Marketing Strategies That Still Work in an AI-Driven World with Jay Schwedelson

You are about to get the high octane growth blueprint you need to stop wasting time on fleeting trends and start building a real asset because email marketing is the one legacy channel that still crushes every conversion rate metric. We're unlocking the high converting secrets big brands rely on from using power words and emojis in your subject lines to leveraging the revolutionary data behind 15 million tested email intros with guru media hubs J. Schwedelson. If you're ready to drastically increase your open rates generate unstoppable leads and future proof your business against the AI content trash wave then hit play and let's get down to business right about now. This is right about now with Ryan offered a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes you ready to start snap in next and cash and checks well it starts right about now. We've hit this world where you can get knowledge from a lot of different places and I love what podcasting does for sort of knowledge enrichment and I think you're a big part of that. We try to keep it kind of 10 foot level stuff you could implement really fast really quickly kind of stupid proof because that's why I'm a little stupid so it works out well. We like to chase the shiny objects where it gets excited about what's new but damn email and drag market still fucking work I'll tell you that. I spend a lot of time in the world that email like emails legacy emails dead emails old school but you know what that's only if you're not doing it right and I like to see everybody just get rid of their email address. Not have an email account anymore how many people really want to do that about zero it's crushing it let's tell a little bit of the J story and building to kind of where we are today. I've been at this for a long time over 25 years I've had an agency when my age who is getting rolling we do everything in my agency we do email direct mail digital media print media all this crap and I would go into these pitches to try to get business and I would go in there with these PowerPoint decks or like 50 slides long saying I do everything great. I'm awesome at all this stuff and almost every time I'd walk either get no business and I would bang my head against well I'm like I'm going to go out of business what the hell is going on I can't get any business. After a few years of really driving myself nuts I walked out of this one meeting this guy said to me that we were pitching to he said you know that stuff you were talking about email if you would just kind of double down on that just focus on that you probably would have gotten that business and then after you got that maybe you would have gotten our other stuff it was like a light bulb moment for me I was like what the hell I go you know what I'm trying to be known for everything and I believe that when you're known for everything you're known for nothing so that night literally I sit in my couch I'm like I got to be known for something I said screw it email was just getting going in a big way this is like almost like 15 years ago where so it was really starting to explode in terms of marketing and using it for sales and so I sat on my couch I went on like go daddy or our network solutions whatever the hell was called and I bought a URL I found subject line.com I could buy it it was 500 bucks it was like a premium domain I was like screw it and my idea was that everybody has a subject line why don't we put up a site where you can go and put your subject line in it'll tell you if it's good or bad using whatever information we had and we keep it free and in order to use it you just give us your information but you could test out your subject lines and this was my idea it turned out to be a decent one because people started using it and you fast forward now we've checked about 15 million subject lines on that site and I became known a little bit as this emailed guy which is fine not that I'm just an email guy but it was an entry point into my business which once you come into my agency then you know we torture you and do all this other stuff for you I've learned that putting a flag in the ground saying yeah this is me this is what I'm about then people willing to learn more about you over time if you don't suck at what you do so having that vehicle whether it's subject line.com or whatever it is wherever business that you're in as a listener I think it helps to define why people should work with you and that's kind of how I got rolling I also like to say if you don't become known for something then they get to make it up themselves you can help define and shape it or they're going to shape their own opinion a lot of it is like if you're not known by lots of people for the same thing it's kind of like getting a million impressions for a hundred different products well that's great but what's it driving to when you're not in the room and your name comes up you already know what they're saying about you and what the topic is that your name's coming up for because then you could build your business around that if it's just generic and just all over the place there's nothing there you have nothing and you could then grow from there that's everything look at Starbucks you go there for coffee because that's what you think of but more than half their business now is nothing to do with coffee go look at your iPhone Apple the majority of the revenues coming from all sorts of stuff not just their phone or it could be anything it could be Tommy John underwear yeah you buy your underwear there but now they sell all this other crap you need an entry point in whatever your business is that's kind of the secret sauce it helps when you've got a great tactic subject line.com was brilliant you coming back to that a minute 15 million I like the pause on numbers and like say them again for people because in today's data world between the news or anything else we kind of get lost in the numbers like oh like that sounds like a lot but like people also throw around making a million dollars like that's just easy to do or something 15 million times it's been used to check a subject line that's incredible man it's funny because then we look at one of the most common things that people are doing right or doing wrong and the thing about subject line the thing that gets me excited about it it's one of the tactics in marketing or in sales outreach that literally it costs you nothing it takes five seconds and by changing a few words a few symbols a few things you can change the outcome of your business and it's just knowing what those little things are it gets me excited to be able to share what some of those quick wins are all the time because it changes everything for you and that's kind of fun we got to save the audience but the mirror is listening is always trying to improve some faster to their marketing and even if they don't specifically go over to email they can pass some learnings down to their colleagues or otherwise talk to me about some tips for that the thing about subject line whether it's a sales outreach email or marketing email you don't send an email without wanting it to get open hello that's why you send the email and what people don't really realize is nobody reads the whole subject line ever you could write jays a giant loser at the end of your subject line no one will ever see it because all they're doing is they're doing kind of that social scroll in their inbox and you got to grab their attention and they'll see the first half of your subject line what really is the most important thing of those first few characters literally the first few characters of your subject line where for example if you start your subject line I know it sounds ridiculous with an emoji alright and people think emojis are stupid but there's a million emojis you don't have to use a smiley face you can use a calendar or a checkmark or whatever it gets people to stop and open up the emails and just by using an emoji and start your subject line it will lift the percentage of people opening up your email by over 20% just by doing that or if you started with a number the three pitfalls to avoid the four things you didn't know about whatever it grabs that attention people want to see what it's about and they don't realize that it grabs their attention but it does or even capitalizing the first word like it might say new like the entire word is capitalized not just the first letter of the first word and it grabs that millisecond attention and you know what people don't necessarily understand about emailing more is it used to be that the words that you put in the subject line like free if you put a dollar sign in subject line it used to be that would cause you to go the junk folder or the spam folder 10-15 years ago but technology has changed and that's not the reason you go the junk folder or spam folder anymore so you can liberate yourselves and use the words and the symbols and capitalization that you want to use because the reason you stay in the inbox now has everything to do with how often you're getting your emails opened and clicked and all that stuff you want to be using all the stuff that you probably were avoiding in the past so that's why I like email even though it seems like you see it's always changing and there are little things like this that can change the outcome of everything some of what I heard you didn't use this word but I'm going to use it for you is just being human like how do we text people and how we do things certain ways it's kind of applying that to the subject line humanity in marketing especially in email is everything now especially with AI the problem now is we have this tidal wave of garbage that's coming at us with AI in terms of content creation using AI to write better subject lines or better emails or better social posts or better whatever and what AI recommends by and large is generic we just did a study where we found two of the words at the start of your subject line that are increasing the percentage of people open up your emails more than any other two words are the words and and the word but literally starting your subject line with the word and like and you need to see why or but you didn't realize this and the reason and and but are doing so well in the last 90 days is because AI would never recommend you to start a sentence with and or but it's like the most un-AI thing ever and that's the crazy world that we're in now we have to say okay what will the robots never recommend so that way we stand out and see more human and it's like you need the worst grammar possible in order to stand out which is great because I sucked at that in high school I love AI I'm embracing it we use it but there is some just garbage repetitive content coming out and being someone so heavily in the spoken word of the written word I love hearing your perspective even a little further about what's the good and the bad and the ugly with AI so far today I love AI also AI is incredible for so many things but the problem with AI when it comes to your content if you're writing a newsletter a blog post social media posts content for your website emails there's two pieces to it there is a technical problem with it and then there's just kind of an engagement problem with it the technical problem it is is that for example Google Google scans all of our websites right and that's how they're determining the ranking when someone searches for something Google is very good at being able to identify content on your website that's been written by AI versus written by a human and what Google wants Google wants human written content so because they're able to identify AI written content they're actually now depressing rankings for those websites who have more than half of their content that's actually being able to identify as AI written from a technical perspective you actually getting dinged negatively by just using AI to write all your stuff so you can't just have AI do that you will lose because of that now in terms of an engagement thing the other issue is that like our email newsletters for example a lot of people are using AI to write their email newsletters and what we have seen from all the data we send out about 6 billion emails a year we have seen that those email newsletters that are predominantly written by AI AI content generated newsletters their click to rate on their email newsletters is about 40% lower than those that are written by a human being because we feel it when you're interacting with a blog or an email or a social post you could feel when there's a person behind it versus when there's just a robot behind it while you should be using AI to edit things maybe it's a little bit of an idea kind of kick around starter thing it can't be your content creator because for a variety of reasons it's going to hurt you Jay talked to me about getting back to maybe some of the core like the email marketing things that are happening real time today in the field maybe knowledge for our listeners for how and what they should be considering and how to do it better the biggest change with email marketing right now is Apple you have your iPhone and on your iPhone you have a mail app Apple's utilizing AI what they're calling Apple intelligence and in real time as we receive our emails using this AI Apple is going to be bucketing all the emails that we receive into four different buckets there's going to be a bucket for primary tab bucket a transactions bucket an updates bucket a promotions bucket and depending on what the emails are about is where they're going to fall in these buckets now it goes without saying that if you are marketing something you're trying to sales outreach you don't want your email necessarily going in that promotions bucket because how often are people going to check that might not be that often understanding why an email may go into primary bucket or the update bucket those are the top two that you want to be in as opposed to the other buckets is going to be a really really important thing and what we're seeing is just as this is starting to roll out is that there are going to be certain trigger words that if you use in your emails that you have a greater likelihood of going into the buckets that you want to go into so for example if you have the word let's say preview or confirmation these are trigger words that are like telling the AI this emails important it's not just selling some garbage let's move it to the update tab or the primary tab or something like that as this unfolds really staying in tune with what are these trigger words that AI is looking for in order to stay in the buckets that you want to stay into is going to be a game changer because email is evolving a lot talk to me about where I can keep up with what you're doing the show all that good stuff I'm all over LinkedIn I post way too much garbage there but please connect with me hit me up on LinkedIn with my horribly long last name you'll find me my show do this not that for marketers it's a pink square you'll see it again that's kind of fun and give subject line dot com try it's a hundred percent free it's kind of fun to do you can check that all out and you'll find me I appreciate the opportunity love the show and can't wait to have your mind I love it I'm gonna go to subject line dot com go check out J show you know to find us Ryan is right dot com will have all the highlight clips the full episode from today and good or YouTube channel to check it out all the interactive content we've got going on over there and of course we'll have links to all of J stuff in the show notes we appreciate you for making us number one we'll see you next time I'll write about now this has been right about now with Ryan Alfred a radcast network production visit Ryan is right dot com for full audio and video versions of the show order one choir about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening