the name of your brand. You know, Acme. That's it. You're not adding in the other piece. So this is an easy one to test. Okay, More examples of this I love. We're starting to see actually brand plus urgency, like ad age. Don't miss, right? And then it goes into its offer. And then a lot of marketers are also just doing somebody like somebody well known at their organization, like Neil Patel does. So another thing to test. All right, and then here's the last set of examples. It's first name plus brand, right? Super cool, super easy. Probably the biggest trend in email marketing that I think people are sleeping on. So something fun to try. All right, another. Here's a quick tip, as opposed to everything else I say, which is ridiculously fast. Okay. When you set. When somebody gives you their email address, right? That first time you send an email to them is the most important thing you can be doing, right? You're establishing that communication with them. First send emails. The first time you send an email to somebody after they gave you their address, first send emails that take more than two hours for the person to receive after they've given you their email address have an 80% lower average open rate. Why do I tell you that? Obviously, if somebody goes to your website, they buy, they subscribe, they download, they inquire about your service, hopefully you have an instant email that goes back to that person establishing the fact that, hey, you're confirming what they did, great. But a lot of you here may have field reps that are out there. You may have people on the phone that are collecting email information. You may have people at a trade show. They're collecting email information. And here's the problem. We wait. All that stuff's being collected, okay? And then somehow it gets in, takes a little time, it gets put into a spreadsheet, it goes here, goes there. And then eventually when you get to it, you send out that email. Those contacts are dead to you. You need to prioritize the moment someone gets an email address within your organization that there is a process that that email can get out fast. That email is gold. That email is so much value. That email is garbage if you don't get it out fast enough. And that's the secret sauce stuff. All right, let's Talk about some other random things. Personalization, right? Personalization. Rihanna does not look happy here. Personalization is different than it used to be. What do I mean by that? It used to be especially an email that if you send down email and you put the person's first name in the subject line, J comma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that would do really, really well. What's amazing is so many marketers and business owners started doing that, putting the first name in the subject line because it did so well for so long that for the first time ever, first name personalization in the subject line actually lowers the percentage of people opening up your emails. That's data from GetResponse, which is wild. So what type of personalization actually does well now? It's very different than it used to be. Very different than it used to be. What you want to think in your mind whenever you sending out an email doesn't matter if you're marketing to business professionals or consumers. What you want to say in your mind is, I need to tell this person that I am marketing to as fast as humanly possible who they are. The faster you tell somebody who they are, the quicker it is that they want to engage. Why? Because when they see it, they're like, oh, this is for me and it's not for everybody else. So how do you do that? You don't do that by putting their first name in the subject line. That's garbage. The other things, though, that are working now that you can put in the subject line that are not garbage. Okay. Are all of these. So for example, if you personalize with geography in the subject line of an email. This is popular in Miami. I live near Miami. That increases the percentage of people opening up your emails by over 26%. How about a life event just for new homeowners? Oh, I just bought a home. That's me. So you're already marketing to these people. You already have the data. You already know what they're about. You know they're a new homeowner. You know, maybe they just had a new baby. Right. You know that they just renovated their home. You just need to tell them who they are. Maybe it's an interesting. Maybe you're selling golf equipment. This is for golfers. People are golf enthusiasts. Oh, I love to golf. That increases open rates by 22%. What is their interest? Just for diyers, right? Just for people that like to cook healthy. Tell them who they are. Maybe on the business side, you're marketing business professionals. Put their company name in the subject line. Right. Is Acme at risk? Uh oh, I work at Acme. That lifts open rates by 28%. A past purchase. You know, how is your new air conditioning system doing? Okay. You recognize the fact that you know that they just bought that. When you tell the person who they are quickly in that subject line, then you reiterate again in the headline of that email. Right. That is how you get people to engage. That is the personalization. And it's super easy because you already have that information. Okay. Other little things that are game changers. And this is where you know, to me, best practices go sideways. Best practices are, okay, you have your buttons in your email and you open up your email and in the email, let's say you're trying to get somebody to register for something. So what is the actual button? The rectangular thing in your email say. Well, of course it needs to say the word register because you want them to register. That's garbage. That's what everybody does and that's what doesn't work. Okay. This is where you need to flip everything on its head. So, for example, the buttons in your emails, the actual buttons, when call to action buttons in your emails are written in first person, they increase click through rates by 28%. That is wild stuff. What do I mean by that? So here's Domino's pizza. I want pizza. I'm hungry anyway, here's Domino's pizza. They could say order now, but they don't say order now. They write, I want in. Why do. Why did they do that? Why did they write I want in? Because of this first person called action buttons. Written first person. What sounds better to you? If you had an AB test, two different emails, one button said buy now. The other button said, yes, I want 25% off. That's the first person version. And again, it's not like somebody sees the button says I love this button. No, what they do though is there's that moment where they get a little bit more excited about your offer. And what you always want to think to yourself is, what is in it for them? Buy now is in it for you. You want them to buy now, but what's in it for them? The benefit versus the commitment. The commitment that you want them to make is buy now. You don't want to market using commitment. You want to market using the benefit. When you could do that by writing in first person, Yes, I want 25% off. Secure my 30% off. Right. Snag my immediate discount. That is how you want to frame the mind. If it's on the business side, and let's say it was an event that you were promoting. What sounds better to you? If you were registering for this webinar, would it be register or save my spot, Register or I want in. When you write that button in first person is when you see that increased click through rate. Now again, this is all about testing. You're like, this guy Jay is epically annoying. He talks too fast. He sounds kind of arrogant. He's a know it all. I don't know what you think about me. It's okay, it's fine. But testing this stuff matters because you test all of it. Some of it's going to work. You get more stuff in your arsenal, hooray, we get more customers. That is how we win. All right, let's talk about other kind of myths that are out there. Especially relates to email. A lot of people will say, okay, our email marketing is not doing great. We're sending out too much. That's why it's not working. We're annoying people. People are unsubscribing. This is the problem with our email marketing. We're sending too much. Here's a secret math formula. If you send out a lot less, you're going to get a lot less business. The problem is not that you're sending out too much. You happen to be sending out garbage. Okay? It's not relevant to them. Frequency is nothing. Frequency does not exist. Relevancy exists. You could send me an email seven times a day. If it's relevant, I'd love it. So you're not going to send less and get more business? That doesn't make any sense. And a lot of marketers and business owners think that they're sending too much. So here's some data from this big study that we did, which is how often do business marketers and consumer marketers actually send out to their email databases? Business is in yellow and consumer is in orange. Ish, red. Okay? And you see here the number of times people email to their database on a monthly basis. Now there's something super interesting about this chart, which is this. First off, business marketers, 81% of them send at least 4 times per month. Consumer marketers, 89% of them send at least 4 Times a month. Okay, now here's the thing that's going to be like, this is ridiculous. This is the craziest stat ever. Now stick with me here. Open rates, the percentage of people opening up your email. Open rates rise 17% for consumer marketers and 21% for business marketers. When you send at least, at least five times per month. And this will continue to rise because deliverability is based on engagement. Now, what does that mean in English? Here's the story. Remember earlier I said that you don't go to the junk or spam folder because you write words like free or use an emoji or you capitalize on the subject line or a question mark. That's not why you go to the junk or spam folder. You go to the junk or spam folder now. And by the way, my company sends out about 6 billion emails a year, so we're analyzing this all day long. You go to the junk or spam folder now. Based on engagement, how often are people opening and clicking on the emails that you're sending out? When you're receiving email infrastructure sees you opening and clicking on emails, it then takes the emails from that sender and says, oh, this sender sending out stuff that people like, let's keep them in the inbox. Right? You need to, as a sender of email, generate enough engagement, enough opens and clicks in aggregate to everybody you're emailing to in order to stay in the inbox. If you ironically don't send out enough email email. Right, Then you cannot possibly generate enough engagement opens and clicks do stay in the inbox. So when you actually start sending out less, right, you not only going to get less business, you're depressing the likelihood of you staying in the inbox. So you actually need to be sending out a decent amount of emails every single month. The problem is you need to send out good stuff. You can't just send out garbage. And by the way, here's an example, here's eMarketer, for example. EMarketer is an organization that teaches us how to do everything the right way. Okay, here's from November 1st through November 7th, they sent me 19 emails. I'm not telling you to send out 19 emails in one week, but I'm showing you that eMarketer, who teaches us what to do, that's exactly what they're doing because they understand email deliverability. How about Tom's? I love Tom's shoes, okay? In the same week, they sent me 17 emails. Again, I'm not telling you to send out 17 emails, but I am telling you that if you think that you're going to send less, you're going to lose. Now you're going to sit there and say, yeah, but we're going to get unsubscribes. People are going to remove themselves from our list. First of all, Unsubscribes do not hurt your email deliverability. They're actually engagement. Ironically, they kind of help your email deliverability. You don't go to the junk or spam folder because you get unsubscribes. Now, if you get spam complaints, that's a different story. But unsubscribes do not. Now, here's the thing that a lot of us may not be aware of. 92% of people saying, take me off your email list. 92% of people unsubscribing come from people who have not opened or clicked on a message in over 12 months. They're unsubscribing because they're not a good fit anymore. Maybe you promote stuff for a new homeowner. Now, their home is three years old. They're not a new homeowner anymore. Maybe you promote stuff for people, people that are starting a business. You know what? They started a business 10 years ago. They're not a new business anymore. They're not a fit. Okay? 92% of people have not opened or clicked on one of your emails. Those are the people unsubscribing, and it's okay. Get them off your list. So if you got 25 unsubscribes, you're basically losing two people, and they probably weren't good prospects anyway. But on the reverse of that, maybe you've upped your email sending, like, two or three more times a month, and you're getting more customers. The key thing always to remember, okay, is that relevancy is everything. I know I'll get. I always get heat saying, jay, you always say to send out more. I say to send out more. As long as it's not garbage. If it's good stuff, send it to me. So think about relevancy, and then that gives you the license for frequency. All right, we're going to get into questions. Hopefully you guys start putting questions in the chat, if you have any, because we left some time for questions, if there are any. If not, I'll just talk to you about all the TV shows that I'm watching, which are really, really bad. But before I do all the questions and stuff, I want, you know that Thrive, I work with Thrive, and I put out a podcast called Small Business Quick Wins. Every single week, we put out episodes that are really short. They're about 10 minutes long. Small Business Quick Wins is in the top 25 out of 50,000 podcasts in the entrepreneurship category. If you want to check it out, all you got to do is scan this QR code and this will take the Apple podcast. It's also on Spotify. It's called Small Business Quick wins. Cool. Yay. All right, then. One of my favorite resources for small business information. I know this sounds like I'm just pumping up Thrive, but I go to this blog all the time. Thrive has an incredible blog. Thrive.com t h r y-v.com/blog. This is the QR code for their blog. If you're in the small business world, you gotta check out this blog. It is amazing. All right, next. Oh, if you want to get in contact with me, we put I have a newsletter that I send out that's really annoying, but it's kind of cool. And I have an email calendar. The best and worst days to send out email for 2025. If you want that email calendar, we analyze every day. And red days are bad, green days are good. If you want these slides, please drop me a LinkedIn connection request. But if you want all the stuff that I got, I want to email it to. All you gotta do is drop me an email at j a y s corpwd.com I will send you my newsletter, the slides, the calendar, everything you could possibly want. And please connect with me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of nonsense there as well. And so that's it. All right, let's jump in and see if there are any questions. I see some questions coming in the chat, so let's see what we got. I'm going to take a deep breath too. There we go. First breath in 42 minutes. All right. What up? All right, question for personalization. What if your audience is fairly broad, how do you come up with the best category? Doctors, dentists, whatever. Okay, so personalization doesn't just have to be about their interests. Okay. It could also be about their activity. What do I mean by that? Right. So you could do things like for our VIP customers. These are people that your customers right now. Okay, let's say you're marketing to doctors or dentists. Perfect for people in healthcare, right? You're telling them in the subject line they're in healthcare. Or only for customers that just renewed with us. People that signed back up. Only for people that have been with us for five years. Okay. Any activity that somebody does can then be turned into a segment that you can then market them to. The other trick that I don't think people do enough is when you're sending out your emails, you have links in all of your emails, right? And those links are. Could be about a particular kind of sale. Maybe it's on the consumer side. Maybe you're selling, you know, beachwear for the summer or on the business side. Maybe it's about a certain type of guide related to a particular topic. What you want to think about doing is categorizing whatever those links are about into segments. When somebody clicks on something in one of your emails, okay. They're actually raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm interested in this thing right here. And then you make that a segment and then you turn that segment into your personalization. So you don't need to have a data rich database in order to segment people and tell them who they are. So yeah. All right, what else going on? So another question came in. It says if I only have time to focus on one thing to improve all of my email marketing, what should it be? All right, that's a good question. So I'll tell you two things that I would do. Okay. Number one is I would take your data and put it through a validation service. And I don't get paid by any of these companies, but it's really important to do this. What does that mean? There are companies out there like Zero Bounce, like Webullah. Okay. And you want to take your database about once a year and have them validate your email list. And what that means is they'll take your email list, they'll put it through their systems and they'll give you back everybody that you should remove. Bad bounced email addresses, poorly formatted email addresses, but also spam traps. Spam traps can be on your list and you'll never know it. And they're really holding back your performance. So step one is once a year doesn't cost a lot of money. Cost you a few hundred bucks maybe. At most you validate your list. Okay, great. Now you take a step back from validating your list and then the next. The easiest pieces to really focus in on are when you're sending it out, the time of day, the subject line. Okay. And then the headline of your emails. If you just focus in on. I'm going to test it's not emails not working. Instead of sending out at 4pm, I'm going to try 8am test time of day couldn't be easier. Then test subject line. Use some of the tips that I mentioned here and then focus on the headline of your email. That big thing up top. If you get them hooked at the right time with the right subject line and the right headline, you'll be well on your way. And again, that will cost you nothing. It takes the easiest amount of time to do and that's where I would really spend the energy. Okay, what's the best way to grow my list without annoying people? Well, this tip is not going to go over well, but it is what it is. And let's reframe the word annoying people for a second. Because the absolute best way to grow your list is to use pop up contact captures. Now you're sitting there saying, I don't like popups. When I go to a website, they annoy me. And they annoy me too. But here's what I'll tell you. When you go to, let's say Nike's website, okay? And the first time you go to that site, they have a popup that shows up. It says put in your email address to get 10% off on your first shoe purchase. What do you do? You either put your email address in and get the discount code or in the top right hand corner you click the X and you say I hate popups. And then you go on to visit the website. Almost nobody and we see it from the data gets so angry by the popup that they just leave the website. Why does that matter? Because we know that for first time visitors to a website, if there is an incentivized pop up contact capture, maybe you get a discount code, maybe you get a free guide. On the business side, any type of incentivized pop up contact capture, on average you will get 5% of the people to give you their email address. And on three time visitors to website, you'll get up to 7% people to fill out and give you their email address. Why does that matter? If you don't have a popup on your site, then what happens is they go to your site and they leave of you nothing to show for it. But if you have the pop up, you get their email address, you get to market to them. And I would even encourage you on different pages on your website to have different kind of popups. If someone goes to a pricing page on your website, you have the ability after 30 seconds you could do a timed pop up and say, hey, we know you're checking out the pricing. How about this? We'll give you an extra 10% off. Just put your email address in. Now every CMS tool, every website hosting tool has the ability to do timed pop ups on individual pages. So I would really leverage that a lot. And if you have, you know, big social media following or you're growing it, let's say you have a big Instagram following, you should use tools like manychat.m a n y chat. Manychat on Instagram allows you to instantly DM people when they interact with your content, and that's another great way to grow your list. And manychat is free for up to the first thousand people that they dm, so that's a really inexpensive way to do some marketing. All right, all right, so we've covered a lot of ground here, all sorts of stuff, and I appreciate you all checking everything out. Again, please connect with me and please check out Thrive. T h r y-v.com they're an incredible platform for all your small business needs communication, you're organizing your reviews or organizing your billing. Thrive is one of the platforms on the planet. T h r y-v.com I want to thank everybody for being here and give the podcast a try. All right, we'll see you soon. Well, that was fun and great news. We got way more where that came from. Subscribe. Make sure you get the latest episodes each week for more actionable tips from today's top small business leaders. And hook us up with a five star review if you've got at least one new idea you may consider using. Lastly, if you want to ensure you never miss a message from your customers again, check out Thrive. Com wins to get your free account with Demand center today.