Current Trends in Email Marketing: Tips & Pitfalls

Key Takeaways

hi everybody this is Lauren Baker with search engine Journal welcome to today's episode of the search engine Journal show with me today I have Jay swedelson of subject line.com hey Jay how's it going great thanks for having me excited to be here thank you for being here as well um we're going we're going to kind of get outside of the SEO box and paid search box a little bit today and talk about something that I think in the grand scheme of things with overall digital marketing is as important or if not even more important than um than uh content marketing uh things like page speed stuff like that is really mastering email marketing growing and nurturing an email list obviously but then once you've grown that list how to really break through to it and Jay you've been in the email space for quite a long time it's really your expertise so if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself telling everyone a little bit about your background your your companies this and that and then your core focus when it comes to email marketing yeah sure so uh My overall business is an agency called outcome media we're about 100 or so people uh based down here in South Florida we've been around uh the company's been around for about almost 40 years and uh the company's been involved in all sorts of different marketing channels whether it be direct mail digital email uh all sorts of stuff and then about I don't know 13 or 14 years ago as email really became more and more uh one of the core media that we focused on we wanted to come out with something for the industry uh about to improve your marketing programs and so we came up with the idea of you know what everybody needs a better subject line it's what really dictates whether or not something performs well or not people getting it opened up and people don't spend enough time on it so he said why don't we come out with a tool make it free and we came out with something called subjectline.com and it's a site that to this day that we started 13 years ago that you can go to you put in a subject line it gives you a score how good or bad it is based on all the latest data that we have um and we've checked 15 million million subject lines and it's really helped the industry you know learn the latest best practices kind of dispel some myths about old things and learn you know the thing about email is people think it's Legacy and it's old or some people say it doesn't work for me the reality of it is email's always changing and if you do the little things right it can be a phenomenal channel for you and that's what we try to expose and that that's what I do amazing amazing so yeah email is incredibly important um it's not only a way to communicate with your audience but most tool sets out there you're utilizing it for your base right uh with Facebook lookalike audiences custom targeting um all on the Google side as well so really important you had mentioned that email is not old yeah so um tend to see uh tend to see people kind of Overlook email marketing quite a bit especially internalized email marketing um and from my understanding you are going to be holding an online event all around email marketing which is a great place for probably some of our listeners and viewers to start could you tell us more about that yeah sure yeah we're all about trying to get best practices out there and I was frustrated by the lack of Education ruining the market and about some of the negative information about email that's out there so we decided to spin up a free event it's a it's very large we have 10 000 people registered it's November 2nd and 3rd it's a virtual event it's called Guru conference so you can go to Guru conference.com to register again it's two days it's over 30 speakers 100 free and it's all email and we got everybody from Ann Hanley to Damon John to have Amazon the NFL the NBA everybody's gonna be there speaking it's going to be a lot of fun and really it's just about promoting email best practices and the latest trends for both business marketers and consumer marketers what content is working what tweaks do you need to do how do you stay in the inbox all the stuff the event looks pretty cool um so yeah and you threw some names out there Damon John of Shark Tank actually I saw him at breakfast the other day yeah and um and then uh also Ann Hanley who we've had some sej events that's pretty cool you said a couple athletes or people that no no those are just the brands so people from the NBA and Amazon and all sorts of stuff yeah yeah awesome that's really cool to hear so again that's a free event uh for anybody what are you using to power that by the way so we're gonna be doing it on the hopping platform and so that's uh been going pretty well and uh we're launching a bunch of events next year as a matter of fact alone I'm gonna hit you up because we're going to do an event on you know search for our Guru events business so we're gonna twist your arm to get you to speak at that thing oh sweet I don't have to leave I don't have to go anywhere or yeah okay that's right that's right all right no problem I can deal with that so awesome all right really looking forward to that event we do a lot of email marketing here at search engine Journal right yes it's really one of our cores is it's one of our our just just our our biggest um pillars in terms of marketing we're always trying to grow our email list send our email like segment our email list based upon their interests what they've downloaded uh which ebooks they've downloaded things like that and then send them offers and or just news it's relevant to what they're looking for right because the last thing you want to do is bombard you can bombard your email list all day as long as this stuff is relevant to them that's just my opinion I was talking to an email marketing friend and um there was actually a prospective client who was talking to him and she had mentioned that she was a little bit hesitant to send an offer to her email list and his feedback was basically if if they're not if they're gonna unsubscribe they would never buy anything from you anyway therefore just send the offer to send it because they're looking they're waiting for something I couldn't agree more I I I let me tell you I I don't I don't not only do I not mind unsubscribed I think unsubscribes are a good thing okay and unfortunately marketers let a handful of people that remove themselves and subscribe or even send in a nasty ground take me off your list I hate you you're a terrible person right they get one of those or two of those and they're oh my God we gotta stop we gotta freeze we're doing too much we're sending too much you know when in reality that person is just a weird person to begin with and they're having a bad day and when people unsubscribe you know they're like purging their their refrigerator they're coming from like seven things at once and to your point it's not like they were on the fence should I unsubscribe or become a customer that's not the debate in their head right it's like I didn't I had a life change I had a career change I don't want to be on this list anymore right and so if you don't keep sending yes relevant it's not relevant stuff but you're not gonna get more business by sending less that's not the way it works you know what I mean you you need to send more and marketers think they send too much but in reality they're just not sending relevant stuff and so to your point and I think scj does a great job with their email I'm not just saying that because you're on the screen uh you you can send out as much as you want as long as you are are relevant yeah I agree I agree even even with like non-work email just like stuff like stuff I subscribe to without even thinking about it like I go and buy a T-shirt and next thing I know I'm getting like uh promos and alerts all the time a lot of them I just don't erase because I just don't delete because I think there might be something in the future that I'm gonna miss out on right the fear of missing out is a powerful powerful thing to utilize there so um well we've kind of gotten into it so let's continue um my understanding is you do quite a lot of myth busting when it comes to email marketing outside of the hey I'm unsubscribes or a warning I see unsubscribers like mean tweets by the way like like right to your point like it's yeah it's very Grandpa simpsonish someone's going to get online and complain about something if I get it I'll have people replying to our unsubscribed confirmation like they unsubscribe and then they get down subscribe information I unsubscribed why are you say I'm recording you to can scam right now yeah it is crazy I love that I love zero understanding of anything uh but go let's go ahead from a myth busting perspective what are some other common email myths that are just wrong uh in your experience so you know if you rewind 10 to 15 years ago everybody's worried about going to the junk folder or the spam folder if you're wanted 10 to 15 years ago and you sent out an email and you put the word you know free in the subject line or you had an exclamation point your subject line you capitalized a word or anything like that yeah 10 to 15 years ago technology was all based on the content that you put in your subject line or in your headline that's the reason you went to the junk folders spam folder because uh they were trying to all the receiving email networks the earthlings the lycos the alts of the east coast of the world back then they were looking for the Viagra guide and the pornography guys and the bad guys and they were all looking at words the content in those emails but but technology changed in the last you know five seven years and the reason you go to the inbox versus the junk folder is not because of the content it's not because of the words or symbols that you're putting your subject line or your headline it's because of your sending reputation uh it's because the engagement the opens and clicks you're generating with you with the people in your database so it's your engagement is the reason you're going to the inbox or not and so what the thing that drives me nuts if you were to go in Google right now you know spam trigger works okay you'd see a hundred articles that were written in the last three months so I'll give you a list of 200 words and symbols and things that you can't do spammy words or you can't capitalize you can't use brackets you can't do any of this stuff and they say if you do this you're going to go in the junk folder you don't go in the jump folder because of content you go in the jump folder because you have a bad sending reputation you have no engagement so people are regurgitating this information and it's hurting marketers because they're trying to write subject lines or headlines in their copy not utilizing the words that all marketers know work the best things like free or expires or capitalize a word or an exclamation point or a question mark when you go back to your inbox if you look at all the biggest brands you'll see the the biggest brands know the secret they're using all those words phrases emojis everything because they know that that's old information so it's like I would love to send a soapbox all day and tell people please don't listen to spam trigger nonsense and you had mentioned ratio right engagement ratios so that kind of goes back to the old unsubscribe session question if someone's building up their list with almost any type of subscriber and trying to avoid unsubscribes versus actively I guess sending to initiate unsubscribes or purging their list right because like we we purge our list I I can't remember if it's quarterly anymore or not but we'll go through people that haven't opened an email in a year or six months or whatever in Purge and move them over to it on the list uh that way we have a list that's a little bit cleaner um one that's the Legacy because someone might open it up my question is how does purging uh um getting unsubscribes and everything else help with uh ratios well first of all that's exactly what you should be doing which is you have basically two versions of yourself you have what you call is pretty much your engaged database anybody that's opened or clicked or done anything within let's say a six month window some people even keep it tighter right and then you have everybody else that kind of that they've lost favor with you that they're no longer engaging with you and you're not going to send them the same content because people are opening clicking and engaging great they're into you the other people are not and by segmenting them out when you send to the people that are engaging with you it keeps the engagement of that uh audience High which means when you send it the likelihood of those emails going to stay in the inbox is exponentially higher than if you co-mingle the two different groups of people and then you take the people that really don't engage a lot and then you basically treat them as a win back right more aggressive subject lines we miss you we need you you're missing out oh my gosh I can't believe you're not looking at this whatever you got to do and then and the people that do open and click over there they graduate back to the happy place which is where the party's at which is the engage database right so you live in these two worlds in general though and it's important to delineate this unsubscribes aren't bad in any world spam complaints are bad those are two different things people don't realize they think unsubscribes hurt deliverability they actually in a weird way help right when someone unsubscribes what do they do they are first of all removing themselves from your list because now they're not a boat anchor but in order for something unsubscribed they have to open an email and they have to click on a link in an email they're actually engaging with your email they're actually helping from a deliverability standpoint so you don't have you don't get any negative repercussions from an unsubscribe you get Negative repercussions from spam complaints which really only occur if you're doing some really sketchy stuff so I try to you know calm the waters in terms of worrying about the unsubscribed stuff but what you're doing what you describe is living in these two separate identities that is spot on to allow for the highest engagement possible and best deliverability possible for your super users I love that so speaking of putting together subject lines and content specifically for those segmented groups yeah another thing we we've done in the past and this is accidentally and and let's chalk this up to like the myth busting conversation is that we sent out like an email blast and forgot to link like link the call to action to the sponsors landing page this is a long time ago by the way for the sponsors that are currently looking at everything um yeah so this was like it was like five years ago and then you know like we didn't do this on purpose but we sent like the oops we you know oops oh oops we made a mistake follow-up email and we had some of the highest open and engagement rates ever after doing that right well and I don't think we faked the oops since but I get that all the time from companies like in my Gmail and stuff like that like and or or also get like the fake uh the fake reply the fake like re let's go to this piece by piece okay all right the first one you said is an awesome tactic the second one is a horrible thing so when I say the first one's an awesome tactic we are horrible people all of us as a humanity and the reason I say that is the one the highest open rate of any kind of email that exists is the oops email right we love seeing people screw up we're like uh oh what do they do yeah we celebrate it as right it's like like we want to see what is that somebody somewhere is throwing up because they screwed up we want to see what the mess up was so the oops emails are literally the highest open rate of any kind of emails so marketers are aware of this so what do they do now it's called the fake mistake and it's not really fake but they use oops uh-oh and yikes and they use it to start their subject lines and they'll say oops instead of saying we screwed up they'll say oops you almost missed the the best sale of the Year yikes you're about to miss this offer uh oh don't miss out because they know that we are trained when we see oops we think the marketers screwed up and we're going to read the rest of the subject line so this idea of the fake mistake to your point it actually lifts open rates on emails when there is no mistake exponentially it's a great test to do but the thing that I can't stand and no offense if you guys do it I have no idea but the re colon or the FW colon the fake reply or the fake forward I can't get on that train to me that is straight up annoying and I I it drives me banana so I'm not on that train pure spam right it's like LinkedIn spam style messaging so yeah but the crazy thing is is it works so for example um there are some CEOs that I've worked with over the years that um basically are sole Proprietors they they basically you know manage everything at the company which is you know for what it's worth um can be healthy cannot be healthy sometimes um so anyway um I've had them forward me things where the subject line has forward you gotta SEO this and then it has it has like a fake conversation in the email where someone is like going back and forth with their boss saying oh yeah you really need to sync up with this company because we can really grow and they reply oh can you send me the information I'd like to contact them and let them know and the person it's like a fake thread and then it forwards a thread over and I can look at it and be like yeah this is just like this is bogus but people it works it works it hooks them it does unfortunately unfortunately yeah although I mean that that scenario does trigger a lot of what I call spam complaints I mean that actually ultimately you will pay a price for that game and I do think it also damages the brand I I it's just it's a tap it's really strange I would say in the last two years major brands are starting to use it which is just get weird I'm getting stuff like that from a t now like the ATT Business it's going straight to my business account and it's like our upcoming meeting from a t and I'm like looking at I'm like oh oh I got a lead from a t and then like I'll read it and it's like no it's someone using like an Old Linkedin tactic about collaborating with the a t business team and then later on as I look at it it's like to get better rates on my internet or phone connection I got one today from Gap about like shorts I'm like or whatever it was I'm like you're gonna do the fake reply so I buy some more cargo shorts I'm like what are we doing here but come on more cargo shirts let's go for it um so okay so we have we we've talked about like um the email trigger words that aren't necessarily a thing that that's a mess uh we've talked about the fake mistake so should we send out a mistake before the fake mistake or just send out the mistake okay no we skip over actually doing any version of mistake we're just basically playing on people's fears really the number one thing in email in terms of if you have an author you know people say what's the number one thing you got to do to drive response for an offer and it's to create urgency and that's really the case for any marketing right creating urgency in that subject line and the fake mistake does that it's like oops you almost missed out time's running out yikes time's running out but any form of urgency two days left you know 24 hours one day only and if you have no urgency because a lot of marketers are like well I have no emergency on this offer maybe it's a service whatever even saying things like don't miss out or hurry nobody wants the thing that's going to always be there human nature is really not a thing that may not be there so in email in the subject line the number one thing that drives uh engagement is generally is creating that sense of urgency always I hear you I hear you and oops yikes uh-huh or uh-uh or whatever uh they only typically have four characters and then an uh punctuation afterwards like an exclamation point or something so it takes up less space absolutely um so how about and we've actually we published a study on this once at scj um I won't tell you the results until yeah you tell me but how about utilizing emojis in um email subject lines listen I am major Emoji fan major Emoji fan and I'm gonna tell you why you know a lot of times when I talk about using emojis in subject line and first off over 94 of all receiving email uh infrastructures can now render emojis fine including Outlook and whatnot that's really happened in the last two years so Emoji is going to show up the way that you want them to show up looking wise um they work incredibly well but a lot of markers they're like I'm not doing Emoji that's silly that's like my teenage kids use Emoji I'm not doing that but in reality what you're really doing is you're just trying to stand out you know every time you hit send you'd say what am I going to do in this email to have my email sent out not somebody else's so when someone's going through their inbox that millisecond you grab their attention with the Emoji and they'll look at the rest of your subject line it's not so much that you put a smiley face and someone's gonna be like that's an awesome Emoji I love this email nobody's gonna throw and reacts like that but they're going to stop and look at it so emojis work incredibly well for both business and consumer marketers the key thing is uh making it the first character number one and you know for business marketers the home run right now of emoji use is using it for your newsletters um taking you know one of the things for email newsletters for for marketers when they send them out they do the horrible thing is they use the static subject line you know this is the name of the newsletter and this is the Edition and this is the date and they send it out and it's mind numbing and it's literally wallpaper that you can put on your wall what what you really want to be doing what's working now is take an emoji let's say it's a calendar Emoji or a check mark emoji and that becomes your your consistent thing for your newsletter and then the rest of your subject line is the topic the key topic or Stat that's mentioned in the newsletter that's what business marketers are doing really well with in terms of how to use an emoji with their newsletters and the open rates are doing phenomenal so whether you're a consumer marketer or a business marketer Emoji use lifts open rates by an average a little over 20 percent so I don't know where you land on it but I love emojis yeah we we saw I think we saw a little bit of a lift on ours but but we were doing mostly smiley faces and stuff like that um I really like what about the Red Alert emergency Emoji I seem to get lots of emails with like the alert yeah breaking news sales emergency the best ones to use really are the uh clock or The Hourglass because once again it's talking about time and those are two of the best that perform well for both consumer and business marketers because you're immediately saying listen there's you you're running out of time you know and that's those work incredibly well you know it's interesting too Google um a Google webmaster conference a couple years ago they let us know that um they unders when they crawl an emoji it took them a long time to figure this out but when they crawl on emoji on a site they understand um the context behind it yeah or the meaning behind it so I'm wondering at the end like I'm not sure if that's the same for all emojis like happy sad cry calendar if it's a peach with water next to it I don't know if they think of that as peach juice or something else don't use a peach in any marketing by the way you learn I learned that the hard way that's not what you think it is okay all right it's peach season no no Peach okay so um so um anyway that's that's really good to hear but my point is that if they can crawl it and figure it out while it's on the site they probably should be able to do in the subject line I would think yeah um and then blast your LinkedIn buddy uh and blast Carrasco from the uh marketing team here at sej he's and just a reminder for anyone that's watching the show live currently on like LinkedIn YouTube Twitter things like that if you have a question feel free to just type it in we'll address it if it's a really good one um so blast asked can you speak to the friendly from what exactly is a friendly from yeah so uh great question blast is awesome so shout out to him so when you send out your email okay it has a from address that you're emailing from so my email address is the letter J schwedelson at Corp WD it's an ugly long email address but when I send it to you it shows up in your inbox it just says Jay schwedelson right and that's because I've set a friendly from or an alias on my email address now you can make your friendly from on your email address that you send from anything you want you can make it say howdy Duty it doesn't matter and you can change it every time you send an email campaign right and it takes five seconds to to do that and it costs you nothing and there's not a platform on Earth that you can't change the friendly from and when you go back to your inbox you're going to see something interesting about this the friendly from is one of the best ways to radically increase your engagement uh for anything you could be an email marketing the reason I say that is what you want to do is have your friendly from tied into your offer so let's say for example you are Salesforce okay and Salesforce is putting on a webinar when they send an email to their Database The Friendly from even though the email address is not changing what they decide to send out for that particular send will say Salesforce webinar in the friendly from so immediately when you get the email the recipient knows oh this is about a webinar and then they read the subject line if it's you know Gap back to school you can literally write Gap back to school in the friendly from every time you hit send you delineate what it is that this email is about using that friendly from it's basically the start of your subject line and you'll see when you go back to your inbox more and more marketers are doing this they're using the friendly Chrome to tie in with their offer and when you do that uh you see on average about a 25 lift in the overall open rate but the other benefit of doing that is you see people unsubscribe rates go down because when you get you know on any given day from Apple I might get six emails from them you know their Apple watch and the I store and Apple TV and apple cares I have no idea what's going on but I'm going to sit back and say hey Apple sent me six emails today I hate them no you view it as like six different things so when sej sends out an email scj webinars sdj report scj live scj newsletter right and it's all these different things you no longer feel like you're getting hit by sej eight times in one day you feel like you're you're hearing from different components of that business so it gives you a license to send more right and it's allowing the person to know earlier on what it's all about so it does really well again it costs you nothing it takes five seconds would you say that a personal name works better than segmenting it in the parts of the business or having something that kind of preludes the offer um first name only uh first and last and then also how important is the email account Avatar when it's sent so a couple of these so in terms of personalization it really is all over the map depending on who your brand is a lot of times if you don't have somebody that's you know well known from your brand and you send it out from a full name it's almost like you are sort of tricking the person where they're like do I know this person and they may open it up almost as being confused which is not a terrible thing but it's not uh generally going to really change your overall response rate one of the things that seems to work really well is you know Jen from sej as the friendly from right you may be sending from offers at scj.com but make the friendly from Jen from sej and that does really well it gives the human factor and the brand Factor uh together so that's a real worthwhile test and everything we talk about is all about testing some will work some won't work that's the nature of the beast in terms of the Avatar you know it really has yet to move the dial in terms of performance it can be a pain in the butt to set up um and I've yet to see it be enough worthwhile but yeah go you got to do that tomorrow I like the quicker wins that anybody like you could be a novice at this and change your friendly from or put a word in your subject line or put brackets in your subject line or whatever and that's a no-brainer got you um and just quickly I'd like to give a shout out to our sponsors paved paved is an email newsletter advertising Marketplace and then also Wix uh for launching designing and maintaining websites website uh web website uh Builder fantastic fantastic from an SEO perspective um some of you that are listening or watching might be thinking okay I thought search engine Journal was all about search engines and search engine marketing um and we're talking email right but um we had talked about this a little bit before the show as well Jay is that um you know there's two components to SEO that are incredibly important um one is getting targeted visitors to your site from other sources other than Google because Google Chrome Crux will pick up how those users interact with the site and I can't think of a better way maybe email and social media are great ways to instantly get targeted users to the site um and then also too probably the biggest factor for our audience is Outreach emails right so everybody loves Outreach emails and sending and receiving Outreach emails so much that I get hundreds of Outreach emails a day uh basically all asking for little things and it confuses me sometimes because it's like the a t thing like hey let's set up a meeting hey let's get on a call did you miss I've even gotten did you miss the call right yeah like oh you missed the meeting I'm like what I miss the meeting ah okay I see what you're doing now but Outreach emails how important is a subject line in an Outreach email um and how can people incorporate the friendly from the subject line and then the content itself of the mail to better get opens and then more importantly probably better to get build that relationship from the beginning yeah so um the the thing that's probably that works the best and I also think it works well in like paid search ads as well uh across the board that we see work the best is in this first of all the subject line is Mission critical too often the bigger mistake email marketers make is they work on this email the copy the creative maybe the landing page they get legal to approve it you know creative it needs brand guidelines also and then finally yeah it's ready to go out and they go what's the subject line I don't know and they spend three seconds right which is so backwards because if you don't have the right subject line no one's going to see all this wonderful content you put together so spend the time in the subject line but the thing that really works is so important to focus on in the subject line is telling the person who they are and what I mean by that whether it's business or consumer the sooner you can establish that the email that you're sending to that person is for them and not for everybody else that's when the likelihood of them opening up goes up exponentially so for example I'll give you some example on a business side the consumer side sure on the business side you know this is just for HR professionals right for CFOs only right all of a sudden you're like wait a minute this is for small business owners who are looking to grow when you are that HR professional that's CFO or a small business owner you see oh this is for HR professionals I'm an HR professional I need to open this up you know or if it's for new college graduates or new homeowners right or did you just recently move new homeowners whatever it is you tell the person who they are and instantly like oh my goodness this is for me this is not just an email sent to everybody that really drives the interest and immediately people open up there's no way that if you got an email because if you're if you're watching this you're interested in search on your Market facts right if you got an email that says this is for search engine marketing professionals or certain people that love search engine marketing you're opening that email because like that's me I got to know what they're talking about right yeah and and that works better than anything got you got you so so let's bring Blast back into the conversation okay um I'm a um I'm a martial arts equipment dealer right uh glass has a Mai Thai studio uh somewhere down there in Florida I'm gonna send that out and be like for Muay Thai uh for Muay Thai uh Masters only for Muay Thai practitioners um from Muay Thai Studios don't miss out on this something like that so it's gonna it's going to stick when someone's going through their uh inbox and there's a higher chance that they're going to click on it because they know it's for them they know it's not for anyone else and they probably have a feeling that it's been been personalized a little bit uh to that individual or their business um now what about with with the copy itself right once they read the email and I have a question because I see people recommending this all and I get emails like this all the time so um I get a lot of Rec I see a lot of recommendations out there like oh so you should really learn as much as you can about uh the person that you're sending the email to this is like not a blast this is like a very targeted email for like someone that like a blocker right and and check out their Twitter check out their Instagram stuff like that so I'll get like an email saying hey I heard you really love leopard geckos and my favorite football team is the Ravens as well um by the way this link on the CJ is broken I'm like first line I'm like whoa who is this nutcase that like are are you is this like is should I call the police or something like what's going on here why why are you stalking me are you looking at my bushes so should people do that is there a point in doing that how personalized should we get where you're where you're not necessarily uh breaking that like barrier of privacy that the user may have so you know there's two different types of email right there's the truly one-to-one email where you're trying to you know the person you're marketing to you're really trying to break in you're trying to be you know create some sort of connection with that person as fast as you can and without being you know super creepy you don't want to be like hey I saw you were on our website and uh looked at these three pages you know we wanted to send you this that's too creepy but the idea that you are telling in some level of personalization about that person's coming taking the time that's going to win every day but a lot of marketers they don't have the time or ability to segment at that level or to to communicate that level they're doing it you know they have an offer right they have an offer they're trying to get sold or promoted or downloaded or consumed right and and really when it comes down to in the email what's important is number one in your mind you should always remember nobody cares nobody cares about anything nobody cares about what you're saying right so if you you want it to be bulleted items like three bulleted items that's it short short sentences nobody you get a blocked text from a friend a big block text right you look at whoa I am not reading that right now right you put that off to the side it's the same thing with email nobody wants a block of text they want to just clean easy and and the call to action buttons are super important whether it's on your landing page or in your email people make the mistake all the time they think you should put like you know register download you know buy now that's very authoritative that's not helping the person right what you really want to do in the call to action buttons you want to make it as specific as possible tie in with the offer where it will say you know start your free trial right literally that should be your call to action button you know get the thing now right uh no credit card you know it's not download you know submit register it save my seat you know you want it to be a positive action that's the benefit of the person that call to action button again on the landing page or in the email is a home run and then also adding things like social proof stuff testimonials right at near the call to action you know showing that five star review right near the call to action button or on the destination page showing that that testimonial that closes the deal and there's so much data to show that that will lift your overall response rate every time sweet sweet yeah that's that's you've been around for a while so yeah the the the social proof in the uh the landing page that goes back to the old like uh Corey ruddle sales letter style things and things like it's funny how like not much of that has changed like highlighting the things in yellow like whatever it may be the the signature at the end um so um rest in peace Corey but uh anyway uh so yeah um that's really cool so breakthrough right with specific targeted messaging based upon what kind of because if you're sitting in in Mass you can't it's really hard to do that it's really hard yeah to but if you can segment your lists right hey the here's a hundred uh construction bloggers here's a hundred Beauty uh Beauty bloggers or beauty practitioners right so this is for cosmetologists oh I'm a cosmetologist let me open it absolutely um so you could even say exclusivity when they're I don't not that you shouldn't be real but you could have exclusivity when it doesn't truly exist this is exclusive for our email subscribers only Well everybody's an email subscribers this idea that not everybody's getting it it's subconscious but it actually impacts performance it's that simple you know exclusive offer for email subscribers only all right I love it it's like I'm one of those what am I getting how important is it to get that CTA button above the fold when someone's opening the email on you know it's more mobile it's pretty important uh to get it above the fold for sure the other thing I would think about with your with your links is that if you have an offer you're promoting something like when you have an offer and you're sending out your email you're like I really hope that our offer does well that's what you hope when you hit send and it boggles my mind why all the links in the email are not going to the offer page so for example about 20 of all click-throughs are on your logo in your message I would say 95 of all logos click to people's home page because they don't think about it right so one in five clicks aren't going to the destination page because it's your logo you're like all right my logo is going to go to my home page all of your Prime all your click-throughs when it's an offer related email should go to the page that's selling your offer or even like having a navigation bar in an email it drives me nuts you have an offer why are you giving them a shopping mall because once they click on something else forget it that offers no nothing sold right or social sharing links when you hit send are you hoping that they follow you on Instagram are you hoping that they buy the thing that you're promoting right Focus the the energy and the activity to where you want them to go you know sounds very similar to landing pages utilized for PPC or advertising right you don't want to distract the individual right I have a friend they accidentally sent out an email that had I don't know if it's accident or not but they had um instead of they had an offer to an item and instead of sending directly to the PVP the product page within a Shopify setting they sent the email offer with the product already in the cart so when people click on the button the product is in the cart and then the cloud code is already there apparently conversions were through the roof right and it's just so simple like don't even don't even take away distractions just take away the whole shopping experience put it directly in the cart for them and push the cart right up to the checkout area uh the virtual checkout area so totally totally listen if you every additional must fill field that you have on a destination page you'll lose eight percent of your responders right so think about everything like if you're collecting zip code I don't know do you need do you need State I don't know it's like think about everything you're collecting because like you just said it's a barrier to Performance that extra step may not seem like a lot to you but every extra step people like ah screw it I don't want it and that's what happens and this is similar with everything so it's just like it's your form page it's your ctas in the email the all the links in the email that probably distract people it's um you know forcing them to type in their address when there's Google apps that will just that would just populate the address with a couple of a couple of numbers from the street uh also like forcing people to enter their credit card just gets outside of email but forcing people to go to their wallet and get out their credit card as opposed is hitting the PayPal button or hitting the Amazon the pay with Amazon or pay with prime button or whatever it may be so that's super cool and it makes a lot of sense across the board um any so we have the holiday season right around the corner um decorations from three different holidays on it already right so um if someone is planning their big holiday pushes what are some uh some Integrations into their email marketing campaign that that you would be recommending they can easily put together right now to prepare for the holiday season great question so let's break it down both business marketers and consumer marketers so between October and December let's talk about business marketers first people think oh I'm mailing it in the Years ending but it's Q4 we got to make numbers right the easiest thing that you could do for a business marketer for the end of the year is to do uh take 2022 and use it this way 2022 most read articles 2022 most downloaded content 2022 most watch On Demand uh uh webinars whatever it is take that most we all love the most and we all have it we all have that kind of we have the most to me of the least I don't care how big or small you are so do that 2022 wrap up and use that it does incredibly well but then after that you got to put 2022 in the garbage can the thing that works the best right now for B2B marketers is 2023 2023 Outlook starting now in October is generating the highest open rates because all we care about is next year what's going to happen next year q1 Q2 so for B2B marketers you've got to focus on that for b2c marketers uh obviously right now you should be doing early Black Friday all day long everywhere Prime day next week it's Prime day absolutely it should see marketers if you don't sell on Amazon should they start should they start promoting on Prime day as well well what's interesting about prime day is uh um email activity meaning people in their inbox surrounding Prime day like two days leading into Prime day is higher significantly higher than a regular day of the week right so it's a great time to be sending out your email a great time to have incredible offers this is our biggest offer of October because people are in the offer mindset right so this idea of early Black Friday big push but here's one thing I'm gonna throw cold water on everything unfortunately one thing that is unique to this year is we are in a contentious election cycle okay so for the next uh five weeks or so we are going to get both parties don't care who you're into we are getting barraged right by political emails and The Game Changer though this year is that uh Google uh has had to change their their their inboxing rules all political emails now they are forcing into the inbox they're not even allowing them to go to the junk folder because they don't want any perception that they're favoring one party the other that's the first time ever this year so over the next five weeks our inboxes are going to be literally flooded with political oriented emails and unfortunately we look back to the last election it actually depresses on average compared to a non-election year open rates by about 12 to 15 percent for all marketers so don't be crushed if your email open rates are not as good perhaps as last year and it has to do with how much garbage frankly is in our inbox so it's a strange year that sucks because uh we have a contentious election year now in the U.S every two years that's right so right right that's exactly right yeah good thing is they they push up the cpms so that's true there you go there's one way to look at it um yeah yeah so awesome awesome so uh definitely uh jump on uh ways to uh stick through both on the B to b side and the consumer oriented side uh but watch out for the political emails that are going to be hitting every I didn't realize that Google was doing that so that's that's really interesting um by the way like a lot of those political emails I get are great at the friendly from like I'll get an email oh yeah well I would say you want to see you want to see where emails going like two or three years from now just look at what political emails do yeah you leave the charge I mean they are the future of marketing always because they they just are so insane about what they do so what they're doing now will be doing in two years it's it's it's it's it's ridiculous I even get emails to contribute to campaigns that are outside of my state oh yeah I didn't think that was a thing really uh but yeah um so which doesn't really make that much sense to me but anyway uh we're not a political show so uh and I'm if I'm not your constituent I shouldn't be donating to you is my opinion um so um speaking of which you had brought up Gmail previously um and ways that Google filters males um so a couple of years ago Gmail made a change where they have is it promotional a promotional folder a couple other folders and then also they'll also they'll um initiate an option to unsubscribe like if I if I delete something Google will do a little pop or whatever and say oh you you know do you want to unsubscribe from this etc etc first of all what are some ways not to get not to get classified in the promotional um promotional limbo or promotional Purgatory of the Gmail inbox and then what are some of the other folders to look out for um does it make sense to like send when someone subscribes to your email uh newsletter to follow up asking them to like drag and drop you out of that promotional inbox like what are some ways to avoid avoid that trap honestly I think the most important thing someone could do is not think about it and I'll tell you why um there's so many things to do in email marketing right and most Market you know I love marketing managers very few people are I am their title says email marketing manager or search engine marketing manager they are a marketing manager right and they wear 15 hats every day and email happens to be one of the things that they do right and to me there's only so many you know things that you could try to get done with your email marketing what you plan I'll tell you the reason I say all that is the promotions tab in Gmail has very limited impact all the data that we've seen in overall performance in order to stay out of the promotions tab in Gmail you have to jump through an incredible number of Hoops really change a lot of what you're doing and I believe to the detriment a lot to a lot of other best practices that generate a lot of Engagement a lot of performance so in some ways I say ignore the promotions tab it's not holding you back significantly but it will hold you back significantly if you try to stay out of it so I'm a fan of saying screw it don't worry about any of that because you got bigger fish to fry by using all the latest tactics tips and trends that are out there that are actually going to produce significant you know results very cool so we're approaching the end of the hour um real quickly I just dropped your Twitter handle in here for folks to follow you um they can go to twitter.com slash World data that's World data I know what oh yeah it's World Ada it's terrible that's the Legacy name of our brand and I'll tell you I would get rid of it in two seconds but here's the problem maybe you guys can help me out on Twitter uh that was our old brand name for my agency my agency is now outcome media so outcome media.com um and by the way if anybody's listening to this please connect with me on LinkedIn that's really where I put out all my stuff Twitter kind of I don't know how I feel about Twitter but my problem is I'm verified on Twitter and if I change my handle I lose the verification so I wrestle with do I change my handle because that's not my brand anymore and not be verified or do I keep the stupid blu