A (3:05)

Yeah, I think the one thing that I been trying to do very hard is always incorporating something to get someone to reply to me in email.

A (3:19)

So I always add CTAs in the top of the email, the bottom of the email in the middle of the email. I want people to have conversations. I also think that I don't make it too deep. I make it like an easy thing to reply to. Like what is your favorite holiday cookie or what restaurants do you normally go to or what's your tradition for this? Like I want a low lift response, but I want people to respond to my emails. I want to build that a relationship with my audience. And I also think it helps my email list grow, get more opens. And I've seen like open rates stay consistent this way. I've seen deliverability stay consistent this way. So that's something that I think needs to be continued. Especially in the age of AI of adding personalized CTAs for replies.

B (4:07)

Yeah, I think for us, what I've come to realize is that nobody should have their best day and time to send out an email. I think that is out the window and it's a misleading statistic. Oh, our best day is Tuesday at 8am I think that's absolutely garbage. And what everybody should be thinking about, what we're, what we look at is what is our weekly aggregate. Unique number of humans that are opening and clicking and interacting with our emails and why we look at it that way is you can send out an email on Tuesday morning, 8:00am you send out the same email or different email on Thursday at 4:00pm, Sunday again Sunday at 11:00am and, and it's not a matter of which one had the highest opens, clicks, whatever. It's that at those different times you're hitting different populations of people that are interacting with your email that like it at that time. So I think this idea of having your best day and time is Absolute garbage. And the metric though you should be thinking about is what is the unique number of people that you are going to interact with your content and send out more sends so you can get to more people but send them out at different times.

A (5:12)

Yeah, I added something along these lines that we've been doing in 2025 and continue to do 26 is we do verified subscriber and open rates, click awaits and verified meaning like we know who they are, they are in our ICP and compare that to the list. So we have like a verified subscriber metrics versus not so like verified of people in ICP that click the emails and open the emails. Because we want to know like truly in ICP what they like and what they don't like and separ it. We don't mind having a bigger email list, but we also want to know like who are the perfect ICP that are opening the email, clicking the email, liking our content look, going back through and seeing what topics they're opening, what topics are clicking through and having a verified subscriber versus like a whole list metric. So we've been separating out those two metrics with our email metrics these days.

B (6:08)

I love that. And I'll tell you another thing that we're doing, which I think everybody should do. Whether you're a nonprofit business consumer marketer which is running domain main frequency reports, one of the probably most biggest missed things is looking at your data this way. What I mean by that is take your database and run a report by domain, right? So@ford.com or@comcast.net or whatever and run it in descending order and what you'll see is of course you might see like a boatload of Gmail, right? A boatload of big ones like that. But you'll be fine. You'll be shocked. You're going to see a boatload of people at, you know, Baptist Health.com a boatload of people at AOL. And the reason you want to do that is this can be a boat anchor in your email deliverability, which is bad because all of a sudden you have a thousand people at Baptist Health and when you try to send out your database, it's causing a bottleneck for deliverability. So that's one problem. But or aol, those are dead addresses. Get them out of there. But the opportunity side is you might say, oh my God, we have 60 people at Ford Motor Company. We've been trying to work with them. I didn't realize that many people are getting our emails by running a domain frequency report in your email database. It will uncover a lot of issues and opportunities. I don't think enough companies are doing that.

A (7:22)

I'll add like because we are in the age of AI and all that stuff. I would say something that I think should happen more but do it with heavy editing is repurposing long form piece of content for email marketing. Like repurpose that talk you gave. Repurpose that webinar you did repurpose that podcast you did and break down the tactics. It's easy. It's an easy way to add an extra send to your database. It's helpful and I now you could put that transcript into AI, help find the key takeaways for for your audience just by prompting correctly and using that as one of your sends that you send to your email list. It's valuable and also could direct back to those channels. So if you have a podcast you could get takeaways direct back to the podcast webinar recordings ways to get people to like interact with things but use AI as a way to repurpose your all your content into email.

B (8:24)

Yeah, I guess the last one for me is that don't believe the garbage that's out there about certain metrics mattering or not mattering or whatever. So open rates still matter. I don't care what anybody says. I don't care about bots. I don't care about Apple. Open rates matter. Anybody that says otherwise is a dork. Pre headers still matter. People started saying the beginning of the year because Apple's like stripping out the pre header in their new iOS update that pre headers the second subject line, that gray text. They don't matter. Matter. That is absolute garbage. Whenever people say things don't matter, they do matter and they're losers and they have no life.

A (9:00)

I think people just say that to rage bait people and get click. Yeah, it's like email's dead. Don't do this. Don't care about open rates. These things matter to the extent that you should care about it over something else, maybe not. But operates are leading indicators. Click through rates are leading indicators. All these are metrics that you should be looking at and that's what the platform gives you. So you should be caring about them. Um, and yeah, that's why we get rid of subscribers all the time. So because we care about that metric.

B (9:31)

So when in doubt, kick them out.

A (9:32)

Exactly.

B (9:33)

So speaking of December, now you're a Floridian, okay. Do you ever. And you're from Africa, which you are. I don't know why I always like that. You're from Africa. It makes me laugh. And you lived on the west coast in warm weather. Have you ever seen snow? Or are you still like. I've never seen snow.

A (9:52)

I did go to the University of Cincinnati, so I went to Ohio, and it was freezing there, so I did live in a snowy place, and I have seen so. But I don't think I. I don't know about you from New York, but I. I didn't. I don't know about your kids, but I didn't, like, touch my, like, first piece of snow till I was like, 8 or 9 years old. Like, it was like magic to me to see snow from being from California. So I remember my first time. I think we went to, like, Lake Tahoe, and I'm like, wait, snow? Like, what is this? So, yeah, I didn't touch snow till I was like, 9 or 10, which is a weird concept to some people.

B (10:27)

You ever made a snowman?

A (10:28)

Yeah, I've done that. I mean, now I'm. It's. Take it probably like 15 years old. But I didn't get the snow tradition. It's more sand castles when you're from, like, a beach city than snowman. So.

B (10:43)

By the way, for everyone around the country that doesn't us in South Florida, it's so pathetic. They'll do get, like, you know, some community thing at a park. They'll bring in snow. They'll, like, blow ice into, like, a little mountain, whatever, and they let kids, like, play on the snow. And it's really, really embarrassing and weird. And I've gone, oh, we used to.

A (11:00)

Do that at schools, and they used to, like, spray, like, the whole, like, grass and that. I remember that. That was, like, the only version. And it would melt in five minutes. But it's. You still got it.

B (11:12)

I love how everybody around the country is listening. It's like, hey, clown you. It's frigging three feet of snow here, and you guys are talking about you've never seen snow. Yeah. Daniel, by the way, you could dm. He loves shoveling snow. He will come to your home and he will shovel out your. Your sidewalk.

A (11:29)

Yeah, I would love to, like, travel to, like, Wisconsin. Right now. I'm Minnesota. Like, I'm really. I'm really in need of heavy snowstorms right now, so.

B (11:41)

All right, well, now you can sing. Do you want to make a snowman or. We'll skip that. We'll do that on the next episode.

A (11:47)

All right.

B (11:47)

Frozen Part 3. On the next episode. Daniel, we'll see you there, man.

B (11:54)

Daniel, come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast, do this, not that, for Marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing. And I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

A (12:10)

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. And it's once a week, the Bathroom Break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

B (12:33)

Later.