Email Tactics You Can Try Right Now | Bathroom Break #102

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 bathroom break.

0:42And 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 know I don't want 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 says advertisement.

1:23And 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, 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.

1:52I'm very excited to hear what it is that the Mad Libs turned out here. 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, Jaden 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?

3:17First 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? 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. Oh, dude, everybody out there needs to go and watch.

3:49It'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 do nothing else, go home and watch that. 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. And you've also seen a lot of email marketing.

4:21So we're going to talk about email marketing. Actually, you were back in the direct mail days. 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.

5:02So the subject line people used to put like in brackets, like the name of my newsletter, Scoop, and it 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.

5:37And 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. 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. I also think that like when someone says it's an anti-best 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. um some things that i'm 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 or that's very easy in your newsletter that's personal like nothing nothing to do with like your business but something like what tv show did you watch this week or um give me a tip to help me with back pain or blah, blah, blah.

6:31It 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 and outreach email or an ad email, whatever you want, just add something personal in that email. 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.

7:07One 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. So something else that we're seeing in the preheader, you know, the preheader is that second subject line where it's the gray thing right under the main subject line.

7:45A 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 pre-header is not important and they think that in gmail something's happening it's not important it's not true the pre-header is solving a massive impact on the percentage of people opening up emails and what we have found is that there's three magic words in pre-headers to use so you write your subject line and if your pre-header 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 rate 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 i was always told that like subject lines first line of your email pre-hitter 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 it's you put something that's so unrelated in your like intro and stuff like that people are gonna tune out uh or something not not close to the front that you're 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 so yeah well 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 um because that's uh that's how it works 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 uh that but that's in a couple months So I get a little break for a little bit.

10:13You have a one-year-old birthday party? No. No. I'm anti-one-year-old birthday parties. I know that's mean, but it's always for the parents, not for anybody else. We're going to probably take him on a trip somewhere. I want to create the condition because he's a summer baby. So he's not going to be able to get birthday parties with his friends in school. So I want to do something fun in summer. I feel like you're projecting. Did you have birthday parties and nobody came because you had no friends in school? Is that really what happened? You got me. I was bullied so hard. You just released a bunch of childhood trauma on this podcast.

10:50Wait, wait. Daniel's really like a really tall dude. And 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. I used to like eat my lunch before lunch and I used to be so sad that I had like no more lunch. And I was just like the saddest moment because I was like so hungry as a kid. It's just so bad. I just 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.

11:22She used to put like a banana in my lunch. And my whole lunch tasted like banana the whole day. And it was like the worst thing in the world where you buy into a sandwich and it's just banana tasting sandwich. Wow, we're unlocking so many childhood moments for Daniel. I know, right? I'm going to go find a therapist. Exactly. This was a great episode. Also, happy birthday to Jay. Everybody flood his comments. He's in the next half century. Let's go. Which is good. He's living life, you know? He's just living life. Here I am. All right, dude. Everybody later. Bye.

12:01Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. get out of there. 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 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 line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

12:35Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.