EP. 9- 99% of Marketers Are Missing These EASY Newsletter Engagement Tricks l Jay’s Scoop

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. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that I'm excited. Why am I excited?

I'm excited for this episode of do this, not that. Today we're talking about email newsletters. Now, I don't care if you're a business marketer or consumer marketer or just you are your own brand.

A lot of us have email newsletters or we've thought about having email newsletters.

And in this quick tip session here, we're going to talk about how to get a lot more people to be reading the newsletters that you're putting out and little quick tips to make that happen.

But before we get into how we're going to get more people to consume your newsletters that you're putting a lot of time into, let me first get on a soapbox about why you should have a newsletter. Some people out there like, maybe even for themselves, like, I've thought about a newsletter, but I don't have enough of a following.

I'm going to have five subscribers or my company's too small to start a newsletter. I need to wait until whatever point in time. The best time to start a newsletter is yesterday. And here's why you want to have a newsletter.

Of course, having a newsletter will help your business. Right. You'll be able to share things going on in your business or in your own career, things like that. Absolutely.

But the reason that it doesn't matter how small your following is, is that when you start a newsletter, I promise you, the first newsletter that you send out. I went back and I read the first newsletter I sent out. I started one about two and a half years ago. It was garbage.

If it was written on paper, it would have been toilet paper. It was terrible. And so what happens when you start your newsletter is you start to do those repetitions.

You start to use that muscle that you've never used before. I'm not a writer, but I have to write this thing. I have to learn how to do that.

But the other thing that happens is when you're creating your newsletter, you need to learn. You need to go out there and research things.

You need to better yourself and figure out what topics you're going to talk about and you become more knowledgeable on lots of different stuff. And secretly, you are becoming your own content engine.

When you produce this newsletter, you have social posts and things to share and things to talk about for weeks from that one newsletter that you created. So I strongly encourage everyone to have a newsletter. You start a newsletter today.

I don't care if it's your own brand, your company brand doesn't matter. Start one and start going now, because it will only get better every time you hit send.

Now, there are things that you can do to increase the number of people reading your newsletter. So let's go through those quick tips. The thing that drives me absolutely crazy is how hard it is to create a newsletter. It takes so much time.

We're getting all the information together, we're formatting it, we're getting all the content, we're getting it approved by seven different people internally. And then by the time you actually hit send, you no longer even care if anybody reads it.

You're just so happy that this thing is going out the door because it is torture. And then you have to do it all again a week later on. Oh my God, you want to quit. Quit. You want to run away.

So what we need to do is make sure that that effort that you're putting in is, is a good use of time and that as many people on earth are actually opening it, here is the number one thing that you can do to increase the readership of your newsletter. I don't care if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer. And here it is and you're going to tell me I'm crazy. Send it twice. That's right.

You want to send your email newsletter twice. I cannot tell you. I would say 99% of marketers make this mistake.

They have their email newsletter and they have it set to go out on, you know, Tuesdays at 9am and finally it's all set to go. They hit send Tuesday, 9am and they watch their email, tracking how many people opened it, how many will click. Okay, they liked it.

And then you move on to the next week. You are assuming people care. Nobody cares about your newsletter. Nobody cares that you just sent it out. Nobody's actually seeing it.

They're scrolling their inbox and they missed it. But guess what? They signed up for your newsletter for a reason. They subscribed for a reason. Because they wanted to get the information.

They just missed it. Okay, so what you want to do is in that same week period, two days later, you want to send that email newsletter out again. So you send it on Tuesday.

Now you're going to send it out again the exact same same newsletter on Thursday. Ideally, you're sending it to people who did not originally open the first newsletter.

You're sending it to non openers, which is a huge portion of the people you just sent it out to. So on Thursday, now you're going to send out to all the people didn't open on Tuesday.

But you're going to do two things when you send it out that second time. Number one, the subject line. You're not going to use the same subject line that you did on Tuesday when you send it out originally.

You are going to use a subject line that is squarely focused on what they didn't do. Meaning it's going to say oops, you missed it.

You're going to want to read this something where you are acknowledging the fact that they didn't read it the first time. When you do oops, you missed it for that newsletter on the second send, on average it's going to increase your engagement rate by about 20%.

This is a no brainer test. The second thing that you want to do is you don't want to send it out at the same time of day. You want a six hour difference from that first send.

So if you send that Tuesday 8am, you want to send out on Thursday like 3pm and you're saying, well, why would I do that? 8am is my best performing time. No, 8am is your best performing time.

For a certain population of people that are getting your newsletter, people read email at different times. I read email at night. I don't read all my newsletters during the day. I don't have time for the newsletters. I read that stuff at night.

So what you want to do is you want to cater to the other population of people that didn't open it up on that first try, that Tuesday at 8am so now you're going to send out Thursday 3pm and it's going to say oops, you missed it.

When you have a six hour gap from the versioning of when you're sending version one and then sending the second touch, you see an open rate increase by about 15%.

So these little things, all you're doing is sending it again, changing the subject line and changing the time of day that you're sending it, you will see a significant increase in the terms of the number of people that are opening up your newsletter. Now the other thing about newsletters that works really, really well are when it's Coming from a person and not a brand A person and not a brand.

An email newsletter is a one to one form of communication.

And when you sign up for a newsletter and it's coming from a brand, you feel like there's no connection there and you feel like it's very, very promotional in nature.

If you can have someone within your company, could be the head of marketing, could be the senior vice president, whatever, could be the CEO, it does not matter.

But actually the friendly from the from name that you're sending from doesn't have to be their actual email address, but the from name that you're sending from is a person. And the newsletter itself has more of a tone that is coming from a human being rather than just a brand. It changes performance dramatically.

We've tested this so many times. Person rather than brand when it comes from a person, an email newsletter rather than a brand, the average open rates are over 30% higher.

When it's coming from a person rather than a brand, who do you want to have that ongoing relationship with? Some random brand or that person that you feel like you're connecting with? So that's another easy way to really boost your engagement.

The last Tip let's talk about the subject line overall of your email newsletters. Here's what you can never do. If you're doing this, I want you to stop immediately and know that you have failed.

This is a fail in the subject line of your email newsletter. You cannot say this is the 73rd edition of whatever newsletter. You cannot say the date. This is the September 9th edition of of the newsletter.

That is ridiculous. You also can't say the name of your newsletter. You know this is the the Greatest News Alert newsletter. Who cares?

Nobody cares about the name of your newsletter in the subject line. Nobody wants to know the date. Nobody wants to know that this is your 37th one that you send out. All of that is garbage.

It doesn't help the person, it's not benefiting them and you become wallpaper. So that subject line, what you want to do is take a hero stat from your newsletter.

Let's say you're talking about all this different type of content and in the newsletter you're going to take the most wildest stat that you're talking about. 71% of people are doing this. What is it? I don't know that's your subject line.

Or you make a question subject line based on the content of your newsletters. Are you thinking about blah blah blah. You take some piece of the content and you turn it into an incredible subject line.

And that is the secret sauce of newsletters. You want to get people excited about opening it up. You don't want to have wallpaper. We are not trying to make wallpaper.

So to recap, and then let's get into something else. You want to make sure that you're sending out twice, that you don't have boring subject lines, that you're looking at different times of day.

And that is coming from a person. Your newsletters are super valuable. You're working too hard on them not to get more engagement.

Now let's go into the last segment of this ridiculous podcast. We have a segment at the end called since you didn't ask.

And since you didn't ask is when I talk about stuff that has nothing to do with marketing or whatever, just basically it's going on in my life or life in general. So I recently went on a guy's trip. I went on a guy's trip and I go on one every year with my college buddies. I have six college buddies.

We go every single year on a guys trip together. And I got to tell you, I always don't want to go. I never have time for it. And I'm always miserable about going because I can't go.

And I always see these guys once a year. They're my best friends from college, but we go every year and I'm so happy that I do it every year.

First of all, I recommend everybody doing this because you don't want to look back on life like, oh man, why didn't I do that? And it is fun, but it is torture. And so this year we just went on it. And every year what we do is we pick out of a hat who's going to be in charge.

And so one of my buddies is in charge this year and he's an absolute moron in the best possible way. And so he picked San Diego, which I live in Florida. Super annoying to get to San Diego for a three day guy trip, but whatever. So we all go.

And it happened to be Comic Con. Comic Con going on in San Diego while we're there. Of course, we didn't know this going into it. Well, he did. I didn't.

And Comic Con, for those who don't know, is the world's largest gathering.

It's like 150,000 people that get together at the convention center and they talk about Star Trek and Star wars and Marvel and DC and all this other stuff. And people are getting dressed up and. And it's. And it's 150,000 of people that are all interested in that stuff.

So one of the nights my buddy goes, I got a great idea.

We're all going to go down to outside the convention center where 150,000 people are hanging out near all these bars and restaurants and we're going to go and check out what's going on there. And we were like, all right, fine. It sounded terrible idea, terrible idea. But I'm like, well, I'll do whatever. I don't care.

It's guys trip we're doing. He didn't tell me though. He bought us all costumes that he wants us to wear out the entire night. So he handed each one of us a costume.

So one of my friends was handed Darth Vader. Another one was a scary clown. I got handed Batman, which was totally embarrassing.

And then one of my other friends got handed this Olaf costume from Frozen, which, which was totally ridiculous. It was a massive costume with this massive head. And my buddy was not happy about it.

He's got this big beard and so we all put it on and now we're walking around for the entire night. And everybody was all into.

My buddy who was Olaf was like an angry Olaf because he didn't want all these kids were trying to take pictures with him and he was just pissed. And all these kids would come up to him like, take a picture of me, Olaf. I love you, Olaf.

They were trying to hug him and he's like, get off of me, dude. And it was phenomenal. It was phenomenal. Like the entire night we had an angry Olaf and I was a very happy Batman.

And yeah, so moral to that very long story is go on a trip with your friends from your youth every year. Live life with no regrets. It's a lot of fun. And don't screw up your email newsletters. And thanks for checking out this episode of do this.

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