Ask Us ANYTHING: Wake the Dead (Your Email List) ☠️… My Spirit Airlines Confession 😬🛫 | Ep. 446

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast. This is our short episode. We're all week long, we're getting questions. We're getting work questions. We're getting ridiculous questions. We try to tackle one of each, and if you want to submit a question, you'd be extremely awesome. Just go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast.

0:33and other ones has asked us anything. And we love the questions. So let's do the work question first. We got a question in from Jenny from Lake Placid. I like Lake Placid a lot. It's in upstate New York. If you've ever been there, I'm telling you, I know nobody asked. I went on a family trip there with my kids. It was so great. I was so great. First of all, it's freezing. That's not why it's so great. But that's where the Olympics took place, like in 1980 or whatever. And everything there is still stuck as if the Olympics just happened. Like you can go on the toboggan or whatever from the Olympics and the ice skating is from the Olympics.

1:09Everything there is about the Olympics. It is like going to hot tub time machine, which by the way, great movie. Um, and if it should be on your radar. So Jenny, I didn't know people actually live there. No offense. That's kind of rude, but Jenny, what is your question from Lake Placid? Jay, we have a ton of contacts in our database who have not opened or clicked on email in over a year. How do we wake the dead as we go into the end of year? All right. Good question. I got two secret sauce things to wake the dead. And one of them, everybody sleeps on. Here's a little known fact that people don't realize.

1:47This is for both business and consumer marketers. Okay. From November 20th through December 20th, all right, letter format emails that come from an executive in your organization. Again, this could be for a consumer brand, business brand, a nonprofit, doesn't matter. Letter format emails that actually come from a founder, a CEO, an executive director, a senior vice president, whatever, from November 20th through December 20th, actually have a 40 % higher average open rate than regular emails do when you are sending to people that are not engaged, people that have opened or clicked in the last 12 months.

2:28What am I talking about? All right. So when you get an email and the from name is not the brand, it's not Acme. The from name is John Smith, founder. Okay. John Smith, SVP of whatever. That's the from name. And then the subject line directly ties into the fact that you know that they haven't opened one of the emails in a really, really long time. So you'd have John Smith founder and says a note from our founder in the subject line or John Smith and the subject line says you disappeared, but I get it. Or John Smith, one-time perk for our lost friends. And if you're a consumer brand out there, you're like, I don't know, we can't do that.

3:05But that's not true. All year long, consumer brands do this. I mean, Allbirds has letters coming from their CEO three or four times a year. Glossier has it coming from Emily Weiss a couple times a year, the big makeup brand. All the big brands do it. On the business side, everybody does it. But this is the time of year to do it, okay? Because everybody's on your list for a reason. And when you get this kind of letter format email, style email from somebody really important, and they're saying, hey, we kind of want you back. We have this special thing for you. We missed you. this is actually the time of year that we're looking for that amazing piece of content for 2026 on the business side or that amazing offer on the consumer side as we head into the holiday time.

3:46So if you've never done that, the key thing there is the from name though. That's what you really need to be considering. Now, the other big obvious thing that you need to be doing if you're not doing is verification style emails. So verification emails, I'll give you examples in a second, but verification emails to non-engaged, 12-month non-engaged contacts. People have not opened, clicked on an email in over 12 months. All right. If you do a verification style email, it lifts open rates by 27 % of the consumer side and 31 % on the business side, according to World Data Research. And what does that look like or sound like or feel like?

4:20So on the business side, your subject line would be something like, are you still with? And then you put in the company name of the contact that you were emailing to. You dynamically put that in. You personalize every single email in the subject line. Are you still with Acme? And then when you do that and the person gets it, they're like, uh-oh, and they open it up. And then you say, okay, great. You're still with Acme. We have this special thing for you. You got to check out this piece of content. So glad you're still there. Or you can do really basic. You don't even need to personalize. You can just have the subject line say, verify your active status, dot, dot, dot.

4:55Now, what will happen is this will work really well and you're going to get a lot of people to wake back up, but you're also going to get a high unsubscribe rate because it's going to really annoy some people because they stopped opening your emails for a reason. And now you're kind of like, it's a little gimmicky that you're trying to get them to open it up. So you just have to have a little bit of thick skin knowing you're going to get some zingers of people saying, take me off your list. On the consumer side, this is it. This is the time of year to do verification because all those people that are sitting on your list waiting for that offer, that holiday time offer, right you want to have a subject line that says something like verify your vip status dot dot dot or still want free shipping question mark or want to make sure dot dot dot now these verification emails do not come from the executive like i talked about earlier they come from your regular brand emails but you are basically doing a verification that they still want to get your junk all right so if you've never tested that you absolutely should all right let's get into the absolute ridiculous question here, because that's what we're good at.

5:53We got a question from Tate from Los Angeles. What do you got, Tate? Jay, what is your favorite airline to fly? Okay. I'm not going to do a commercial for any one airline. Oh, okay. I'm going to say this though. This is going to come out. I'm going to sound so bougie. Can I say bougie? Is that a bad word? I don't even know, but this is going to sound very bougie. So, So, this is so bad. For a really long time, I used to avoid flying Spirit Airlines. And by the way, I'm not affiliated with any airline. Nobody's sponsoring me. Nobody cares about what I'm saying about these airlines. But I used to avoid Spirit Airlines because I thought that Spirit was like some sort of inferior brand that if I flew on Spirit, I wouldn't make it to my destination.

6:38I'd have to wave goodbye to my family and that would be the end of me. That's how I felt. Judge me. I don't have to tell you. And then my son just started going to school in New Orleans. And from South Florida, New Orleans, like the airline to fly is Spirit if you want to get there. Okay. There's just no other planes that are really going there. So I had to have this real meeting with myself. I said, Jay, you got to get on board with Spirit. And I'm here to report. I'm here to tell everybody. Nobody cares. Spirit is great. It is awesome. First of all, their planes look cool. They're yellow and that looks cool.

7:16Second of all, I have gotten there multiple times. I'm still alive. That's a win. On top of that, they've been on time every single time. I have nothing but positive things to say about Spirit Airlines. So I, although I will say on the most recent flight, I don't understand something. I was on one like a week ago. This has nothing to do with Spirit. I don't know what I'm about to come out of my mouth, but I don't understand when people get on the plane and then some people like they need to immediately use the restroom i'm not talking about like the planes like midair like we're now like 10 000 feet up whatever i'm talking about your boarding you have your bag in your hand you're trying to figure out where you're gonna put your bag and then somebody's instead of going down the aisle someone's making a hard left and they're going hey they asked the the attendant can i use the restroom and first of all that just happened the flight i was just on but i've seen like, I don't get it.

8:10Like we are just getting on the plane right now. We like, you could, what were you doing? Like, what were you doing 10 minutes before this? And I know that's wrong. Maybe people have issues and medical issues and I shouldn't judge them or whatever. And if that's the case, okay, fine, whatever. But if that's not the case, like nobody should be making a hard left when you're getting on the plane, you should be going down the aisle and finding your seat. I just think it's a strange time to have to do that. What am I talking about? Legitimately, what am I talking about? I don't know. I actually don't know.

8:45So what have we gotten out of this episode? Number one, send emails to people that have not been opening or clicking them. Good luck with that. Number two, fly Spirit Airlines. There you go. That's my commercial. Number three, go to the bathroom. That's what I got out of this episode. I don't know what's going on anymore. I appreciate you being here. Be awesome. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what?

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