Ep. 145 – ULTIMATE Email Newsletter Trick! ➡️ How do I use AI in regular life? 🧠 | Ask Us ANYTHING

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.

We are here for Ask us anything from do this, not that. This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in very ridiculous questions. We try to tackle one of each.

And if you want to submit a question, it's really easy. Just go to jschweddelson.com there's a button that says podcast.

Click that and there's another button that says Ask us anything and you can submit anything. And you would be surprised about some of the crazy stuff that we get. So let's jump into it.

The question, let's do the work question first, then we'll get to the ridiculous one. The work question comes from Benny from Orlando. Orlando is something else, man. I mean, it is just so much going on there. Oh, you know what?

This guy that I'm friends with, a little bit of a strange dude, he went to Orlando recently and he went to something he told me called the beer spa. And I gotta tell you something, this couldn't sound worse to me. And he's a little bit out there. This dude loves beer.

I mean, I'm fine with beer or whatever, but the beer spa, it's a spa where you like soak and you relax in beer bathtubs and you're drinking beer and then after you're in the beer bathtub, you go and you lie. You told me you lie on these beds made of hay and the whole thing smells like beer. I mean, it sounds terrible. Who wants to do that?

You smell like garbage. I don't know. And the best part is because this guy is really out there, he's like, guess what? Bathing suits were optional. Like, you're gross, dude.

Like you're actually gross. Anyway, what's your question, Benny? He said, we're trying to get our customers and people that are our newsletter subscribers more engaged.

We want to hear from them more via email. Do you have any strategies to that? More interaction from them? Because it feels very one sided. We just email them all the time.

Well, I'm going to give you a tactic that we do and we do this tactic with our own databases, my customer databases, my newsletter databases. We do this once every Six months, and it is a home run.

Okay, so what you want to do is you send out an email, let's say, to either your customer database or your entire newsletter database, and you have the subject line be question. That's it. One word. You write the word question and then you ask them something. Right.

So in my case, we may say, hey, we're working on our plan for all the podcast episodes that we're going to do for the next few months. What would you love to hear about?

Or you may want to ask, hey, we're having a meeting internally about our new roadmap for the software we're developing.

What are some of the pain points that we could help you solve that, that we could try to get into production, or you could ask them what are topics you're hearing in the industry? We'd love to hear from you because we're working on our content that we're going to be developing and we'd love to know whatever's on your mind.

So we could try to develop that content around it. So every six months when we do this, on average those emails get about a 65% open rate. And normally our emails get about a 50% open rate.

And the other thing that's amazing is that we get a 10% reply rate. And so you're asking the person, just reply to this message and let me know your ideas, let me know what you think, let me know anything.

We get about a 10% reply rate on that message. And the reason it's fantastic is all of a sudden you're engaged now with the people in your database. Okay, this costs you nothing. Couldn't be easier.

When you get anybody to reply to an email that you send, you get to stay in their inbox at a much higher level because that's the only ultimate thing. Getting somebody to reply to one of your emails is the ultimate way to beat all deliverability issues and stay in somebody's inbox.

And why do people reply? Why do people want to do it? People are actually nicer than you think, for the most part. And people love participating.

They feel like they are part of something. They feel like you care about them. It feels very one to one.

So this idea of a question email, whether it's to your customer database, you could even do it to a prospect database, definitely to your newsletter file, is a fantastic way to interact with your database and to get that interactions not being so one sided. All right, before we get to our ridiculous question, okay, this podcast, I got to tell you who it's Sponsored by. It is sponsored by Marigold.

Now, I send out a lot of email. My agency, we send about 6 billion emails a year, business and consumer, and we use Marigold.

Marigold is not just for people sending out heavy volume. You could be sending out just a few thousand emails. They have something for small, medium and enterprise companies.

And you're like, well, what's a Marigold? I don't know. Marigold maybe. I never heard of them. It is a roll up of my Emma and Cheetah Digital and Sail through and campaign monitor. It is awesome.

If you don't know them and you're not happy with your platform, go check them out@meetmaragold.com I would not be telling you to check them out and I wouldn't be using them and if it wasn't a fantastic platform. So check them out@meetmargle.com they are terrific. All right, let's get on to the ridiculous question.

We got a question in from Jen from Knoxville, Tennessee. I have no idea if Knoxville is near Nashville because I am clueless, but I am going to Nashville in a few weeks on my annual guys trip.

So every year, my six best buddies from college, we go on a guy strip every year.

And then each year when we're on the guy's trip, we pick out of the hat and whose ever name comes out of the hat, that person is in charge of the trip for the next year. They pick the place, they pick what we're doing, they pick the restaurants.

And we had to go towards this format because it used to be that we would have this text chain and we just never stop, right? Oh, we should go to this restaurant and be like, no, that thing looks terrible. I don't want to go there. Whatever. So we put somebody in charge.

It's a. I hate when my name gets pulled out of the hat because I. There's nothing you could do, right? Oh, you know, we got this Airbnb. It's terrible. It's the worst location, whatever.

So my buddy's in charge and I'm already making fun of him. I'm already telling you, doing a terrible job. I will report back after the guys trip. So that's in Nashville. Anyway, you didn't ask.

So what's the question, Jen? Okay, Jen wants to know, hey, how do you actually use AI in your regular life?

Okay, I'm going to tell you, I got a few different ways that I really do use AI. So first off, and maybe you haven't done this. This is actually cool. You can take whatever's in your refrigerator. I'm serious.

You open up your refrigerator, you make sure everything is kind of visible. If you have some tomatoes, if you have some leftover chicken, you uncover it, you make sure everything in your refrigerator is totally visible.

All right? And then what you do is you write a prompt like this into ChatGPT and you upload the image right now, they change it. You can upload an image.

You can even just take a picture with your camera within ChatGPT or.

Okay, and you can do this on most other AI platforms now you just click the little upload button, you upload a picture of the stuff that's in your fridge and you say, please analyze the image of the contents of my refrigerator.

And you want to say things like identify all the visible ingredients that you see in food items and suggest three to five easy to cook meals that I can make in under 15 minutes with the ingredients that you see and make sure it's something for somebody that does not really cook a lot. You will be blown away with what it tells you that you could do. And then it gives you all the instructions. It is awesome. So I do that a lot.

A really practical way to use it is for legal documents.

All right, so let's say, you know, you don't want to reach out to an attorney, you have a legal document for who knows what, anything and somebody wants you to sign it. You're like, I don't understand all this legalese garbage. I don't know what's going on. So save yourself a few bucks.

You could take that legal document. You go on ChatGPT or any of the other ones, you say something like this. Please analyze this legal document and provide a summary of the following.

The potential risk and liabilities, the rights and obligations of each party, any unusual or non standard provisions, important dates or deadlines, and please review this understanding that I'm signing this and my goal is whatever it is.

I'm trying to buy a house, I'm to trying, I'm trying to resolve a matter, blah, blah, blah, blah, and act as a great legal expert and give me everything you think I should think about. And I'm telling you it is awesome and it gives you the confidence to sign these legal documents. So I would try that out.

And the last one, which is kind of stupid is this whole thing of using it for making sure you don't dress like a doofus. Right? So I'm not the greatest fashion person. I don't know what's going on.

So, so you could take a picture of yourself and say, hey, act like a fashion expert and tell me, what do you think of my outfit? Is it on trend? I'm going to this kind of party. This is how other people dress. Is there anything that you would change?

And believe it or not, it gives you some good advice. Because normally I send a picture of myself to my kids. I go, do I look good? And they go, no you don't. And they leave it at that.

They don't give me any suggestions, which is probably okay. Anyway, so that's the way I use ChatGPT and all these other AI tools. There's a million different stuff, but I love those.

Anyway, thanks for being here. Make sure to check out our longer Tips episode at the end of the week. And listen, if you haven't registered for Guru Conference, you're missing out.

That is my gigantic free virtual email marketing event. Sarah Jessica Parker is going to be there. Amy Porterfield is going to be there. Anne Hanley is going to be there.

The founder of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman is going to be there. And then also we have another event called Delivered Conference. You go to delivered conference.com that is all about direct mail. It is free.

It is virtual. That's in September and we are almost out of spots. And Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank's going to be there. It's going to be awesome.

So go to guruconference.com and delivered conference.com check out our episode the end of the week. And yeah, have a great day. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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