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
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