Podcast interview with Jay Schwedelson

Jay Schwedelson is a speaker, author, and digital pioneer.

He is the founder of SubjectLine.com, Outcome Media, and Guru Media Hub.

Jay Schwedelson is one of the top marketing experts in the U.S. His guiding philosophy centers on providing the latest, research-backed knowledge and best practices to marketers of all sizes and industries.

Jay is the Founder of SubjectLine.com, the leading free subject-line rating tool, ranked in the top 1% of all websites worldwide. Having led SubjectLine.com through the testing of more than 15 million subject lines, Jay uses his knowledge to guide organizations across multiple industries on how to implement impactful email marketing.

Jay is also the Founder of GURU Media Hub, which hosts the GURU conference, the world’s largest email marketing event, as well as other major marketing events that attract more than 50,000 attendees annually.

His podcast, “Do This, Not That!: For Marketers,” is among the most popular in the United States and has been ranked in the top 10 out of over 50,000 marketing podcasts in the entire country.

Through his agency, Outcome Media, his team executes over 40,000 marketing campaigns annually for many of the world’s most iconic and successful brands. Jay has been named to Crain’s Top 100 Industry Leaders for 10 consecutive years and was inducted into the Hall of Fame at his alma mater, the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, in recognition of career excellence.

Register for Guru Event – Guru Event 2024 is a two-day free online event happening this month between the 16 and 17 of October.

Main Topics

Subject lines – The importance of subject lines in email marketing, tactics for crafting effective subject lines, and examples of successful subject line strategies.

Email content – Optimizing email content elements like pre-headers, call-to-action buttons, links, and overall messaging.

Email marketing trends – Discussions on emerging trends like AMP for email, BIMI, SMS/text messaging.

Email marketing best practices – Tips and insights on improving email marketing campaigns, testing, and overall strategy.

Keywords

Some Of The Key Terms And Phrases Mentioned In The podcast Conversation Include:

Subject Line, Pre-Header, Call-To-Action (CTA), Friendly From, Personalization, Emojis, Suspense, Amp For Email, BIMI, SMS/Text Messaging, Email Deliverability, Email Authentication, Testing, Marketing Automation

Questions/Answers

Q: What’s your opinion about subject lines being left for last in email campaigns?

A: Subject lines are among the most important elements that determine whether an email gets opened or not. Marketers often spend too little time on crafting effective subject lines, leaving them as an afterthought. This is a mistake, as subject lines play a crucial role in capturing the recipient’s attention and driving engagement.

Q: Can you share examples of small changes in subject lines that can impact email success?

A: Some examples include starting the subject line with a number (e.g., “7 Reasons You Need…”), using emojis, capitalizing the first word, or creating suspense with ellipses (…). These small tweaks can significantly boost open rates and engagement.

Q: How important are pre-headers in email campaigns?

A: Pre-headers are extremely valuable real estate in emails. They should be offer-related and continue the messaging from the subject line. Pre-headers should be less than 85 characters and should be checked on both desktop and mobile devices to ensure they display correctly.

Q: What’s your opinion on AMP for email and BIMI?

A: While AMP for email (interactive emails) and BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) are discussed as potential trends, Jay suggests focusing on tactics that can have an immediate impact rather than spending time on complex implementations like BIMI. BIMI and or AMP for email takes time and a lot of effort to implement. Start with small changes, and BIMI can come later.

Subject lines are crucial but often overlooked. Spending more time crafting effective subject lines can significantly improve email performance.

Small tweaks like using numbers, emojis, capitalization, and creating suspense can boost open rates and engagement.

Pre-headers should be optimized for offers and continue the messaging from the subject line.

Call-to-action buttons should state the benefit rather than the commitment to increase click-through rates.

Friendly from names can be customized to align with the email topic, increasing open rates and reducing unsubscribed.

Testing and trying multiple tactics is essential, as what works today may not work in the future.

Focus on tactics that can have an immediate impact rather than complex implementations like AMP for email or BIMI (can be added later)

Inject fun into email marketing by taking a positive, lighthearted approach rather than being overly negative or technical.

Quotes

“Marketers spend all their time on the creative, on their author they’re trying to get legal approval, they’re trying to make sure it all looks perfect and it’s rendering in every platform you could possibly imagine. And then they finally get that all done and then what do they do? They go, oh, we need a subject line let let’s spend 4 seconds you writing this thing that is going to be the primary reason somebody decides to open or not. So the subject line in many ways is, is among the most important things that you’re going to utilize right there.”

” if you start your subjectline with the word exclusive, instantly you will get a lift of about 15%. exclusive colon whatever invitation. invitation is one of the secret sauce words of email marketing and marketers get confused they think in order to invite somebody to something you need to be having an event. You can invite anybody to anything.

“I think the promotion tab’s a great thing. I’m very happy when emails go in the promotions tab number one the promotion stab is part of your inbox. It’s not the junk folder. When somebody clicks on the promotion stab, which by the way is very limited number of people are still using the promotion stab. So that thing is, is not growing.”

List all questions asked and summarize answers

Q: Can you tell us more about your background and how did you got into email?

A: Jay’s roots are in direct mail marketing, growing up around a family business focused on measurable marketing. He gravitated towards email because of its ability to communicate with an entire audience at a low cost and test different tactics.

Q: You’re wearing many hats. Can you tell us more?

A: Jay’s primary business is an agency called Outcome Media, focused on direct response marketing for various brands. He also started Subjectline.com to provide education on email marketing, and Guru Events to host virtual marketing conferences like Guru Conference.

Q: What makes direct mail so unique these days?

A: Every direct mail piece is considered by the recipient, unlike other marketing channels where messages are easily ignored. Targeted direct mail campaigns and marketing automation integrations have elevated the channel.

Q: Can you share some examples of small changes in the subject line that can impact email success?

A: Starting the subject line with a number, using emojis, capitalizing the first word, and using brackets can create a pause and increase engagement. However, these tactics alone do not cause emails to go to the spam folder.

Dialogue

Subject Lines and Pre-Headers

Jay emphasized the importance of subject lines and pre-headers in email marketing, as they are often the primary reason someone decides to open an email. He provided several tips for improving subject lines and pre-headers, including:

• Using personalization beyond just the recipient’s name, such as their job title or interests
• Starting the subject line with a number or using emojis to create a pause and increase engagement
• Capitalizing the first word or using brackets to make the subject line stand out
• Creating suspense with ellipses (e.g., “Our biggest sale of the year starts…”) to encourage recipients to open the email
• Ensuring the pre-header is offer-related and less than 85 characters
• Testing the pre-header on mobile devices to ensure no HTML code is displayed

Friendly From and Call-to-Action Buttons

Jay discussed the importance of the friendly from (or from name) and call-to-action buttons in email campaigns. He suggested:

• Changing the friendly from to match the email’s topic or offer, can increase open rates and reduce unsubscribed
• Using “John from [Brand]” as the friendly from to combine personalization and brand recognition
• Stating the benefit in call-to-action buttons (e.g., “Save My Spot” instead of “Register”) to increase click-through rates

Email Content and Trends

Jay shared insights on email content and trends, including:

• Considering where every link in the email leads, as many clicks go to the logo or homepage instead of the intended destination
• His skepticism about AMP for email becoming a major trend in the near future, as most email marketers lack the time and resources to implement it
• His belief that BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is too complex for most email marketers to prioritize
• The importance of injecting fun and positivity into email marketing, rather than focusing solely on potential issues and problems

Link and sources discussed

https://subjectline.com  – Jay’s site for email marketing tips and resources

https://guruconference.com – Virtual marketing conference focused on email marketing

https://deliveredconference.com  – Virtual conference focused on direct mail marketing

https://outcomemedia.com  – Jay’s agency focused on direct response marketing

jayschwedelson.com – Jay’s personal website and newsletter

Transcript

00:00:06
Jay Schwedelson: Marketers spend all their time on the creative, on their author. They’re trying to get legal approval. They’re trying to make sure it all looks perfect and it’s rendering and every platform you could possibly imagine. And then they finally get that all done. And then what do they do? They go, oh, we need a subject line. Let’s spend four seconds writing this thing. That is going to be the primary reason somebody decides to open it up. So the subject line in many ways is, is among the most important things that you’re going to utilize right there.

00:00:34
Sella Yoffe: Hello and welcome to episode number nine of Email Geeks Show. The podcast were once a month email geeks around the world share their knowledge about email marketing, email deliverability, and marketing. My guest today is Jay Schwedelson, a true email marketing top voice. Jay wears many hats, is the founder of subject line dot line.com, and the president and CEO of World Data Group, which runs Guru Events, he is also a speaker, an Autor and podcaster and one of my favorite email friends.
My name is Sella Yoffe and I’m an email deliverability consultant. I work with global email senders, startups and email service providers to improve their email deliverability, email authentication, and strategy. And I’m the host of this podcast. Hi Jay. It’s great to have you on the show.

00:01:37
Jay Schwedelson: It’s an honor to be here. I am a listener and watch over your podcast. So this is, uh. This is fun. Yeah. Thank you.

00:01:44
Sella Yoffe: Can you tell us more about your background and how did you got into email?

00:01:50
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. So, my roots in marketing go for it really started the direct mail world. Yeah. Um, I grew up around a family business that was in my garage that my folks started in my garage. That was all about direct mail, starting about about 1980. Um, so all I knew, uh, about the world of business was marketing and most importantly, measurable marketing that you can, you know, spend a certain amount of money on marketing and try to get a certain amount of money back. And, you know, that fascinated me. And, um, as the years went on, I got involved with a lot of digital marketing, and then I, I always kind of gravitated towards email, uh, because I felt that I really loved this, this world where you could communicate with your entire audience whenever you chose. Um, without a lot of cost involved. And you could test a lot of things without having a lot of cost involved. So this was always something that was really interesting to me. So, you know, fast forward to today, I do a lot in email, direct mail, still digital marketing, but but email to me is such a unique channel that I don’t think will ever go away, no matter how many times people try to kill it off. So, uh. Yeah. How I got there.

00:03:05
Sella Yoffe: So you are wearing many hats. Can you tell us more?

00:03:09
Jay Schwedelson: My primary business, um, is an agency called Outcome Media. Outcome media is an agency that focuses on really all different forms of of direct response marketing, marketing that is immeasurable. And we help some of the biggest brands and small brands, both business and consumer, uh, with strategies to increase sales, increase pipeline increase, lead generation, increase, you know, retention efforts. So we don’t own any data. Uh, and as it relates to email, we use eight different platforms to send emails for all of our clients. This last 12 months we did about 6 billion emails on behalf of our clients. So a lot of email. And because of that, um, uh, we started a site many years ago called Subject Line Comm to really allow the industry to have some basic understanding of things that you may want to be testing, in the world of email. And that got, you know, got some popularity. And we felt that, you know, maybe there could be more education in the marketplace for the everyday marketer. So we started another company called called Guru Events that puts on a number of large scale virtual marketing conferences. One of them is called Guru Conference, which is a free, uh, event, uh, which is all about email. And the goal really, there is to just get more ideas out there, more things that you could test and learn about as it relates to email. So we try to do what we can to do our part to, to spread information about email marketing and, and trends and tactics and all of that. Um, if so many major brands, major platforms, we have some big celebrities that are going to be speaking. We just we just really get excited about people being able to have access to information. You don’t have to spend $1,000 to go to a conference. You don’t have to travel somewhere. If you want to learn anything about email, you go to this thing and get a little bit smarter by the end of it, hopefully.

00:04:55
Sella Yoffe: I attended the Guru conference last year and it was fantastic.

00:04:59
Jay Schwedelson: Oh that’s nice. Thank you. Appreciate that.

00:05:01
Sella Yoffe: It almost like being there except for not being able to drink beer together.

00:05:07
Jay Schwedelson: Well, we’re going to work on that this year. And you know the other thing we’re doing this year, we’re going to see how it goes, which is, I think, very counter to a lot of virtual events. We’re not going to have on demand afterwards. We’re not going to have any on demand. And the reason we’re doing that is we feel if there’s no on demand, there’s going to be a lot of people very angry that they couldn’t get to the content. They have other things going on, and I understand that they should be angry at me. That’s fine. But we do believe that if we could bring everybody together live, it creates such a networking opportunity, so much more life and vibrancy to the event. So we’re going to see how that goes this year. And it’s probably going to be a total disaster. But it’ll be fun trying it out. Yeah. Never stopped trying.

00:05:47
Sella Yoffe: You mentioned your background in direct mail. I share the same background and I really believe in this medium.

00:05:54
Jay Schwedelson: Well, that’s why, by the way, one another conflict we’re putting on which you could find it delivered conference. Com very similar to Guru conference which is all email delivered conferences all direct mail. So virtual two day giant conference all about direct mail because I believe in it too. Um, so, you know, we’re going to try to see if we can get more marketers engaged.

00:06:11
Sella Yoffe: What makes it so unique these days?

00:06:14
Jay Schwedelson: Every time you get a direct mail piece, you have to consider it. You take it from your mailbox and you look at it for a split second. You say garbage, not garbage. Yeah, right. There’s not many other marketing channels that you do that you know, in social, uh, you don’t do that because you’re speeding by things. And when you post something online, it’s only going to a fraction of your audience. Right. And so in this world of and same thing in digital ads, things like that. So in direct mail every piece is considered and looked at um, and that is a difference maker. And listen the days of sending just mass volumes of direct mail that doesn’t happen as much, but super targeted and then also marketing automation programs tied to direct mail. You know, when someone does an abandoned cart on a website. You can have a mail piece out in the door within 24 to 48 hours to that person. That’s a home run campaign. So this idea of marketing automation telling, you know what direct mail, I think has really elevated it as well.

00:07:12
Sella Yoffe: So many email marketers often prioritize planning the campaigns, crafting the copy, the visuals, and leaving the subject line for last. What is your opinion about that?

00:07:24
Jay Schwedelson: You could not be more spot on with what you’re saying. Uh um, marketers spend all their time on the creative, on their author. They’re trying to get legal approval. They’re trying to make sure it all looks perfect, and it’s rendering in every platform you could possibly imagine. And then they finally get that all done. And then what do they do? They go, oh, we need a subject line. Let’s spend four seconds writing this thing that is going to be the the primary reason somebody decides to open or not. So the subject line in many ways is among the most important things that you’re going to utilize right there. And so a couple of things. Um, some people think that doing things in the subject line to stand out are gimmicks, that you shouldn’t do that because it’s a gimmick or a marketer will be like, oh, I would never open that if I saw that. That that really hurts. Marketing in general. The name of the game is there’s so many emails that are going out. What are you going to do? Uh, to have your email stand out and not the other person that’s going out at the exact same time? What’s that thing that’s going to happen when the person scanned their inbox with that millisecond, that’s going to say, oh, I want to open that. So some of the things that are working really, really well right now are personalization. That is not about your name. For so long, marketers have been relying on personalization of the subject line to say, Jay comma, check out this. Whatever. Okay. But that every market it worked. You’re whined a few years ago. That would work great. But what do we do as marketers? Once we see something working, everybody jumps on board and they abuse it. And to gets to a point that it’s it’s wallpaper. And now it doesn’t work as a tactic anymore. Right. And that’s what happened with first name personalization for both business and consumer marketers in the subject line. But personalization in the subject line beyond name is a home run. What do I mean by that? If you are a business marketer okay, or consumer marketer, the sooner you can tell somebody who they are in the subject line, the more inclined they are to open up the email. What I mean by that is if your subject line is targeting, you know, Chief Financial Officer okay. And that subject line says this is important for CFOs, right? Or for HR directors. HR directors need to know this. Or on the consumer side, perfect for new homeowners. Okay. This is for people that are investors, all right. For new grandparents, whatever it is, it could be a life stage. It could be someone’s job, function, or title for SMB owners. When you can tell the person that this is for you and not for everybody else, they immediately it resonates with them and they open up. If I send you an email, right? So if I send you an email says email marketers need to know this. You’re like, oh, I must open I’m going to open this up. I mean, there’s no way you’re not opening that. You’re opening that up. And all all you’re really doing is personalization. But now with the name, but with what the person cares about or their interests or their career. And it is absolutely the easiest way to to get an email open right now. That’s and then of course, you could do a million other things. You know, we can get into brackets and making a question and all these different things. But that to me is a tactic that’s underutilized, that does really, really well.

00:10:43
Sella Yoffe: Sometimes you share examples backed with data of small changes in the subject line, like adding a number or an emoji, which can impact email success. Can you share some examples?

00:10:56
Jay Schwedelson: Absolutely. We are constantly we’re constantly sending out campaigns to our clients that are, you know, real like meaning like, uh, it’s not based on survey. It’s like pressing send we’re sending out to hundreds of millions of people and we’re seeing, uh, responses come in and things are always changing. You know, what we say today, oddly, will not be the case, uh, six months from now. Uh, because people may overdo it or trends will change all sorts of stuff. Right. Um, so little things that can have a big impact. I’ll give you an example, one that does really well that most people don’t consider when your subject line actually starts with a number. Okay. It starts with a number. It does. It will increase your engagement, your open rates significantly. You know, the seven reasons you need to blah, blah, blah. The six tips every marketer should know. The nine things new homeowners need to have. When it starts with that number, we see a spike. As humans, we love lists. Uh, we. The funniest thing about a list is we don’t actually care who made the list. We don’t even think about who made the list. Who’s deciding who’s on the list. We just want to know what’s on the list. Okay, so when, uh, you can. And when when marketers say I don’t have any content to promote, I have nothing to say. I’m waiting on this big new video or this thing, and I go, that’s not true. I can go to your website, go to any page on your website, and I can make a list of whatever’s on there in about 30s. Right. The seven whatevers the seven biggest trends this fall. The seven pitfalls you need to avoid. Who cares when you start a subject line with a number? It does incredibly well. The same thing with an emoji, right? You can’t use an emoji in every subject line every time you send it out, but here and there, putting it in there, it will give a lift. And why do these things give lift? Why does starting your subject line with a number, or putting the most important thing in brackets to start your subject line, like let’s say you’re promoting your list. It says, you know, tip sheet, right? You put that in brackets to start your subject line. Why does capitalizing the first word of your subject line matter? Why does everything at the start of your subject line matter? Because as you’re going through that your inbox and everyone treats their inbox like social media, now they’re scanning it, right? You’re trying to grab that that, that moment. So to grab that person’s pause so they actually will consider the rest of your subject line. So all of these things capitalization and a number and brackets and emoji, they create that pause. Now what you’ll find a million articles about. And I appreciated a blog post that you did. Um, or a LinkedIn post you did the other day is that I think there’s a lot of marketers that still hold back from doing a lot of these tactics and subject only because they believe that that is the reason that they’re going to go to the junk folder. They’re going to go to the spam folder. Yeah, right. And you know more about deliverability than I’ll ever know. But the reality of it is, is, you know, that if you’re going to junk Folder or the spam folder. Um, it’s very likely not because you put a number to start your subject. I’m sure you have other issues now. The only thing I’ll say to that, and I won’t get on the deliverability thing, but some portion of all email gets to go to the junk phone. It’s going to happen. That’s called life. And then to not get super technical, I mean, over 95% of all email marketers are sending out on what’s called a shared IP. Right. They’re not sending out on these dedicated IPS. When you send out on a shared IP, you’re sharing reputation with a zillion other marketers. And the idea that because you put the number seven to start your subject line on this email is the root cause that you’re going to the junk folder when you’re on a shared IP with 50 of the marketers is ridiculous. So I like trying to liberate marketers from saying, yes, you can put free in the subject line. You can use an exclamation point, you can use brackets, you can use an emoji. Do all of these things because you’ll get more engagement. And it’s not the reason you’re having a problem, at least in my opinion. I don’t know, you.

00:14:49
Sella Yoffe: As you said before, subject lines are a crucial part of female success, yet many marketeers spend only four seconds on them. For those who want to take their email marketing to the next level. Can you share some tips on how small things in the subject line can impact campaign engagement?

00:15:09
Jay Schwedelson: I’ll get super granular in some weird places. I’ll give you an example of like how little you have to think, how minute you can get to have an impact. Okay, let’s say you’re promoting a sale that ends on Friday, okay? Okay. Or you have a webinar that’s going to occur on Friday. Right? It’s on Friday, right. You send out an email on Thursday okay okay. Promoting it because tomorrow is the end of it. Tomorrow is the end of it. If you say tomorrow is the end of the sale, tomorrow is the webinar, or you say Friday is the webinar, or Friday is still using the word tomorrow versus the day of the week. Okay, we’ll give you actually over a 20% boost in your engagement on that email. Amazing. And so you there are a little things right, that have a huge impact. I’ll give you another example. If you start the word, if you start something with the word exclusive. Mhm. Okay. Instantly you will get a lift of about 15% exclusive colon. Whatever. Invitation. Invitation is one of the secret source words of email marketing. And marketers get confused. They think in order to invite somebody to something, you need to be having an event. You can invite anybody to anything. I’m inviting you to this sale. Okay? I’m inviting you to see our latest fashions. I’m inviting you to check out our most recent content. When you see the word invitation or invited to start the subject line invited colon. Whatever your invitation, code, whatever. Again, it’s all in the subconscious. It’s. No, it’s not like anybody is going to get that email. See that something like, oh, this is all great. Nobody does that. But we see it. We don’t know why we care, but we feel better about it than we’re invited to something and we read the rest. And that is the game. And it is a game. It is a game. How am I going to, you know, open. And then once you get your email open, there’s 75 other things to consider, right. To get to get that email open, I’ll tell you another thing in the subject line that does really, really well, and that is creating any kind of suspense, any kind of suspense. You know, Amazon has really pushed pushed this a lot. If you look at Amazon’s emails over the last year, not the ones that are confirming your whatever or whatever, but a lot of Amazon’s emails at the end of their subject line, they’re using the three dots, the dot dot dot. Right. Okay. They’re using the dot dot dot, the three dots at the end of a subject line that create that suspense, um, do incredibly well because human nature is we want to know what it is, right? What is going to be the keynote, our keynote is dot, dot, dot. Who is it going to be? Uh, our our biggest sale of the year starts. Dot dot dot. Like when when is it going to happen? That suspense is leading you into the email. And so when you talk about, oh, email doesn’t work for me, I can’t get it to point by using things like those three dots, you’ll actually see engagement boost by over 25%, usually on average for both business and consumer marketers. And you’re not doing anything. All this, all these things that we talk about cost you nothing. Take five seconds to do and you can test it. You know, if we put out ten ideas during this podcast and you test them all and three of them work, you might say J and sell her a bunch of morons, a bunch of dummies. But the reality is you now have three new things in your arsenal that you can test, that you can incorporate, and that’s called marketing. It’s not going to all work for everybody, but little test that equal big changes I think are super important.

00:18:38
Sella Yoffe: We both came to email marketing from direct mail. In direct mail, you have a real estate that you can play with the size and the shape of the envelope, the copy and the graphics on the front and at the bottom of the envelope, and some other things. With email, we have a limited real estate. We have the friendly from the subject line and the pre header. Can you tell us if pre headers are so important 150%.

00:19:10
Jay Schwedelson: So the pre header. Some people call the second subject line right. It’s the grayed out subject line below your subject line. Yeah. So generally speaking the pre header. Uh and by the way it used to be the pre header was used for format issue links. Right. It would be that that language. If you’re having trouble viewing this click here. Um right the format issue content. And that’s fine to have later on in your pre header. But if the start of your pre header is related to format issue stuff, you should stop watching this podcast and you should immediately go to your email templates and change things, because that pre header okay is incredibly valuable real estate. It’s the next thing that’s going to dictate whether or not your email gets opened. You start the dialogue in that subject line okay. And then you continue it in the pre header. And you get that email. But number one your printer should be less than 85 characters. Because anything more than that forget it. It’s not going to work all that type of stuff. But it should be offer related and in many ways even more aggressive than the subject line so that it stands out and you can do all the same stuff that you do in the subject line, emojis and capitalization and this and numbers and words. You can do it all in the pre header. So the most important thing you want to do though is make sure it’s all related. Now the second most important thing you want to do. The people on about 30% of all marketers mess this up when you set up your pre header okay. Uh, for most marketers that may not be on the most craziest systems. Yeah. The when you get a test message for your email campaign, okay. If you look at it on your desktop. The pre header will look fine. You’ll see all the words as you’ve written them. Yeah. But it’s really important to look at the text message especially your pre header on your mobile device on your phone. Because about 30% of the time for marketers because a way they’re, they’re creative. People have set up uh, their email templates and their spacer images and gifts and all the stuff. You’ll see code, you know, HTML code show up in the pre header, but you only see that testing on your phone. It’s very, very, very important that you look at your test messages on both your phone and on your desktop. Because when you have HTML code, uh, show up as your pre header, it depresses your open rate by about 25% because people think it’s spam and it’s not real. So the most important thing about pre headers make it an offer. But look at your test messages on your phone. 100%. Mhm.

00:21:45
Sella Yoffe: Investing four seconds on the subject line is probably not enough. I would like to ask you to elaborate more on the ratio that marketers should spend on the subject line, compare to the overall campaign.

00:22:01
Jay Schwedelson: Oh well, it’s not so much you need to spend an inordinate amount of time. You just need to really consider it. It needs to be like, okay, we’re very focused on the friendly from or from name. What’s that going to be? We’re very focused on the subject line. We’re focused on the creator, of course, the imagery and the content of our emails. I’ll tell you another big area that I think marketers probably missed the most is the call to action buttons in the email and on the destination pages. It’s another topic, just like the subject line, that we just completely don’t spend enough of time on. So it’s not a matter of okay, dedicate three hours to a subject line. It’s they all need to be equally weighted. And the subject line, or the call to action buttons or your pre header can’t be an afterthought.

00:22:44
Sella Yoffe: You mentioned the friendly thrown. Can you explain how marketeers can improve their campaigns with it?

00:22:50
Jay Schwedelson: So let’s let’s break it out for a second. When you send out an email. Right. If I send you an email, my email address is a letter J Watson at, you know, outcome Medium.com or whatever. But when you get an email from me, okay, it’ll just show up just because I made the from name or the friendly from to be my name. We all do that. Brands do that. When you get an email in your inbox, it doesn’t say you know, a mail at nike.com, it just says Nike because Nike has determined that they want to show up. Just say nothing. What marketers don’t consider enough is that you could have that from name be whatever you want on every campaign, and by changing the firm name, it does not hurt deliverability at all. Okay, it takes five seconds to change it and it can actually significantly increase your overall engagement. The number people are opening interacting with your emails. What do I mean? So first off, having your from front name tied to your offer, tied to your subject line helps incredibly. So when Salesforce sends out an email, it doesn’t just say Salesforce is the firm name, it may say Salesforce Events, it may say Salesforce Demo. It may say Salesforce. You know, FYI, if they have a newsletter, if gap, the clothing store is going to send something, it might say gap back to school near frontline, it might say gap Memorial Day sale. Whatever it is, they will put the topic often of whatever it is their email is about in that from friendly from to delineate what’s going on. Look at Apple. On any given day you might get four or 5 or 6 emails from Apple and you have one email address, Apple. And all they’re doing is sending something from the same email address, but their from name is going to be App Store, Apple Card, Apple TV, Apple Music. Right. And they’re doing that to let you know what the topic of the email is. And by the way, not only does having your topic mentioned in the friendly. From when it’s tied to the subject line of the offer, increase your open rate by about 20%. Okay, not only does it do that, it actually drives down Unsubscribes drives down people removing themselves because people don’t view that sender almost as the same sender. Right? When gap has got back to school, and gap latest deals and gap whatever in your subconscious. When you see all these emails coming in, you’re like, oh, that that’s that is the same company, but it’s different parts of the same company. It gives you the opportunity to send more without upsetting the recipient for both business and consumer marketers. So I think that friendly from and that from name is a major untapped potential for email marketers.

00:25:27
Sella Yoffe: Interesting. Never considered that as a so impactful.

00:25:33
Jay Schwedelson: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a variable. And as you mentioned, you know, this whole idea of having a come from from a name, right, rather than a brand. Of course, that does really well. So if you haven’t come from John Smith, as you’re from name, that could do really well, but something that does really well, like sometimes you have a problem, let’s say John Smith, you want to have the email come from John Smith to promote whatever because you think it’s more personalized. But nobody knows who John Smith is. He’s some sales person. Nobody knows who it is. And that’s a little bit of, uh, is this going to really upset people because they’re getting an email and they’re confused. So the way around that works really well is you do John from brand as you’re from name. Right? John from gap, John from Salesforce. It literally says John then from Salesforce. And what you’re doing there say, hey, this is from a person and it’s also from the brand that, you know, and that’s what’s going on. And it allows you that safe space to have it be more personalized and yet stand out. And it’s a great test.

00:26:29
Sella Yoffe: So we covered the appetizers, the friendly from the subject lines and the pre headers. Let’s open the emails and dive into the content itself?

00:26:41
Jay Schwedelson: Absolutely. First of all, when you open up the email, before you even consider the call to action button, you need to think about every link in your message right when you send out an email. If your email is a newsletter, that’s a different thing. If you’re new, if your email is transactional, someone just bought something different. But if you’re sending an email that has an offer, you want them to buy something to subscribe to something, whatever it is. Yeah you are. When you’re about to hit send, you’re hoping that thing happens. You’re like, I really hope I get a lot of sales. I really hope I get a lot of subscribers. You’re hoping this one thing happens when you have an offer email. And the reason I say that is it’s really important to consider every link in your message. I’ll give you an example. The logo in your email, the logo. Okay, I may not realize this, but about 1,819% of all the clicks that you’re going to get and any email that you send out are going to be clicked on the logo in your message. Where is the traffic going when you click on the logo? Usually the person who designed your email said, I don’t know where this should go and they have it. Go to your homepage. The logo trap, right. Because that’s normal. But that’s about 20%. 1 in 5 year clicks is going to go not to your destination page. So when you’re saying, I really hope I get subscribers, I really hope I get buyers, whatever it is that you’re hoping for, and yet you’re sending 1 in 5 clicks to your homepage, which, by the way, no one’s going to find your offer. Once they go to the homepage, they’re gone. Goodbye. You’ll never see them again. Okay, so think about every conduit, every every link in your message where they’re going. Um, because that’s important. So when you come back to the call to action buttons, when you have those buttons in those big buttons and they say things like, uh, download, register, buy now, it’s you’re literally telling somebody what to do. First of all, it couldn’t be more boring. Okay. And second of all, it’s the what’s in it for me just by changing the language in those buttons, you can radically change your your overall click through rate. So, for example, let’s say you’re promoting a webinar. What sounds better to you? Register or save my spot register or I want in uh, or register or I don’t want to miss out gets you excited. You’re like, oh man, I want my spot. I don’t want to miss out. Right? And it’s the same thing for anything else instead of by now, it’s how about save now or I want in on the latest deals or in the I want in on the biggest sale of the year. Get the person excited. You state the benefit when your call to action button state the benefit rather than the commitment. Yeah, you see about a 25% lift in overall, uh, click through rates just by stating the benefit to the person rather than the commitment that you’re asking them to make. Amazing. And these little things, when people say to me, email marketing doesn’t work for me. Email marketing is debt. Email marketing doesn’t work for you because there’s no one thing an email that you do that’s going to change everything. It’s a series of 100 little things. And if you’re not trying to do many of them and test many of them, you’re not going to have success. Because a lot of the marketers that are doing well are trying to do all of these little things that are constantly changing, you know, constantly changing. So it’s always changing, which keeps it exciting. And the call to action buttons, I think, are really a missed opportunity in my opinion. You know, we wouldn’t all have careers in the world of marketing if all you had to do is one thing. It’s 100 little things. Um, and it’s all about testing. And you can’t test everything all at once. You can’t be like, I’m going to try a different time of day. I’m going to try a different subject line, a different pre header, uh, a different offer, a different call to action button. And let’s get it out and just see what happens. That’s called a mess. So you do really need to try to test in a way that you have information that, you know, can really, uh, impact whatever. And by the way, something doing bad is as valuable as something doing good, right? So don’t take failure as something like, oh, man, we stink. That’s why. Email is better than direct mail in certain cases or other platforms. Because you could here’s you sent the email. It didn’t work. It’ll send out the next one. It’s okay. Nobody cares. So it’s fine.

00:31:05
Sella Yoffe: What’s your opinion on the dreaded promotions tab?

00:31:11
Jay Schwedelson: I think the promotions have is a great thing. I’m very happy when emails go in the promotions tab. Number one. Uh, the promotion spam is part of your inbox. It’s not the junk folder. When somebody clicks on the promotion stamp, which, by the way is very limited, number of people are still using the promotion. Yeah. So that thing is is not growing okay. It’s not like this. Like the vast majority of people use it. It’s a limited number of people, but for the people that do a promotion step, when you click on that tab, you are in shopping mode.

00:31:43
Sella Yoffe: Yeah.

00:31:44
Jay Schwedelson: Right. You’re in the mode of I want to see promotions. You’re like, what are these awesome promotions going to be? And so it’s not like you are going to click in the promotions website. What are all these emails about? Sales. This is terrible. You went there for a reason. Yeah. Right. And so I think going into the emotions tab is a good thing, not a bad thing. And it comes back also, you know, can you do 75 weird things to get out of the promotions tab? I guess you could try to do all this craziness. Is it worth the effort in the spectrum of of what you should spend your time on? I think it’s a colossal waste of time. How do we do? Um. Oh. So good. There you go. You’re the deliverability guy, so you know better than I do.

00:32:27
Sella Yoffe: You know, email is a good old channel. There are no daily changes in new things, like with social media. But there are few things that people in the industry talk about, like AMP for email and Beam. Let’s start with AMP for email. What do you think about it?

00:32:45
Jay Schwedelson: You know, it’s funny though when you bring up AMP for email, is that, uh, and for those listeners that, you know, aren’t aware it’s really amp ML is where you can truly have interactive emails where you could do things inside of an email similar to a website. And the technology absolutely exists. It’s not supported by enough ISPs and platforms and whatnot. But the thing I find funny about AMP email, if you go back and you look at every year like November, December, every major publication and every site, they get a group of email experts and they ask these email experts, different experts every year, what is going to be the biggest trend for the next year? What is it? What’s going to happen in email in the next year? I mean, you can go back to the last, I would say at least five years probably. I don’t know how long. And every time it’s AMP for email. This is going to be the year where it gets, you know, everybody’s going to start using it. And then of course the year passes and it doesn’t happen. Yeah. And so uh, it it doesn’t feel like there’s a I maybe I’m wrong. It doesn’t feel like there’s going to be this tidal wave of change that’s coming to email, uh, in the next 12 months that I can see. But maybe, you know, long term for sure. I think there’s a lot more energy around text messages and SMS in terms of evolving that space more, um, and certainly ChatGPT and integrations there. I don’t see, other than what Microsoft has done with outlook to a certain extent, in kind of their ability to allow better things to happen within their email environments. I don’t think you’re going to I don’t see a massive tidal wave of change coming to email formats, whatnot. Maybe you do. You’re closer to.

00:34:25
Sella Yoffe: It.

00:34:26
Jay Schwedelson: And what about me?

00:34:28
Sella Yoffe: I’ll tell you within me. Here’s the thing about and I think that I don’t know if Everyone in the email world really recognizes this enough. I would say the vast majority of email marketers or people that they’re that do email marketing are not email marketers. What I mean by that is they are marketing managers that wear 12 hats. They’re responsible for the website, for social media, for content, for search and also email. It’s it’s one of the 12 things this is I mean, this is what like in the United States, we have 25 million businesses. I would say 99% of the people that are doing email marketing fall into the bucket, you know, that I just described. And so when you we don’t have enough time in the day to get a cup of coffee. Uh, what you need to do with email is you need to prioritize. What are a couple little things I can do that’ll make a difference. And when it comes to Beanie Babies, hard baby takes time. Baby takes effort. Baby takes a pretty good understanding of email set ups and all this stuff. And when you have the time to either put, you know, a number to start your subject line, okay? Or you have to get your website up or you know, you don’t have the time to dedicate to it. So I’m a big fan of focus on the stuff that you can do to have an impact. And if you have all the time in the world, mess around with me. But in reality, the vast majority of people, I just don’t think they have the time or understanding. Yeah.

00:35:51
Jay Schwedelson: You are posting really helpful content as well as some fun stuff.

00:35:56
Sella Yoffe: Let me tell you one thing about the the world of email marketing is that I think that one of the things that we everyone collectively is done wrong is we’re a very negative, very negative, meaning that a lot of the conversation is this is what you’re doing wrong. This is why you’re having a problem. You’re doing this really bad. You’re not doing deliverability right. You’re going to do this, which is going to cause you issues. It’s and it’s very, very dry and it’s very, very down and sad. Um, it’s very rarely. This is a fun channel. Right. We’re sending nice little graphical things that show up, and people get happy and they get offers. And you could test all this stuff out and and don’t you don’t have to always be so concerned about every email getting to the inbox. And let’s have fun and let’s be positive. I think and that’s one of the reasons, frankly, we started Guru Conference because I was like, let’s inject some fun into this world, which is always about like doomsday. Like if you don’t do this right, then you’re doing the wrong thing and you’re a bad person. It’s like, relax, we’re sending out some emails. Everyone’s got to relax.

00:37:05
Jay Schwedelson: That’s how I love that approach. So thank you. Yeah.

00:37:10
Sella Yoffe: Come on, have some fun.

00:37:12
Jay Schwedelson: Can you share how people can follow you? Enjoy your content, and of course some of the fun stuff that you are sharing.

00:37:19
Sella Yoffe: I love connecting with people, so please connect with me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of stuff, uh, there and then, um, you can visit subject line com, Bitcoin.com, which is a free site. I also encourage you to register for Guru Conference at Guru Conference. Com and then you can also go to I have my own personal page. If you sign up for my newsletter and that’s at my full name, Jay Olson. Com and you can get on my newsletter and then I will send you all sorts of craziness and we can be in contact. But, uh, I love connecting with everybody.

00:37:51
Jay Schwedelson: Amazing.

00:37:51
Sella Yoffe: Thank you very much. It’s been helpful. And of course, that was fun.

00:37:57
Jay Schwedelson: Absolutely. You know what? We spend a lot of time staring at our computers and all this stuff. We should make it fun. So. And you’re. And your podcast is terrific. You get lots of different, uh, in different industry people, different people, different thoughts. And I and I love that. And you do a great job. So, uh, everybody keep listening because great stuff.

00:38:14
Sella Yoffe: Much appreciated.

00:38:16
Jay Schwedelson: Thank you very much.