Ep. 151 – 3 EASY Email Marketing Tips (you haven’t tried)!! 😮 Flying SOUTHWEST!! | 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. 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 do this, not that.

And today we're going to talk about little things that can have an impact. And let's talk specifically. In the world of email marketing, it always makes me laugh when people think, oh, email's old email, email's legacy.

The same things apply all the time. It's just not true. And we see it in the data. Things are always changing. What works, what doesn't work.

And the secret to email marketing is trying very little things to get that extra little boost. And that's what I want to go through.

A series of super random, and I mean really random little things that you're probably not testing, probably not on your radar, but actually can change the outcome. The first one is this idea of title casing versus sentence casing in your subject line. So in your subject line, Right.

Do you capitalize every word in the subject line, which would be title casing, or do you do sentence casing, where you're only capitalizing the first word in the sentence? Right. So which one does better?

What's really interesting when I'm talking about things that are always changing, it used to be if you rewind 12 months ago, 12 months ago, title casing did a lot better. That's the one where you're capitalizing each word in the subject line. It would beat out regular sentence casing.

Now, now sentence casing is actually beating out title casing, only capitalizing the first word in the sentence, and it gives you about a 10% lift. And I know you're listening to this, maybe you're in your car, you're on a walk, whatever, and you're like, this is what I'm listening to. Yeah.

Because these little things have an impact and that's what you want to be testing. Along the same line, something that's really well, that we're seeing in the last six months is capitalizing one word in the subject line.

It's not necessarily the first word in your subject line, but capitalizing one word in your subject line. So it really stands out. It actually is lifting email open rates by about 15%. And no, you do not go to the junk folder.

You do not go to the spam folder because you capitalize a word. Even if you capitalize multiple words, look in your own inbox. This is for business and consumer marketers.

Look in your inbox and you tell me if you see words that are capitalized. And by the way, that's your inbox that you're staring at. All right, so what other random things are doing well?

All right, if you have an email newsletter, you have an email newsletter. What is the subject line of that newsletter? Please?

Whatever you do, it should not be the this is the July 7th edition or this is the 23rd edition of our newsletter. That's literally the worst thing that you could do for the subject line of a newsletter.

But what's working really, really well in last six months is when the subject line of your email newsletter is a big stat. Whatever is the most compelling stat in your newsletter. You want to make that the subject line. You don't even say anything else.

You just say the stat. So if the stat, something like, you know, 71% of SMBs are using ChatGPT for billing analysis. That's it. You make that the subject line.

When you use a stat as the newsletter subject line, we're seeing a boost open rates by over 20%. Because what you're doing is you're saying, hey, this is going to be covered in this newsletter. You got to check this out again.

Little things that have an impact.

Let's talk about another little thing that I know you're not going to use, but I am telling you, you need to add humanity to your boring business email newsletter or your consumer newsletter that nobody's looking at. Okay? And the way that you add humanity to it is with a meme. Yes, memes work. I don't like memes. Memes are childish. Memes are ridiculous.

You know what memes are ways that we communicate to get us all to get a little bit more relatable, gets a little bit more comfortable in what it is that we're interacting with, and makes life a little bit more enjoyable. When you include a meme in your newsletter, it increases email click through rates by over 24%. By the way, great use of AI.

If you've never tried this, you could take any meme out there. Okay, you can now go on ChatGPT. You could upload an image.

You click the little a pay per click icon next to the prompt bar and chatgpt, you upload the meme that you like. But maybe it's not about your industry, maybe it's not about whatever it is that you're doing.

You upload the meme and say please caption this meme and make it about the retail industry and give me 20 different captions that are all crazy funny and then it will provide you back captions for that meme so you can make it spot on for whatever it is that you're doing. Using memes in newsletters increases click through rates by significant amounts. You have to try it out.

All right, the last one is resending to non openers. Now I know when you have an email campaign, you send it out and let's say you get a 30% open rate and then you have something set up.

Hopefully whether it's an offer email or it's a newsletter, email doesn't matter which one it is, business or consumer doesn't matter.

Hopefully you have something set up that two or three days after the email goes out, you have an automated email that's going out to all the non openers and you're sending out that email again, right? You're sending out the offer email or the newsletter email again to the non openers.

But what you need to do on those resends, and you must do that resend is the subject line of those resends need to immediately address the fact that the person didn't open the first one. Right?

So when you do a resend to non openers that addresses the fact that you did not open the first email that has a 35% higher average open rate than using a standard subject line. What do I mean by that? So on the resend you're not using your old subject line that people didn't react to.

You're saying something like you missed this one or second chance for whatever. And if you really are bold, you'll do things that are fun on that resend.

It will say things like feeling ignored over here or knock knock anyone home question mark or we're starting to feel ghosted or hello, can you hear us? Yoo hoo, where are you? Now these may sound ridiculous, but this is how email works. It is a one to one communication.

You need to talk like a human being. And on the resend you need to address head on that the person ignored the first one and that's how you're getting that extra 35% lift.

All right, before we get into since you didn't ask which is the totally ridiculous portion of this podcast, I mean it always ridiculous, I will want you to know this podcast is sponsored by Marigold. You send out email, you have a platform, maybe you have A loyalty program. Maybe you have an SMS program. You don't like your platform.

I could read your mind right now. It's frustrating to you. It's not going well. Guess what? You should be checking out Marigold.

I use Marigold business email, consumer email loyalty programs. I am telling you, you got to check them out. Meet marigold.com Small business, medium business, Gigantic marketers. They all use Marigold.

It's a roll up of Cheetah Digital and sell through and my Emma and campaign monitor. It is awesome. Check them out@meet marigold.com. all right, let's get into. Since you didn't ask, does anybody else out there fly Southwest?

I was just on a Southwest flight and Southwest is very unique. And listen, if you work for Southwest, I like you, I like Southwest.

But there are some unique things to Southwest and you wind up interacting with humanity in a different way. So if you don't know when you fly Southwest, right, you line up kind of like in. In your A, B, C, D bucket of seats before you get on the plane.

And then there's a number that's assigned to you, so you may be in, you know, group B and you have number 10. So this just happened to me, right? So I'm like, group B, number 10 or whatever. And you line up and everybody lines up.

And then you do this weird thing where you say to the person like, in front of you behind you, hey, what number are you? Because you want to see if you should be in front of them or not. So I said to this woman in front of me, I go, hey, what number are you?

And she goes, I'm 12. I go, oh, I'm 10. And I'm like, let me scoot in front of him. She goes, she goes to me, seriously, you can't wait, two seats or whatever, two numbers?

I go, well, that's just part of what you do. I'm 10 and you're 12, so I'm supposed to be in front of you. She goes to me, this is what she said. Just get a life. I'm like, what did I do wrong?

I mean, get a life. I was like, wow. But then. So I didn't do anything. And maybe I should have.

But, you know, I get so worried that in the airport now, if you do anything, like, it explodes and you're going to be in big trouble. So. So I didn't do anything. But that late get. Who says get a life?

And then you get on the plane at Southwest and you do the routine where you try to find a seat Right. You pick out whatever seat you want. And I'm an aisle person. I cannot. I don't like being in the window.

I definitely don't like being in the middle seat. So I. There was an empty row. I was so excited, so I grabbed the aisle seat. Fine. I'm all set up. Somebody comes along, they grab the window seat.

Fine person seem like they're relatively normal. Great. And then I do the maneuver, which is probably terrible, where I put my backpack on the middle seat.

And then I do like a stare where I'm trying to give off a vibe where you don't want to sit next to me. Like I'm. I'm not somebody you want to interact with. I'm trying to give off that vibe. It's not going well. And then what happened?

This lady who is carrying like an enormous number of things comes over and she goes, is that seat open? I'm like, oh. I'm like, yes, it's open. So I move my bag and whatever. Which is fine. I'm not like a jerk or whatever.

But what did she have that was so annoying? She had a full size pillow. Who brings a full size pillow onto a plane? And it was basically like I was in this woman's world.

Like she was all over my area. Forget about the armrest. I lost the armrest, like right out of the gate. This woman dominated the area. It was out of control.

And I was very happy to get off that plane.

I know this is all very important information to you, but if we fly together, then I'm going to pick my seat number thing and I'm going to ask you not to bring a full size pillow. Stop it. All right, thanks for being here. You're awesome. Check out guruconference.com Check out jschwetelson.com Drop me a note there.

If you want to do anything together, partner together, hang out, whatever, and you're great. Bring a full size pillow on the plane later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketer. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.

Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stewart, and me. GuruEvents.com check it out.