The 7 Ways You Might Be Doing Email Wrong

Jay Schwedelson (00:00): No matter who you are, it could be the NFL, Amazon IBM, Salesforce, I don’t care. Some portion of all your email will go to the junk folder and spam folder. It’s fact, every time you press send on an email campaign is an opportunity to test something. And it doesn’t have to be complex or sophisticated because a lot of people hear that like, oh, I don’t have time, I don’t have the infrastructure. I don’t want to do the setup. Listen, nobody does, right? All you want to do is what did we do last time? Okay, let’s try something else.

John Jantsch (00:30): This. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Schwedelson. He’s the leading marketing expert in the us known for his research backed approach. He’s the founder of subject line.com, a top ranked free subject line rating tool and has tested over 15 million subject lines. He’s also founded Guru Media Hub hosting the Guru Conference, the world’s largest email marketing event, attracting over 50,000 attendees annually. So Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Schwedelson (01:02): Fired up to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:04): So your agency in your literature mentioned that you sent out over 6 billion email messages in the last year. So I have to ask, what’d you learn? What are you seeing as trends going on in email?

Jay Schwedelson (01:16): Yes, we do send out a lot of email about half what we send out to consumer, half what we send out business. We always are seeing new trends and new things, and I guess the thing I try to think about is getting that email open. People just don’t realize the importance of that subject line. And so I think if people paid a little bit more attention to some of the small things that you can do to radically change the number of people opening up your emails, it can really improve the outcome and how you’re using email.

John Jantsch (01:40): Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, I’ve been sending email for years and I’m always puzzled by the fact you’ll look at your stats and it’s like this email got 15% more opens in last same time of the week, same time of day. It’s basically my newsletter subscribers. Y And I’m guessing you have discovered that subject line just really has a lot to do with people opening.

Jay Schwedelson (02:01): Yeah, I’ll give you some quick wins that you can do that literally cost you nothing, take three seconds to do, and they really do have an impact. So for example, whatever you start your subject line with really matters. Nobody actually reads the whole subject line. You could literally put the end of the subject line j’s a big loser and no one does see it because no one reads the whole thing, right? So what you put the first few characters matters if you start your subject line with an actual number, right? The number seven, the seven pitfalls. To avoid the three hottest fashion trends this winter, the five things every HR pro needs to know, just a number starting there will actually increase the percentage of people opening your email by about 15%. Why? Because it stands out a little bit. And when people are doing that social scroll in their inbox like, oh, wait a minute, I’ll take a look at this, and it’s in the subconscious.

(02:50): Other things that help you stand out is when you fully capitalize the first word or two words in your subject line, maybe it’s the word new or just released and you capitalize every letter in those first word to two words, it works so well. And then other little things that work, which sounds ridiculous, is at the end of your subject line, putting the three dots, the ellipsis, something that all SMB owners need to know dot, just putting those three dots. We are inquisitive. Human beings are inquisitive. We need to know the answer to stuff. So using those three dots or using a question mark, it will lift a percentage of people opening your emails by a ton. So little things, big impact. That’s what I’m all about.

John Jantsch (03:33): How far can you take that? I mean, I get a lot of clickbaity ones and they follow that formula. Five things you should stop doing today and then you get in there, it’s like these are five things everybody talks about. I mean, so do you sometimes run the risk of being so intriguing with the subject line that you then don’t deliver?

Jay Schwedelson (03:53): Well, that’s a great point. You need to deliver, right? So the way email works is it’s like links in a chain. You have a good subject line and they decide to open it up. Then you have a really compelling headline. Okay, I’m going to now go a little bit further. Now you start to deliver on the promise that you made in that subject line, that headline with whatever the bullets are or the offer that you made. And then you have a really compelling call to action button that doesn’t say something horrible like register or download. It says something really good, and then you get ’em to that landing page or that destination page. And again, you take ’em through each step. So if you’re not delivering on your initial promise that you made in that subject line, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. So I couldn’t agree with you more.

John Jantsch (04:33): Okay. I want to go back to something you just said because I get a lot of emails that say download or register in a button. What should they be saying?

Jay Schwedelson (04:41): So the secret sauce and email when it comes to the buttons in your email, your call to action buttons, those rectangular things, if you write them in first person, you’ll see an increased click-through rates by over 25%. What do I mean? So let’s say you were promoting a webinar and you had two versions of your emails and the buttons in one email said register. That’s what you want them to do. But then the other ones that you’re testing say, I want in or register versus save my seat. What sounds better to you? You get a little bit excited. Again, it’s in the subconscious. Nobody actually gets excited, but you have to think about what is in it for the person, not what you want. You want them to register, you want them to download, you want them to download that piece of content instead of download is Yes, I want my free whatever report, right? You want the person to feel that they’re part of the action and instead of telling people what to do, get them involved with doing that thing and it actually does matter and all these things cost you nothing and they take five seconds.

John Jantsch (05:44): Yeah, I always love the ones that write under. It says, no, I don’t want to be better looking and have a better sex life or whatever it says,

Jay Schwedelson (05:52): Those work so well, you’re a hundred percent right. The negative ones do better than anything. It’s phenomenal. I saw one for a newsletter the other day. It was Subscribe to this newsletter and it says, no, I can’t read. And I was like, it’s amazing. I was like, that is amazing.

John Jantsch (06:10): So you mentioned the testing word a couple of times there. Should we be constantly AB testing or whatever format you use, subject lines, even actual content? What’s your take on testing?

Jay Schwedelson (06:22): Every time you press send on an email campaign is an opportunity to test something. And it doesn’t have to be complex or sophisticated because a lot of people hear that like, oh, I don’t have time, I don’t have the infrastructure, I don’t have to do the setup. Listen, nobody does, right? All you want to do is what did we do last time? Okay, let’s try something else this time. If that’s the least that you could do and it’s not scientific, that’s okay. It’s better than not trying something new. Every time you hit send, you should be testing something. The key thing about testing is you always want to make sure your tests are different enough. The problem a lot of people make is they go, okay, we’re going to change this one little thing, right? This one image, this one little button. Your tests have to be really disparate from the last thing that you did or else small test changes equal small result changes. Significant changes equal significant result changes. Even if it doesn’t do as well, that’s important too. So testing always.

John Jantsch (07:22): Alright, so another T word timing used to always be like conventional wisdom was never send on a Friday or always send on a Tuesday at seven. I mean, are the rules around timing?

Jay Schwedelson (07:33): That’s a great point. It’s so funny. Everybody follows the herd. So everyone used to be like, well never send on a Monday or Friday because everyone’s upset that they’re at work or they’re looking forward to the weekend. It’s not going to do well. So what did everybody do? Everybody collectively with one brain, they start sending on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which led to about 85% of all email being sent on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, which then led to everybody saying, oh, we should be sending on Monday and Fridays because nobody else’s, and it’s just unbelievable what we all do. But here’s the way you really should be thinking about it is not all email is the same. And I think that’s the problem in general. You have newsletters, you have promotional emails, you have transactional emails, you have all these different buckets, and so you need to find the right days and the right times for each of those things.

(08:19): So for example, newsletters, they do really well at the start of the week, Monday, Tuesday, and early in the morning, five to 6:00 AM that’s not going to do really well for your offer based emails, right? They’re going to be maybe 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM and if you’re on the consumer side, the weekend’s going to be the best time for you. So the type of email you’re sending is really important. And then in terms of how you’re measuring everything, what you really want to do is almost think of yourself as if you’re a swimmer, you just want to be beating yourself. It’s not, oh, what’s my industry’s average open rate, click-through rate. It’s like, who cares? It’s on my newsletter. I get an average open rate and click-through rate of this. And I tested this week and it did better than that and I beat myself and that’s great. And on my promotional emails, I tried Wednesday instead of Thursday and it went up from this to that. And you want to benchmark yourself and beat yourself, and that’s how you’ll find the right time and the right day and the right cadence.

John Jantsch (09:18): Yeah, I’ve actually had some of my best commercial successes on Sunday nights for business emails, and I think it’s just that’s when a lot of times business folks are kind of collecting their thoughts for what’s going to happen for the

Jay Schwedelson (09:28): Weekend. Totally agree. Absolutely.

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Jay Schwedelson (11:37): Yeah, so ESPs, email sending providers, they are the platforms that everybody uses to send out their emails. It could be the MailChimps Constant Contact, HubSpot, Salesforce, you name it. And first off, I don’t believe anybody should be setting up their own mail servers in house. Not because you can’t do it, but you can’t keep up with the changes and it’s impossible. It’s just not worth the time, energy, or money. And these platforms are relatively inexpensive, so nobody actually loves their ESP, they just don’t. So if you’re like, oh, mine’s not that great, I’ve never met a human being that’s like, oh my god, the best ESP, that’s not a thing. It’s some version of okay, not great. That being said, what should you be thinking

John Jantsch (12:15): About? Early days, people loved MailChimp. I will say that though, they had some rabid followers, not so much anymore because big and bought. But anyway,

Jay Schwedelson (12:25): You’re right. No, you’re right. Early on there were a handful of people like, oh my God, this is so cool. But now everybody, I don’t know. I just feel like everyone gets frustrated. And also unrealistic expectations. Here’s a secret that people don’t realize no matter who you are, it could be the NFL, Amazon IBM, Salesforce, I don’t care. Some portion of all your email will go to the junk folder in a spam folder. It’s fact. But people get frustrated when they send out an email like, oh, someone went to junk. My ESP must stink or whatever. And that’s just not true. But what I would tell, the advice I would give when you’re thinking about your ESP is different, ESPs are good at different things. So if you are doing direct to consumer email marketing, there are certain platforms that are really good for direct to consumer email marketing.

(13:10): If you are doing B2B or B2B SaaS company selling like accounting software to enterprise level contacts, there are ESPs that are focused on making sure their email deliverability to enterprise level business to business organizations is spot on. If your marketing to education professionals or government professionals, different ESPs have different specialties and the reason they specialize is they know how to navigate getting the emails into these organizations, into these things. So you really want to make sure whoever you’re going to be working with, what is their roster of clients? Do they look like you? Are they in the same market that you are? Because if they’re not, you’re probably using the wrong platform.

John Jantsch (13:48): And we could go way deep into the servers and why they get whitelisted and all those kinds of good things. But talk a little bit about the connection between email and landing pages. A lot of people are just sending out generic stuff, maybe they send you to our website, but a lot of times we’re sending out offers, but hopefully that offer is going to a specific landing page. Talk about the relationship of those two elements.

Jay Schwedelson (14:12): Yeah, it’s everything. I’ll tell you, one big fat mistake that everybody makes is that about 19% of all click-throughs and emails, regardless of what they’re promoting, are clicks on the logo within your email. Nobody ever thinks about that. And I would bet the overwhelming majority of people have their logo traffic going to their homepage and not the offer destination page, not the landing page. That is one in five clicks. The other thing that people do is they stick social sharing links at the bottom of their emails because that’s their format. But here you are, you have an offer. When you have an offer, all you’re hoping for is that offer gets taken advantage of. You’re not hoping for more people to follow you on Instagram. You’re not hoping people click on your logo, get homepage. So take every conduit to response and send them to that landing page.

(14:55): That’s where you want them to go. And then when they get to that landing page, think about everything. If somebody is filling out your form, are the fields laid out horizontally or vertically because vertically is going to do way better than horizontally. Are you asking too many must fill fields? If you’re asking somebody zip code, do you really need their state potentially? And make sure that on that landing page, you also have some kind of social proof that you put right near that final submit button where it says a quote or a testimonial from anybody at anything. These are the most comfortable socks ever. This is the accounting software that changed our company. One final testimonial right near that final button increases the conversion rate significantly, the last validation step. It’s that last thing for people to feel like, you know what, I feel comfortable doing this. So there are little things on your landing page that radically can change the outcome of your performance.

John Jantsch (15:52): It always drives me crazy, is people who use templated stuff and so it’ll have their whole navigation on the top. It’s like, don’t do that. What’s the one thing you want the person to do when they get here? Remove everything else. Tell you. Right. Let’s talk about list hygiene. You’ve been doing this for a while. We all know that. I don’t know what the statistics are, but I remember hearing at some point, 10 to 15% of your list goes bad, but every 90 days or something like that. And if you’re not cleaning it up, you really ruin your reputation. Talk about your, not just how important, but let’s just agree it’s important and what’s your approach to keeping a list clean?

Jay Schwedelson (16:27): Yeah, so the attrition rate annually is going to be at least 20% for your database. You’ll lose about 20% of your database. And a whole other topic we can get into is being intentional about growing your list. If you’re not intentional about growing your list, you’ll have no list within a few years. But in terms of data hygiene, if you are not at least once a year, I like to recommend twice a year using a email validation service and there’s a zillion of them and passing your data through an email validation service to look for spam traps, to look for problematic email addresses. You are on a path to total failure and horrible deliverability, and a lot of these services are super inexpensive and you need to be doing this. It’s like not going to the dry cleaner. If you have a suit and you’ve worn it 10 times, eventually you got to bring the thing to the dry cleaner because it’s going to be a problem. That’s how you should be viewing your database.

John Jantsch (17:18): And some ESPs are going to say, Hey Jay, you’ve been getting X amount of bounces. Clean it up or no more. Right? And so what should we be doing? Alright, that’s once a year. What should we be doing monthly? I mean, I mentioned bounces. Hard bounces should just be immediately taken on care of.

Jay Schwedelson (17:32): Yeah, so when you send out an email, some percentage is going to bounce and there’s really two kinds of bounces. There’s hard bounces and soft bounces, and any platform you’re going to be able to receive the breakout of those two things. A hard bounce must immediately be taken off your list because when you send out to your email database and you have hard bounces, the receiving email infrastructure that are out there, the Gmails and Yahoos and Outlooks and Comcast, all that stuff, when they see you trying to deliver to hard bounces, they think that you are a bad sender. They think that you are not caring about your database, and that is when they will flag you. That is when you’ll go to spam and junk is for not removing your hard bounces. So immediately remove those and soft bounces your ESP, you should make sure there’s a routine set up that after three soft bounces they get put on the sideline as well. That’s generally a good rule of thumb.

John Jantsch (18:25): Let’s talk about the future and pretty much every conversation I’ve been having, although we’re 16 minutes and 52 seconds in this recording, and this is the first mention of ai, but I will mention what’s the impact of AI on email, sending personalization, all the things?

Jay Schwedelson (18:42): Yeah, we have big changes coming in 2025, massive. So Apple is about to roll out iOS 18 at the end of 2024, and in this rollout, they’re going to be making major changes to the mail app on our phones. That’s the little blue icon that we all use to check our mail. About 47% of people check their mail regardless of what email address, business consumer doesn’t matter. They use that mail app on their phone to check their email. In iOS 18, they’re going to be rolling out Apple Intelligence, which is Apple’s AI tools, and they are for the first time going to be within our email inboxes on our phones bucketing using AI, bucketing our emails and do four different buckets. So they’re going to be taking our email as we are receiving them. They’re going to have primary, they’re going to have promotional, they’re going to have updates. And so basically if you’re sending out promotional email, it’s not just going to go in the regular inbox anymore, it’s going to go in this promotions tab. And so the game’s going to be how do we write our emails? How do we construct our emails to give us the best chance to show up in the tab that we want to show up in? So that’s going to be all AI driven, and so there’s going to be a lot to learn as 2025 unfolds.

John Jantsch (19:49): What about security and privacy? More and more it seems like, although it seems like when GDPR was coming around, the sky was falling. It seems now that while people are talking about it, it’s not with the same panic. Do you see more and more privacy and security things impacting email

Jay Schwedelson (20:06): In the United States especially? It’s really relegated to what the platforms decide, what Gmail decides, what Apple decides what these guys decide, because we have not had any federal privacy legislation as relates to email since 2003. CAN spam, which is the weakest law you could possibly imagine.

John Jantsch (20:23): No enforcement either Canada, yeah,

Jay Schwedelson (20:25): No enforcement, right? There’s a patchwork of different state laws, but those are also all over the map. I mean, Canada has Castle and Europe has GDPR, and those are really viable laws related to email. So really the things to keep an eye on in terms of privacy is what is Gmail making us do? What is Apple making us do? Because that’s going to be really what we have to follow in the foreseeable future. There’s not going to be any federal legislation related to email.

John Jantsch (20:50): Yeah. Well, Jay, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and talking a little bit about email. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Jay Schwedelson (20:59): Sure. So I got my own podcast too. It’s called Do This, not that for marketers. You could check that out. I do four episodes every week, 10 minutes each, so that’s fun. And then I’m always on LinkedIn. I post way too much stuff there, so connect with me, drop me a DM on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you. And you can also just go to jay sch wetson.com, my full name, and you can find everything you want to know about me right there.

John Jantsch (21:23): Plus you can always play around with the free subject line.com app as well, or tool as well.

Jay Schwedelson (21:27): Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Awesome.

John Jantsch (21:29): Yeah, so thanks again. Hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road, Jay,

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