EP. 77- 5 MISTAKES Most Marketers are MAKING! | Jay’s Scoop

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 usually on do this, not that we talk about things you should be doing. But today I want to talk about five things you absolutely should not do that you very likely are doing that are actually hurting your performance.

Let's talk about email subject lines. First, there are words that you could put in your email subject line that will increase the number of people opening up your emails.

We all know that, right? But did you know there are words that you could put in your email subject line that will actually lower your email open rate?

We need to avoid these words. Let me give you some examples. Here's a word that you might put in your subject line that crushes open rates. The word learn. Okay. Learn the latest.

Blah, blah, blah. Nobody wants to learn anything. We're tired, we're busy. It feels like work.

When you put the word learn in your subject line, it actually lowers your open rate by about 9%. So what other words are like that? The word reminder. Reminder is annoying. The word meeting. Nobody wants another meeting. Okay.

Or find out if you're putting that to start your subject line. People don't want to find out. Okay. Or the worst thing, which is I don't think anybody's really using it. The word chat. You have time for a chat.

All of the words I just said. Okay. Reminder. Time for a chat meeting. Find out. They actually lower your open rate by about 8 to 10% when you use them. You want to avoid these words.

There's one word that actually increases your open rate significantly, but it's a word you should never use, and that is the word urgent. Yes, you want to create urgency in your subject lines, right? You want to say two days left, 24 hours left, ends on Friday.

But you don't actually ever want to use the word urgent unless you're like a bank and all of your data has been compromised. Your open rate will go really high if you use the word urgent. But you're going to get a lot of people.

They're going to be really upset because I promise you, it is not urgent that you sell the socks that you're promoting. It's not urgent that your Accounting software, free trial gets downloaded. So avoid those words.

So what are some other things that you should not do in your marketing to make sure you don't hurt performance? A lot of us have databases that we haven't emailed to in a long time.

They're like some sort of legacy database or maybe a company got acquired and you got a database. Or, or you have an old trade show database, or you have some database of old buyers that you haven't emailed to in forever.

The worst thing that you can do in email marketing is take a database that you have not emailed to in an incredibly long time and then have the brilliant idea of saying, you know what? We should email to that list because we haven't used it in forever. When you do that, you will actually explode your infrastructure, right?

You're going to get flooded with unsubscribes, flooded with bounces. Your email sending reputation is going to go in the garbage. But now you're listening, saying, but, Jay, I want to use this list that I have.

And you can. What you want to do is two things. Number one, you want to take that email list and you want to clean it and validate it.

And there's a lot of different companies out there that can clean and validate. And nobody here is paying me to say this. I'll tell you some of the companies that I use to do this. I use zero Bounce, I use Validity, I use Webula.

These are all great companies. And what you want to do is take that list, give it to these companies or any other company that's out there that cleans and validates email lists.

It's very inexpensive, okay?

And they will be able to remove all of the problem email addresses, spam traps, emails that are no longer deliverable, syntax errors in your database, dead addresses. And then you have a list that you could email to, but you don't yet want to just email to it. So let's say you had 50,000 people.

You go and use one of these cleaning services and validation services, and now you get it back, and now you have 45,000 people. That doesn't mean you import that list into your tool, your email sending platform, and hit send. Very bad idea.

What you want to then do out of that remaining 45,000, take 10%, take 4,500 names, and you could send to those 4,500 names and then take a step back, wait a few days, and be like, okay, how did that all go? Did we get flooded with unsubscribes? Did we get Responses did it go okay?

Because you don't want to just send to everybody when it's a database you haven't used in a really long time because it can cause you major problems. So that's a never do. Okay, It's a never do. Now what are some other never do's? Let's stick with email because why not?

When you're sending out an email and you have an offer, what a lot of marketers do, they get excited, business or consumer, and they stick in multiple offers. Like, oh, let's put in this offer too, and that offer too. And when you send it out, there's three different things in there.

And it drives me crazy because whenever you send out an email, if it's an offer, whether you're a business or consumer, you have a goal, you hope something happens. I hope we get a lot of downloads of this piece of content. I hope we sell a lot of sweaters. Right.

With this new discount offer, you're hoping one thing thing happens. But when you add in all these other offers, what you're doing is you're giving the recipient of that email options. And here's the crusher stat.

When there are three or more destination pages, okay?

When there are three or more basically offers in any given email, the primary offer, the hero offer, the one that you're hoping that does well, it will receive 50% less clicks overall. What does that really mean?

That means when there's basically three things being promoted in the email, but there's the one that you really want it all to get all the clicks, that one receives 50% less clicks. So you really have to say to yourself, do I need to promote all these things at once or do we really want to zero in on promoting that webinar?

We want to zero in on promoting this one sale item, right? You want to limit the things that the recipient has to consider every time that you send something out.

Another thing that we kind of mess up on when we're sending out emails is the automated emails that we have set up.

Many of us do marketing automation now, whether you're a business or consumer marketer, which is basically this always on email program that, okay, somebody went to our website that's going to trigger an email that's going to go out tomorrow. Somebody, somebody opened an email that's gonna trigger an email that goes out now.

Somebody didn't open an email, somebody clicked on an email, someone went to this page on our website and everything is triggering off all these different automated emails. What's really important is that in your automation streams the content in those emails is not dated.

It's floating around and saying our holiday picks are whatever because it's very hard to keep up with our automation streams. So you have to get real with yourself.

And you have said yourself, you know what, I'm not going to have the time to audit our automation streams all the time. So what you want to do is make sure all of the content that you're emailing out in your automation streams have no date. Right.

So you want to make sure all of your content, everything you're saying can be sent out now, six months from now, a year from now, and that way you don't have to be worried about it. All right, the last one is what we are doing in our pre header. This one drives me bananas.

So when you send out an email, you have your from address, you have your subject line and then you have the pre header. The pre header is that second subject line, that gray text right below your subject line. Right.

It's super important real estate because it's one of the deciding factors of whether or not somebody's going to open up your email, that they're looking at the from address, they're looking at the subject line and then they're looking at your pre header. Now your pre header, you have about 85 characters to write whatever you want to write.

But really it's the first few words that really matter because nobody's reading the whole thing. The epic fail that you don't want to do, okay, and you better not be doing this, is to have format issue link information in your pre header.

What do I mean by that? We all see in our emails, it will say, if you're having trouble viewing this, click here.

And what the problem is, marketers put that in the pre header as the first thing in their pre header. And when you are looking at your phone and you're looking at your email, you look at the subject line, it says whatever it says.

And then it says below the subject line, if you're having trouble viewing this Click here. You haven't opened the email yet. How do you even know if you're having trouble viewing it? It is ridiculous. You look like you're a clueless marketer.

So what you want to make sure of in your pre header, okay, you want to use that space for offer related information. It should be tied to the subject line. It should be an extension of that subject line. You can even personalize in that pre header.

Okay, you put emojis in the pre header. Do not have it say if you are having trouble viewing this, click here. It does not make any sense. The person hasn't opened the email yet.

So those are some things that you really want to avoid. Now, before we get into the chaos of this podcast called since you didn't ask, I wanted to share with you this really cool offer.

So Marigold is the exclusive sponsor of do this, not that, this podcast. Now, I love Marigold. They're my email sending platform. They're also amazing for loyalty marketing programs.

I was just reading, reading it before I was doing this podcast.

It said millennials, okay, have made twice as many purchases from emails they've gotten than SMS promos that they've gotten from brands that they opted into. You think about millennials, like, oh yeah, they're on their phones or we're doing sms.

No, they're still buying from email twice of the rate from sms. If so, download this piece of content. All sorts of crazy stats.

So I'm getting inundated on Facebook because my high school reunion is coming up. Okay, my 30th. That's crazy. I'm 47. 30th sounds so nuts to me. That's the 30th reunion. Anyway, I went to high school actually in New York and Florida.

I switched in the middle and so I'm getting it from two different high schools. Come to reunion. Come to reunion. I'm going to tell you right now there, what is less Than zero.

There is a no percent chance I would ever go to my high school reunion. I. I know that sounds bad. I'm not like, cool. It's the opposite of cool. I just have no interest whatsoever.

Here's who I think should go to high school reunions, okay? And I wasn't like some sort of super cool dude in high school or anything like that.

But if you were in high school and you didn't have your act together at all, you were a disaster. Okay? And then after high school, you became awesome. You got in great shape. You're doing great. You're dominating the world. Everything's awesome.

You should go to your high school reunion. Come. Because you should be there and say, look at me, I crushed it. Remember the dude who you thought was a doofus? I'm crushing it now.

Definitely those people should go to high school reunion. Everybody else in the middle, like me. Yeah. What are you doing? Come on. Who can stay at home? Watch Netflix. What? Oh, this is the best, though.

This is the best. So my high school union coming up, and the best thing happened.

Somebody from my high school who I have not even thought about in a billion years by accident, liked a social post of mine for. From 10 years ago.

I almost never post on social, but it's the best because you ever do that where you go on somebody's profile and you're looking at their old pictures and the worst thing that could possibly happen is they you like one of their photos. Oh, no. They're gonna know that I was looking and I was stalking them and I saw the. I'm like, oh, you're such a loser. And it made me so happy.

I don't know why. I'm a horrible person. So don't do that. Don't go into people's old profiles by accident liking something bad.

If you want to go to your high school, you're doing great. You should go. Have a great time. I'm not fun. I sit at home, I watch Love is Blind. Team Trevor. What an incredible season of Love is Blind.

I don't know what we're talking about anymore. Listen, give this podcast a review. Please register for Guru Conference. Free virtual email marketing event Guru Conference dot com.

It's going to be epic. You're awesome and hope high school was great. Thanks for being here. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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