What’s Up THIS WEEK: 25% Increase in EMAIL OPENS! And...Avoid doing this with AI! 📺 Nobody Wants This??📺| Ep. 433

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 what's up this week from the Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And this is our short episode. We break down what's going on this week in business and marketing, in life. So let's jump right into it. We got something about email, Instagram, all sorts of stuff. So first off, October is such an interesting time for email marketing, and people don't realize there are certain tactics that work incredibly well in October and early November that don't do as well other times for some reason.

0:42And this is some data from subjectline.com. So one of those tactics, first on the business side, business to business, is in your subject line, the personalization that does actually the best this specific time of the year is company name personalization. So when you actually put whoever you are sending an email to, you put their company the name of their company in the subject line, it increases email open rates by over 30 % this time of year, meaning things like this. Your subject line could be, is Acme at risk or new security tips for Acme or is Acme prepared for 2026? There's something about seeing your company in the subject line and it's getting your mind thinking about what's coming next, what's the outlook for the upcoming year, whatever it may be.

1:32But first of all, if you've never tested company in the subject line, you're missing out. But this is the time of year that it does particularly well. So that's a really great personalization tip this time of year. And then the other one, which is so obvious on the consumer side, but I don't think people realize it enough, is actually talking about Black Friday, saying Black Friday. Do not wait for mid-November to say Black Friday. Do not wait for post-Thanksgiving, or that would be totally ridiculous. I mean, that's out of control. Now, literally right now, these next 10 days is when you want to be doubling down using Black Friday because Black Friday, actually the last week of October and the first week of November, if you put that in your subject line for either consumer offers or small business offers, we also see that lift open rates well over 25%.

2:23So think about this time of year and not just going through the motions because everything is starting earlier. I mean, And I know you feel you go to Target, Costco, whatever. And it's almost like it's already 2026. It's wild. All right. What else is going on that's kind of interesting? Well, Instagram, there's some new data out from a Wisi, this big study where they revealed that basically posts on Instagram are dead. It's all about, I'm talking about regular posts. It's all about reels. Reels are where it's at. You shouldn't even be wasting your time with regular posts pretty much anymore. They should all be reels.

3:00And their study showed that Reels now have an average reach to reach about 30 % of users as compared to 14 % for regular posts that are carousels or even 13 % for photo posts. And the engagement rates from another study that just came out from Vidico said that Reels get almost double the engagement rates versus regular posts. And this makes a lot of sense because Adam Massari, who's the head of Instagram, came out this week and he actually talked about the fact that Instagram is going to be changing the format on Instagram. We go on there, what the little icons are that we can move around and be able to toggle when we're looking at our feed.

3:37And they're going to actually now change the tabs. So he said the first tab is still going to be stories and your feed. But then the second tab is going to be your reels and the third tab is going to be your DMs. and now you'll be able to swipe between the tabs and they're organizing, this is what he said, they're organizing the app around what people use for it most, which is Reels and DMs. So it's all about Reels on Instagram, period, end of story. Let's talk about some AI stuff that's going on. So ChatGPT, we all go to ChatGPT, right? And we ask it for help with content, all this stuff. Well, there's some new data actually out from World Data Research that shares that the top 50 phrases that ChatGPT gives back when asked for content generation help in marketing efforts actually causes a drop in engagement by over 15%.

4:31What does that mean? You go there, you ask it for help with a blog or content for a landing page or an email or a social post, and it's giving you back certain phrases, right? So now the top 50 phrases, the most common ones that it gives back is actually if you use any of them, you're dropping by about 15 % because it's like wallpaper when people see it. So what can you do? There's one simple prompt that you want to do when you are getting any content back from ChatGPT or you've written any content or anything like that. And the prompt is basically this. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but this is what you want to do.

5:07You want to go to ChatGPT with whatever copy of content, whatever you have, and then you want to say, take this copy and rip out anything AI normally gives back that lowers engagement, generic phrases, corporate tone, forced positivity, fake hype, or anything that sounds too polished or predictable. You want to use a prompt like this with any content that you're about to put out there, especially any content that you've gotten from ChatGPT or any of the AI tools, because basically we now need to even go further with this idea of un-AIing our writing because we are all just turning all of what we're putting out there into generic garbage.

5:49So this data that the top 50 phrases that it's giving back are actually hurting your performance is really important stuff to consider with everything you're doing out there. All right, let's get into useless, meaningless stuff that's going on. So I saw that Nobody Wants This season two is coming out in the next day or so. That's that romantic comedy thing on Netflix with Adam Brody and Kristen Bell, which is fine. Season one was good. Everybody likes season one, season two, whatever. But Kristen Bell is strange. No offense to her, but she's actually a strange human. I'm gonna tell you why I said she's a strange human.

6:21So Kristen Bell was married to Dax Shepard. Okay, whatever. I don't even know if I care about them, whatever. I don't know why I follow these people on Instagram, but I do. So they just celebrated their 12th wedding anniversary. Who cares? Whatever, it doesn't matter. Everybody puts their anniversary online, great. So they put a picture of themselves on Instagram and then Kristen Bell wrote this caption, which I thought was really strange. This is a caption she wrote on the post about her and Dax Shepard wedding anniversary. She wrote, happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who once said to me, I would never kill you.

6:59A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point, even though I'm heavily incentivized to kill you. I never would. what what is like dude just right i love you 12 years have been amazing i can't wait for the next 12 years what are we doing why do we have to say the most bizarre things so what just so you get some people to share it and to talk about it like idiots like me on podcasts what is going on it makes me want to unfollow people just stop be regular come on enough enough with me what am i talking about? I don't know. Listen, you're awesome. You got to check out Guru Conference coming up.

7:36It's free as virtual. Guruconference.com. I don't know. I would tell you all these reasons why you should register, but I'm too lazy. So just go register. Who cares? All right. Thanks for being here. Later. 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? I want to to even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You could find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff.

8:09And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.