SPECIAL SERIES ==>Email Quick Wins!<== | BATHROOM Break #48 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

0:28Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. Thanks for checking it out.

0:34Oh, there we go. We're live. We're live. We are live. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Bathroom Break Live. We do this on the Marketing Millennials podcast and do this, not that podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and I'm here with the... Jay Schwedlison. Wait a minute. Are we live on your page or Marketing Millennials? Marketing Millennials. Oh, that's why I keep refreshing the wrong page. But today we're going to talk email marketing tips, ones that you can implement today. This is our first time going live off of Riverside. So again, don't judge us. Jay, do you have anything to say today? Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

1:15We actually are live. We've said at least 12 times already in the span of one minute. So if you haven't listened to The Bathroom Break, that's a podcast episode that Daniel releases on Market Millennials. And I release on my podcast, Do This, Not That, every week. It's super short. We go through a lot of tips on random stuff, which we're going to do right now. But we always talk about nonsense before we get going. So, Daniel, let's talk about some nonsense. I have a question for you. What are you watching right now? I see a lot of memes being made by you, White Lotus memes. Are you, like, all in a White Lotus?

1:47Yes, and I actually love how all in the cast members are. I'm not spoiling spoilers. I've been seeing videos about how people come up to them in grocery stores and ask them for spoilers. It's kind of crazy. But yeah, I'm all in White Lotus. I'm behind on Severance. So don't spoil it for me, anybody on Severance. But those are the two shows I'm doubling down on right now. What shows are you watching? Wait, before I tell you what I'm watching, can you do for everybody that's dialed in live, can you do your best Parker Posey impersonation? I feel you do that a lot in your free time. No, I don't. Jay actually posted a picture, a video of Parker Posey on his Instagram and took it down because he thought nobody would know what it was i liked it when she was like buddhism tsunami it was great that's actually pretty good well thank you very much uh yeah what i'm watching which i know everybody cares about is i just finished watching the ruby frankie ruby frank story she's this like mom youtuber who lost her mind and was like hurting her kids that was on hulu and then i was watching the good american family with ellen pompeo i don't know what Natalia Gray story about this girl who's either faking how old she was.

2:59It was crazy. So I'm watching really trash garbage stuff. But what's not trash or garbage is what we're going to do right now. So by the way, as we keep talking, are people showing up to this thing? Yeah, people are showing up. People are in. People are in live. Yeah, drop us some comments. Let us know how ridiculously pathetic this is. No, it's awesome. All right, let's jump into the topic of the day here. We're talking about some rapid email tips, stuff that's going to get people to open, to click, to respond, to engage that maybe people aren't really thinking about that much. So Daniel, you want to fire it off.

3:30What's your first email marketing tip? One of my most favorite and the one I tell a lot of people is treat every email like it's someone's first email. So your welcome email is your first impression, but every other email there is a first impression to someone else. So you can't just phone it in every email, just like social. You can phone in every social post because open rates, algorithms, all that good stuff don't normally always show a post to someone. So you always have to repeat what you say, say things great, make it your best email that you ever put out. I love that. And by the way, for everyone that's here now, if you don't know Daniel, which you should, he's the founder of Marketing Millennials.

4:15So that's why we're on his page right now. And I'm Jay, I'm a big doofus. Anyway, so some email tips that I always think about is the little stuff. So for example, people don't know this, but about 19 % of all the clicks that happen in any email that you send out are going to be on the logo in your email. And what happens is whoever's coding your email, they generally aren't taking the click-through traffic that's on your logo and sending it to your offer page. They usually send it to your homepage because they're just not thinking about the logo traffic, but that's one in five clicks. You want to think about every click through in that email that you're sending out and where you're sending that traffic because every time you hit send, you're hoping one thing happens.

4:56They take advantage of the offer. They subscribe, they download, they do a free trial. And if you have click throughs going elsewhere, what are you accomplishing? It's why I can't stand a lot of times when you have social sharing links in your emails, because if you're trying to get something downloaded or bought, let all the click-throughs go to that one thing. What else you got? Actually, we'll double down on that. I think too many people will go put their company homepage or something like that. Your offer page can lead to a lot of things that you're trying to do. So that email is supposed to do one thing.

5:31When you're trying to make an email, you're trying to sell the click. And that's the goal of a lot of emails and marketing is to sell the click. But my next tip is, and this might sound counterintuitive to people, but as you're growing a list, you should kick the unengaged people off your list. A couple of reasons for this. I know a huge list number is a vanity metric, but it actually in a high engaged email helps you, one, get seen by more people because the email providers are like, okay, this is an engaged email list. It's not just sending to people who don't care about your content. So every month we do a bulk cutoff of people who have been unengaged for 90 days.

6:19So that means no clicks, no opens, no emails. But before we do that, we do a Dear John flow of three emails, a win back campaign to try get them back. But if they don't get any engagement on that win back campaign, we'll kick them off the list. I say a highly engaged email is way more important than having a bigger list, even though growth numbers look great on a dashboard. Yeah, I don't think vanity metrics in email are just ridiculous. You got to get real with yourself and focus on what matters. One of the other big things in email that I think is a total myth is when to send out your emails.

7:00When should you actually press the button? What time of day should you press the button? And there's this feature that is now available in almost every email sending platform that I think is actually garbage now. And it's called send time optimization. So in almost every email sending platform, there's a button that you could check that says, I want to use send time optimization. And it's using AI and all this stuff. And basically what it's doing is it is sending out the emails that you are sending out to everybody in your database. But it's sending it to each person at a different time depending on when they most normally open up their email.

7:34right so if i open up my emails normally at 847 i'm going to get your email at 847 when you check that box on your platform and so many marketers now are using this this functionality that we're actually starting to see it not work because all the emails now are going out to you exactly at the same time of when you open up all your other emails it's like this confirmation bias that's happening so i'm a big fan of not using that but the thing i will tell you about when to send out your emails is 80 % of all emails are sent out on the hour. When you set up your campaign, you're sending it up to go out at 11 a.m., at 2 p.m., at 8 a.m.

8:10If you send out your email campaigns, whether it's business or consumer, not on the hour, at 11.17, at 8.09, at 2.22, you'll actually see a lift in your open rate performance because your emails are not going to be categorized in the same bucket in the inbox with all the other promotional email. Just by not sending out on the hour is a win. What else you got? another way to get your emails open i think a lot of people forget is the pre-header of your email but the pre-header one thing that i've been testing out that's worked really well is adding brackets and putting a read time on your email so i'll put this is a four minute read it's a three minute read it's a six minute read it sets expectations for people to open up the email We've actually seen a 10 % to 15 % lift in our open rates by just adding read time on some of our emails when we test it in the preheader.

9:04So one thing to say is you test this, but also test the preheader. It's an underrated place to test. It's basically the second line of your email. The subject line is the first line of your email. The second line of your email is a preheader. So test things in there, test emojis, test things that are outrageous. This will help improve your open rate if you actually start testing your preheader of your email. Yeah, I love that. I think preheader is such an untapped area to be testing. And the other really kind of out there thing that we do a lot, which I know is going to sound ridiculous, is I like unsubscribes.

9:43I like getting people off my list that don't want to be there. It doesn't hurt deliverability. It's a big myth that unsubscribes are this terrible thing. And what I would encourage everyone to do is go back to all your email sends and look for the emails that generated the most unsubscribes. Which emails had the highest unsubscribe rate? And what a lot of marketers will do is like, oh, no, we can never do that again because it generated the most unsubscribes. I totally don't buy into that. Whatever you did in that email is something that got a reaction. Okay? You took a stand on a topic. Okay?

10:13Maybe you broke out of your normal boring format. You did something that got a reaction. And yeah, there was a lot of people who said, why am I still on this list? I never even look at this thing. And they took themselves off the list. But if you did it right, you also got interactions in the other direction. So I would look at your unsubscribe emails, the ones that generated the most, and say, wow, how can I do this a little bit differently? And you really get some traction out of this. So don't think of unsubscribes as a big problem that you have. I actually love that. I think it's signal. It's signal of positive and negative things.

10:45But it's not an end-all, be-all. So if your boss says, why did we get so many unsubscribes on this email? What did you do? You could, what Jay said, say we took a stance. We tried something new. This is something different we did in our email. So that's why you should always have a hypothesis going into things in marketing. So you can know why and what you're testing when you go into things. But the next thing I want to add to help in the inbox is something I like to have something consistent in the inbox. So what we do in the marketing millennials is add a flame emoji on every single email. Why?

11:21Because when people are searching for our email, they know to look for the flame. Every time we're in the inbox, they know to look at the flame. A consistency in anything in content wins. So in social media, if you're consistent on your voice, your format, what you do, people will know why to follow you. If you're disparate, they don't know why. Same as subject line. Be consistent so people know where you are, who you are. They don't think they're following somebody else. So I like to have a consistent emoji in every single email. So that's something we do, and it really helps keep our open rates at a good place.

12:00All right. So before we wrap up here, I want to know something. Do you think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's son got the job because he's Arnold Schwarzenegger's son on White Lotus? or do you think he got it because he just deserves that position i think it helped him get the position um but i do think he fits the frat bro bro vibe of um saxon so i think um people are really hating on him online though they're really hating on like i hate this character i hate this person but if they're hating on him online he's probably doing a pretty good job as a character because that's what the goal is to like hate him as a character.

12:43Right. It's like getting unsubscribes in your emails. He's getting a reaction. You like garbage TV. So what are some garbage shows that people should watch right now? Well, of course, everybody just finished Love is Blind. And if you didn't, you're out of your – you just are a loser because it was incredible. Dave is a loser. Every guy this season except for the guy that got married was actually horrendous. I was very disappointed with this season of The Bachelor. I think The Bachelor is in major trouble. The Bachelor in Paradise is coming out this summer. That'll be good. But I think the Bachelor franchise, and I've never said this before publicly, not that anybody will care, but I think the franchise is in trouble.

13:20So there's that. And a lot of the other reality TV shows are actually hard to watch. Everyone says I need to watch Traders. I'm going to try to get involved with that. But a lot of them are tough. So yeah, I need more garbage in my life. I am all in on White Lotus. Everyone keeps telling me to watch adolescence on Netflix. I haven't watched that yet. So I have a lot of homework to do. I don't know. I need to get a life basically. Everybody who joined in, well, if you like the live comment, tell us what we could do better. Tell us what we could do next time. What do you want to hear? We might go live again next week if you like this or another week.

13:58We do this every week on our podcast feeds, the Market Millennials and Do This Not That. That Do This, Not That podcast is top five on the charts, but been three trending for the last 63 weeks. If you go look at Jay's feed, he posted about this and hyped it up. But he also, also, I forgot where are my manners. Congrats on the launch of Guru. Guru Conference. Thank you. We just launched GuruConference.com, our free email marketing virtual event. But that event is meaningless because the real event later this year is going to be Marketing Land, Daniel's event. but I'm not supposed to talk about it yet.

14:35It's top secret. So pretend like you didn't hear it. Well, thank you all for joining and have a good rest of your day or good night or wherever you're joining, what time you're joining in from. Later. Daniel, come on, man. I got to 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 back from my bathroom break this is daniel go follow the mark and milan podcast but also tune into this series it's once a week the bathroom break we talk about marking tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email subject line to any marking 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 later