The Email Advice You NEED to Hear | Bathroom Break #77

0:01Welcome 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 episode of The Bathroom Break.

0:36I am here with the conference hopper. He just went to a huge conference, which is like the conferences of conferences. Had three talks. He's still running on Celsius. You die. You die. So I walk by a booth and I see these people that I do work with and they go, Jay, we want to invite you to this VIP dinner tonight. We'd love for you to come. I'm such a jerk. I'm VIP dinner. I sound like such a tool. I just said that. And they go, will you come? And I go, actually, I'm going to lie to you and tell you I have another dinner, but I'll be in my room hiding out. And the guy's like, you can't actually tell us that.

1:15You're supposed to lie. I'm like, I don't care. I mean, you should have said, if you listen to any of my content, you know I put that out publicly that I'm not going to go to any dinners. Yeah, it's amazing. At least you told the truth. That's a start. Listen, Chicken Wing Room Service is underrated. What are we talking about? I wanted to ask you, because you have been talking about this for a long time, and I think you have a take on it that I think people should know about. But with emails, how many emails should I send? Like sending volumes, the holiday season's coming. What should I do with my email list?

1:53All right. So in general, everybody thinks they send too much to their list. And I don't care if you're in a boring B2B industry, you're in a nonprofit, you're in a consumer, you're direct to consumer, I don't care. You're actually not sending enough email. I know that sounds ridiculous. Two things. Number one, you stay in the inbox now based on engagement that you have with your database. How often are people opening, clicking, interacting with your emails? The weirdest stat of all time is that those marketers that send at least five times per month, okay, have over a 20 % higher average open rate than those that send less.

2:27And the reason being is if you don't generate enough opens and clicks on your overall email sending, then the receiving email infrastructures don't view you as a credible sender. So now the way you stay in the inbox is by sending out a lot. But here's my hot take, and I want to know what you think about this, Dan, is that I hate when people say the best day for my emails is Tuesday at 10 a.m. That's our number one day, that's when we send out our emails. And I'll tell you why I hate that. Because I also like sending emails out at 9 p.m. on a Thursday. I like sending emails out at 2 p.m. on a Sunday.

2:59And the reason I do is not to find what is the best day and time. I don't care about that. I believe, and I see it in the data, that different populations within your database interact with email at different times. There are people that read emails on Sunday mornings, people that read emails at night, people that read emails on Tuesday morning. So it's not what is your best day and your best time, but you need to be doing sends at all these different times ongoing to reach different segments of your database. And you can't just focus on that one. What is the best day and time? First, I mean, I'll pick over that first.

3:32When someone says best time and we talk about this all the time is usually that a time you should probably avoid because now it's become a public knowledge that that's the best time. But I also think that the best thing in marketing is just testing a bunch of things. but also now that ai has come in the picture there are some sending platforms that can put emails in the inbox when people when your audience best time so that you can you if you have a stronger esp or marketing automation platform they probably have features like that where ai could predict like put in this email in this inbox at this time or this person should have a text message versus an email so think about that but if you don't have something like that for my emails for the market millennials i will send it on sunday at 2 30 one day and then monday at 3 3 22 one day and i'm trying to i'm really i honestly believe that what matters more is putting out good content people want to open and having a good like when you come in the inbox they know it's your name versus trying to predict like the perfect email so like subject line and who you are showing up in the inbox is actually i think matters more than send time in my my point of view i totally agree with you and i also think in terms of how much you are sending uh people think oh the reason I'm getting unsubscribes is because I sent out that one extra email.

5:10That's why our unsubscribes went up, which is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Okay. You can't send out less and get more business. The reason you're getting unsubscribes is because people find your content epically boring. Or what people also don't know about unsubscribes is sometimes you've done something really great and unsubscribes do not hurt your deliverability. They don't cause you to go to the junk folder. But the reason I say they're a great thing is because let's say you listen to us talk and you get out of this idea, oh, I've never tested an emoji in my subject line. I don't care if you're B2B, B2C.

5:40And you say, I'm going to test an emoji in the subject line. I'm going to do an A, B split, whatever. And then you hit send. And when you send it out, you get this really high open rate. You get this really high click-through rate, but you also get one of the highest unsubscribe rates you've ever gotten. You might say, Jay and Daniel have no idea what they're talking about, but that's not what happened. What happened was for the first time in a long time, the people in your database noticed the email because you stuck an emoji in there. They opened it up. They checked it out and they said, you know what?

6:04I've changed my job function. I've changed where I live. I don't need the local services anymore. I've changed something. I'm not a fit on this list anymore. Let me unsubscribe. They unsubscribe because you stood out for the first time in forever. So it's a good thing that you got the unsubscribe. Don't get turned off about sending out more because of ridiculous metrics. Yeah, I agree because I sometimes get unsubscribes that say, hey Daniel I like you said I've changed jobs and could you put me on it I actually subscribe resubscribed with my new email or I like oh hey Daniel your content's great but my inbox is like busy I'm sorry I need to like that happens all the time but it's better but also I truly believe you need to get closer to your customer and the closer you get to your like real audience is better than having people go off your list.

6:58So the people, the raving fans you should care about. And if people don't want to be on the list, they can resubscribe later. Don't worry about those people are leaving. But I do agree that if you're sending more emails with bad content, that's bad. That's what we're not saying. Don't send an email just to send an email. Send an email that is above average in the inbox, but send more emails that are above average good content that people want that are personalized to them and personalization doesn't have to mean hey daniel hey whatever i mean personal i mean the contents personalized to them the the whatever's in there is made for them that's what i mean by personalized no i'm glad you called that out because sometimes i say this and i forgot to say the most important part which is relevancy and frequency are married together right you if If you're sending out relevant, engaging stuff that's good for that person, you have the license to send out stuff.

7:55I wish Daniel sent me your newsletter every single day because it's awesome content, right? So it's all about are you being relevant? If you're being relevant, you could be more frequent. If you're being irrelevant, then you suck and you should send out less. All right, before we wrap up here, Daniel, I want to know something. You've now been on the daddy circuit here for a few months now and you're operating with less sleep. What is that like? What is going on with you? Are you just miserable in terms of interacting with other humans? Like, what is your deal now that you're in no sleep, man? I wouldn't say miserable, but the caffeine intake is at Jay's level now, where like before I was like at like one Celsius per day.

8:35Now it's like five or six going. So I think the caffeine intake has gone up. And also, yeah, I don't get grumpy, but I notice it like the headache levels go up, the body aches go up so i'm just i'm just saying that we'll get through this period he'll eventually sleep more than four hours at one time so no it never happens again it's over because then you get old like me and you just can't sleep anymore so that's it that's what happened your sleeping time is over i'm envious of people like sleep till like 11 o 'clock i'm like how do you do that um people probably slept through this episode but they shouldn't and they also should go and follow the marketing millennials podcast the greatest podcast that's ever been created leave daniel a review he deserves it he's a great dude ridiculousness but also um guru conference is coming up so everybody go register um nicole kidman what about yours mine's halloween eve so if you want to come show up in um costumes it's marking land 10markingland.com come on hang out Yeah, attendmarketingland.com.

9:43It is free. It is virtual. I'll be there. Daniel will be there. It's going to be bunkers. All right, we'll see you at the next one.

9:53Daniel, 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 I 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 Light 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.

10:26We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.