The Secret Psychology Behind Emails That Get Opened with Jay Schwedelson

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a business owner looking for tips on improving email marketing? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson interviews email marketing expert Jay Schwedelson, founder of SubjectLine.com, to discuss data-driven strategies for boosting email engagement. Jay shares actionable tips on crafting attention-grabbing subject lines, debunks common myths about spam filters, and highlights the importance of growing a targeted email database. 

Jay provides some tips for creating interesting subject lines for emails. One thing to consider is using white space. This includes having a subject line and then a pre header. A pre header is a second subject line and is usually in grey text. With this tactic, many people are intrigued because there is so much open space that they wonder what the email is about. For Jay, this saw open rates increase by 25%.

Jay and Tyson chat about the key metrics for email marketing. One metric is to understand your target audience through developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is creating a description for the ideal customer who will benefit from your business. Identifying your ICP will help a business tailor their marketing. Another metric is focusing on the database and how to grow it. This can include hiring the right people to work on improving your database and knowing what to add to it and remove from it.

Listen to learn more!

• 4:52 Why Email Still Dominates in the Age of AI
• 6:27 The Value of Unsubscribes
• 10:29 Emotion vs. Logic in Subject Lines & CTAs
• 12:30 Vanity Metrics: The Truth About Open Rates
• 18:43 The Power of White Space in the Inbox
• 23:12 The Most Important Metric for 2026: Database Growth
• 24:30 Email Frequency & Relevancy for Lawyers 
• 27:18 The Future of Email: ChatGPT Atlas Browser
• 29:21 Closing Plugs & Contact Information

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 


Connect with Jay:

• SubjectLine Website 
• GuruConference Website
• Instagram
• Linkedin  

Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

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Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

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Tyson Mutrux 00:00:00 J. You started subject line, which is phenomenal, by the way. It's a really cool website. People should really check it out. Subject. Subject line. Com. You built it on billions of data points. And I wonder what's the what's one surprising pattern that even you didn't expect to see once you started to look at all the data?

Jay Schwedelson 00:00:21 Yeah. You know, everyone focuses on what's inside of their email, regardless of who they're promoting to and sales emails, promotional emails, whatever it is. And they don't spend enough time with the subject line, which if you don't get your email open, who actually cares? You know, it's in your email. And the key thing about a subject line people always get wrong is that they'll always be like, well, how long should it be? 50 characters, 60 characters and all that is nonsense, because the reality of it is we don't really read the whole subject line. When we get an email, read the first few characters, and then we decide this is worth my time or not.

Jay Schwedelson 00:00:51 So literally, what you put with the first word is what the first character is. What you do in that space is more important than anything else you're going to do with the email that you're pressing send on. So, for example, if you start your subject line with an with a number, you know the three pitfalls to avoid. The four things everybody needs to know. The nine things are going to happen 2026. Just a number alone will increase your open rates. The percentage of people opening up your emails by 20%. If you start your subject line with a fully capitalized word like just in and all the letters are capitalized, it'll increase your open rate significantly because it gets people to sort of stop the scroll when they're doing that social scroll in their inbox. So thinking about the start of the subject line really was kind of a game changer for us to realize.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:32 See, that's really incredible to me. And I guess my concern would be, and I wonder what your thoughts on this, because I've seen where you talk about numbers before in brackets and a lot of different things.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:41 Where is that point where you've crossed the line, where you get put in like, you know, Gmail, jail or email jail where you've now crossed the line and it's just too much.

Jay Schwedelson 00:01:50 Yeah. And that's a great, great topic because if you were wanting ten years ago what you wrote in your subject line, what you wrote in your body copy, the headline of your email was the reason whether you stayed in the inbox or went to the junk or spam folder, right? Gmail or wherever. It didn't matter because back ten years ago, it was all based on content, the words and symbols and capitalization. And still today, if you go and you Google, you know, words to avoid or spam trigger words, you'll find all these lists of things to tell you. If you do this, you're going to go to the junk folder. And it's just an epic, epic regurgitation of nonsense and misinformation. It's not true. You don't go to the junk folder or spam folder because of spammy words, because of the words like free, because of exclamation marks or emojis.

Jay Schwedelson 00:02:31 You don't. It has nothing to do with the content, the words or symbols that you're doing. It has to do with more technical stuff. And so the irony is, the way that you stay in the inbox now is by getting a lot more opens, a lot more clicks, by showing that you are a sender that generates engagement. And when I say the irony is by doing all the things that you think you're supposed to avoid, words like free exclamation marks, capitalization, those things actually generate more engagement, more opens more activity, and it actually keeps you in the inbox more. So the funny part is, the things that we are we're avoiding because we think it causes us to go to the junk, are the things we should be doing to keep us out of the junk folder.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:12 I've got sort of a follow up to this. It's going a little bit deeper. So you know how in Gmail you've got like your regular inbox and you've got like the updates and then you've got the promotions, how do you stay out of promotions and updates so that you stay in or does it or does that even matter?

Jay Schwedelson 00:03:27 So the promotions tab is a great place to be.

Jay Schwedelson 00:03:29 And this is another thing that people get confused by. Number one, trying to get out of the promotions tab is really hard. And they'll be companies out there that say they can help you do it, and they could do it for maybe a few weeks and then you're back in there. It's not worth it. I'll tell you why. When people get that promotions tab wrong. First of all, not that many people have it activated. Less than 30% of people have their Gmail or Apple Mail promotions tab activated, right? Of the people who do have that promotions have activated where your mail is automatically put into these different buckets. 50% of the people that have it activated check it every day. Okay, so 50% of the people are taking the time to go into their promotions tab every day. Now why does that matter when someone goes to the mall, right. You're in a buying zone. You're like, what am I buying? I'm at the mall. That's the mindset that you're in. When somebody clicks on the promotions tab, they're not lost.

Jay Schwedelson 00:04:23 They're not like, where am I? What am I doing? They're in there looking for promotions and things that they can engage with in that way. So 50% of the people on a daily basis, they're going they're looking to engage with these offers in these things. And we've actually seen absolutely no drop in performance for any kind of sender, lawyer or legal things. Small business, big business, consumer, B2B, no drop in performance by your emails going into the promotions tab. So it's a waste of energy and actually not a good use of your time to try to get out of it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:52 Why do you think that email has persevered? Because if you had would ask me ten years ago, I would have said by this point email would be declining, especially if you told me the AI was taking off the way it is. Like, why do you think it's persevered the way it is?

Jay Schwedelson 00:05:04 Well, first of all, everything else is rented. Real estate email is owned real estate, right? There's no other media on the planet that when you want to communicate with your entire audience, you get to decide that you're going to send out a communication.

Jay Schwedelson 00:05:17 You want to do that in social if you post lucky, if 10% of your network that follows, you will see it. You want to do it on TV ain't going to happen. You're not going to reach your whole audience. You want to do it on search. You have to pay $1 billion a keyword. You can't reach your whole audience. There's no other media on the planet that for relatively no money, you can communicate to your audience whenever you want. And now, with the world of AI, it's going to become even a bigger deal. And here's why. Now, 60% of the time when people are going to Google now to search for something, now 60% of searches are resulting in people not leaving Google. They're getting their answers because of AI mode on Google itself. Same thing with ChatGPT. They're getting the information they need without ever leaving, which is why website traffic is starting to crater, right? People's website traffic is going down, down, down in 2026. Forget it. You're going to have no website traffic because people are staying on these AI platforms and on things like Google.

Jay Schwedelson 00:06:10 They're not leaving. So you're going to need a robust email database even more to reach your audience because they're not coming to your site anymore. So email is the cockroach of marketing. It will never die. It will outlive us all. And it's the most valuable asset in your business, in my opinion.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:27 I've heard from several people that you want people to unsubscribe because you basically want to tailor your list and get it, get it kind of fine tuned. Is that is that? Does that still apply? Do you? Do you agree with that?

Jay Schwedelson 00:06:38 Oh I think unsubscribe are great and they're misunderstood. So why do I think they're misunderstood? So first off, when people get, you know, let's say somebody listens to this episode and they gotta get Jay, you talk too fast. He's annoying. But I'm going to try what he said. Okay. I'm going to stick a number at the start of my subject line, and I stick a number. The four things you need to avoid in 2026.

Jay Schwedelson 00:06:56 I hit send to my database. Now, when you hit send to the database, what happens? Your open rate goes up. Oh my God, we got such a high open rate. We got a great click through rate. Oh my goodness. oh. We also got more unsubscribed than we've gotten like in six months. This guy has no idea what he's talking about. And that may be true. But what really happened though is something different. What really happened was someone got the email that you sent with that number four to start the subject line. And for the first time in forever, your email stood out to them and they actually wait. I'm still on this list. They open it up and you know what? Your product, your service, your promotion, your thing, you're no longer a fit for that recipient. And they unsubscribed. They didn't unsubscribe because you sent them one more email because they didn't like your whatever. They unsubscribed because they actually opened it for the first time in a long time.

Jay Schwedelson 00:07:40 You did something good. You actually stood out and unsubscribed. Do not hurt your deliverability. They do not cause you to go to the junk folder or spam folder. It's 100% myth that anybody thinks that they do. And in order for people to be into you. You need when you in order to turn somebody on. You have to also turn some people off. If you're trying to be for everybody, then you're for nobody. And so I think unsubscribed are a great thing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:03 And that seems to be consistent. I mean, that's it's been like that for the last, I don't know, umpteen years. It seems so that's that seems consistent. All right. So I'm on your website right now subject line com. And like I said it's cool. Everyone should check it out. You've got this free enter your subject line here and then evaluate. And here's my question for you though. What's a way that maybe you could use this to evaluate your subject line in a way that most people might not think? Because I imagine that you've probably used this, you know, hundreds of thousands of different ways.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:36 And I wonder if you've got any special tricks on how to use this.

Jay Schwedelson 00:08:40 Yeah. You know, in general it's a starter. It's an idea starter. Okay. So if you notice when you go to subject line com it is a free tool. It doesn't ask you anything. It doesn't say hey who are you promoting to. Is this for a business offer or a or consumer offer. It doesn't ask you any of that. So what it gives you back is kind of the don't. Don't screw this up completely and think about these things, right. And it's kind of like an idea starter for your subject line that in general don't just gloss over it. Right. Try different tactics in your subject line all the time. And then the mistakes that people make is, you know, the idea of confirmation bias that you're gonna make. Okay. we're going to try sticking an emoji in the subject line. We've never done that before, even though it's totally off brand. We're going to try it. Great.

Jay Schwedelson 00:09:23 We do it and it works well. And you're like, oh my goodness, it works so well. Now you're doing that every single time, blah blah blah. Because it works so well, that's the worst thing you do in any kind of marketing. What you want to have, whether it's your social post, your email, subject lines, whatever you do, you need an arsenal of tactics that you're rotating through. Because if you do the same tactic every single time, it won't work right. It's kind of the same idea with email templates, which always drive me bananas. You know, a lot of companies, law firms, Whatever. Right? Like we we made a new email template. All of our emails now look like this. And we hit send and we sent it out. It did so much better than what we used to send out. And I was like, wow, this templates, it's wildly good, which is ridiculous. What happened was you did something different, right? It stood out a little bit.

Jay Schwedelson 00:10:09 It wasn't the same garbage you've always been doing, but they think, oh, it worked because it's a great template. No, which is why you need to have many different formats of your emails and many different formats of your social posts, and you got to mix it up to actually not become wallpaper. So that's the same thing with subject lines. You need to have an arsenal. So the site gives you a lot of ideas of how to kind of build that arsenal.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:29 I love that I've seen where you said that emotion drives clicks more than logic, and I wonder, how can you trigger emotion in such a short amount of time with with the email subject line? Because that that seems like it could be really difficult.

Jay Schwedelson 00:10:43 Well, let's talk about clicks for a second, because you bring it up and I think it's one of the most, missed over opportunities in email marketing and also for social posts as well. So somebody opens up the email, right? And let's say you want them to attend a webinar or download a piece of content or something, right? So what do we all do? And let's just say it was a webinar.

Jay Schwedelson 00:11:04 You promote this webinar, here's the speakers, whatever. Here's the topic. And then you have a button, a rectangular button, a call to action button in that email and that button, I would say 95% of the time I'm going to say the word register because that's what you want them to do. You want them to register, but that's that couldn't be more of a turnoff. In general, when you talk about how do you get people to click, you want to get in their mindset. The easiest thing you could do in your email marketing or on your social post or anywhere else is to write things in first person. So instead of register, it would say yes, count me in. Instead of register, it would say save my spot. When you actually write things in first person on your call to action buttons, those long rectangular buttons we see click through rates rise by over 25%, and you should do this on your landing pages. You should do this on your social posts. Reframe everything into the person's mindset, not what you want them to do.

Jay Schwedelson 00:11:55 And these are the little things. When people say, oh, email doesn't work for us. Email doesn't work for you because you're not playing the game. There's no one thing you're going to do that's going to crush it. There's a lot of these little things that add up to totally change the outcome.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:07 It's funny when you said that, I instantly started thinking about emails that I thought were great emails, and the emails that maybe I've drafted that were not so great, that were not in the in the first person. So that's I think that's a great one. What I find is something that's pretty interesting. It seems like one of your biggest crusades is against vanity metrics. So when you we talk about what some of the vanity metrics are when it comes to email.

Jay Schwedelson 00:12:30 You know, I.

Jay Schwedelson 00:12:31 Chronically one of the biggest vanity metrics that everybody says is useless, I don't think is useless, which is your open rate. Okay. So a lot of people in the marketing sphere say your email open rate, your percentage of people to open up an email is meaningless.

Jay Schwedelson 00:12:44 And they say that because what it means is let's say you have an email list of 100,000 people. You send it out and your tracking report says you have a 32% open rate. When you go in there, it says 32,000 out of 100,000 people on your list opened it up. Now, in the marketing world, everyone says open rates meaningless because there's all these bots out there. Apple now automatically shows, opens and inflates things. There's all these things that are causing your open rate to be not real, and that is 100% accurate. Your open rate. When you go into any platform, you should know that that is not a real number at all. Okay? Because of all everything I just laid out. But when people say open rates are irrelevant because I think it's the stupidest thing of all time because it is directionally really important. So let's say you're listening to this episode and you're like, all right, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to try to use that number at the start of the subject line.

Jay Schwedelson 00:13:36 I'm going to do an A, B test 50,000. We'll get one with the number 50,000 won't. All right. And then you go into your tracking port after you hit send. And the one that had a number of subject line had a 40% open rate. The one that didn't had a 20% open rate. Now, what that means is directionally, you know that the one with the number crushed it. It did better. And it's almost like a Gallup survey on your marketing tactic. So it's really important to understand the metrics that you are looking at that are not absolute metrics and maybe directional metrics like your open rate. Right. Because, you know, sometimes you'll get confused. You read this stuff like don't even look at your open rate. It doesn't mean anything anymore. And that's nails on a chalkboard to me. It's just it's just not true.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:18 Let's say you're to do an a B test like what you're talking about. You use, you know, regular subject line and you've got you put your number at the beginning after you've run that for one month or two months or three months, however long the duration is, would you then flip those and test them on the on the other audience, or how do you normally do it?

Jay Schwedelson 00:14:36 you would think we have more of a laboratory than we do.

Jay Schwedelson 00:14:38 And I think that the hard part when people listen to stuff like this, like, oh, I don't have time to set this all up. I'm not that sophisticated. But and here's the reality of it. It doesn't even matter. I mean, yes, you want to have it perfect and have all your metrics lined up and all the things and all whatever, but the real game is just try something new, right? Every time you hit send on email, you should be testing something. That's it. You really can keep it that simple. And, you know, things continually change. So if you did something and you learned it today, six months from now, it won't hold. I'll give you an example. AI has really screwed things up in the world of email marketing a little bit because so much now we go to AI and say, hey AI, what should my subject line be? What should the headline of my email be? What should it be? And then AI gives it back to us.

Jay Schwedelson 00:15:24 You know, ChatGPT or perplexity cloud whatever you use and says use this right. And then we take that and we use it. And the problem is now, as recipients of all this stuff, there are now certain words and phrases that six months ago, a year ago were fine. But now, because AI gives it back to everybody so much that us as people that receive this stuff, we immediately discount it because it's like wallpaper. I'll give you an example. Like the word unlock the word discover the word learn. Okay, these words used to be words that actually would generate engagement if you put them to start your subject line. Because these were good words that allow things to stand out. They're now among the most given back words at the start of a subject line that ChatGPT gives you back, right? So if you go to inbox now, you will see the word unlock like four zillion times. We're being told to unlock everything. It's ridiculous. And as recipients of this stuff, we are now tuning it out.

Jay Schwedelson 00:16:21 So whatever you test now, okay, it may not work in six months, which is why you always have to be testing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:28 I love it, that's great advice. I do want to. I want to give you a chance to to push your guru 2025 and here's why. So our CEO, Becky Eberhardt, she found you because she listens to Amy Porterfield and she attended because of Amy Porterfield. Podcast. She attended event tastic! And she said it is the. It was by far the best virtual event she has ever been to. And so I think that's awesome. And so do you want to talk about guru 2025? Because that's in November. It's actually coming up in a week or two, about ten days or so. So when you talk about that really quick.

Jay Schwedelson 00:17:03 Yeah I appreciate you bringing that up. Yeah. You know, in general, I think that the idea of virtual events got stained coming out of Covid. So we tried to reinvent them a little bit. So we have a number of events throughout the year.

Jay Schwedelson 00:17:13 And one of our biggest events called Guru Conference. It's free and it's virtual. You can register for it at Guru Conference Comm. We'll have over 25,000 people there. It's a two day event all about email marketing. We actually have Nicole Kidman speaking, Amy Porterfield speaking again. We and we do crazy stuff. We have Lance bass from NSYNC judging a dance contest. Flavor Flav will be there. And what we do, and I encourage this for everybody, is, you know, you can make virtual events fun and different. And then the other big thing that we do is we don't do on demand in general, whether it's for your webinars, a big virtual event, whatever you do. I think we have to stop treating our content like Netflix, like it's always available. So what we do is we do something called earned on demand, where if you don't show up for at least an hour, you can't get the on demand link at all, and our show up rates are over 70% because of that.

Jay Schwedelson 00:18:02 So when you think about if somebody's going to put on a webinar out there or something, don't just play the same playbook that everybody else is doing, because when people actually show up, your pipeline goes higher, your conversions go higher. And so we've tried to reimagine that. So guru conference, if you want to see a wild virtual event, it's it's worth trying out.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:19 What a great idea. We should do something very similar with Max lock on because, you know, like on day two, there's always the attrition where, you know, every single conference people leave. I that's a great idea. That's really good. All right. So back to back to some some questions. I am curious, is there an email that you can remember that you opened recently from some other company or someone else that you're like, you're really impressed with and if so, why?

Jay Schwedelson 00:18:43 I'll tell you the tactic that I have stolen that I saw from a couple of different companies that's working so well, which is this idea of white space in the in your inbox.

Jay Schwedelson 00:18:53 So when you go to your inbox, everyone's always focus on what should I write a subject line, when should I send out all the things? But, well, we don't think about enough. Is white space. What I mean by that is you have your subject line and then you have your pre header. The pre header is that second subject line kind of that gray text right after the subject line. Right. And I saw somebody do this. And now we do it a lot which is if you actually send out your email with no pre header and your subject line is three words or less. So now you have a really short subject line. Right. Let's say your subject line you said must nose and then you have no pre header. What happens is your email visually stands out massively because there's so much white space after that very short subject line. And when we've been doing this we're seeing our open rates on those emails go up by over 25% just by not doing something. Keeping your subject line crazy short and no pre header.

Jay Schwedelson 00:19:44 So it's cool to think about your marketing from a visual perspective and not just what is it saying.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:50 What an incredible idea that is. That is fantastic. It reminds me of what whenever I had Infusionsoft, it wasn't for the same purpose, but we would take so that people wouldn't get to the unsubscribe button. We'd create a bunch of whitespace at the bottom of the email. Definitely a different purpose, but that was something we would do for sure.

Jay Schwedelson 00:20:08 Infusionsoft. You're going back to old school before they were, before they went back.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:12 Back. We were always with keep and I think starting in 2011, so quite a ways. I think the big mistake they made was getting rid of the conference changing. To change their name. I don't know how they're doing these days. It definitely is. It definitely is. I want to ask you about, because I know I don't have a whole lot of time with you, and I want to make sure I get some of the stuff out. You were talking about running a holdout tests.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:33 And can you talk about holdout tests?

Jay Schwedelson 00:20:35 Yeah. So,

Jay Schwedelson 00:20:37 In general, it's hard to figure out if what you're doing, you know, is working, right. Is it actually working? So one of the big things that we are big fans of are holdouts. Right. So let's say you have 100,000 people in your database okay. You take 10,000 of them, you put them off to the side and they don't get any of your email marketing. They don't get any of your remarketing. They don't get any of anything that you're doing. All right. And then you measure what is the number of people in that holdout group, that 10% that are going into pipeline, that are turning into opportunities, that are doing whatever without them receiving none of the marketing pushes that you're doing. And what that will really show you is the actual value of your overall marketing, because the reality of it is now attribution is a little bit of garbage. It's, you know, a lot of people think, oh, I ran this search ad, somebody clicked through, they converted.

Jay Schwedelson 00:21:29 That is why they became a customer or whatever, an opportunity. And that's ridiculous. And then we assign value to that search ad that it did really well. It's silly because what really happened was that individual saw some emails a few months ago, they saw some social posts, they saw this, that, whatever. And then they were on Google and, and they were in market for what it is that you do. And they saw your ad and they clicked on it. And then it's the surround sound that you've created from everything you've been doing. It's not that last touch attribution, which is where a lot of marketing budgets kind of go to go to fail. So by having a holdout group, it will give you a view on the totality of how your marketing is doing, and you'll actually be able to sit in a meeting and say, listen, all this crap that we're doing, it's actually turning into a lot of business or it's not.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:18 I really like that because my problem with things like TikTok and Instagram and all that, and I know that it works for some people.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:25 But the problem that I see a lot of time is, is there is no they can't connect it to actually getting cases. They just can't. I think that's interesting with the with what you're talking about. The holdout test is that you can actually create some sort of a tighter connection between here's our marketing and then here's our clients and all that. So I think that that's a really smart. You can't really do that with social media unless you're doing ads, which is just a different beast altogether.

Jay Schwedelson 00:22:49 But here's why no one's going to do it. Not a single listener on this show is going to actually do the holdout group. And I'll tell you why. Because I'm like.

Jay Schwedelson 00:22:55 Well.

Jay Schwedelson 00:22:55 I need to market to everybody, or else I'm going to go out of business. And that is where the conversation goes sideways.

Tyson Mutrux 00:23:03 That's a really so I think that's a good challenge. I would love if anybody does run it. Let me know and I will report back to Jay because I definitely would. I would love to hear someone do it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:23:12 And actually I'll even see if I'll find a way to do it ourselves. I'll try to do with Maximum Lawyer. I'll have Becca get this thing. I don't deal with any of that stuff. So I'll talk to the backend and and see if we can get that set up. But if you were going to choose just one metric to track for growth in 2026. All right. So and I wouldn't say for growth for for when it comes to knowing whether or not your email marketing is working in 2026. What do you think that metric will be?

Jay Schwedelson 00:23:41 I am always.

Jay Schwedelson 00:23:42 Focused on is our database growing? Are we bring on more of the right people? Right. So we define our ICP and then we're constantly looking at database growth of the right people, not just the database growth overall. And the reason that we're always that's a North Star for me is on an annualized basis, your email database will shrink by about 20% between emails that are bouncing and unsubscribed and whatever. And so if you don't have an active program that you are adding to your database, then over time you have no database.

Jay Schwedelson 00:24:13 So thinking about what is your ICP, what is your target audience, and then what is your database growth? You know, month over month, year over year. But factoring in the people that are coming off your list, not just the net news, it's like the actual growth. that to me is like, keeps me up at night.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:30 Well, if that keeps you up, they should keep it. Should keep all of us up as well. Yeah. All right. I want to ask you about, the, I guess, frequency when it comes to emails, because this is something I hear all the time, and I do, I you may give me a lot of pushback on this. I do think it's different for attorneys that are sending out emails than let's say you're like a you're a marketer sending out emails because I think it's more expected. What do you think the frequency specifically for lawyers should be when it comes to sending out emails more?

Jay Schwedelson 00:24:59 and I'll tell you why I say that.

Jay Schwedelson 00:25:00 And a lot of people say that's ridiculous, blah, blah, blah. Here's the mistake that almost everybody makes. they like, oh, our emails aren't doing well. We're annoying people. We're sending out too much. We should send less. Well, that's horrible math, right? You send out less, you will get less business. That's how it goes. So here's the thing. First off, frequency is tied to relevancy. You need to stop just sending out. Hey, work with us, work with us, work with us. You need to send out things that have no agenda for you, right? Here's value. Here's a new change to this law. Here's something some it's trending in your area. Whatever. Content unrelated. Here you go. And you send that out a lot. But the other mistake in terms of sending is people make this mistake and they say, oh, we send our emails out on Tuesday at 8 a.m. it's the best. That's when we have the highest open rate click through rate.

Jay Schwedelson 00:25:50 That's the day that we send. And that is ridiculous. And here's why that is. That may be the best time that it performs well. But for me, for example, I read my a lot of my emails at night, like late at night. I also read my emails on Sundays, like kind of midday on Sundays, because this is the time that I have to really dig into emails. And so what you want to be doing is sending out more emails, but not consistently. You can keep that one day that you like that Tuesday, 8 a.m. but send your email another email out on, you know, Thursday at 7 p.m. send another email out on Sundays at 4 p.m. and what you want to make sure of is that you're not comparing them. You're not saying, oh, well, Sundays at 4 p.m. does worse than Tuesdays. No, what you're doing is you're reaching a different population within your database that consume emails at a different time. So you have to stop saying, oh, this one did better than this one.

Jay Schwedelson 00:26:40 No, it's like real estate. It's another piece of real estate of when you get to send stuff out during the week. So think about your frequency differently and also think about your relevancy differently.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:53 This this is probably going to be my last question, but because it depends on what your answer is going to be, I wonder if. Well, I just wonder if there are if there's anything on the horizon that that might I wouldn't say disrupt email, but would. It's going to upend it to a certain extent, where maybe there's massive feature changes that Gmail might be integrating. I wonder if there's if you're aware of anything on the horizon that might change email drastically.

Jay Schwedelson 00:27:18 I think the biggest thing that's going to happen, which probably happen in the next 3 to 6 months, is so ChatGPT just announced they have a new Atlas browser, so they have a browser. It's going to compete directly with Chrome, right? Free browser the way you go on the internet. So ChatGPT releases. Right now it's only available if you're a mac user, but the next few weeks it's going to also be available.

Jay Schwedelson 00:27:37 If you're a windows user. What does it have to do with email? So one of the functionalities within this Atlas browser, which I think everyone's going to be using, is that if you have your inbox opened up right, like within the within the browser, you can easily tell the Atlas browser, hey, all the emails in my inbox that say the word guy. I want you to reply back to them and say, hey, here's your free guide. And by the way, why don't we set up a call and then you're going to be able to tell the Atlas browser and like one keystroke just to do that. And why does that impact email marketing? Because I believe what we're heading towards is the promotional emails that you're sending out to get cases and all the different stuff to your database. Instead of saying, click here and go to this website and sign up for blah, blah, blah, you're going to be sending out emails that say, hey, you want the new tip sheet on how to do blah blah blah.

Jay Schwedelson 00:28:27 Just reply to this email with the word tip sheet and I'll get it right to you. Right. And then you'll be able to use ChatGPT Atlas browser to instantly without you doing anything. Reply to all these messages, and the reason that has a lot more value is once you start to email back and forth to somebody, you're way further down the funnel than just somebody filling out a form on a website. So I think there's going to be a fundamental change to how we are corresponding and interacting with people because of the Atlas browser and what's coming.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:58 I couldn't agree more. I've had Atlas for six days. If you would ask me six days ago I said, you're probably crazy, but they've already added new features. I was using it earlier today and they've added on a lot of cool things in just six days. It's only going to be getting better. I was a I loved comet. I think comet it is. It's not as good as as Atlas. I think it's better. So I think you're you're completely right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:21 I do want to just take the last few seconds just to make sure we plug subject line comm. Anyone you want to test out your subject line or you want to get in touch with J do that guru conference. That's that's for. Yeah. The conference you have coming up in November and then event tastic. You have in June of next year. Event tastic. Com which is just great. Your websites are fantastic too.

Speaker 4 00:29:41 Oh, thanks. Appreciate.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:42 The design is great, but if people want to get in touch with you, let's say they want to work with you. How could they get in touch with you?

Speaker 4 00:29:47 Yeah. You just go to.

Jay Schwedelson 00:29:48 My full name. Josh Olson. Hard to spell, but if you figure it out, Jay Adelson. Com, that's where you'll find me. I have a podcast called Do This, Not That, which is, just a lot of firehose of rapid tips. So you can check that out and listen, this is awesome. And I appreciate you having me on.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:03 Yeah. Thanks for doing it. I really do appreciate it. I mean, I think it's one of those things where I told you before, I could probably talk to you for three hours. So it's probably it's probably best that we were kind of limited at the time, but.

Speaker 4 00:30:13 That.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:13 Was great. I really appreciate you doing this. And if anybody if you listen to this, you can tell Jay knows what the hell he's talking about. So check him out. Check out all of his all of his events, all of his sites. Listen to his podcast. but, Jay, I really do appreciate it. Thank you so.

Speaker 4 00:30:26 Much. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.