4 INSTANT Ways to Increase Social and Email Engagement😮 [White Space is Secret Sauce!] Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 350

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness. We are back for Do This Not That podcast presented by Maribald. And today we're going to rip through some tactics that are so easy to do for your email marketing and your social media that you're probably not thinking of that can be game changers. And it's all about thinking about what people see rather than what people read. White space in our marketing is a game changer. And I'm not just talking about making sure that you have a lot of white space around your call to action buttons.

0:39No, no, no. Everybody knows stuff like that. I'm talking about little tactics that you're probably not thinking of that can really give you a boost. So first I want to rip through some email marketing tactics for you to try and then some social media ones. And this is all about testing. If we have five different things in here and you test them all, some will work, some won't work, but you got to test it all and see what happens. So the first one is the preheader. Everybody knows that in email marketing, when you send out your promotional email. You have your from name, you have your subject line, then you have that second subject line, that kind of grayed out text that is your pre-header.

1:13And everybody messes around with the pre-header. They put their offer information in there. They'll do all sorts of stuff. But have you ever tested absolutely no pre-header at all? Why would you want to do that? When people are going through their inbox and they're scrolling, they're doing that social scroll in their inbox. When there's a lot of white space surrounding your email message, it stands out. whether it's in the subconscious or not, it stands out. So when you have no preheader whatsoever, and you will see only 2 % of emails that go out have no preheader whatsoever. So reverse that for a second.

1:47Now think about your emails being one of only 2 % of emails that are out there that have no preheader. And what we see is that when you have no preheader, okay, B2B business open rates rise by about 14 % and consumer email open rates rise by about 12%. If you've never tested a no preheader, that is an easy, easy one. Now you can't do this on every email, but you can mix it in there as part of your arsenal. And the key thing when you do no preheader is to use a very short subject line because the shorter the subject line is, the more white space is going to show up in that person's inbox. So another one as it relates to email, before we get into all the social stuff, there's always this question of how many call to action buttons should I have in my email.

2:33And in general, we always say, oh, have a bunch of them because you want to give people the most amount of opportunities to click through from your email and go to your site, your landing page, your offer page, whether it's consumer or business offers. But if you've never tested the complete opposite of that, just having one call to action button, very visible, very simple, very clean, just one. If you've never tested that, that is a must do. WordStream came out with some data recently, and this is kind of wild. They found that emails with just one call action button had a 3x increase in clicks.

3:10That's a 300 % increase in clicks. Now that's really a large increase, but more important than if you're going to get 300%, which you probably won't. If you've never tested sending an email with only one call to action, that is a must do. Okay. That is a must do. Now, the other thing as it relates to inside of your email that I think we all know is you cannot have big blocks of text. You cannot have, you know, five, six, seven lines of text. Nobody's going to read that. But the stat is this, emails with blocks of text that are over four lines or more, four lines or more, see a 20 % drop in their click-through rates.

3:47Nobody cares what you're writing. Nobody's reading four lines of text. Break it up with white space. You need to be thinking about your content visually and not always about what you're trying to say. Now, let's get into social. I have a secret trick for you on LinkedIn that absolutely crushes it that nobody ever does, but it works so well. So on LinkedIn, you know, when somebody writes a bunch of sentences on their LinkedIn post, a company page post or a personal page post, and there's a bunch of words and sentences, if you want to see the rest of the post of what they've written, what do you have to do?

4:24You have to click that little button that says more. It says M-O-R-E dot, dot, dot. And then it opens up the post and makes it a lot bigger. Now, when you click on that button more to see the rest of that LinkedIn post, you're actually sending a signal to LinkedIn saying, hey, I'm interested in this content. And when you do that, that post from that person or that company page, it then circulates it further. The algorithm likes when people click on that little thing that says more. So the trick is this. If you can write a really great hook as your LinkedIn post, and then you hit the return button three times, enter, enter, enter, and then you put in the rest of your content, what you're doing is twofold.

5:06Number one, you are going to create a lot of white space. So it's going to stand out in that person's feed. But the other thing that's going to happen, okay, is that it's going to make somebody click on that thing that says more, it's going to open it up and your post will actually circulate a lot farther. We see this increase circulation by about 15%. So an example of this would be if you did a post and you wrote something like this, only for marketers, dot, dot, dot, that would be everything. And then you hit the enter button three times, one, two, three, and then you put everything below that, the rest of your content.

5:41It forces people to hit that more button. It gets your post circulated more. This is a great easy test that I don't think enough people really think about. On Instagram, with your carousels, carousels are it, right? Carousels is the best type of content on Instagram other than doing a reel right now. Carousels are crushing it. But what you want to think about doing is within your carousel, like every other carousel page, you want to have either minimalist or one word pages, right? So you might have something like you have your big regular image first, then your second image in your carousel might say, now this dot, dot, dot, or it might say, guess what?

6:23Question mark. And what it's doing there is number one, it's getting the person to go to actually the third image or the fourth image, right? You want to do this every other image. And that is a signal to Instagram that people are engaging with this post and they circulated further. But in addition to that, it also breaks up kind of the rhythm, if you will, in a good way. It gets people a little bit more interested, more engaged. It's very easy to consume. It's easy on their mind. So if you haven't done this, I format of a carousel with minimalist inserted into your posts, you're really leaving some great stuff on the table.

6:57All right. Before we get into the absolute ridiculous portion of this podcast called since you didn't ask. I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is the email-sending platform I use. They have something called Emma. It is awesome. And just for listeners of this podcast, they're giving us a special offer, 50 % off for the first three months if you want to try out their Emma platform, which is incredible for loyalty, for retention, for tracking, you name it, business consumer. You go to jschwedelson.com slash Emma. That's jschwedelson.com slash emma and you can get the 50 % off for three months.

7:34It is awesome All right, let's get into since you didn't ask this is a portion of the podcast where I don't know what I talk about but I talk about whatever's going on in my life So I just had my physical at the doctor, which I I don't know. I shouldn't put it off I know it's very important But I I did it. Okay, don't even don't even start I did it But I realized something when i'm at the doctor and I feel like everybody does this why do I lie to the doctor? I don't understand why I lie. I'm there. This person is trying to help me make sure that I can continue to live. And yet they asked me questions and I am not truthful.

8:10Like he said to me, all right, so how much water are you drinking every day? And I thought in my head, okay, I drink like, you know, one, maybe one of these big waters that I bring that I fill up with this water bottle. And I said, I drank three of them. And after it came out of my mouth. I said to him, I just lied to you. And he starts laughing. And he goes, what are you talking about? I go, I drink one. He goes, well, you should drink more. I go, I know. I go, why did I lie? He goes, everybody lies. And then, and then he says to me, let's talk about your stress levels. He goes, do you have a lot of stress?

8:43I go, no, I don't. I go, I just lied again. I just lied again. And he's like losing. He goes, what's wrong with you? He goes, why? He goes, either tell me the truth or whatever. I couldn't take it. And then he's like, do you drink coffee late in the day? And I'm like, oh, I want to lie to you. I want to say, no, I do not drink coffee late in the day. But that would be like, I do. And he goes, good, we're making progress. You're not a liar anymore. Like, what's wrong with me? So this is my new thing. When I go, I'm now going to be honest. That's it. It's over. What are we talking about? I don't know.

9:18I never know. Anyway, I appreciate you being here. Don't lie to your doctor and keep it real later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart and me guru events calm check it out