How to Upgrade Your Webinar and Email Strategy for 2026 with Jay Schwedelson (Founder, SubjectLine.com)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

2:07Trusted by companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site so more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering Exit 5 listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out.

2:38It's convertive.com slash Exit 5. That's convertive.com slash Exit 5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02Hey, it's Dave. We've been having a lot of fun recently with our live session strategy lately at Exit 5. Don't you dare call them webinars. And this conversation I had with Jay Schwetelson a few months ago is a big reason why. Jay is the founder of subjectline.com and Guru Media, and he's one of the sharpest tactical minds on email, webinars, live content. And we get into the word, we get into why the word webinar kills registrations. I thought this was really interesting before you even start in what to do instead. Tactics for improving the webinar experience overall, including how to dramatically increase show rates and a bunch of email plays that you can try that are easy to test.

3:40We even talk about our mutual love of Bravo, Summer House, big, big stuff going on there, and the many great marketing lessons from Bravo and Andy Cohen and the gang. And this is a good one for anyone running live content or email programs who wanna squeeze more out of what they're already doing. Enjoy my conversation with Jay Schwetelson. All right, excited to do this episode, Jay Schwetelson. We got connected through email content over the years, love your energy, expert in all things email, events and virtual events. We were just talking backstage, but let's kick off this. You actually, you created this virtual events business.

4:14We were just talking about how to explain to your lawyer friend what a virtual event is. Can you kind of recap the events of maybe the last 30 days, and that's a good way to introduce you and tell the story about your business? Yeah, for sure. So I have a media business called Guru Media Hub. And some of the things that we do is we put on really large scale, completely bonkers, very different virtual events, ones that you actually might want to go to. We do them at scale. So we have one that's about events called Eventastic. That's about 15 ,000 people. But our biggest one is called Guru Conference.

4:44It's about 30 ,000 people. It's all about email marketing. It's a virtual event. We just had it. We had Nicole Kidman there, whatever. So about whatever. Yeah, right. That's my flex. You like that? Hold on, hold on. For the marketers listening, not to derail your story, but like how do you get Nicole Kidman for a virtual event? Does it seem like a regular event? and she's got an agency and you reach out? You do. And I will tell you the thing, the reason I like doing virtual events is that with celebs, first of all, they're a lot less expensive because again, to fly somewhere and show up, it's like, you know, 5, 10x what they have to do virtually.

5:18So you can get people that we otherwise way out of reach virtually. And the thing I always get asked about is, I'm at an email marketing conference and people say, what the hell does Nicole Kidman know about email marketing? And I was like, absolutely nothing. Who cares? I go, this is a human to human thing. You want to show up and see what she has to say. And I think that's part of why people get virtual events wrong. They think you have to like follow this boring ass playbook that nobody cares about. So what ended up happening was after the event was a big success this year, it was bonkers. I ended up having a conversation with the leadership at Constant Contact, the big billion dollar, 500 ,000 customer global brand.

5:55And they were like, what are you doing? Do you know that's where I cut my teeth at young Dave Gerhardt with hair? that was where you became the legend that is Dave Gerhardt. No, that's still a work in progress in my own mind. But yeah, yeah. The legend in your own mind. And so fast forward, they were like, we love what you're doing. And we want to lean in and make this even bigger. So they acquired Guru Conference, along with some of my other media assets, like subjectline.com. And they just want to take email marketing to all around the globe. So it's really validating to see a big brand like that, see value in something like a virtual event.

6:29And so, yeah, we try to look at the world a little differently. Okay. So how have you created this virtual event that is worth a company spending lots of money to buy? And forget that, forget even the acquisition, right? Even if this didn't happen, you were still going to come here. You've created these virtual events. You get thousands of people to go. You have really interesting place how you integrate brands in them. I thought people don't go to webinars, Jay, I thought webinars are dead. Isn't Virtual Avengers another name for webinar? Have you made this thing interesting? And let's talk about it with the lens of like, I believe in this channel and I want to help people realize like it's not that the webinar is broken.

7:05It's about the packaging. And I think you guys do an awesome job at this. Well, I appreciate you saying that. Let's just talk about webinars for a second. Besides from my events, I think webinars are critical content play for B2B marketers, but they are stained and they're done completely wrong. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Anybody that's out there right now that's using webinars as a go-to marketplace, if you are actually calling it a webinar, you should stop listening to this podcast and go and change that. What do I mean? We've done all this analysis where we take the exact same webinar, content, pictures, marketing plan, everything, and all we do is we do an A-B test on calling it a webinar or something else.

7:43So when we, for example, call webinar a live panel, a live insider session, right? and live insider session will outperform the word webinar by about 35 % in terms of registration. And all you've done is not use the worst word in the human language, which is the word webinar. The biggest mistake in marketing, you have a webinar that you're promoting, you send out an email. The first word you put in your subject line says webinar colon, boring, boring, boring, boring. Nobody cares, okay? So you just need to think about everything, whether it's your virtual event. I'm happy to take you through some of the things that we do.

8:19but if you're thinking about your webinar, stop following everybody else's playbook and just look at it a little bit differently and that's how you can win. Yeah, I love that. We call ours live sessions. I don't know, it's just, I'm not even trying to be cool with it, just live sessions. And it's actually become a joke that when we host them in the chat, like I get mad if anybody calls it a webinar and I joke like, this is absolutely not a webinar, like wink, you know, and it works. That's amazing, live insider session versus webinar, even just testing that. But that all goes back to the packaging.

8:49It's like the reason no one's showing up is because we're not putting enough thought on the way in. Let's actually create a product here. And I also think there's something, there's a psychological trigger or some marketing hack where if you can name it, it just feels more real than webinar tomorrow on the 10 best practices for blah. A hundred percent. And I would say there's another trick. I hate calling them tricks, but welcome to marketing. And it's on the way out, but you package in your marketing. And what we've learned is that the world now needs to have attend to receive. What do I mean by that?

9:18We know that if people show up to a webinar, as opposed to watching it on demand, number one, nobody actually watches on demand. Let's start there. But if they actually show up to a webinar, the percentage that they go to pipeline is about 400 % higher than if they watch on demand. So how do we get them to show up? Because show up rates are down year over year significantly. So if you don't have baked into your marketing, attend to receive, again, you might want to stop listening and go do that. What does that sound like? What does that mean? So you want to say, if you attend live, you get the Q2 summary guide for HR professionals.

9:50If you attend live, you get beta access to our new SaaS release. If you attend live, you get live Q &A that nobody else will get. And then you put that front and center in your marketing. You need to have attend to receive elements to your webinars to increase the show up rate because that's when your BDRs get happy on following up on the lead. So again, it's not that webinars don't work anymore. It's that everybody's doing what they've always done. So attend to receive. Do you have like data around that? You've seen that that improves people going because I feel like I would just go for like two minutes and then I'd be like, all right, I'm on the hit and I'm out.

10:24Yeah. So you have to stay, you know, usually we time and we have to stay at least 50 % of the time for it to trigger. And what we have found is actually increased show up rates by over 30%. And when it works and when it doesn't work, it doesn't work when it's just like in the background, like of your marketing, it has to be one of the lead elements of your marketing. Hey, this great new live insider session. And if you show up live, you get the Q2 report for blah, blah, blah. You need to lead with it. That's when you get the benefit. So like, I agree. And then, but also my brain is like, but isn't there also a play where like, people are busy.

10:57There are so many other things. Like it is a sign of interest. If I'm interested in this topic, but I'm not going to show up live because I got other stuff on, maybe I am going to listen to it later. I know that that's kind of like people who, you know, everyone works out every day or whatever. It's just you say it, but you don't actually do it. I don't buy that. I feel like if that content is good, though, wouldn't I want to spread that to more people? Like, I want to send you the recording. So here's the thing. The answer is yes, we should be wonderful to all people. I don't subscribe to that at all.

11:26The problem is we've turned our marketing into Netflix. It's there whenever you want it. It's always available. You know what? That's how you wind up scrolling and never watching anything on Netflix. You don't know what the hell to do with yourself. So for example, at my virtual events, our big giant virtual events, we get 30 ,000 people, whatever. We don't do on demand. That's crazy for a two day event. We do not do on demand. So if you don't show up, you're screwed. You don't see any of it. But what we do is what we created is something called earned on demand. If you show up for one hour to our virtual events, it will trigger the on demand link.

12:00But if you don't show up for at least that one hour, you don't get it at all. and people wind up staying five, six, seven hours, whatever it is. And you know what? It's not touchy-feely. I get a lot of hate email. I hate you. I really wanted to go. I can't believe you're not making this available. You're a terrible person. People tell me to die, which is terrible of them about virtual email marketing content. Who cares? But the moral of the story that I found is we need human-to-human connection, whether it's on a webinar, a live event in person, a virtual event. And if you want to be all things to all people, you want to cater to everybody, good luck to you.

12:32have fun going out of business. I want to get people there and get their energy. That's interesting because there is something I'm just thinking about selfishly about our webinars. The people who go, it's amazing. They stay the entire time. The chat is insane. People aren't just like dunking on the speakers. They're like trying to help each other out in chat and they're sharing stuff. So like maybe it's like you're trading off. I might have to let go of like, oh, but all these people aren't going to see my content. Would I rather be able to say like 10 ,000 impressions or 250 super engaged people live.

13:04That's kind of the bet you're making, right? Yeah. And you know, it's okay. Let there be FOMO. Okay. It's, you know, I think live events, I'm a big believer in live in-person events. I believe that live in-person events are going to be the things that outlast AI. But if I was going into my marketing career today, I would go into live in-person events because it will win the day. People are going to be starving for human connection as this AI stuff unfolds. And so I think we need to treat anything virtually, whether it's a webinar or virtual event, whatever, as if it's a live event. Because if you miss going to that live event, then you missed it.

13:38Yeah, you can watch the on-demand that nobody's going to do. But the more we treat live things, the more we take our online stuff and we try to bring that live component to it, I think that that's how we're going to win. I like that. I like that bet. I'm into that. I'm betting like I'm using AI, but I'm really into people right now. Right now. Yeah, right now. I think it's made me appreciate it. There's just a certain type of energy. I mean, I sit in my office and I spend half of my day. I don't know if you're real. Like, you know, it's a video. I'd spend all my time on a video conference. But then last weekend we had, you know, 10 of our neighbors over for brunch.

14:15And it was just hanging out, bullshitting with people. I think there's just a certain energy that I agree that we do miss. Well, you guys have created an event also where you bring this energy live with Drive. Oh, yeah. You bring everyone to where you are. And I guarantee you coming out of that, there's just so much more than just if you're watching on-demand garbage. I was telling you about Dan, our CEO behind the, in the backstage stuff. We always joke, we call it being drunk on events because inevitably one of us is somewhere the other isn't. And it's like Thursday night at 11 o 'clock. I'm never up that late.

14:47I'm calling him. He's like, what? I'm like, dude, I just left this event. I left our New York City meetup and I'm like, I got a hundred ideas. And then like the next week he's like, oh, you're just drunk on events right now. The next week he calls me, he's like, I just went to our Arizona meetup and you won't believe it. It's like, there is something different. A hundred percent. Listen, I think that especially in this world where a lot of companies are still not in office, right? Like remote work is still a big thing. Yeah. The only place we're really getting together are these industry events or pop-up events or dinners or whatever.

15:17I think more and more, they're going to become that much more valuable. I do think that any business, it doesn't matter what you sell, what you do, how boring your industry is, whatever, if you don't have an in-person motion for your business in some capacity in terms of some sort of micro event or whatever, or at least a big presence at industry events, I think that you're going to be left behind. I want to talk more about in-person events. People love these little plays. You got the subject line, calling it an insider session versus a webinar, the attend to receive. Give me some more webinar, not webinar plays you've learned over the years.

15:47Yeah, right. So insider session plays, webinar plays. A few things. Number one, we're seeing attendance rates and registration rates on Fridays crush it in the last 12 months. For so long in B2B world, it was like, no, no, no, we don't do anything on Fridays because that's a really bad day. It couldn't be further from the truth. And if you haven't tested it, you should because sort of coming out of the pandemic, we found that Fridays of the day, you better yourself. You take less calls. Somehow you consume more content. We see these show up rates and registration rates for Fridays has gone up exponentially.

16:18And the other big thing is the other big real estate that nobody's really using in B2B is weekends. Sundays, big time. Sending out long form emails on Sundays around 11 o 'clock or so is incredible because I don't have a work-life balance. And if you do, God bless America. God bless you. If you could turn it off at 5 p.m. on a Friday and not think about work until Monday at 9 a.m., you are a unicorn, okay? On Sundays is the only time I can really look at my email. not anybody slacking me or this other garbage and I can consume stuff. And what we've seen, this was a media post as well, that click-through rates for business-to-business emails on Sundays is up like 60 % year over year.

16:59So if you're not promoting that webinar on Sundays or you're not taking advantage of Fridays, I think there's a lot of real estate out there that you should be reconsidering. Amazing, amazing. We need all this. I need all this in our business now. We just had this conversation yesterday. We need to do another promo for an event that we have coming up. And I was like, we should send the email on Sunday. because we're targeting execs. And a lot of execs are Sundays, you know, is the cleanup. You get ready for the weekday. And then, interesting, your anecdote on Friday, I think there's something we got to do.

17:26We have this group of CMOs and we do their events on Fridays and they all say, actually, we didn't choose Friday. We gave them a list of the dates and they almost all always said Friday. And the show rates on Fridays have been awesome. And so I think there is something there. I love the way you frame that. We all spend the week. You kind of have less meetings on Fridays. Maybe Fridays you're maybe leaving a little early to go pick up the kids or do something. 100%. You take a call that day. I like that. That's really good. This might be too much. We're giving away too much. I'm not going to publish this.

17:56Sorry. This is for me. This is for our business. What about the content? Like for me, I love all these plays. All these things matter. But like to your point about Nicole Kidman, is that who it was, right? Yeah. It doesn't matter if she was on Friday or Tuesday. Someone's going to go because she's there. Right. Talk about the overall just like packaging. So we had this name, Live Insider Sessions. How can people get better on figuring out like what should we do a virtual event about though? So that's an excellent question. I always think there's two paths that everyone needs to think about because the biggest mistake in B2B marketing is that everything is a lead.

18:32If someone downloads a guide, oh, they go into our KPIs for our lead. We got another lead. If someone registers for webinar, they're a lead. If someone downloads a case study, they're a lead. And somehow we say all these leads are created equal, which is absolutely ridiculous because if someone downloads the one-on-one guide for HR, whatever, they're garbage compared to someone who downloaded a case study who's obviously in market for whatever the hell it is that you're promoting. And the reason I say that is I don't think that numbers should be what we are measured against. So for example, if you're doing a webinar, what is your goal?

19:04Is your goal database growth, general awareness? Okay, great. do basic stuff that's like, you know, what everybody needs to know about the 2026, whatever, very top funnel stuff. But if you're trying to sell product, okay, you want to get people that are mid funnel, not top of funnel. The intentionality of the title of your webinar is very important. How to fix this problem with your productivity in three simple steps, because that's actually what your product does. And you're going to get less people to register, but the people that do register are going to be more of a mid funnel play. So I think you have to really be not just what should we call it?

19:41Think about what the outcome is that you want. And the other packaging thing, which is really more of a trick, hack, gimmick, whatever, is how long your webinars are. If you're doing a 60 minute webinar insider session, you are out of touch. Nobody wants to put that on their schedule, period, end of story. Awesome. I don't even want to do 45 minutes. We are huge fans right now of 22 minutes. I'm going to tell you why. That is the secret sauce number, 22 minutes. Because what happens when you promote as 22 minutes, I'm like, I can do 22 minutes. They put a 30-minute block on their calendar, okay?

20:15And you give them, I hate that line, but you give them back eight minutes. And people say, well, I can't do it in 22 minutes. I'm like, well, then you're boring and you stink. I had Yamini, the CEO of HubSpot. She came on my podcast. I did that episode. It was an 18-minute episode because I knew, I could have talked to her for three days. Okay, it's Yamini. But I knew if I kept it that short, it would get consumed that much more. When you promote your webinars 22 minutes, for some reason, first off, anything that's not a round number, a five or a zero, like 30 minutes, an hour, whatever. Not believable.

20:47It crushes it. People believe it more. Yeah. So testing different time elements is another way that I would really lean in. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases. And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes.

21:26That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did, check them out at optimizely.com slash exit5.

22:02That's optimizely.com slash exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep. Before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search.

22:36And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. Do you think I should do that for the podcast then too?

23:10Like every podcast is just a default book an hour. But like, if I just cut this right now, that was an amazing 15 minutes just on webinar stats. But then I'm like, but there's so much other stuff that I still want to talk to you about. Yeah, well, so I have a podcast. I've had a podcast for a while and I have found the shorter I go, the more downloads I get. I think if I get to zero minutes, I'll take on Mel Robbins. But really more to it though is, it's not even about is the content good. People make the mistake with podcasts that I'm going to have the greatest episodes. This content is so good.

23:41Who cares how good your content is? That's not what people are doing. They're looking at the title of the episode and then they're saying, how long is it? It's 22 minutes. Okay, fine. Then the other times they'll look at an hour and 10 minutes. What is this garbage? Who has an hour and 10 minutes for anything? And they say, screw that. Now, there's plenty of people out there that say, no, no, no, no. I listened to this time and I'm driving. I do it again and again and great. You have 12 super fans. Good for you. The reality of it is if you chop it up, here's the way that the algorithm works on Apple and Spotify and all the things.

24:14They're looking at your downloads. Okay. And so if you chop up this episode into four things and people are loving it and now they download the next 10 minutes, the next 20 minutes, the next whatever, you're getting more downloads. And then the algorithm within Apple land and Spotify land circulates your show more. So not only do you get more listeners because they're not turned off by how long it is, you're actually getting more listeners because the algorithms are seeing you're getting more downloads. Basically, you're gaming the system. And that is actually how you get greater circulation. But in the Yamini example, yeah.

24:46did you just pick one topic and I'm going to interview her just on this thing and that's it. That's exactly right. Yeah. With her, I just did that. With her, I said, that's it. We're going to talk about this in and out. Yeah. Done. And a lot of people want more. It's okay. But like, what if, why not, if she said yes to the pod, you probably could have got it for an hour. Why not have recorded four 20 minute segments and then like you can put them out over time. I should have done that. Okay. That was a fail. Okay. I'm just wondering, No, because I'm trying to understand like this is actually a great takeaway, which is like I'm totally with you.

25:18If I saw a podcast episode on, you know, that was 17 minutes long, specifically on webinar tips. I'm like, oh, cool. Yeah. Sometimes I even do this on my own podcast. It's like I talked to the guy about where he went to college for freaking 30 minutes. And I'm like, why did I do that? No. And we chop ours up. And then it's also good for social, too, because then you can almost put the whole thing on social as one clip. You know what I mean? because it's a topic. Yeah, but I just, there's a psychological thing there which you totally, and then the webinar thing is also super smart. An hour, that's a big ask.

25:52You know, you to come on this podcast means you, all right, if I could talk to Dave, I know he's like, okay, legit, whatever, it'll be worth it. An hour is a big block on my calendar. If I got an hour, I'd start to freak out. But 22 minutes, now you block 30, you can make a coffee in between your next meeting. I'll give you an example. It plays everywhere. So like, let's say everybody has an email newsletter that's out there. One of the best things you could do in an email newsletter is you put it in the preheader or you put it at the end of every content block in your newsletter, you add two min read, the number two M-I-N read or three min read, right?

26:22You put that at the end of your content blocks, you put that in the preheader of your email, you know, five min read, whatever it is. We need to have extreme management of expectations related to time. All we're thinking about when we're deciding whether to consume a piece of content, whatever it is, is do I want to make time for this? And it's in the subconscious. When you add things like three min read to that content block, and Google does this all the time, in your newsletter, they'll decide, you know what, I'm going to click on this. I got 180 seconds to read about whatever. And your click-through rates go up exponentially.

26:55Thinking about what the person's experience is and how to consider their time can be a game changer. So do you have any opinions on newsletter length? I have opinions on things being visually boring. My newsletter is very long. But what I mean by visually boring is one of the biggest fails, I think, in all of email newsletters is when you open up a newsletter and you see big content blocks. So for example, if I got a text right now from my mom and it was this giant text block, whatever, I would know that that was drama that I have no desire to think about right now. And I'd push my phone off to the side because I have no time for that.

27:32But when I get an email and I open up and there's a big content block, anything over five lines in one given block of text, we don't realize it. But subconsciously, we immediately tune it out and we don't keep on reading for the most part. And this is why click-through rates go down. So if you could chop up your content blocks into three or four lines, you will see your click-through rates go up. And there's going to be plenty of people out there like, no, no, no, you don't understand. I love Morning Brew. I love Daily Skim. And there's such big content blocks and blah, blah. Amazing. It's like saying that you love the Mel Robbins podcast and it's an hour and a half long.

28:04There are going to be outliers because the content is superior. It has built up this brand, this following, but your thing, you are a B2B boring electrical engineering supply company. And I promise you, no one cares about the latest innovation and whatever it is that's going on enough to see a content block that has seven lines and it looks visually boring. Yeah. I haven't looked at your newsletter in a while. Pardon me. I'm on your list and I open everything. I wouldn't read it either. Yeah. So your length is okay, but you break it up with design. Are you like making graphics? Yeah. So mine's long.

28:41I have all this stuff, but what I do, I have a hack that has worked incredibly well from my newsletter, which, so at the bottom of every newsletter I send out, my newsletter is about marketing tips, what's going on, new ideas, whatever. The bottom of every newsletter, I have a section called, since you didn't ask. Every news I ever put out and is the dumbest crap in the world of anything that's going on that I'm. So I'll give you an example. This past week's edition, I talked about two topics. One, I talked about the fact that high school musical is a 20th year anniversary and it was released on TikTok in full, but they chopped it up into 60 second clips, the entire movie.

29:17And I talked about my fascination with high school musical and Zac Efron, which is very weird. Not that I'm into him, but who cares? And the other thing I talked about was that in my office, somebody microwaved a piece of fish and the entire office stunk like crap. And I thought that I smelled for about a week and I had a breakdown over this. And so at the bottom of every newsletter I send out, I have this section, since you didn't ask, where I talk about whatever nonsense is in my brain. And the reason I do it is it makes everybody stay to the end. You have to give a reason for people to want to stay other than you saying, and by the way, sign up for my webinar and here's my latest podcast episode who cares except for your mom and it's such a great way to sprinkle personality into like you don't have to make the marketing stuff have a ton of personality because it doesn't have to be corny but then people feel like i get to know the guy who's writing this and exactly and like that's such a good like anti-ai slop technique also right right you know like ai is not gonna be writing about you know that Mary, you know, heated up the salmon.

30:15Right. That's exactly right. How did you learn all this stuff? How does your brain work? Like your high school musical, like, are you the guy that like, if you and me went for a walk, you're pointing out like, you see that thing right there? That was actually created in 1926 by this guy. You know, do you know, are you a history guy? Like, no, I know nothing. So first off, as it relates to pop culture, I have the worst taste in TV. I don't know why, but from day one, I love reality TV. I've seen every episode of every season of The Bachelor, Bachelorette. Golden Bachelor, Bachelor in Paradise. I've seen every season of Love is Blind.

30:47I mean, you name it. I've watched, I mean, Real Housewives, every geography. I don't know why, but I love this garbage. And so that fascinates me. And as it relates to all the tips, tricks, and nonsense, you know, this agency I've had forever, we just run so many campaigns. And I just always feel that there's got to be something that you can do that will get you to stand out. I'll give you one that we've been doing a lot lately that crushes it, that everyone sleeps on. When you talk about email marketing, what we don't think about is white space. So for example, when you look at your inbox, if you see an email and it has no preheader, okay, if you have a short subject line, less than three words subject line, and you have no preheader, there is extreme white space around your email.

31:32And just by having no preheader and three word subject line, your open rates skyrocket. And all you did was create white space for your email to stand out because 98 % of all emails have a preheader. Now, for some people out there, they're like, whoa, how do you do that? You go on ChatGPT, you say, I use MailChimp, I use HubSpot, I use Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, whatever you use. How do I send out an email in my system and not have a preheader show up? Because if you just don't write one, it grabs the first line of text and shoves it in there. Yeah, I was going to ask you, because that's not the preview text field.

32:05It is the preview text field, right? And so, well, there's two fields. But you're saying if you leave that blank, the default, you need to change it so the default doesn't show like the first line of the email. Exactly. So if you go into ChatGPTC, say this is a platform I use, I want to have no preheader show up. What do I do? It'll actually give you some different image references to put in your emails in certain spots. It's not hard to do. And then when you send it out, you will be in shock how much higher of an open rate you get just because you have white space around your email and all the other emails don't.

32:36So it always fascinates me whenever I'm looking at any marketing, how can I go in the opposite direction? Whatever anybody is doing. Like if you have a webinar and your promo has two circles of people's heads in it and you're sending that out, don't do that. Stop it. Stop it. What if it's a cool graphic though? We do that. Nobody, let me tell you something. I can't stand it. I get these email templates with these, these two people are speaking on our webinar. Nobody knows who they are. Right. Literally nobody cares. Do that if it's Nicole Kidman. I actually, I used to obsess over like podcast titles.

33:08I had a podcast like 10 years ago, early podcasting, and you could actually manipulate titles. And since then, I've always gone back to like, do you put the guest's name in the podcast title? Well, if it's a guest that nobody knows, and I've taught a class on this, and it was like the example that I used was like, if I had Tom Brady on my podcast, I should call that episode, episode 256, Tom Brady. That's what I did. So I had Gary V on, okay? I wrote, Gary V is here. Because you know who that is. I mean, but other than that, you know. It's normal to want to be like the state of social media, what works on LinkedIn and content strategy, comma, with Gary Vaynerchuk.

33:44But then we buried the whole hook. You buried the lead. Yeah. Whereas, let's say, you have the senior vice president of marketing for whatever SaaS platform. Who knows who that is? I mean, come down. So do you only, then are you only sending three, like, is therefore my subject line always going to be bad if it's more than three words? No, no, no. I mean, and it's all about testing. Everything I said, if I said seven things to try and two of them work, you're like, oh, Jay's a doofus. which is true on many levels, but it's all about testing. This is not going to work for everybody. This is great.

34:11I'm taking so many notes. The lesson is you don't need to take this as, it's not like a coin-operated machine where everything works for everyone. But I think you've given a ton of examples that it's like this type of thinking might be how you move the needle on some of this. Let's try a three-word subject line with no preview, right? Exactly right. And the reason that it works with three words, I mean, you go four words, five words, whatever, it's just that if you make your subject line too long, you don't get the benefit of the white space. that's really it. What else should I ask you about?

34:41Definitely not anything that you should be watching on TV. Look, I have no shame. The only, I've never been a bachelor guy, but the only, my wife and I, every single night after we put the kids to bed, we usually have one hour before we go to bed and we just exclusively watch Bravo. Oh, amazing. I mean, I had Andy Cohen do one of my events. So... Oh, that's a great, virtual or live? Yeah, no, he did. So I have an event called Eventastic, which is an event about events. And I had him keynote last year as a fireside chat because, first of all, selfishly, I just wanted to ask him random weird questions, which I did.

35:14But he actually puts on an event called BravoCon, which is, you know, a 30 ,000 person event. So I was like, oh, he's like a unicorn. He actually does this. So, yeah, I'm all in on Bravo. Yeah. I mean, my wife Leah's always like, you need to get Andy Cohen to come to drive. He's the best marketer there is. I don't know. Oh, yeah. He's wild. He was a good dude and he played along. He was great. Okay. Okay, what role do you think email plays for my audience? This audience here is B2B, mid-market, enterprise types of marketers. What types of email strategy would you be thinking about? We're still in this world of like every brand kind of thinks they have to have a newsletter or they have content offers they send out.

35:51Anything that stands out as like, you know, some strategy we can give out as it relates to email for these more, you know, marketers at bigger orgs? Yeah, I would say in general, believe it or not, you're not sending out enough email, which I know is going to sound the opposite of what every meeting you're sitting in, okay? And here's the reality of it. When you're in a meeting and they say, you know what, our email engagement's down, I think we're annoying people. I think we're sending out too much email and that's why it's not working. First of all, that's horrible math. The less email you send out, you're going to have less performance.

36:20I don't care what goes on. The problem is that you're boring people to tears. That's the reality of it. And here's the weirdest thing about email marketing now, as opposed to 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you used to go to the junk or spam folder because you wrote the word free in the subject line or you capitalized something or something stupid like that. It was based on content. That changed. Anybody that tells you that there are spam trigger words, it's garbage. That's from 1985, whatever. The reason you go to the junk folder or spam folder now is based on engagement. How often are people clicking and interacting with your emails?

36:52If you don't have enough engagement, you as a sender into that network, you actually will go to the junk folder and will go to the spam folder. The irony of email is you actually need to be sending out enough email, generating enough engagement, or you won't stay in the inbox. But then the game is, okay, you convinced me we should be sending out more email, which you should. It just needs to be better. And you need crazy subject lines. You need crazy headlines. You always want to think about email marketing like it's a chain. And any break in the chain, it's gone, right? What is your friendly from?

37:27What is your from name? Is it just your brand? Are you just saying Acme or is it saying Acme special content? Is it saying Acme live event? Are you starting out of the gate with your friendly from your alias with something else besides just your brand name? Then what is your subject line say? What's the first, what are your subject line? What's your preheader starting with? I'll give you a great example on the preheader that people sleep on. That's that preview text, that second line of text. Okay. People say it's not important anymore because Apple doesn't show it all the time. Who cares? Nobody's using that feature yet on Apple.

37:57Your preheader is still very important. Here's secret sauce stuff for your preheader. If you start your preheader with one of these three words, and, but, or plus, and, but, or plus, they are continuation words. We are simple-minded species, human beings, okay? When you read the subject line and then you see the word and, or you see the word but, or you see the word plus, all of a sudden you keep on going, okay? And we see it lift open rates significantly by using one of those three words because it's that chain. Get them to open. read the headline, the next thing, the next thing. So it's just about how do we keep them engaged?

38:34I talk a lot. I just talk too much. No, you're good. I was just trying to think about, like, it's hard because your whole thing is like engagement. Like you actually want to get people to reply. And a lot of the ways that we use email at like in a B2B org is just like, it's meant to just like deliver information. If someone were to reply back, it would cause all these like, you know, ripple effects. Like we were just talking about this with our newsletter. The data is great, but I can get a feeling of how it went because of the responses that we're getting. Well, by the way, I think that's a very important thing.

39:06Annie Hanley's been talking about this a lot, which is what she calls actual reply rate, which I think is a fantastic metric. So when you send out your newsletter and you encourage people to reply and you're looking at that rate, I do believe, and we're seeing it tested more and more, and this is a super awesome hack. And I'll tell you what everyone should do, all the B2B marketers out there. So what do we all do as a B2B marketer? we have a content piece that we want to promote. It's the guide to whatever. You send out your email and say, hey, click here to download the guide. You take them to some cheesy landing page and you hope that they download the guide.

39:38That's what everybody does. But here's the motion that Markers are starting to test that works like 300 % increase in overall response rate. What you do is you send out your email, basically a short letter format type email. and say, hey, we have this new guide for whatever. If you want the guide, all you have to do is reply to this email and write the word guide. You're not taking them to the landing page, anything like that. Reply to this email, write guide, and we will get you that guide. Now, what happens in doing that? Number one, a lot more people do it than filling out the form. That's a win.

40:12But the secret hack is the number one way to stay in somebody's inbox in perpetuity is to get them to reply to an email that you send. It is a signal saying that you are interested in this sender. So when they reply guide to you, now you have this block, this technical lock that you're going to stay in their inbox. And also, by the way, you're in a dialogue with that person, which is also extra awesome. So this idea of what you just talked about, and not just anecdotally, like it felt like we got some replies, but actually using it as a response mechanism, I think is a super great tactic. Yeah, I love that.

40:50We do it in our newsletter and that one works easy because it's like, I wrote it, hey, it's person. What did you think? Reply back. I'm like, reply back to me. Yeah, let me know what you thought. I do read every one of these. But you made me think of the reply guide thing. You could do that earlier on in the welcome sequence and get that signal going right away. It doesn't just have to be in response to the newsletter. Yep. Agreed. Okay, Jay Schwedl said, I'm going to wrap with you because I'm going to test. I'm going to put my own, I'm like, cut with you now because we're going to put out a 37-minute episode, which we usually do longer than that.

41:20And I'm going to see. You've jammed up my notebook. My mind is exploding. Oh, no. Great to have you. People can find you on LinkedIn. We'll link to all your stuff. Big fan of your work. And hopefully I'll see you. Appreciate you, man. You're a rock star. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.

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