Five Email Lessons to Take Into 2026 | Bathroom Break #85

0:08Welcome 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 Schwettlson, 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.

0:45I'm here with the Jay Sweroson of Do This, Not That podcast and Guru and Inventastic and it goes on and on. And I want to get started with what is what do you do in the month of december like what are you i like holiday person are you a vacation person are you a leave florida are you stay florida what is what does your december look like so um i always really try to carve out a week where i might my two kids they're both teenagers we always do some trip together uh and i and i encourage travel even if it's like something local, like you can't, you don't want to spend a lot of money, but something where you, maybe it's just you and your partner or you and your kids.

1:31I think once a year, at least for a week, you lock in and you go do something. So we do that every single year. And it's good because if not, I would lose my mind. I didn't want to do it, but my wife forced me to do it years ago. And I'm very happy because I look back now and I have a lot of, you know, memories and crap and whatever. But I go full force work mode until that last week of the year. And then New years, I try to stay home and avoid everybody I know. What is your vibe in December? Pretty much the same. It's hard being married to a person in e-com because this is like the peak year for e-com and then it's not the peak time for B2B except like close out the rest of the year type vibe.

2:14It's not big sales, websites breaking, stuff like that. It's more like figuring out what went right, what we did in preparing for 2026. So, but usually like we like to, the Christmas, New Year time go on a trip, just not this year because - Baby time. Baby, yeah. Baby time. You can't really do much. You can't do much, but I like it. It's fine. We'll figure out, we're going to start traditions with the baby and I think that's going to be fun. Which the baby won't remember for a solid five years. So get that started. but let's talk about what worked in email we're gonna talk about the five things this year that we learned in email heading in 2026 that matter that you should be thinking about for your email marketing whether you're a business marketer consumer marketer so daniel what are what's something that hit you this year about email that kind of was a game changer yeah i think the one thing that i've been trying to do very hard is is always incorporating something to get someone to reply to me in email.

3:18So I always add CTAs in the top of the email, the bottom of the email, in the middle of the email. I want people to have conversations. I also think that I don't make it too deep. I make it like an easy thing to reply to. Like, what is your favorite holiday cookie or what restaurants do you normally go to? Or what's your tradition for this? Like, I want a low lift response, but I want people to respond to my emails. I want to build a relationship with my audience. And I also think it helps my email list grow, get more opens. And I've seen like open rates stay consistent this way. I've seen deliverability stay consistent this way.

3:57So that's something that I think needs to be continued, especially in the age of AI of adding personalized CTAs for replies. Yeah. I think for us, what I've come to realize is that nobody should have their best day and time to send out an email. I think that is out the window and it's a misleading statistic. Oh, our best day is Tuesday at 8 a.m. I think that's absolutely garbage. And what everybody should be thinking about, what we look at is what is our weekly aggregate unique number of humans that are opening and clicking and interacting with our emails. And why we look at it that way is you can send out an email on Tuesday morning, 8 a.m.

4:37You can send out the same email or different an email on Thursday at 4 p.m. You send it again Sunday at 11 a.m. And it's not a matter of which one had the highest opens, clicks, whatever. It's that at those different times, you're hitting different populations of people that are interacting with your email that like it at that time. So I think this idea of having your best day and time is absolute garbage. And the metric that you should be thinking about is what is the unique number of people that you are getting to interact with your content and send out more sends so you can get to more people, but send them out at different times.

5:11Yeah. I added something along this lines that we've been doing in 2025 and continue to do 26 is we do verified subscriber and open rates, click rates and verified, meaning like we know who they are. They are in our ICP and compare that to the list. So we have like a verified subscriber metrics versus not. So like verified of people an ICP that click the emails and open the emails because we want to know like truly an ICP what they like and what they don't like and separate it we don't mind having a bigger email list but we also want to know like who are the perfect ICP that are opening the email clicking the email liking our content look going back through and seeing what topics they're opening what topics they're clicking through and having a verified subscriber versus like a whole list metrics.

6:04So we've been separating out those two metrics with our email metrics these days. I love that. And I'll tell you another thing that we're doing, which I think everybody should do, whether you're a nonprofit, business, consumer marketer, which is running domain frequency reports. One of the probably most biggest missed things is looking at your data this way. What I mean by that is take your database and run a report by domain, right? So at ford.com or at comcast.net or whatever, and run it in descending order. And what you will see is, of course, you might see a boatload of Gmail, a boatload of big ones like that, but you'll be shocked.

6:40You're going to see a boatload of people at baptishealth.com, a boatload of people at aol.com. And the reason you want to do that is this can be a boat anchor in your email deliverability, which is bad because all of a sudden you have a thousand people at Baptist health. And when you try to send out your database, it's causing a bottleneck for deliverability. So that's one problem. Or AOL. Those are dead addresses. Get them out of there. But the opportunity side is you might say, oh my God, we have 60 people at Ford Motor Company. We've been trying to work with them. I didn't realize that many people are getting our emails.

7:14By running a domain frequency report on your email database, it will uncover a lot of issues and opportunities. I don't think enough companies are doing that. I'll add, because we are in the age of AI and all that stuff, I would say something that I think should happen more, but do it with heavy editing is repurposing long form piece of content for email marketing. I repurpose that talk you gave, repurpose that webinar you did, repurpose that podcast you did and break down the tactics. It's easy. It's an easy way to add an extra send to your database. It's helpful. And AI now you You could put that transcript into AI, help find the key takeaways for your audience just by prompting correctly and using that as one of your sends that you send to your email list that's valuable and also could direct back to those channels.

8:09So if you have a podcast, you could get takeaways, direct back to the podcast, webinar recordings, ways to get people to interact with things. but use AI as a way to repurpose all your content into email. Yeah, and I guess the last one for me is that don't believe the garbage that's out there about certain metrics mattering or not mattering or whatever. So open rates still matter. I don't care what anybody says. I don't care about bots. I don't care about Apple. Open rates matter. Anybody that says otherwise is a dork. Pre-headers still matter. People started saying at the beginning of the year because Apple's stripping out the pre-header in their new iOS update that pre-headers, the second subject line, that gray text, they don't matter, matter.

8:51That is absolute garbage. Whenever people say things don't matter, they do matter and they're losers and they have no life. I think people just say that to rage bait people and get clickable content. Yeah, it's like, email's dead. Don't do this. Don't care about open rates. These things matter to the extent that you should care about it over something else. Maybe not, but But like, open rates are leading indicators. Click-through rates are leading indicators. Like, all these are metrics that you should be looking at, and that's what the platform gives you, so you should be caring about them. And yeah, that's why we get rid of subscribers all the time, because we care about that metric.

9:31When in doubt, kick them out. Exactly. So speaking of December, now you're a Floridian, okay? Do you ever, and you're from Africa, which you are. I don't know why I always like that you're from Africa. It makes me laugh. And you lived on the West Coast in warm weather. Have you ever seen snow? Or are you still like, I've never seen snow? I did go to the University of Cincinnati. Oh, yeah. So I went to Ohio and it was freezing there. So I did live in a snowy place. And I have seen snow. But I don't think I, I don't know about, you live from New York, but I didn't, I don't know about your kids, but I didn't like touch my first piece of snow until I was like eight or nine years old.

10:12Like it was like magic to me to see snow being from California. So I remember my first time, I think we went to Lake Tahoe, and I'm like, wait, snow? What is this? So yeah, I didn't touch snow until I was like 9 or 10, which is a weird concept to some people. Have you ever made a snowman? Yeah, I've done that. I mean, now I'm probably 15 years old, but I didn't get the snow tradition. It's more sandcastles when you're from a beach city than snowmen. By the way, for everyone around the country that doesn't know, since South Florida, it's so pathetic. They'll do some community thing at a park. They'll bring in snow.

10:51They'll blow ice into a little mountain, whatever. And they let kids play on the snow. And it's really, really embarrassing and weird. And I've gone to that. Oh, we used to do that at schools. They used to spray the whole grass of that. Yeah, I remember that. That was the only version. And it would melt in five minutes. But you still got it. I love how everybody around the country is listening. It's like, hey, clown, you moron. It's freaking three feet of snow here. And you guys are talking about you've never seen snow. Yeah, Daniel, by the way, you could DM. He loves shoveling snow. He will come to your home.

11:26And he will shovel out your sidewalk. Yeah, I would love to travel to Wisconsin right now or Minnesota. I'm really in need of heavy snowstorms right now. All right. Well, now you can sing, do you want to make a snowman or we'll skip that? We'll do that on the next episode. All right. Frozen part three on the next episode. Daniel, we'll see you there, man. See you.

11:54Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. All right. 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 the land 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