In this episode of “Do This, Not That”, host Jay Schwedelson discusses the importance of continuously growing your email list to offset natural subscriber decay over time. You’ll hear new tips on minimizing the fields you collect to increase form conversion rates, using first-party data and popups to capture more subscriber data, and leveraging your best content to attract new subscribers.
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Best Moments:
(00:49) Email databases lose 20-25% of subscribers annually through things like bounced emails and unsubscribes
(03:21) Minimize form fields to increase conversion – 3 fields have 45% higher submission rates than 6 fields
(03:56) Use first-party data like page visits and content downloads to tag customer interests vs asking too many questions upfront
(05:20) Website popups, especially timed ones, have high conversion rates — can offer incentives to capture emails
(06:46) Repurpose your best content by highlighting key stats and requiring an email to access the full version
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Transcript
Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. Welcome back to do this, not that.
So I got a question for you. How many people have you added to your database today? I bet you don't know the answer and you know why that's a problem.
Is that did you know that on an annual basis, the attrition rate for your database, your email database is at least 20%. That means 20% each year of your database is going to disappear. The email address is going to be dead, not deliverable, unsubscribed, gone.
HubSpot actually says it's 22% annually. And get response campaign monitor say for both business and consumer databases, it's at least 25%.
So what we're going to talk about today is what are we going to do to grow our database every single day? Have always on programs growing our database.
Because if we're not growing our databases while we're sleeping every single day, then our databases are shrinking every day and then we're going to go out of business and we don't want to do that. I mean, literally on a monthly basis, you are losing 2 to 3% of your database. So each day we need to be doing something.
You need an always on program. And the thing that always makes me laugh is as marketers, what do we have?
We have always on programs, our marketing automation streams, our drip streams, we're firing off emails all day long while we're sleeping, all this stuff. So we have always on marketing programs, but do we have always on database growth programs? And we need it.
It's so crazy because we're going to wind up with no database and that's a fail. So let's talk about first of all, why do people fall off your list? Right? And that's not what we're going to try to solve for.
They're going to fall off your list no matter what.
You know, people change jobs, their email provider switches, they unsubscribe, a mailbox is full, you have a bad setup with your email sending platform and you're getting bounced emails that shouldn't be bouncing. 100 other reasons. I don't care about the fact that your database is shrinking.
I care about the fact that we're not focused on growing our database and things that we could be doing to grow that database. So let's talk about how we're going to get our always on program. So while we're sleeping, we're going to grow our email database.
The first thing we have to always put in our mind is, and I know I'm not going to have a lot of fans after I say this, but that's okay. Collect as little information as humanly possible. This is probably one of the biggest fails in marketing. On all of our forms, right?
On our landing page forms. On our newsletter subscription forms. On any form where somebody's filling something out.
We of course want to get as much data as humanly possible from the person filling it out. But guess what? Nobody wants to give us the data, right?
So we know, for example, that three field forms on a landing page, website, whatever, versus a six field form. Three field forms have a 45% higher average submission rate.
One field forms, if all you collect is just the email address, have an 80% higher submission rate than if you have more than one field, right? I'm a big fan. Just click name email address. Maybe country if you need it. Get the opt in. That's it. You don't need more than three fields.
But you're like, yes, I do. I need to know. I need to know all the information about everybody. No, you don't. Because here's why you're not leveraging first party data enough.
First party data is gold. That is when people are interacting with your content, interacting with your emails.
You're sending out pages on your website, landing pages, they're downloading stuff. I don't care, okay? Whatever they're doing by their actions, they're giving you first party data, right?
If somebody's spending time on a page on your site that's all about women's dresses, tag them. They're interested in women's dresses. If you have a site geared towards software for businesses, right?
And the person goes to the section for small businesses, tag them. Small business, right?
Or if you have a suite of different tools and one of those tools is payroll, and the person spending time on the payroll site, great. Tag them. They're interested in payroll.
If you're promoting a country club information and somebody goes to the pickleball site, you didn't ask them when they signed up on your site, are they interested in pickleball, but now they're spending time on the pickleball page, tag them in your database. Interest in pickleball Take everything the person is doing that they're clicking on, that they're interacting with, tag them.
That is how you get the information. It is not asking them this horribly long boring list of fields that nobody wants to fill out and is crushing crush your data collection.
Now how are we actually going to have always on programs where people are actually giving us their information? First off, we have to get over the fact that you don't like pop ups. Who, who cares that you don't like pop ups?
Nobody likes pop ups on a website, but they work incredibly well and nobody ever leaves a website because a pop up was popped up.
What we do though is we fill out, we give that email address to get the 10% off, we give that email address to give that amazing piece of content, right? So you want to have some version of either a website pop up when someone comes to your site, right? Pops right up.
Those have a 7% data capture for first time visitors when you pop something up right when they come to your site. But if that's too aggressive for you, you don't like it. Okay, whatever.
You gotta be testing timed pop ups and every website hosting software solution that you're using, everybody can do these timed pop ups. This is easy.
So if somebody's spending time on that women's clothing page for three minutes, you can pop something up, says hey, put your email address Here, get 10% off women's addresses.
Somebody spending time on that payroll software page, you could pop something up says, put your email address in, we'll give you the seven tips small business owners need to know for payroll solutions. You can pop it up timed based on how long they're on the page and the content of that page and you will see an enormous data capture.
Timed pop ups related to content of the page have over a 15% data capture. This is a no brainer.
Now the other thing that you want to be thinking about doing is leveraging your absolute best piece of content, whatever your best piece of content is, right? Your company has a best piece of content. You take that piece of content and you pull out hero tips, hero stats, hero things, whatever they are.
And then you give that one stat, that one hero thing to everybody in your company and on your company social page.
So you're gonna have everybody in your company post on their social page and on your company social page you that hero stat thing, whatever, and then they're going to write in their post and if you want the full report, the full guide, the full fashionista's guide to summer fashion doesn't matter if it's consumer or business. If you want the ultimate guide to content creation tip sheet, here's what you do. DM me DM the company page and we're going to send you the link.
And then you send the link, they click on it, they fill out the form with the three fields. You get their data, okay? And if anybody that likes your post, you DM the link so they can download the full content piece.
Take that hero piece within your content piece, leverage it. And always on growing your database.
If you're not growing your database every single day, if you're not measuring how many people did we add today, how many people did we lose today, then you are not doing it. You're not doing your job in terms of getting you to that next level. So always on.
Now, before we get to, since you didn't ask, which is, I don't even know what goes on in that portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now, Marigold's been a longtime sponsor and I appreciate them. And maybe you're tuning this out, but don't. Marigold is my email sending platform.
is. It is called the Marigold:I need to have a loyalty program. I'm working on it. And this stat blew my mind. That's in this report. 63% of consumers say they'll pay more to shop with brands that they are loyal to.
They'll pay more. Right? We need these loyalty programs.
gold and you can download the:Since you didn't ask what is going on with me, you have to tell me if this is, if this is out of control, because I think it's out of control. So I was at a conference this week, all right, Decent sized conference. And it was a marketing conference and there was all these sessions going on.
So I went into this one session where this dude was speaking and the room was huge, right? Hundreds of seats, but there was like seven people in the room. And I sat kind of in the back and the speaker was horrendous.
Most boring speaker of all time, whatever. So after like 10 to 15 minutes, I'm like, I gotta get outta here. So I did the maneuver where I took out my phone, I pretended I got a phone call.
Cause I'm a horrible person. And I put it to my ear and I stood up. And then I started walking out. And the dude stopped the session, and he goes, wait, wait, wait.
I promise the session's gonna get better. Give it another chance to me. He said it on the microphone, and I was like, what is. What is actually going on right now? So I gave him a big smile.
I go, okay, okay. And I sat back down because I felt terrible, right? And by the way, session got worse. It was horrible.
But I was like, I cannot believe this dude just did that. And I need to learn from this because it's all this. This also happened to me in the mall.
So I was in the mall, my wife, last week, and we were shopping one store. It was epically boring, whatever store we were in. I go, I'm going to go to the next store. I'll meet you in there. Just find me in there, okay?
So I walk to the next store, and as I'm walking in, I noticed there's nobody in this clothing store. Like, nobody but the salesperson. I don't know. I'm just going to walk in. I just need to, like, be in another store.
So the salesperson comes over to me and she's like, can I help you? And I said, honestly, I don't even know where I am. I don't know what storm in. I don't know what's going on. And she looked at me like I was an idiot.
And I probably was. And she goes, oh, let me pull out some stuff for you. And I felt so bad. She gives me all these clothes, and she's like, you gotta try them on.
You go, what am I doing? And so I go in the dressing room, and then I get a text from my wife. She goes, where are you? I go, I'm in the such and such store.
So she walks in, and then she texts me, and she goes, I don't see you. I go, I'm in the dressing room. She said, why? I said, I don't know. I don't know how I wound up here. I don't want to buy anything in the store.
I don't even know what store I'm in. Save me. Help me. In general, I am now I need to avoid large rooms and stores where nobody else is in them, because clearly I am dysfunctional.
I am doing the wrong things. I don't know what's going on. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Anyway, thank you for being here. Maybe leave this a review. I don't know.
Terrible. Not terrible, leave a review. By the way, drop me a Note on J Schweddelson.com what's going on with you?
I want to hear and register for Guru Conference, the free virtual email marketing conference that I'm putting on. Guruconference.com we're going to run out of virtual seats. Come on, register. You're awesome. Appreciate you being here later. You did it.
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