Email marketing is a big part of our service offering here at Digital 22. It’s also one of the...
Probably 2024's hottest name in marketing, Jay Schwedelson joined us on Avidly Talks to discuss all things related to email marketing, the impact of iOS 18, AI and much more.
If you're not sure who he is, Jay Schwedelson is the founder of one of the most popular marketing websites in the world (subjectline.com), the immensely fun GURU Marketing Conference and the enormously popular Do This, Not That podcast.
We knew he was popular enough here in the Avidly offices, but when we saw the Schwedelson-mania at INBOUND 24, we realised just how big his following actually was.
Watch the episode now or listen via Spotify below to learn more about how Apple Intelligence and iOS 18 will KILL your email marketing efforts if you don't pay attention:
Listen on Spotify
Takeaways from this episode
- An email database is the most valuable asset a company has, as it allows direct communication with prospects and customers.
- Growing and managing an email list is crucial, as there is a natural attrition rate of about 20% per year.
- To grow an email list, marketers should leverage tactics like pop-up contact captures and social media engagement.
- The future of email marketing involves more human-centric approaches, such as sending emails from individuals rather than brands and focusing on building relationships.
- AI, like Apple's upcoming update, will impact email sorting, and marketers need to adapt by creating emails that stand out and feel more personal.
- B2B marketers should prioritize generating replies and building relationships through no-agenda marketing.
- Email newsletters should include personal touches and inject humanity to engage readers.
Subject lines, call-to-action buttons, and timing are important elements to consider in email marketing. - Marketers should focus on metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and replies, while avoiding common mistakes like sending generic content and neglecting personalization.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Overview
02:00 The Value of an Email Database and the Challenges of Database Growth
08:23 Strategies for Growing an Email List and Maintaining a Healthy Database
10:54 The Impact of AI on Email Sorting and the Need for Human-Centric Marketing
13:31 Tips for Creating Effective Email Newsletters
17:54 Metrics to Focus on and Common Mistakes in B2B Email Marketing
Full video transcript
Paul Mortimer (00:00.992)
Cool, here we go again. Right, there's my notes. Right, welcome to Averly Talks, a mostly marketing, sales, and HubSpot focused podcast. I'm recording this one in the open office because it was a bit echoey in one of the rooms. Each week we're diving into topics that help you do better in your work, try to make you smile along the way. So this week we're joined by the one and only Jay Shreddelson, a marketing expert, B2B email marketing expert, company founder, sought after public speaker. You're inbound 24 next month.
Jay Schwedelson (00:30.348)
Yes, that's going to be wild. I'm excited for that. Inbound is an amazing event.
Paul Mortimer (00:36.128)
forward to it. I'll be there again this year so I'll come and say hello. You also host the massively popular Do This Not That, a 10 minute episode podcast and also Guru email marketing newsletter and conference which is happening in October so we'll more about that later and I'll include the links obviously to those but they're great fun and highly valuable so I'm really excited to have you with us. How's it going?
Jay Schwedelson (00:38.71)
Nice. Please.
Jay Schwedelson (00:46.775)
Yes.
Jay Schwedelson (00:51.788)
Yes, appreciate that. Yeah.
Jay Schwedelson (01:02.868)
I'm fired up, you know, always love talking email, B2B, all of it, everything's always changing, so yeah, I love to get into it.
Paul Mortimer (01:11.263)
Emily, who I work with in our team, said just before we were signing off, said, I've got Jason Wilson on the podcast. was like, you're going to enjoy this one. I was like, yep. So we're going to talk about, this series is all about, obviously, AI has been everywhere for the past 18 months, two years. But this summer in particular, we've seen a real acceleration in changes, privacy updates, tools release, search EPT, et cetera, et cetera.
Jay Schwedelson (01:19.32)
Well, she's a liar, but that's okay. It's all
Paul Mortimer (01:39.421)
We're going to talk at it from the angle of email with you and AI in the era we're in when it comes to email marketing. So just with all that going on in AI and data and privacy changes, tool changes, technology changing, how vital is a reliable email list for marketers and why is the case? did we get here?
Jay Schwedelson (02:00.6)
Well, email to me, your email database is the most valuable asset your company has. And the reason I say that is that it's great to have social media followers. It's great to try to do the SEO game. But there's no other way that you can communicate with the entire population of prospects or customers that you have at any one time other than email. That's the only way. Because when you post on social, at best you'll get to maybe 10 %
of your audience or your followers and good luck with search and good luck with all the other channels. making sure that you are intentional about growing your email database is important. It's also important because on an annualized basis, any B2B database, you'll have about 20 % attrition, meaning you will lose about 20 % of your file. So if you're not intentionally trying to grow your database, you're going to have no data in a very short order.
Paul Mortimer (02:55.347)
I think that points to just needing to always manage your data, grow it as well. How do you advise or see people doing nicely growing that data pile, that email list pile?
Jay Schwedelson (03:12.504)
Yeah, a few things. I think the problem that marketers have is they say that there are certain tactics that they personally find annoying so they don't do them. A great example of that is pop -up contact captures. You go to a website and it says, hey, give us your email address and you get to download the seven pitfalls to avoid for whatever sector. And on average, about 5 % of first -time visitors to a website will actually
Paul Mortimer (03:21.609)
Hmm.
Jay Schwedelson (03:39.81)
give that email address and download that piece of content. But a lot of marketers are like, well, I find pop -ups annoying, so I'm not gonna have them on my site. Well, it's more annoying not to have a database and your company to go out of business. And people don't leave your site because of a pop -up, right? They just exit out if they don't wanna do it and they go on their way. So leveraging things like pop -up contact capture is important. And then the other thing is being very intentional on social media, putting out content and saying, hey,
DM me and I'll get you a copy of whatever or trying to send people to forums to fill things out. The whole point of having a social media following should be to ultimately grow your email database. It shouldn't just be to get people to like and comment and whatever. That ain't it. So every day when you are waking up or sleeping or whatever, there has to be things in place to grow your email database or you're going to be in trouble.
Paul Mortimer (04:35.135)
Yeah, so the 20 % decay on that list, what are the things that are in causing that that perhaps people might overlook?
Jay Schwedelson (04:44.696)
So that's a good question. So first off, you have people that will unsubscribe and that's fine. People will remove themselves. That happens all day long. lot of job changes take place all the time, okay? And then there's lot of just burps in the internet. Things that will cause email messages to bounce. And then after things bounce, systems will remove those addresses. So, and 20 % is a lucky number. It can go well higher than that. And certainly in different sectors as you're seeing job changes and all these different types of things.
If you think that you'll just be able to consistently just add to your database with nobody leaving your database, you are wrong.
Paul Mortimer (05:22.463)
How do you sort of distinguish, that's the word I'm after, how do you distinguish between somebody who's actually decayed and needs to come out versus somebody who's just letting the newsletters or the messages tick along ready for when they want them? Because I get probably 50 newsletters a day nearly, it feels like, and I don't let them subscribe from them, I wait till I'm ready to read them. So how do you distinguish between those two things?
Jay Schwedelson (05:51.724)
Yeah, I get pretty aggressive with things in terms of taking people off my lists. Another good example is Neil Patel. Neil Patel is NP Digital, one of the biggest marketers out there.
Paul Mortimer (06:00.509)
Now, he came to mind when you talked about pop -ups, he came to mind. I remember he was on the podcast a few years ago, and this was at the height of inbound content methodology, and his site had pop -ups. You've got to leave another pop -up.
Jay Schwedelson (06:08.182)
Yep.
Jay Schwedelson (06:15.192)
Always. So I just had Neil on my podcast and I asked him what does he do with re -engagement? How long does he let people stay on his list that haven't opened or clicked or engaged with one of his emails, one of his B2B emails? He takes people off after 30 days. If someone hasn't opened or clicked on one of his emails, they are gone from his database. He's sending pretty frequently. You know, he's sending pretty frequently. has newsletters, has all these blog things that he's sending people to.
Paul Mortimer (06:35.517)
What kind of sending cadence are we talking?
Jay Schwedelson (06:44.184)
So he's sending multiple emails a week, but if you haven't opened up an email in 30 days, you're gone from his list. Now that's aggressive. I think most people would be in the six month to a year category, but leaving people on your list is, it doesn't help anybody for two reasons. Number one, when you continue to send to people that don't open or click or reply or engage, it actually crushes your deliverability in terms of staying in the inbox. It's gonna be one of the number one determining factors.
And number two is I think it takes people's eyes off the ball. And what I mean is in every company around the planet, there's the meeting that takes place all the time that is, how do we get the 50 % of our database who haven't opened or clicked in a year or two years, how do we get them to reengage? What are we gonna do? What are the offers? How are we gonna win them back? And sadly, the same amount of energy is not put focused on your new customers or new people that are entering your database. It's always about getting the old people who are no longer interested.
you know, back engage. So it takes your eyes off the ball, it hurts your deliverability. So if people are interested, they'll come back and it's okay if they don't. Focus on the people who want to focus on you and I think it's a much better recipe for success.
Paul Mortimer (07:55.871)
good advice, I'm glad you mentioned the 6 to 12 months thing as well because we're not all Neil Patel with audiences and you focus quite largely on B2B emails as well any advice for people in -house marketing teams who probably getting pressure from sales or from their boss, from their CMO, whatever how to build that nerve holding in terms of
Jay Schwedelson (08:01.579)
Right, that's right.
Paul Mortimer (08:23.091)
be disciplined with how ruthless you are on people staying in the list or not because it's tempting to just cast that wider email net and keep people on the list just to pad the numbers almost I guess.
Jay Schwedelson (08:34.934)
Yeah, what I would say is that I would pick maybe four five times a year where you're gonna take everybody and go back to them. So let's say you've come over the program that if somebody doesn't engage, open clicked, replied in six months, you're gonna put them off to the side. Four or five times a year, you could take everybody that you got. When you got something really important to say, some amazing new piece of content, something really huge.
and go back out to that entire database, engaged, non -engaged, whatever. And the reason that's a win is number one, your deliverability will be strong because you've gotten rid of the dead weight for the majority of your sends. But the other benefit by kind of going four five times a year to your entire database is very similar to yourself where you're saying, okay, I got these newsletters I really don't read, maybe once in a while I'll go back to them. You forget which ones you're even on.
but then all of a sudden you're not getting those emails and then three months go by and all of a sudden you get one. You're what? Wait a minute? What is this thing? And it almost jolts you back into paying attention to that brand as opposed to the wallpaper of the weekly email that you're just ignoring. So it's a good way to still leverage your entire database without kind of just making it turn into wallpaper.
Paul Mortimer (09:31.377)
Mm.
Paul Mortimer (09:48.895)
That's a good idea, that novelty factor. We've seen that, we've been doing some newsletter analysis and see that when newsletters are new, as you'd expect, you've got a novelty window where they'll open the first few every time, but then you see it drop off, don't you? So yeah, you can flip that around and wake up people by messaging them with a big topic less frequently.
Jay Schwedelson (10:03.832)
Totally.
Paul Mortimer (10:11.517)
Something you were just chatting about before we started recording, AI in the content landscape, was going to talk to you about. You mentioned Apple AI and effect on the inbox. What were you getting at?
Jay Schwedelson (10:24.664)
So Apple right now only has the beta version out, but iOS 18, which is the operating system we're all going be using on our phones, is going to be on all of our phones before the end of the calendar year 2024. Right now it's only in beta. And part of that is, of course, their big AI update, which is called Apple Intelligence. And there's a massive update coming to the mail app, the little blue icon that's on all of our phones. Now some of you may think, okay, well don't use an Apple email address. What does that have to do with it?
You could have a Gmail address, you could have any kind of email address, it doesn't matter because 46 % of all mail is checked using that blue icon on your iPhone. And the big change that's coming is that Apple, using their AI, is going to be sort of similar to Gmail but not. They're going to be bucketing the emails that you receive into different tabs. There's going to be a primary tab, a promotions tab,
Paul Mortimer (11:05.811)
All
Jay Schwedelson (11:23.53)
an updates tab, all these different tabs depending on what the email is about. Now the issue is if you wind up let's say in the promotions tab with all your emails, they're not gonna do that well, right? And so what the game is going to be is how do we stay in the primary tab or even the updates tab because they're gonna be the ones that are checked most often and the way you're gonna stay in those tabs is actually being more of a human. Having newsletters that don't come from a brand but they actually come from a
Paul Mortimer (11:37.129)
Hmm.
Jay Schwedelson (11:53.336)
person, right, getting people to reply to emails that you're sending as opposed to just opening them. There's going be a whole different way that we're going to need to interact. And the reason that the Apple mail is going to be a bigger impact than what happened with Gmail, because when Gmail announced their tabs years ago, there wasn't a huge adoption rate. Their promotions tab didn't really impact marketers that much. But the game here is in Gmail, you could turn that off pretty easily. What people don't realize is currently,
In order to turn off the bucketing of your emails within iOS, you have to turn off all of the AI features on your iPhone with iOS 18. You're either gonna have all Apple intelligence, chat GBT and your maps and everything, or you're going to get nothing. And so I think people are gonna really want all those AI features. So it's gonna cause everyone using their mail app to actually have to interact with these tabs. And as marketers, we're have to figure out
How do we stay in that update or primary tab?
Paul Mortimer (12:57.171)
interesting how is it going to be different as tactic wise do you think versus how we know it today
Jay Schwedelson (13:06.294)
Yeah, it is. I think that we are gonna have to be a much more human level, right? So for right now, for example, if you send out an email newsletter and it comes from your brand, the Acme company, update, whatever, we're already starting to see a big shift towards them coming from an executive within a company, Joe Smith or whatever. And the tone of the email is much more of a human tone as opposed to just a brand tone.
and there's a lot of encouragement of, reply to this email, I'm reading these emails, whatever, doesn't matter how big your brand is. This idea of layering in the humanity, because those are the emails from all the testing that we're seeing that are actually going to stay in the primary, because they're gonna feel more one -to -one with the individual.
Paul Mortimer (13:47.967)
well do you know what you like is whenever you do reply when people ask that the newsletter senders do reply back which is good he said it's like human things in inaction isn't it
Jay Schwedelson (13:54.422)
Yes. It's amazing.
Yeah, the irony of what Apple's doing is they're gonna be using AI and yet as marketers, we have to act more human because of the AI. It's fairly ironic. But the whole thing about AI and email is that the pendulum swung too far. We got this shiny toy with AI and so we all started using it for content generation, for writing, for blogs, for newsletters, for everything. Everybody's doing it.
So now all of the emails and everything going out is so generic, right? That what will, what is standing out, what's going to stand out as we head into next year is going to be the humanity of it all. And that is how you're gonna win the day in email. It's not going to be this boring stuff. So it's going to be subject lines with poor grammar. It's gonna be things where it doesn't make any sense. You'll start a subject line with the word and or but or shh or psst. Things that AI would never recommend you to do.
Paul Mortimer (14:57.887)
think you suggested a great one. Sorry to talk over you then. You mentioned on the Exit 5 podcast recently, a great tip from that was something really out there, no thank you. As though just a nice little tactical hack of... But I think it was described as we're accustomed to just clearing the inbox. So you do, it's okay to be sort of daring like that or cheeky like that with your subject lines, right?
Jay Schwedelson (14:58.048)
is what's going to work in email.
Jay Schwedelson (15:11.5)
Right, right, right.
Jay Schwedelson (15:21.026)
Yes.
Jay Schwedelson (15:28.662)
It's across the board, right? I mean, it's even social posts, right? So you go on LinkedIn, what are the posts that do the best? It's lo -fi content. It is when people are the camera at themselves, right? That is what works the best. And you see, you know, the founder of Chili Piper, she'll point the camera at herself all the time. The founder of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, he posts the craziest stuff, right? Darmesh from HubSpot. Why does everybody like Darmesh? Because he's real. He shares real stuff.
He's not all buttoned up. And that is where we're headed with content. That's where we're headed with brands. Brands need to have an identity beyond just this boring, generic garbage.
Paul Mortimer (16:09.439)
I with the email sorting, back to AI sorting your emails for you, I had a look into it ahead of this on my, we used Gmail, and inside the promotions tab were some human one -to -one chats that would follow up sales chats from people trying to sell us software, but it knew to put those into there.
so is even want to want to know how that's going to i a i a i know we went to put that until i knew fit but find that interesting that there's no given
Jay Schwedelson (16:44.016)
that's a fact. You could be more right. mean, everybody will be chasing their tail because there's nothing anybody's going to do that's going to get everything into the right tab, into the right thing. It's the same thing with going to junk folder. know, people think that they send out an email, maybe they send out a different time or they put a word in the subject line or they did something and they see an email go in the junk folder like, it's because we just did that. It's not true. It doesn't matter if you're Amazon, Apple, IBM, HubSpot, whatever, some portion.
of all your emails will go to the junk folder. It's the nature of the internet. Some portion of your emails will go to the promotions tab, the tab that you don't want it to go to in Gmail and Apple, whatever. It doesn't matter. So you want to do your best to put your best foot forward, but with a management of expectations that it's not going to be perfect.
Paul Mortimer (17:29.568)
So, exactly. Cool, so next topic I wanted to pick your brains out, what brains about was how are you seeing, you see a lot of emails, you see a lot of tactics, you talk about it with a lot of people, how are you seeing mainly B2B companies misunderstanding or misusing email as a channel, what metrics are they looking at and what metrics are they ignoring?
Jay Schwedelson (17:54.722)
Yeah, I don't think that enough B2B marketers are trying to generate, as you talked about before, replies. I think we're all still very focused on, got a piece of content, click here to download it, click here to register for the webinar. It is very rarely trying to get people to reply and actually create the relationship of any kind. And I think it's ridiculous. just so...
Boring and it doesn't really generate the response that you want and what really works best for B2B marketers is this idea of no agenda marketing, right? When's the last time you you've sent stuff out that literally had no agenda you weren't trying to get somebody to download Something where they had to fill out a form or register for a webinar They had to watch it was something that was just for them where you sent an email say hey I came across this piece of content
I thought it was perfect for you. It's about whatever. 71 % of people know about blah, blah. Just want to send it your way. And you're not saying, let's have a call. You're not saying sign up for this. You're not saying there's a form. Just here you go. And this idea of no agenda marketing, if you do, and we've done this big study, if you send out three emails in a row to your prospect database that you're trying to market to, and it has no agenda, the three emails.
thought you'd find this interesting, this is really cool, whatever, and you have really good subject lines. When you send out that fourth email asking that person to do something, whatever it is, we see an exponentially higher response rate on that fourth email. Because all of a sudden, you're maybe a little bit of a thought leader with them, maybe you've built some credibility, you're not just a jerk that just sends garbage all the time. And I think that that's where B2B marketers are missing the boat. They're just pounding away with garbage and garbage and garbage. You don't have to do that to win.
Paul Mortimer (19:47.848)
I like that. What you need is bit of nerve to do that as well. To not just stick it in as a little... Well they might want to click it. No, the whole thing doesn't work.
Jay Schwedelson (19:59.072)
I know, Right, right. By the way, you know, wait for that fourth email. Give it a shot. You'll be surprised.
Paul Mortimer (20:11.336)
It's how you'd act at say, back to inbound, big demo trade floor. The most popular booths are the ones who don't sell to you. They're the ones with a nice game, just come and have fun. Do want a free pen? Yeah, no worries. They're the ones that people are getting the most foot traffic to. So yeah, it makes sense that it applies in emails. Psychology. Newsletter specifically now, just because I think that was my...
Jay Schwedelson (20:14.124)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jay Schwedelson (20:29.386)
Always. Yeah.
Paul Mortimer (20:38.24)
thing I share most is your email newsletter tips and what's your process that you like for creating newsletter? Obviously there's AI in the mix, talked about everybody sending AI, generated content, what role does that play but what's your creative process generally for putting together newsletters?
Jay Schwedelson (20:57.9)
Yeah, mean, my newsletter's a little bit odd, and I know that, because what I try to do is I make it as simple as possible. Like, okay, here's a few tips that you could take right now and you could try to test them out for yourself. And then at the bottom of my newsletter, I always put in whatever's going on in my life. TV shows I'm watching, whatever I'm eating, something ridiculous. And what I found is that
Before I didn't include that bottom section where it was just the kind of the work stuff my newsletters did okay but as soon as I started including the Like humanity of it right the more personal side of it my newsletter exploded And there are other newsletters like this like my buddy from the marking Millennials Daniel Murray He has an amazing newsletter and at the bottom he'll talk. I just bought my wife this thing. I played tennis I sucked whatever I think injecting humanity into your newsletters
is an underrated thing to do in this world that we're in. So that's, my process is just a bizarro process. And the other thing I'll throw out there is if you're not republishing your newsletter on LinkedIn as a LinkedIn newsletter, I think you're completely missing the boat.
Paul Mortimer (22:13.906)
It's a free hit avoiding duplicate content anyway or anything like that.
Jay Schwedelson (22:19.692)
Well, there's one piece about LinkedIn newsletters I don't think people realize. So when you go on LinkedIn and you publish your first newsletter, what happens is, yeah, it generates a post, who cares? But it's the single event that beats all of social media. So when you publish just one newsletter on LinkedIn, it will instantly send out an invitation to every person that you are connected to or that follows you to subscribe to your newsletter, instantly.
Everybody's seen them on LinkedIn, you want to subscribe to blah, blah, And then, even if you never publish another newsletter again, every time you get a new connection or a new follower, it will then immediately ask that person, do you want to subscribe to this person's newsletter? So you could wait a year until you publish the second newsletter and you'll be building up this following, this newsletter following every single day. And then when you do publish that next newsletter, it goes out via email.
and it goes right to the inbox, because LinkedIn's sending it out. And you have this whole population of people that aren't subscribed to your regular email list that are getting your email newsletter. So if you're not doing a LinkedIn version, I think you are bananas.
Paul Mortimer (23:32.037)
No, I agree. Where do you stand on that specifically with, are you talking personal accounts or company pages?
Jay Schwedelson (23:40.952)
I like it for your personal. I like it for your personal. And LinkedIn actually just this week changed something where you're now allowed, if you wanna put ad dollars and boost your newsletter that you publish on LinkedIn, you can now do that on a personal page. Up until this week, you can only do it on a company page newsletter, but LinkedIn is going all in on personal newsletters. So I think it's great.
Paul Mortimer (24:08.362)
Nice. Email newsletters. What are your top features? Timing, could be content features. You've got the personal thing, but what else? Is it about design? Is it about when you send it? Is it the subject line? What's a top, top priority?
Jay Schwedelson (24:25.686)
Well, definitely a subject line. If the subject line doesn't grab you, you are done. I'm not saying you should do this, but if you look at the biggest newsletters in the world, they all go out incredibly early in the morning. And the first character of over half of the biggest newsletters on the planet are an emoji. That is, mean, if I say to you morning brew, most people already know that cup of coffee emoji. They could see it in their head. They have branded that. And that's over half of the biggest newsletters using emoji as that first character.
And then I think within the newsletter, I think having a meme here or there, I think is really important, because you gotta break up the boring. And for some people, like, that's off -brand, that's this, that's that, that's garbage. I mean, go on LinkedIn and follow Cisco's LinkedIn page, or follow SEMrush. I mean, you'll see, they're posting pictures of dogs and cats and craziness. Don't tell me your brand is too serious, because it's just not true.
Paul Mortimer (25:20.191)
because 1 % of companies are probably a bad thing to be seen as too serious anyway so lighten up, be human. Yeah. Look we're coming up to time, a couple more things to talk about but before that I want to just pick your brain on some either or versus...
Jay Schwedelson (25:24.618)
Right, right, right. Right, exactly.
Paul Mortimer (25:40.531)
designed email or plain text.
Jay Schwedelson (25:43.372)
It's gotta be a mix. I don't think fully, just fully graphical or fully text is the way, it's a hybrid. I think that's important.
Paul Mortimer (25:55.719)
In your inbox, do you go by read and unread, or do you use the folders and labels?
Jay Schwedelson (26:02.196)
I go by red and unread. My inbox is a disaster. I always try to come up with a new plan. It never works. It is so bad. So if you have a plan, I will follow it. If you have a good one, I will follow your plan.
Paul Mortimer (26:06.484)
You
Paul Mortimer (26:13.651)
What's your target number on unreads?
As good as I've got is under 10 unreads. They're the do that this week. And then if I don't get to it, I take the link out of whatever it is and put it in my calendar.
Jay Schwedelson (26:30.008)
That's good. I like that. I might steal that.
Paul Mortimer (26:31.455)
Everything else goes into one red. Red. Everything else goes into red, sorry. Okay. Send from company or send from person?
Jay Schwedelson (26:34.38)
I like it.
I might do that.
Jay Schwedelson (26:41.762)
person from company i like you know jay from guru media
Paul Mortimer (26:43.94)
that was my next one i was gonna say full name or name from
Jay Schwedelson (26:49.44)
You know, at least the first name, I like also full name, but get a name in there in some way, shape, or form. It can't just be the brand. Nobody cares about your
Paul Mortimer (26:59.935)
especially with AI sorting it for you. Email subject lines with emoji or without emoji.
Jay Schwedelson (27:01.847)
Yes.
Jay Schwedelson (27:06.86)
think it's a mixed bag. You don't want to become wallpaper and you want to be a clown and just always use an emoji, but if you're not, kind of put it in there every third or fourth email. I think you're missing an opportunity to stand out. And it doesn't have to be a ridiculous emoji. I mean, it could be a circle. It could be a check mark. It doesn't have to be somebody, you know, a green guy's face that's nauseous. So it could be anything.
Paul Mortimer (27:27.967)
Do you put every link in an email to the same destination or multiple CTAs?
Jay Schwedelson (27:34.114)
For the most part, I try to drive, if I have an offer, everything will go to the one place. If it's a newsletter, it's gonna go all over the place. But if you have an offer email, it boggles my mind why you would have things going to multiple destinations. It's like, what is the point of the email? If it's to get the offer sold, drive them there. Take your social sharing links out of your offer emails. Makes no sense to me. Just focus it.
Paul Mortimer (28:00.987)
Agreed. Okay, last proper question just to finish. What's the one thing listeners can do or action this week after listening to this to get better email marketing? Mostly B2B.
Jay Schwedelson (28:12.184)
I would spend a little time with your call to action buttons. The buttons in your emails, long rectangular ones. Don't say things like register or download. That is for you, that's not for the recipient. Have the word say something for them. It could say I want in, save my seat, give me my free content. Think about the recipient every time. First person, for the win, every time. Your button should be written in first person.
Paul Mortimer (28:31.859)
First person. First person as well.
Paul Mortimer (28:40.96)
Amazing. Thank you very much. Emily was right. I did enjoy that. So if you're at Inbound 24 next month, you can find Jay on stage. You can also sign up to Guru Conference 16th to 17th of October. It is really good fun. is hands down the best virtual conference you will sign up to this year. Also check out his podcast, Do This, Not That. If you haven't got 10 minutes to make yourself better as a marketer, you're not doing it right. So if you've enjoyed this episode of our podcast,
Jay Schwedelson (28:43.564)
Thank you, it was fun.
Jay Schwedelson (28:58.547)
Thank you.
Paul Mortimer (29:08.735)
Be sure to leave us a comment and a five star review. Spotify's doing comments, let's try that out. Plus hit that follow button to not miss future episodes and check out some of the previous 100 plus episodes we've got in the back catalog. So thanks Jay, I'll come and catch you in Boston in a few weeks time.
Jay Schwedelson (29:23.542)
Yeah man, we gotta hang out, looking forward to it. It's gonna be fun. All right.
Paul Mortimer (29:26.207)
Thanks very much. See you soon.
