The Truth About Losing Email Subscribers (and Fatherhood) | Bathroom Break #72 🚽

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 for another special episode of The Bathroom Break.

0:37I'm Jay Schwedelson. I'm here with the Marking Millennial, Daniel Murray. And today we're going to be talking about some important data around unsubscribes. Before we do that, Daniel's added a new person to his newsletter, to his database. Daniel, you now have a kid. You're a first-time father. First off, how are you doing? How is it going? um this the highest of highs of having a kid and then there's the like no sleep and all that so it's it's it's good and trying to take care of myself too so it's it's it's a great it's a great experience i get why people say things flip a switch when you have a kid so but i'm glad i live in the age age of ai now and it could solve a lot of worries parents have where i could just past chat GPT a lot of things.

1:23What are you asking chat GPT about parenting? Of like, is this enough? How much formula should a baby have? Is the baby getting enough sleep? Oh, wait, the baby has a little blood on each shirt. Is this okay? Like all this stuff. Does it say, actually, you're a horrendous dad and you need to go find help? Yeah, you have mental health problems and extreme anxiety. So you should go see a therapist. One last question before we get to the episode regarding this being the bathroom break. Everybody really wants to know, how are your diaper changing skills? I'm actually a pro at diaper changing. My kid tends to have 12 to 15 diaper changes a day.

2:06So we're getting in numbers now. We're getting in numbers. It's a volume game. It's a volume game. But the doctor says you have to get at least four to five pee diapers, and he's exceeding that. So I'm proud of him. Well, Daniel always says about marketing, you got to get your reps in. And this is the exact same thing. So let's jump into the topic of the day, unsubscribes. Why are we talking about this? I'm going to tell you why we're talking about this. Because normally, the time of year that we're heading into, kind of the Q4 time of year, people don't realize this. But from October 1st through December 15th, it is the highest unsubscribed period for any other time of the year.

2:44That 75-day period on the consumer side, your unsubscribe rates are 230 % higher during that period. And on the business side, they're 220 % higher on the business-to-business side. But the reason we're talking about it is because this year, unsubscribe rates are going to be even higher than normal because the economy is a little bit all over because of tariffs. I don't care what you think about tariffs. It doesn't matter. People will be watching their wallets a little more. So they're looking for more deals. When they look for more deals, Daniel, why does that cause unsubscribe rates to go higher?

3:16Because a lot of people, what they do when they come, especially in consumer, they look for the welcome offer. Once welcome offer hits, they look for the email. And then after the email, they don't want to be sent just a flow of emails in the inbox unless it's another deal. Also, this also brings to the point that any discounts you're giving should be better than the welcome offer. Otherwise, you're not going to win like if you're giving like welcome 10 you can't give 10 off the next time because you're just gonna so any exceeding discounts need to be if you're doing a sale needs to be better than that welcome offer that you have but a lot of people are right now like you said are seeking deals but i think it's actually a good thing because you want to have people on your list who want to buy and want to continuously buy um and it's a good signal that someone's alive on your list.

4:11You'd rather have someone leave your list, knowing you leave your list, they know that you're not the right customer, than have someone that you don't know if they're opening or closing your email. That's my point of view. Yeah. And on the business to business side, the reason unsubscribes are also so high, okay, is because everyone's trying to like, oh, I'm going to get super organized heading into the new year. And they're like, I'm going to get off this list. I'm going to get to inbox zero, all this stuff. And the reason that we're talking about this is the biggest fail that we both see marketers make is the reaction to unsubscribes.

4:42What they do is they're looking at their dashboards and they go, oh, it's October and their unsubscribes start to tick up higher. They go, oh no, we're sending out too much email. Our newsletter is not interesting. This offer stinks. That's the problem. Let's rein it back. Let's change things because our unsubscribes went higher. And that's why it's important internally to manage the expectations say, no, no, no, no. This is the time of year that we get high unsubscribes. So Daniel, when you see unsubscribed on your newsletter or on your offer emails, do you freak out? Do you start to pull back the reins?

5:15What do you do? I think it all goes into like analyzing if this is the time of year or is it, are we sending things the wrong type of things to the audience? Is this content audience mismatch or is it actually just a time of your thing? Because also, sometimes if you send something way out of left field that has nothing to do with your audience, you're going to get a ton of unsubscribes because they're on your list for a reason. But if you're doing the same cadence and there's a high unsubscribe, you shouldn't freak out and say, I'm sending too much emails. you should look at the data and say okay maybe these people are not in my icp maybe these people are getting inbox zero like i don't if i'm consistently doing content audience matching with my content i'm not worried i'm more worried if i send something out of the blue and then i see a high unsubscriber so you were you were telling me before and this is kind of funny uh if you don't read Daniel's newsletter, you should.

6:20Um, it's incredible. Uh, but it's very long form. He writes a long form newsletter, a lot of in depth about marketing stuff. He's got a like 150 ,000 subscribers, whatever it is. You're saying that sometimes now you're getting unsubs because people think that your newsletter is written by AI. First of all, do you do that? No, I think, I think, um, I would say like it'd be dumb for anybody not to like use AI to edit content and help you like get catch grammar mistakes but the initial like first four drafts i think you the drafting process like in the ideation and the the tone and voice and structure is me the editing sometimes is ai so i'm not going to lie and say that it's never has ai but i think i think people are jumping to conclusion that like if something this is like the m dash issue and the period issue or like too much spacing here was like too many emojis i had to like reel back emojis in my newsletter just because people thought it was ai but i've been using a emojis in my newsletter before ai was a thing so it's like these like little things of like people thinking it's ai because you use too many emojis or you use too many of the like m dashes i'm not an m dash person so thank goodness i never fell into that but like there's writers out there that have been using m dashes forever and now they're getting called for using ai when they're not using ai so i think i think it's an excuse and i'm also okay like if you think if you don't like my content unsubscribe that's like that like you want to weed out the people you're trying to get the point of an email list is to get to the closest to your icp as possible like you want the core audience on your list and you want to keep looking at the retention of that core audience so if you're not retaining core audience there's something wrong with your content but what we do with our email list is look at like in the last 12 months how many people we've retained and you normally see after the curve after 10 months that um if you're retaining the same the audience the retention of audience pretty much the same so the first like two to three months you're always going to see higher unsubscribes and new people because they're like oh let me a lot of people go on a list let me test out this content and don't like it.

8:36But once it goes longer, you normally see you retain those people for a long period of time. Yeah, it's so important to be putting out value so that you can retain these people. So all right, so back to you being a dad. Okay. So what is your vibe? Like if a random person comes over and wants to see the baby, are you like super chill? Like, Like, oh, yeah, you want to touch its hands? You want to touch its face? You do you. Or like when my kids were younger, we were like, we were freakazoids. We wouldn't let anybody near the baby. Like, where do you land on that? Wash hands for warm water for 20 seconds.

9:16If you don't have a T-dab shot, which babies are very, they can get whooping cough very easily. And adults don't know they're carrying whooping cough. So if you don't have a T-Dep job in the last five years, you can't come see my baby. Yeah. Until the baby gets shot in the next two months, it's fine. But you have to wash your hands. There's no kissing the baby. I don't care if people hold the baby. If you have, I don't care about that. But just don't kiss the baby and wash your hands, and it's all fine. Well, everybody cancel your trip to Daniel's house because you're not going to be able to kiss the baby, especially if you might have whooping cough.

10:02Look at this. Dr. Daniel. We're changing the podcast name to Dr. Daniel. Well, we did it again. Another amazing episode of the bathroom break. Listen, follow the Marky Millennials. That is the best podcast. My podcast stinks. Do this, not that. But if you're bored, you could follow that one, too. And we'll see you at the next. 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. And I hope you give it a try.

10:34Oh, 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.