The Marketing Psychology Behind High-Performing CTAs | Bathroom Break #88

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.

0:44I am here with the gym bro, Jay Shwedelson, and I am Daniel Murray. And I want to talk about why I call him the gym bro, because I just figured out that this guy for the last two years goes to the gym three times a week, and he runs Saturday, Sunday. So he's really some sort of athlete out here. So I know New Year's resolutions are happening. How do you get to the gym three times a week, and what do you suggest for people to do that? Okay, don't follow anything I do health-wise. I've been going for three years, so you can screw off three days a week. I go at around 6.45 in the morning, which is absolutely terrible.

1:23And I'm a very horrible worker outer. And I also get very embarrassed. So I go to this gym in my community area, and I get there. And if I go to use the bench press, I'm very weak. And so I try to wait until people that I don't know are nowhere near the bench press because I don't want them to see how weak I am because that would really bring shame to my family. So I'm not thinking about getting healthy or getting stronger. I'm just thinking about how embarrassed I am by how weak I am when I'm at the gym. What do you think about that? I like that. I mean, I have been kicking off tennis again, and I've been trying to go at times when nobody could see me playing because I haven't played for five months.

2:01So I don't want to get embarrassed when someone comes and sees and they say, what happened to you? So I'm going as early as possible to play tennis these days. Well, let me ask you something. Me and a gym broke. so for everyone that doesn't know, Daniel doesn't talk about it a lot, but he was a D1 college football player, University of Cincinnati, like real-time, whatever. I want to know something because you used to have, you were a big dude, you had a bench press a lot. What was your max best bench press in your life? I think it was like 425. Wow, that's crazy. That's crazy. And now it's probably like 205, so we'll see.

2:38That's crazy. You're like tough. Don't mess with Daniel. What is your max bench press? everybody should know. No idea. Six pounds. All right, let's get into it. Listen, what we want to talk about today is something that works in social media. It works in email. It works in all marketing. And it's going to annoy you that it works, but it does, which is this idea of telling people what to do. And it's in our subconscious. But when you actually tell somebody what you want them to do in your copy, in your social post copy, in your images, in everything, it crushes it. So Daniel, do you use this tactic and how have you tried it?

3:18Yeah, I think one way I like to do this is in ads or content and saying it at the end, screenshot this and send this to your team, um save this for later um it helps the one metric i always try in content is shareability and getting that that share button hit but you sometimes have to remind people to do that so if you have that at the end where you say screenshot and send it to people especially in even in my email where i might have a guide or something say save this and send this to your team or as a CTA, you'll want to screenshot this. Something where you're going to tell people exactly the action that you want them to take.

4:05I think the click here button is a little bit dead now, I would say. And I don't like to say that buttons are dead, but it's not going to perform as good as telling people what to do. And there's some other ways that I think about it, but I wanted you to go into some ways you're using it as well. Yeah, I'll tell you two ways that we're using it. We've tested it and it's worked really well. So email, in this subject line, if you actually start your subject line, and this is from our subjectline.com data, if you start your subject line with open this, right, or open this email, it actually lifts the open rates by about 15 % from what we've seen, which is ridiculous because you're telling somebody what to do.

4:42But if you've never tested that, that's a great simple test to try. And it's a little bit annoying that it works. You're like, screw off, I don't want to listen to you. But for some reason, the subconscious, We react to what we're told to do. And we also have tested this quite a bit on LinkedIn, where we'll put out a post, like a carousel post with some sort of useful tactic. And we'll do a test of including save this post. We'll put that in the top portion of the copy versus not having it. And when we include save this post, we actually now, because LinkedIn has changed there what you could see, we actually see a lot more LinkedIn saves.

5:16And we could see that in the analytics when we say save this post. So by telling people exactly what you want them to do, it will give you a boost in performance. Yeah. Some other places I've seen and I've wanted to test this and I'm going to test this in 2026 is buttons on your website or your nav bar. Instead of saying content, you could say learn here or have what action they're going to take at that button. instead of saying content library you could say learn here or instead of community you could say network here having a idea what they're going to do when they click that button is way better i feel like than just having obvious titles that everybody is doing i think you got to tell people what they're going to expect when they click that button when they land on that that page and i think Like I'm betting that it will help retention when you say, this is what the action I want you to take when you do click this button or watch this piece of content or view this ad.

6:24More people will do that action and you'll retain them longer that way. Yeah. And in a lot of ways, we've been all doing this, but we're doing it in a horribly boring way. Like we're telling people, you know, let's say for an event or a webinar saying register. You're trying to tell the person to register. or if it's a consumer offer, buy now. But you're telling them that at the very end and you're telling it in this very self-serving way as opposed to on the upfront, open this, read this, save this, screenshot this. Instead of just doing it at the end of the motion, do it at the beginning of the motion so you can get more people to actually make it to the end of the motion.

6:59The hardest thing to do in marketing and what our job is is to get attention. But once you have attention, the next thing you need to do is invest in ways in capturing that attention because you spent all this money to get this person to a landing page or to your content or something. And all I'm saying to do is test these, test different CTAs, buttons to make them more action forward instead of just generic and see if there's a lift in your content, see if there's a lift in your download, see if there's a lift in your saves. And like what Jay said, which is something as gold as, if a platform is tracking that metric, like Lincoln's tracking saves, Instagram tracks the share button or repost button.

7:46If you're saying those things and people are doing those actions, that gives you signal that you're trending in the right direction. All right. So back to our gym bros thing. I want to know something like when you're at the gym, are you the type of dude who, if you're using something, you leave a towel on there on the bench or on the machine, and then you go somewhere else, do something else and you come back, or do you take it with you wherever you go? Like, are you trying to like hold on to your thing? Are you a jerk like that? I think it depends on how busy that place is at the time. So I'm pretty conscious that if the gym is busy, I'm just going to stick to my machine.

8:22But if it's an empty gym and there's, my worst is when there's two people in the gym and you have a little rotation going and someone goes to take that machine when there's a thousand other machines in the gym. and they will need to use that machine in that moment. That's when I get annoyed. The other times I'm pretty conscious that, hey, there's a lot of people in this gym. I am not hogging this machine. Or if I'm going to do this, I just say you can work in with me and do that. I'm pretty, but I think it's the worst to just save a machine. Yeah, horrible. Bad gym etiquette, which is absolutely the worst.

9:01But Daniel's actually going now every single day at five in the morning. Oh, did you see this, by the way? This is so wild. I saw Marky Mark or whatever his name, Mark Wahlberg. He was on the news. He was talking about his sleeping, whatever. He gets up at three in the morning, he said, and he goes to bed at 6.30 at night. Sounds like you're a sketch. I don't know what's different than what you do every single day. 6.30 is crazy. He's going to sleep like... That literally is my baby's schedule. You know, my baby goes to sleep at 7 and wakes up at 3.30 every single morning. So he's literally my baby.

9:38But he said he wants to spend more time with his kids. But I'm like, dude, you're going to bed before your kids. I'm like, I don't understand. Yeah, like your kids ain't waking up at 3.30. No, what's going on? I don't know what's going on. All right. Again, I don't know what's going on with this podcast, but you guys all crush it. Leave Daniel a review. Leave me a review. I don't know. We'll check in the next one. Daniel, 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.

10:12And 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 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. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.