SPECIAL SERIES ==> Quick Wins and Some Nonsense <== | BATHROOM Break #102 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

0:07Jay Schwedelson:Welcome 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.

0:16Daniel Murray: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 Schwedelson, 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.

0:39Jay Schwedelson:We are back with another bathroom break. And this is a very special episode, because Jay turned the big 5-0 on Friday. So everybody, again, flood these DMs, flood LinkedIn, floodys Instagram say happy birthday big five oh but in honor of the big five oh I got mad libs 50 years of mad libs I didn't even know that mad libs was as old as jay but that's that's cool to

1:07Daniel Murray:know I don't know first of all I pretty made the effort that you actually went you went online and you ordered a mad libs book the 50th anniversary because I'm 50 years old because I'm an old loser very nice of you I mean I appreciate that and we're gonna read one because I found one that

1:22Jay Schwedelson:says advertisement. And we, I asked Jay to fill out these, these words. He's not really good at this. He puts like lame words, but the, the Mad Libs is advertisement. So we're going to read it. I didn't even read it yet. So let me just frame what happened before we got on. David goes,

1:36Daniel Murray:I got this Mad Libs book for your 50th birthday. I'm like, wow, you went all out. And he goes, I'm not going to tell you anything. Just answer noun, plural noun, verb, whatever. So I gave him all these words and I, I'm an idiot. So I can only imagine what's about to come out here, But we're all going to hear, this is a very special moment for the episode. I'm very excited to hear what it is that the Mad Libs turned out here.

1:56Jay Schwedelson:Okay, this is advertisement that Jay wrote. Look at yourself in the cow. What does your smelly face tell you? Right? It's time to treat your toe to an ocean napping cruise. So do it. Sail and style on a hairy luxury tomato. Whether it's the annoying spacious of our staterooms or the tall elegance of our salons, everything is fit for a stop sign. Our ships are skippered by Norwegian ears, whose ancestors dating back to the ninth doorknob were seafaring cheeses. Europe's most foggy chefs prepare your culinary Tic Tacs. Our pastry chips create slimy desserts that melt in your water bottle Our dashing waiters are at your tissue before you raise your colon Don't delay, plan to sail today Now look in the mirror and how about that smiley podcast You can guess which words, J.J.

3:08Jay Schwedelson:You did the tic-tacs, you get the best words for this But that was such a good advertisement Would you be sold to go on this?

3:17Daniel Murray:First of all, how did Mad Libs last 50 years? And that is their business model. Like, I mean, that is unbelievable. No podcast has ever done that before. We just broke the internet. That was one of the worst things I've ever heard. But let me ask you a question about that, because that was an ad, I guess, for a cruise. I've never been on a cruise. Have you been on a cruise?

3:37Jay Schwedelson:No, and I never planned to go on a cruise. I'm scared of being stuck out in sea. And remember that, like, poop cruise? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, once I saw that, I'm like, I'm out. I'm never, that's never happened.

3:47Daniel Murray:Oh, dude, everybody out there needs to go and watch. It's a Netflix documentary called Poop Cruise. And it was phenomenal because basically all these people were stuck on the boat. The boat was broken and the toilets were all broken and they were stuck at sea. And everybody was like, go into the toilet in garbage bags. It's the best documentary of all. It is legit the best documentary of all time. If you did nothing else, go home and watch it. That's going to be the most useful thing you got out of this episode. And listen, I'm 50, so I have a lot of experience. I've seen a lot of bad TV. I'm telling you, this is good.

4:18Jay Schwedelson:And you've also seen a lot of email marketing. So we're going to talk about email marketing. Actually, you were back in the direct mail days.

4:26Daniel Murray:You didn't even see email. I did. Direct mail is my OG jam. I still do direct mail. I love direct mail. But let's talk about some quick win email marketing tips. So everyone gets something useful out of this nonsense of an episode. So you want to go first or should I? You go first. All right. So let me give you a few things that are working really, really well right now that I'm surprised that are working. So in the world of email newsletters, it used to be in the subject line that for the last few years, you did not want to put the addition in your subject line. So the subject line people used to put like in brackets, like the name of my newsletter, Scoop.

5:07Daniel Murray:and I would say scoop number 47 and they put that in brackets and then they say whatever the subject line was. But people got away from that because it was actually depressing performance. So we've been testing this a ton and I don't know why, maybe it stands out, but now starting your subject line for your email newsletters with the actual addition number, like in my case, scoop, scoop number 42, whatever, and then closing the brackets and then doing your subject line is actually lifting our open rates significantly. And it's just one of those things that goes to show you that a tactic that you think, okay, nobody should ever do that again.

5:44Daniel Murray:It's a bad idea. You constantly need to be retesting them because there are little things like that, that I thought were dead, that just come back to life.

5:51Jay Schwedelson:I also think that like when someone says it's an anti-bass practice, then you could start doing it again because then it goes the opposite way. So when you say like, don't do this, then people start doing it again. Some things that I'm seeing is I think now in the age of AI, and you do this really well, and I think a lot of people do this really well, but I think when you add some sort of question that's very easy in your newsletter that's personal, like nothing to do with your business, but something like what TV show did you watch this week or give me a tip to help me with back pain or blah, blah, blah.

6:30Jay Schwedelson:It helps lift reply rates. It makes your newsletter feel personal. It teaches people to reply. It gets deliverability up. And a lot of people just don't add that personal note in there. And it will make your newsletter, and you can pre-do this, but it can make your newsletter feel way more personal than a newsletter that has nothing, or even in regular email, an outreach email, or an ad email, whatever you want, just add something personal in that email.

6:59Daniel Murray:Yeah, and I would double down on that and just say this, whatever platform you're using, I don't care if you're a big market or small market or B2B, B2C, nonprofit, whatever. One of the things that you should be asking your platform, your email sending platform or your CRM platform for that matter is, are you able to handle people replying to our mass emails? We send out our newsletter, send out our promotional emails. Can we actually get those replies? Can we reply to those replies? That functionality is not in every ESP, but more and more, that is what is driving engagement. So you should be leaning into your platforms and asking that.

7:36Daniel Murray:So something else that we're seeing in the preheader, you know, the preheader is that second subject line where it's a gray thing right under the main subject line. A lot of people are making the mistake. They think because after Apple did their most recent update to our iPhones, the preheader got a little jacked up on for some people using the mail app on Apple. So people think the preheader is not important and they think that in Gmail something's happening. It's not important. It's not true. The preheader is still having a massive impact on the percentage of people opening up emails. And what we have found is that there's three magic words in preheaders to use.

8:11Daniel Murray:So you write your subject line, and then if your preheader starts with one of these three words, and, but, or plus, the words and, but, or plus, they're continuation words, and they actually lift your open rates significantly because what you're trying to do is get the person to read the subject line and then continue on. You say, you know, this is our hot new deal, and then your preheader says and, blah, blah, blah, or but, blah, blah, blah, or plus, blah, blah, blah. It will lift your open rates by another 10%. So thinking about the words that you're starting your preheader with are really important.

8:42Jay Schwedelson:I was always told that like subject lines, first line of your email, preheader is like the second line of your email. So it always should continue. And then the like, it should lead into whatever is in your text, because if someone opens it, then they're going to start reading. because if you put something that's so unrelated in your like intro and stuff like that, people are going to tune out or it's something not close to the front that you're talking about. Like if you say like five tips and those five tips are in the bottom of the email, someone like you just spammed me, you didn't say the right thing.

9:19Daniel Murray:So yeah, the way you think about any marketing, but especially email marketing, it's like a chain, right? And anywhere, any link in the chain that's broken, you lose the person And it's every link of the chain has to be connected. So you have the from name that has to be compelling. Then the subject line. Okay, great. They like that. They continue with the preheader. Then they continue with the headline. Then the body copy. But if any part of that along the way is bad, the chain breaks and you lose the person. And so you really want to get the most important thing. Keep going up top. Cause that's, that's how it works.

9:50Daniel Murray:So let me ask you a question, Daniel, before we wrap up here. So Ari, Daniel's wife's birthday is now in the rear view. They do the birth month or whatever. Like, are you, I forgot when that, when is your birthday? Like what's the next big event in your home? Is your son's birthday the next big event? Yeah. Son's birthday is the next big event. One year old, one year old.

10:08Jay Schwedelson:But that's in a couple months. I get a little break for a little bit.

10:13Daniel Murray:You have a one year old birthday party?

10:16Jay Schwedelson:No, no. I'm anti one year old birthday parties. I know that's mean, but it's like, it's, it's always for the parents, not for anybody. of course uh we're gonna probably like take him on like a a trip somewhere like i want to create the condition because he's a summer baby so like he's not gonna be able to get birthday parties with like his friends in school so i want to do something fun in summer i feel like you're

10:39Daniel Murray:projecting did you have birthday parties and nobody came because you had no friends in school

10:42Jay Schwedelson:is that is that really what happened you got me i was bullied so hard so you just released a bunch of childhood trauma on this podcast wait wait daniel's really a like a really tall dude and he

10:53Daniel Murray:He was like a lineman. He played college football, D1. Did you bully people? I feel like you took their lunch because you were probably hungry. You know what I used to do? I was actually thinking about this.

11:04Jay Schwedelson:I used to eat my lunch before lunch, and I used to be so sad that I had no more lunch. And I was just the saddest moment because I was so hungry as a kid. It's just so bad. I was thinking about that the other day that I used to pre-eat my lunch. I mean, mom used to do this terrible thing, so parents, please don't do this.

11:22Daniel Murray:she used to put like a banana in my lunch and my whole lunch tastes like banana the whole day

11:27Jay Schwedelson:and it was like the worst thing in the world where you buy into a sandwich and it's just banana tasting sandwich uh it was not wow we're unlocking so many childhood moments for daniel right i do like go and find a therapist exactly um this was a great episode also happy birthday to jay everybody flood his comments he's in the next century next half century um let's go which is good he he's living life you know he's just living life here i am all right dude everybody later bye daniel come on man i gotta get back to work get out of there all right while he's still

12:04Daniel Murray: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

12:16Jay Schwedelson: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 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.