Ep. 193 - SECRET reason you are getting UNSUBSCRIBES!📞 I avoid my friends 🫠 Ask Us ANYTHING

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit a question, it is super easy. You go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast. You click that and there's a button that says ask us anything and you could submit anything you got about life, marketing we don't care it's cool it's fun all right today's question let's talk about the work question first we got a question from sarah from baldwin park california uh you know what's in baldwin park california is in and out burger if you're not living on the west coast maybe you don't know about in and out burger it's kind of like mcdonald's but on the west coast and everyone hypes it up but like it's the greatest thing of all time and a lot of celebrities go there I'm just going to tell you right now, I think it's overrated.

1:31It is fine. It is not like, oh, I'm near an in and out. I need to go. It's literally fine. You didn't ask, but if I was going to have some fast food, I would crush some Taco Bell, number one on the list. I mean, Chick-fil-A is fine. KFC is very underrated. I've never had Popeye's. I would like to have a Popeye's chicken sandwich. I don't know how much chicken is in the sandwich. It's like a big ball of fried stuff, but it looks pretty good in my opinion. Anyway, who cares? Sarah, what is your question? Jay, we are seeing crazy high unsubscribes in our email marketing campaigns, but oddly, we see very low overall click-through rates.

2:13Does that make any sense? So this is a very important question, and there's two things I want to talk about. I want to talk about the epic fail that are one-click unsubscribes and how it could be ruining your database. And then also want to talk about really quick link level click tracking in your email and why it's critical. All right. So when you send out an email, at the bottom of your email, you have an unsubscribe link. This has nothing to do with that top of the email unsubscribe that you have for Gmail and these other systems. this is that link that you put into the footer of your email and you say hey if you don't want to get more emails click here and unsubscribe now if somebody clicks on that link and they get taken to a page and say hey do you want to confirm your unsubscribe and you click yes that is a two-step unsubscribe and that is exactly what you want to have in place that's great but if for whatever reason you're seeing really high unsubscribes on the emails that you're sending out and you're confused as to why, you may have in place what's called a one-click unsubscribe, which is really bad.

3:20I'm going to explain to you why it's bad. So if you have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails and someone just clicks it, that's it. They click it and then it takes them to a page that says, okay, now you're removed. And all they do is click it once. Okay. That is a one-click unsubscribe. The reason that that is absolutely something you never want to do is because there's so much what's called intrusion detection software. There's so many things that are looking for bots and scammers as you are receiving your emails. There's all these automated software tools that are out there, antivirus tools that are out there, okay, that are looking to see if the emails that you are receiving are malicious.

4:04And the way that these tools work that you may not even be aware of being applied onto your inbox or the people that you are marketing to's inboxes, okay, especially corporate accounts, what's happening is these software, these network intrusion software detectors, what they do is they scan every email that comes into their network. Every time anybody in their organization, or it could even be like a Gmail, It could be anything. Anytime anybody receives an email, the software is automatically scanning every link in the message, and it's automatically clicking on every link in the message to make sure that those links in the messages are not some sort of phishing scam, are not going to trigger some sort of virus, are not something malicious.

4:51And it's done automatically. And then when it shows up in your inbox, that email looks like it's never been opened, but it actually has been opened, and all the links have been clicked on. Now, why does that matter? Because if you have a one-click unsubscribe in the email marketing that you are sending out, then when these intrusion software systems are scanning your emails and clicking everything, they're actually clicking on that unsubscribe link. and they are unsubscribing that person from your database because it's automatically clicking on that one link. That is why you need to have that two-step process to ensure that when somebody clicks on the link, it then gets reconfirmed on that other page.

5:33If you only have a one-click unsubscribe, then you're going to get a mountain of unsubscribes. Your database is going to automatically remove them because that's how your email software does it. And you're not even going to know that these people are being removed and they don't even want to be removed. So if you see really high unsubscribes and low overall engagement click-throughs or whatever, you may have a one click unsubscribe setup and that is a really bad idea. The other thing that you need to do is link level tracking in all of your emails, okay? You cannot just be looking at, hey, I got a 3 % click-through rate on this email I sent out.

6:10Where did they click? Did they click on your logo? Did they click on the call to action button? Did they click on a particular offer in your email? Did they click on the unsubscribe? Are you including unsubscribe clicks in your overall click-through rate? Because that would be ridiculous if you are. That's an inflation of metrics that you don't need. But more importantly, that is you want to see where people are clicking because number one, it will help you to identify the engaging content that you're putting out there. Okay. You can improve your personalization, right? Because you're going to know that, oh, this person clicked on this product or this thing in the email.

6:46So the next email we send them should be about that, right? And then it also allows you to optimize your call to action placement, right? Are people clicking on the call to action button way up top or they can on the one lower down. But if you're not breaking out your link level tracking and you're just looking at it in aggregate, you're leaving so much valuable information on the table and that's a total fail. All right. Before we get into the ridiculous question. I want to let you know that this podcast is presented by Marigold, which is the greatest email sending platform on earth. I send out over 6 billion emails a year with my agency.

7:23We send out business and consumer emails. We use Marigold and you can check them out at meetmarigold.com. That's meetmarigold.com, but that's not what I want to tell you. They literally just came out with the best piece of content I've seen from anybody in forever and is free and you got to check it out. They came out with this new report on 200 brands and they named the brand specifically and they rank the brands based on how they're doing personalization, how they're doing their loyalty marketing, how they're doing all this different stuff. And they break down each brand. Okay. Is there relationship marketing trends report?

7:56And you can access it. It's the brand ranking report. You can access it at jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. That's jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. I'm telling you, it goes through 200 brands. It is so cool. You got to check that out. All right, let's get to the ridiculous question. We got a question in from Dave from Plainview, New York. Dave, what do you got? Jay, my wife tells me I should call my friends more and I should text more of them to be more in contact. How often are you in contact with your friends? Well, I'm probably the worst person in the entire universe to ask this question to because I'm horrible, okay?

8:40I don't call anybody ever. I don't have anything to say like, okay, hi, what's up, man? How you doing? Oh, really? Cool. What else are you doing? I don't care. It's like, I don't care. I know that's terrible, but I just can't do it. I mean, I'll be in my car and I'm like, Oh, should I listen to the radio? Right. Should I listen to a podcast? I listen to music or should I call one of my random friends? And when I do get them on the phone, they're like me, they'll be like, why are you calling me, bro? Like, is there a problem? Like, no, like, well, what's up? Just text me. So they don't want to talk to me.

9:19So I don't call anybody ever and in terms of texting i'm i'm definitely the worst texter of all time because i i never initiate the text ever and uh because i don't here's why i don't initiate texting i don't initiate texting because i don't know how to end the text discussion i don't really know how to do that and always goes on way longer than i wanted to so somebody will text me about something i'm like oh that's so funny ha ha ha we'll go back and forth and i'm like i gotta get out of this conversation. I can't keep going back. And if you wait too long, it's weird. It's like, why aren't you texting me back?

9:52So I always just try to get out as fast as possible. And I used to do this, the yellow thumbs up and try to be like, yeah, this is over. I'm giving you a yellow thumbs up. But now I've learned that the yellow thumbs up, that's not nice. That means like screw off, I guess. So I don't do that anymore. So now I've migrated to end the conversation where you hold down the message and you give the reaction in the top right-hand corner. So I have found that instead of doing the thumbs up, if I do the exclamation points, that ends the conversation really fast. For me, it does. So that's what I'm always looking to do.

10:28How can I end the conversation as fast as possible and get out of it and hopefully never communicate again? So definitely the wrong person to ask, but thank you for asking. Listen, I appreciate everyone being here. Register for Google Conference. It's almost over. You almost missed your spot. It's free, it's virtual. I'm not even gonna tell you about it because you should already know you should be going, come on, world's largest event. Be there later.

11:16Guruevents.com. So you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.