In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson shares a powerful email marketing tactic that’s helped transform his business—revealing a simple strategy for gathering valuable customer feedback through email and how to leverage AI to analyze responses.
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Best Moments:
(01:04) The email strategy: sending a basic feedback request email to your database
(01:46) Subject line technique: using only the word “question” with no preheader
(02:37) How to adapt this strategy for different business types and database sizes
(04:00) Using AI to synthesize and analyze customer feedback responses
(05:38) Why this approach works better than traditional surveys
(05:55) Bonus benefit: improved email deliverability through reply engagement
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Transcript
We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And I wanna share a tactic that my company does twice a year. It's super easy, it takes a minute to do and it changes my business every time that we do it. And I don't think enough people do this. It's this idea of sending out a very simple email to your database and the email.
The purpose of the email is to get information back from the people on your database about their thoughts on your products, your services, on your content. On ideas to improve your products or services on ideas to, uh, content ideas that for you to put out there in your newsletter, in your blog, in your podcast, and whatever you're doing.
It doesn't matter if you're a business to business brand, a consumer brand, um, if you're giant, if you're tiny, it doesn't matter. And this is exactly what we do and I'll tell you why we do it and how. AI has changed everything. It's really simple. We take our newsletter database and twice a year we send out an email and the email is a subject line.
All it says is the word question, the full word. That's it. The word question is written in the subject line, no other words. And we have no pre-header at all. And this way it stands out big time in everybody's inbox. And when we send this email out, what we send it out for? Is for an understanding of what content we want to generate.
So we'll send an email that says, Hey, we'd love to get your feedback. If you could reply to this email. We are building out our content roadmap for the next six months, and we'd love to know what's on your mind. What are the topics that you would love for us to discuss? What are the podcast episodes you wish we would create?
What is it that is on your mind or questions or concerns? We'd love to hear it all. Now, you may be sending yourself, well, I don't have a podcast. I don't have a newsletter. I don't have any of that. It's not just for that. Let's say you have products that you're selling. Maybe you have a massive database.
Maybe you have 300,000 people in your database. You're like, I can't email everybody. Tell 'em to reply and tell us. Tell us what you think about our products. No, but what you can do is you could take your top 1%, your most frequent buyers, your highest spenders. Take that portion of your database, send out this email, put question the subject line, no Preheader, and say, working on, you know, product improvements.
What is it about our product that you would love to see us improve? What is another kind of sister product you wish that we had? What do you think of the content we're saying on sharing on social media? Is there anything else? Maybe how tos that you'd love for us to share? Reply to this email and you keep that email really, really short.
Two to three sentences, and you tell 'em to reply and say, we're reading every single reply that you send us. Maybe you wanna let your salespeople do this. Have an email, go out from your salespeople. Again, subject line just says question. No pre-header and says, Hey, we're working on our promotional plans for the next six months.
What would get you to, you know, jump on board? What type of pricing deal are you looking for? What is the issue of why we're not working together? What's the one thing our competitors are doing well that we're not doing? Reply to this email and let us know your thoughts, and then here's what you do. This is why AI is perfect for all this.
If you write this the right way and you don't fill it up with images and nonsense, and you actually can have it come from a person in your organization, that's amazing. You send out this email subject line question, no Preheader, and now you get back all these responses like, oh my God, they're all over the place.
What am I gonna do with this? This is a mess. Here's the beautiful part. You take all of the replies. All you gotta do is you can stick it in a spreadsheet, you can stick it in a Word doc, it doesn't matter. And then you go over to chat GBT. You could use the free version of chat, GPT, alright? And you upload all of it.
You could do it as an attachment or you just copy and paste and you say, Hey, chat GBT, we just sent out this email to our database. And we ask them this. And you tell the question that you ask Cha, you know that you asked everybody and say, will you do, will you synthesize all of this data? Will you give us the 10 most common themes that people ask about or talked about ranking from most, you know, to the least top 10.
What are outliers? What are things that sound really interesting that you think that we should also be thinking about? And can you categorize this for us so that way we can really jump all over this and instantly it will synthesize the data, basically this freeform data, and it will give you a roadmap for future products to create.
It'll give you a roadmap for content to create. It'll give you a roadmap for. Barriers of why you're not getting sales from your prospects and people that you're communicating with. You really couldn't do this before without AI because it was too complicated and people make the mistake. They think, oh, we'll run a survey and that's how we'll get our data.
Or we'll ask people on a, on a form for blah, blah, blah. Nobody likes filling out surveys. They go bababababa, they click on whatever, and they don't care. You don't get back useful information. But when you actually ask people their opinion, you let them be part of it, it will blow your mind how much interaction you get.
And here's a bonus, anybody that replies to that email. It is the actual best signal for an email system that that person likes your content, and you'll now stay in that person's inbox forever because getting them to reply to an email is an incredible engagement signal. So it's gonna help out with your email deliverability, it's gonna help out with your roadmap for everything it takes five seconds.
We do this twice a year. And it is a game changer. Again, I don't care if you have a personal brand, if you have a very large brand, if you're a consumer, if you're a B2B, if you have a sales organization, I don't care if you're in a boring industry. This is for everybody and it crushes it all right. I know that was kind of random, but I love that tactic and I don't think enough people try that out.
Alright. Now before we get into, since you didn't ask, which is the totally ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want you to know that this podcast is presented by Emma from Marigold. I love this email sending platform. You don't like your sending platform. It stinks. Emma is awesome. Okay. And I have a special offer only for the listeners of this podcast.
And if you don't have good loyalty programs, if you don't have great metrics, if you don't have good deliverability, if you don't have good templates that you could tap into, I'm telling you Emma from Marigold is awesome and only for listeners. This podcast, you get a 50% off three month trial. All you have to do is go to Jay schon.com/emma.
To get the information, 50% off. Come on, Jay schon.com/ema. Check it out. Alright, let's get into, since you didn't ask, so I don't think I should be around human beings because I don't get along with people very well when I'm walking around the planet. I don't know. I don't think I'm a jerk. Maybe I'm a jerk.
I don't know. So this just happened to me, and you all can tell me if I'm a jerk. So. I was at Whole Foods, and I saw this woman that I know, I mean, I know her pretty well. I, I don't like go out with her. I have couples and stuff, but I know her pretty well. Okay. And I see her and, you know, we're waiting at the, the food area where they have the prepared food.
And she walks up and she goes, wow, you look tired. And I was like, who are you? You clown. I don't. And when someone says to you, you look tired. Do they not know that? That's like crazy rude. That basically means you look like garbage. And by the way, I didn't think I looked like garbage in that moment, but apparently I did.
And I was looking like, oh yeah, I've been really busy and I blew it off. I'm like, she's a loser. Don't care. And I, and I was done with her and I moved on, but my head, I'm like, she's a jerk, whatever. So then fast forward 48 hours later. I'm in Starbucks. Okay. And who's there? Same woman is there. Now granted I was not looking my best.
It was on the weekend. Okay. I was in like, I don't care mode. 'cause it was the weekend. I wasn't all dressed up. I didn't look my best. Okay. And now we both wind up waiting for a coffee. After you order the coffee, you're waiting there in that little area waiting for your coffee to come out. She turns to me, she's like, Hey Jay.
I'm like, what's up? She says to me. You are so lucky, you don't care what people think about you. I was like, what? I was like, what? She goes, oh man, look at your vibe. Look what's going on here? You know, whatever. And I'm sitting there like, fuming, fuming. I was like, what is wrong with you? You know? And so then I was like, should I say something?
Should I not say something? Um, whatever. And I said, screw it. I'm gonna say it. So I said to her, I go, so, um, are you basically trying to say, I look like crap? And she looks at me very surprised, makes a nervous laugh. And then she goes to me, well, I've seen you look better. And then I don't know why, but instantly I just look at her in the eye and go, same.
Oh my God. Then she looked at me as if I just said the meanest thing ever. And then she stormed away, grabs her coffee storms away. And I was like, dude, I literally said, same. I said to you what you just said to me. Why are you allowed to be angry at me? That's ridiculous. Anyway. This is what I mean. I shouldn't be around people because what am I supposed to do in that situation?
Just be like, oh yeah, I'm not looking my best. I don't, I don't know. I don't know what to say to other humans. I shouldn't be around other humans. Anyway, I appreciate you being here. I think you are looking your best right now and I think that you don't look tired and um, yeah, that's what I got. Appreciate you being here later.