SPECIAL SERIES ==> 📩 “Open This Email” Works?! <== | BATHROOM Break #88 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

0:07Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. we are back with another episode of the bathroom break i am here with the gym bro jay swettelson and i am daniel murray and i want to talk about why i call him the gym bro because i just figured out that this guy for the last two years goes to the gym three times a week and he runs saturday sunday so he's really some sort of athlete out here so i know new year's resolutions are happening or how do you get to the gym three times a week and how what do you suggest for people to do that okay don't follow anything i do health-wise i do go i'm going for three years so you could screw off three days a week i go at around 6 45 in the morning all right which is absolutely terrible and i'm not i'm a very horrible worker outer and i also get very embarrassed so like where i go to this gym in like my community area and i get there and if i go to use the bench press, I'm very weak.

1:33And so I try to wait until people that I don't know are nowhere near the bench press because I don't want them to see how weak I am because that would really bring shame to my family. So that's, I'm not thinking about getting healthy or getting stronger. I'm just thinking about how embarrassed I am by how weak I am when I'm at the gym. What do you think about that? I like that. I mean, I have been kicking off tennis again and I've been trying to go at times where nobody could see me playing because I haven't played for five months. So So I don't want to get embarrassed when someone comes and sees and they say, what happened to you?

2:07So I'm going as early as possible to play tennis these days. Well, let me ask you something. Me and Jim broke. So if everyone out there doesn't know, Daniel doesn't talk about it a lot, but he was a D1 college football player, University of Cincinnati, like real time, whatever. I want to know something because you used to have, you were a big dude. You had a bench press a lot. What was your max best bench press in your life? I think it was like 425. wow that's crazy that's crazy and now now it's probably like 205 so we'll see that's crazy you're like tough don't mess with daniel uh what is your max brand's press we should everybody should know no idea it's six pounds um all right let's get into it listen what we want to talk about today is something that works in social media it works in email It works in all marketing and it's going to annoy you that it works, but it does, which is this idea of telling people what to do.

3:02And it's in our subconscious. But when you actually tell somebody what you want them to do in your copy, in your social post copy, in your images, in everything, it crushes it. So, Daniel, do you use this tactic and how have you tried it? Yeah, I think one way I like to do this is in ads or content and saying it at the end, screenshot this and send this to your team, save this for later. It helps. The one metric I always try in content is shareability and getting that share button hit. But you sometimes have to remind people to do that. So if you have that at the end where you say screenshot and send it to people, especially even in my email where I might have a guide or something, say save this and send this to your team.

3:53Or as a CTA, you'll want to screenshot this. Something where you're going to tell people exactly the action that you want them to take. I think the click here button is a little bit dead now, I would say. and I don't like to say that buttons are dead, but it's not going to perform as good as telling people what to do. And there's some other ways that I think about it, but I wanted you to go into some ways you're using it as well. Yeah, I'll tell you two ways that we're using it. We've tested it and it's worked really well. So email, in this subject line, if you actually start your subject line, and this is from our subjectline.com data, if you start your subject line with open this, right, or open this email, it actually lifts the open rates by about 15 % from what we've seen, which is ridiculous because you're telling somebody what to do.

4:42If you've never tested that, that's a great simple test to try. And it's a little bit annoying that it works. You're like, screw off. I don't want to listen to you. But for some reason, the subconscious, we react to what we're told to do. And we also have tested this quite a bit on LinkedIn where we'll put out a post, like a carousel post with some sort of useful tactic. And we'll do a test of including save this post. We'll put that in the top portion of the copy versus not having it. And when we include save this post, We actually now, because LinkedIn has changed there, what you could see, we actually see a lot more LinkedIn saves.

5:15And we could see that in the analytics when we say save this post. So by telling people exactly what you want them to do, it will give you a boost in performance. Yeah. Some other places I've seen and I've wanted to test this and I'm going to test this in 2026 is buttons on your website or your nav bar. Instead of like saying content, you could say learn here or have a, what action they're going to take at that button. Instead of saying content library, you could say learn here. Or instead of community, you could say network here. Having an idea of what they're going to do when they click that button is way better, I feel like, than just having obvious titles that everybody is doing.

6:04I think you got to tell people what they're going to expect when they click that button and when they land on that page. And I think I'm betting that it will help retention when you say this is what the action I want you to take when you do click this button or watch this piece of content or view this ad. More people will do that action and you'll retain them longer that way. Yeah. And in a lot of ways, we've been all doing this, but we're doing it in a horribly boring way. Like we're telling people, you know, let's say for an event or a webinar saying, register, you're trying to tell the person to register or if it's a consumer offer, buy now.

6:41But you're telling them that at the very end and you're telling it in this very self-serving way as opposed to on the upfront, you know, open this, read this, save this, screenshot this. Instead of just doing it at the end of the motion, do it at the beginning of the motion so you can get more people to actually make it to the end of the motion. The hardest thing to do in marketing and what our job is is to get attention. But once you have attention, the next thing you need to do is invest in ways in capturing that attention because you spent all this money to get this person to a landing page or to your content or something.

7:15So all I'm saying to do is test these, test different CTAs, buttons to make them more action forward instead of just generic and see if there's a lift in your content. See if there's a lift in your download. See if there's a lift in your saves. And like what Jay said, which is something, his goal is if a platform is tracking that metric, like LinkedIn tracking saves, Instagram tracks the share button or repost button. And if you're saying those things and people are doing those actions, that gives you a signal that you're trending in the right direction. All right. So back to our gym bros thing.

7:53I want to know something. When you're at the gym, are you the type of dude who, if you're using something, you leave a towel on there on the bench or on the machine, and then you go somewhere else, do something else, and you come back? Or do you take it with you wherever you go? Are you trying to hold on to your thing? Are you a jerk like that? I think it depends on how busy that place is at the time. So I'm pretty conscious that if the gym is busy, I'm just going to stick to my machine. But if it's an empty gym and there's my worst is when there's two people in the gym and you have a little rotation going and someone goes to take that machine when there's a thousand other machines in the gym and they will need to use that machine in that moment.

8:37That's when I get annoyed. The other times I'm pretty conscious that, hey, there's a lot of people in this gym. I am not hogging this machine. Or if I'm going to do this, I just say you can work in with me and do that. I'm pretty – but I think it's the worst to just save a machine. Yeah. Horrible. Bad gym etiquette, which is absolutely the worst. But Daniel's actually going now every single day at 5 in the morning. Did you see this, by the way? This is so wild. I saw Marky Mark or whatever his name, Mark Wahlberg. He was on the news. He was talking about his sleeping, whatever. He gets up at 3 in the morning, he said, and he goes to bed at 6.30 at night.

9:17Sounds like you're a sketch-up. I don't know what's different than what you do every single day. 6.30 is crazy. He's going to sleep. That literally is my baby's schedule. My baby goes to sleep at 7 and wakes up at 3.30 every single morning. So he's literally my baby. but he said he wants to spend more time with his kids but i'm like dude you're going to bed before your kids i'm like i don't know your kids ain't working waking up at 3 30. what's going on i don't know what's going on uh all right again i don't know what's going on with this podcast but you guys all crush it leave daniel a review leave me a review i don't know we'll check in the next week daniel come on man i gotta get back to work get out of there all right while he's still in there.

10:01This 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 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 Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. 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 client 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.

10:35Later.