Jay Schwedelson has had an interest in direct marketing since he was a five-year-old watching his parents’ direct mail business. Today, he’s one of the internet’s top email marketing experts, but the thing he loves most about email is that you don’t need to be an expert to do it well.
“Just get it out there,” he says. “Iterate and keep going. Consistency will win out—you will beat out 95% of everybody else you’re competing with just by being there and doing it.”
For nearly 30 years, Jay has run Outcome Media, an agency that today offers demand generation services and email and direct mail marketing. In 2021, he launched GURU Conference to offer affordable, accessible marketing education to business owners and marketers.
On this episode of Be a Marketer, Jay and host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, discuss what’s most important for email marketing in 2024. Jay also offers his top tips and resources for business owners looking to tap into the power of email.
👉 Check out the email marketing conference mentioned in this episode: GURU 2024
Meet Today’s Guest: Jay Schwedelson of Outcome Media and GURU Events
☕ What he does: Jay is a lifelong entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Outcome Media and GURU Events. He is an expert in email marketing who also started SubjectLine.com, the free subject line testing service for email marketers.
💡 Key quote: “Email is the most important thing on the planet. Your email list is the most important asset in your company — no questions asked.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
Chapters
Jay Schwedelson has had an interest in direct marketing since he was a five-year-old watching his parents’ direct mail business. Today, he’s one of the internet’s top email marketing experts, but the thing he loves most about email is that you don’t need to be an expert to do it well.
“Just get it out there,” he says. “Iterate and keep going. Consistency will win out—you will beat out 95% of everybody else you’re competing with just by being there and doing it.”
For nearly 30 years, Jay has run Outcome Media, an agency that today offers demand generation services and email and direct mail marketing. In 2021, he launched GURU Conference to offer affordable, accessible marketing education to business owners and marketers.
On this episode of Be a Marketer, Jay and host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, discuss what’s most important for email marketing in 2024. Jay also offers his top tips and resources for business owners looking to tap into the power of email.
👉 Check out the email marketing conference mentioned in this episode: GURU 2024
Meet Today’s Guest: Jay Schwedelson of Outcome Media and GURU Events
☕ What he does: Jay is a lifelong entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Outcome Media and GURU Events. He is an expert in email marketing who also started SubjectLine.com, the free subject line testing service for email marketers.
💡 Key quote: “Email is the most important thing on the planet. Your email list is the most important asset in your company — no questions asked.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
What is Be a Marketer with Dave Charest?
As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Dave:
Today on episode 43 of the be a marketer podcast, you'll hear from a founder with an obsession for email and reality TV. And I'm sharing why showing up consistently may be the best advice you'll ever hear. This is the Be A Marketer podcast. Be A Marketer. When you started your business, you probably didn't realize how many hats you'd actually have to wear.
Dave:
All of a sudden, you have to be an owner. You have to be a boss. You have to be the person making sure all the things go, all while making sure you're getting new customers to keep things going. And that means you also have to be a marketer. Listen.
Dave:
We get it. Marketing is not your thing. You're a business owner first, a marketer by necessity. The good news, you don't have to be a marketer alone. I'm your host, Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing.
Dave:
And on this podcast, we'll explore how to find the time to be a marketer. No jargon. No hype. Just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer.
Dave:
And at Constant Contact, we're here to help. Well, hello hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. My girls are currently in their sophomore year in college and they're both runners. Now this year, they've been doing great in terms of finding their stride and consistently beating their time during their freshman year when my wife and I went to one of their meets, and one of the girls was having a really rough time. She was feeling frustrated because she wasn't as fast as the other girls.
Dave:
And in that moment, her headspace was that she wasn't ever gonna get any better. Now as a parent, it was really tough to watch her struggle, of course, through this moment. Now I would have supported her if she decided that track was no longer for her, but I'm proud that she decided to stick with it. She kept showing up, doing the work, and giving the best she could in any given moment. And as I've already mentioned, she's finally seeing the results of that work.
Dave:
Now if there's a lesson to be learned, it's that showing up and practicing consistently gets you results and allows you to improve. If you ask me, the same is true in pretty much every aspect of life, including marketing. Marketing is a practice, not a perfect. All you can ever do is the best that you can in any given moment. You benefit not from waiting for perfection, but by taking action and showing up consistently.
Dave:
And there's something else that you get from showing up regularly like this. Your business is top of mind. And at the end of the day, that's what marketing is all about. Being top of mind with the people that you're trying to reach. And as the saying goes, out of sight, out of mind.
Dave:
And so your plan should be to show up consistently so that when someone needs what you offer, they think of you first. Or if someone asked them for a recommendation, they also think of you first. So when it comes to marketing, remember this. Doing something is better than doing nothing. And if you continue to show up consistently, you'll reap far more rewards than those that do not.
Dave:
At the end of the day, you're just trying to beat your own personal records. Well friend, today's guest is Jay Schwendelson, founder of subjectline.com and guru events and he's also the CEO of Outcome Media. Now, Jay's been in the marketing game since the tender age of 5. Thanks to the direct mail business his parents started in their garage in the late seventies. He literally grew up around the kitchen table learning about direct mail campaigns and he was fascinated by the idea of measurable media where you spend $1 and then you make 2.
Dave:
After college in the mid nineties, Jay started a business that was one of the first online ad companies. But after that business, to use his words, went, he grew enamored with everything going on in the Internet and email in particular. Well, let's pick up the conversation there.
Jay Schwedelson:
I really felt that email was going to really become something dominant, which sounds ridiculous now. But at the time you're talking about the late nineties, it was just really starting to get going. And so we pivoted everything to email and really started going heavy in email. And then fast forward that turned into a full blown agency which is called Outcome Media. We're about a 100 or so person organization and we certainly don't just do email.
Jay Schwedelson:
We do demand generation services for email, for direct mail, podcast advertising, digital media, you name it, Work with about 500 companies, business and consumer marketers, many fortune, you know, 100 companies. But along the way, because we were doing so much in email about 15 years ago, I started a website that gained some popularity because a lot of our clients would come to us and say, hey we're doing all this email stuff with you guys, what's the right subject line to use?' And we'd say do this, do this, we had all this data because on an annual basis we transmit about 6,000,000,000 emails for all of our clients. And so we need it, we were like, we need a tool. So we can't, don't keep just spouting stuff off about subject lines. So we said, alright, let's make a little website.
Jay Schwedelson:
So we made this website that had a tool on it about you put your subject line in and it gave you a score and it gave you information about if it was good or bad. And we bought the domain subjectline.com, which 15 years ago, you could just almost buy it with a domain you wanted, right? Because it was a wild west. And so subjectline.com was born and we kept it as this free tool for marketers and it just gained some traction. And if you fast forward now, we've checked over 15,000,000 subject lines and now has an AI component where you can go there, you put your subject line in, it'll give you suggestions on how to write a better, it's all free.
Jay Schwedelson:
And so it kind of gave me this thing in the marketplace like, oh, he must know about email because he's the guy who started subject line.com and I'll go to somebody, oh, you're the subject line guy. I'm like, alright. I'll be the subject line guy. That's fine. And then about 2 years ago, I, and this is probably a longer version of the story than you wanted.
Jay Schwedelson:
I've always felt about email marketing in particular that there's very few people on the earth that wake up every day and say I'm an email market. There's 25,000,000 businesses in this country and almost every single one does email marketing, but very few people are email marketers that work in those companies. But there are people at these companies that have the responsibility of email. And the education that's out there as related to email marketing was really relegated to these expensive events for super sophisticated people and you have to fly somewhere, spend $1,000 on a ticket and the the conversations there are like for the 1% of of marketers that understand everything. And I didn't think that there was any place for the everyday marketer who has the responsibility of email but doesn't call themselves just an email marketer for them to get that education.
Jay Schwedelson:
So we said, you know what, let's do something about that and let's start up a new event. So we started up something called Guru Conference brand new, new company in this Guru Event thing and the idea was massive free 2 day event all about email marketing for everybody. And let's bring together the best minds in email marketing. And, let's also change the way that people look at virtual events. We're gonna make it fun.
Jay Schwedelson:
So we did that and you fast forward over 2 years, you know, and we now have an event that has over 20,000 people that are registering and attending and all this stuff. And so we feel like we're doing something pretty cool for the industry, whatever industry that is. And so that's kind of my journey. I have these two businesses, my agency, Alcon Media and my guru media company that does all these virtual events. That's a long answer.
Dave:
No. I love it. You know, one of the things that I love about what you're saying here, because I think this is the sweet spot. Right? When I think about even who you know, the audience that we're trying to talk to and and a lot of Constant Contact customers who are gonna be listening to this, it is that group of people that are, I always say, they're marketers or they're business owners first, marketers by necessity.
Dave:
It's a thing that they know they have to do, but if you gave them a choice, they would probably go take out the trash.
Jay Schwedelson:
You know
Dave:
what I mean? It's it's all of these things that you have to do. And so what I love about email and to your point recognizing, oh, this is gonna be something that's important, which I think founders of Constant Contact obviously did too, particularly for the small business owner, is that what I love about it and my personal fight on many levels is trying to get people to stop thinking about the advanced things that they can do because everybody's talking about like, oh, you do this. You gotta set up this flow. You you know what?
Dave:
The end of the day, all you need to do is send an email regularly. And if you can do that, you're gonna start to see some results from it. And this is time and time again talking to successful businesses, and I think that's what the exciting thing and interesting thing about email is is that you can start simple. And then my hope is always that someone will and say, like, oh, okay. Like, well, what else could I do?
Dave:
And then you start to layer on those little things that may be a bit more advanced. But that's the thing that I think is really curious about email. So I'm curious from you, and we'll we'll talk more about this as we go down down the path here. But I'm curious from you. As you started your business, you're doing these things.
Dave:
I mean, did you did you go right away into starting your own business, or were you doing something else before that?
Jay Schwedelson:
No. No. This is, I started a business while I was in college. And then after that, I kind of morphed some other entities and stuff. So I've never, other than working in the mall in high school, I've never done anything else.
Dave:
Wow. Good for you. What's that like then? I mean, what challenges are you facing kinda doing that?
Jay Schwedelson:
It's fine now. But years ago and as I've been going through all this, when you don't have experience working at a bunch of other companies or I've never been client side as people say or things like that, it's very insular in terms of your your your knowledge base. So I've had to try a 1000000 things and fail a 1000000 times and probably waste money on things that I probably should never have wasted money on. But now, 25 years or whatever into this whole thing, I have a really good idea of stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work because I've done it. I've tried it myself.
Jay Schwedelson:
So it's painful trying to get through all of that. But being at this stage, it's nice because I have the wounds to know things that I shouldn't be doing. And also you have the ability to my agency business is really nice because I get a window into 100 of businesses. You, on one phone call I'm talking to somebody that's targeting engineers, another one's talking to home services and another one's just selling a consumer, direct consumer product. So we get this window and you see all this data and all this stuff like, wow, this is amazing.
Jay Schwedelson:
So I love the whole journey. I love all the HR stuff and all the stuff when it comes with, you know, the business stuff. That stuff is not the most fun. This is the fun stuff. Meeting, you know, amazing people and sharing whatever knowledge we have.
Jay Schwedelson:
That's the fun part.
Dave:
So you mentioned wounds along the way. Yeah. Anything in particular that stands out to you that you wanted to share?
Jay Schwedelson:
Something you said I think is spot on, which is the value of consistency. I think that the one piece of advice that I wish I knew my younger self was to start, let's say it's email. Perfection is the enemy of progress. I need to get that tattooed on my forehead. Because so often, especially in my career and I see it a lot of other business owners and other marketers, they're waiting till they have the most perfect thing set up, the most perfect email workflow or email design or the newsletter that's written perfectly and they always want it to be just right.
Jay Schwedelson:
Their website has to be exactly right and they're constantly in this waiting mode. Just wait until you see what we're gonna do before they hit send or before they go launch with something and just get it out there. Get it out there, iterate and keep going. Consistency will win out. If you do that, whatever it is, you keep going, you keep iterating, you will beat out like 95% of everybody else that you're going competing with just by being there and doing it.
Jay Schwedelson:
And I think that that's been a fail for myself that I wish had I known that earlier on, I wouldn't have always been weighted. And so to your point, I don't think that, oh, how do I integrate AI into my dynamic personalization and my call to action buttons? Like who cares? Just let's get
Dave:
the email
Jay Schwedelson:
out and let's get another customer. That's where I come from it.
Dave:
One of the things that I'm I'm always kind of saying is that like one doing something is better than doing nothing.
Jay Schwedelson:
Always.
Dave:
And then 2, once you recognize that, you also need to recognize that you're only gonna be able to do the best you can do at that moment in time. And so you just let that be what it is. And then the goal is to learn and write and add and adapt and change as you go along. So I love that.
Jay Schwedelson:
Totally.
Dave:
What do you love most about owning your own business?
Jay Schwedelson:
That number 1, I can move fast. We're about a 100 people. So we're not in constant contact, way bigger company. Right? So like, I'll give you an example.
Jay Schwedelson:
So for our events business right now, we don't have a TikTok page for events business, right? And so we had a meeting and we said, we need a TikTok page and here's what should be on it and whatever. And like within a week that page is gonna be launched, going, done, happen, right? There's no really red tape. There's not none of that.
Jay Schwedelson:
And you can test things without fear. You know, let's test it. If it fails, it fails and it's on me, you know, it's, I'm okay with that fail. So I love the laboratory environment that I have access to because I can it drives my team nuts. I could wake up in the morning and be like, we need to be trying this.
Jay Schwedelson:
And then we try it and it may work, it may not work. So that's the beautiful thing about owning my own business. But, you know, obviously there's insane pressures that come with owning your own business as well. The economy, life, whatever. But I love that and I love owning a business of this size.
Jay Schwedelson:
If I had a 1,000 employees, then you are I gotta check with this person and get legal and I need a procurement or whatever. And I I I don't know what to tell you.
Dave:
I'm curious. I wanna kinda transition us into talking about email marketing. But to get there, I wanna understand kind of so where you're at right now, what would you say are your top priorities?
Jay Schwedelson:
For my business?
Dave:
Yeah. Because, like, I think, ultimately, like, I'd like to talk a little bit about how you're thinking about marketing and what your approach is. And so I think we need to map right goals to or things you're trying to accomplish to what it is that you're actually doing. So, like, yeah, where are you right now with that stuff?
Jay Schwedelson:
I have a split brain. So on one half, my goal is for my agency to continue to expand out our offering in terms of the media. They're helping clients buy. So that's really what we're doing. We're executing on media buying for demand generation programs.
Jay Schwedelson:
An area that we're trying to grow in quite a bit is podcast media, ironically, because we're on a podcast, But really trying to organize that media better on behalf of our clients and also buying media with influencers and especially business influencers. I think that's a really big growing market. So growing the media options for my agency, that's number 1. The other piece is my media company, what we're calling Guru Media Hub, which incorporates all these virtual events and newsletters, all that. We're scaling up this media business that is purely focused on providing content to marketers at scale and for free, not just about email, it's a lot of different channels.
Jay Schwedelson:
So scaling up a media company is something I know nothing about, 0. And so and we're trying to do it so it's not boring and not like something people don't wanna be involved with. So scaling that up and trying to figure out as I go along and screwing it up, that's kind of the other half of my brain.
Dave:
If those are the things that you're trying to do, what does, I guess, success look like to you, and how do you start to measure that? Or what's the metric that you look at?
Jay Schwedelson:
Well I'll focus on the media company for a minute there. The success there is being able to build upon the success that we've had. So now we've put on these large scale virtual conferences that people seem to resonate with people and they really like and we know we can get people to want to come back every year. Now is there an appetite for other tentpole events? Like right now in that business, we have an event for email called Guru conference.
Jay Schwedelson:
We have event for direct mail called Delivered Conference. And then we have associated media around it, webinars, newsletters for direct mail now and email. The question becomes and what we're trying to see is, can we do other categories? So we're talking very seriously about a tentpole event for event marketing in general, where marketers who put on webinars or in person events or on demand video or virtual conferences, that there's an event about event marketing. Because in a lot of ways we feel, I feel that events in general, especially virtual events are misunderstood and there there's a better way to do them.
Jay Schwedelson:
If we educate the marketplace, I think it could be the benefit of everybody. So more of these tentpole events that we could build communities around, that would be a massive success for us in trying to figure out if we have the bandwidth to do that. Well, speaking of bandwidth, I mean, obviously, a part of this and a
Dave:
a challenge for businesses of any size really is just hiring great people. Do you have any processes in place? Like, how do you go about just hiring great people. Do you have any processes in place? Like how do you go about finding the people that are the right fit for your business?
Jay Schwedelson:
It's interesting. COVID really changed the game for my business because we were all in person. We had about a 100 people coming every single day. Obviously went virtual during COVID and we're a marketing services business, so we're not manufacturing anything. We went virtual and then after COVID, we did a survey, the whole company.
Jay Schwedelson:
We said, all right, who wants to come back in? And 100% of the people said, no, we don't wanna come back. And I said, oh, that's not good. And I said, you know what? I was watching other companies with their arbitrary, you have to come back in 3 days a week and you have to be here for this.
Jay Schwedelson:
And I'm like, why? It's so random. It's so weird. I would go visit, I would go visit a client and they would win these arbitrary days and I'd be there. I'm like where's everybody else?
Jay Schwedelson:
I go well everybody's days aren't on even the same dates. They come in some come in Monday. So you're here by yourself. I don't get it. And so I decided that we're gonna stay permanently flexible.
Jay Schwedelson:
You can come in if you want, no requirement to come in at all. And it was like the greatest employee perk that you could ever come up with. And I leased out the space in my building and it has allowed us to also broaden the scope of like we could hire people anywhere, doesn't matter. And having this ability to tell people we're fully remote, you never have to come in. It's like better than an increased salary for a lot of people.
Jay Schwedelson:
Doesn't be home, wants to be with their kids, no commute, all this stuff. So we've really been able to be successful in finding incredible talent just by sticking with the COVID playbook. So that's what we're doing and it's been interesting for us.
Dave:
I love that flexibility. It is interesting that you do have the ability to find talent that you wouldn't have found based on locale. Right? And I think that's really interesting. Is there anything in particular, though, that you look for when it comes to hiring?
Dave:
Like, are there types of people? Like, what are you looking for in an employee?
Jay Schwedelson:
I've kind of abandoned looking for executives that have the greatest resumes. I like finding, frankly, people that are fairly young in their careers that are just go getters. They're consuming content. I like when I go into his Linkedin profile, they're sharing a bunch of stuff that's really interesting to them. They have all these like little free certifications that they've gotten.
Jay Schwedelson:
I don't care that they were the director of whatever whatever. You could almost tell by how people interact online, how they function, you know, how they think and what they're all about. And so we find really cool people and then we interact, we hire them and we're like, okay, you're not good at sales actually, but you're assuming you're really good at like this marketing stuff. So let's pop you over here if you're into that. And they're like, okay, great.
Jay Schwedelson:
And so we try to find these go getter people and then we stick them in the right spot if they're game. That's been my successful formula. I it's probably not gonna be something you do at, you know, get your MBA and learn about, but it works for how we function.
Dave:
That's a great point. I mean, even when you think about just as a business owner yourself or anybody for that matter, it's really about, yeah, leaning into those strengths that you have and then finding people to fill the gaps that you don't have. That's a great way to look at employees too. Like, yeah, what's your thing? How do we how do we make you the best at that?
Dave:
And I'm using the best loosely, but, like, how do we focus there so that we can get what you're good at, right, and use that to our maximum advantage. I love that line of thinking. I think that's a great way to think about it. How often are you working on marketing the business and what would you say are the things that you do specifically?
Jay Schwedelson:
I have a bunch of standing calls every day, you know, with my sales group, with, a different group. So we have a standing marketing call every day. I'll tell you for my agency business, we don't do a lot of marketing at all. I would say almost all the business we get there is by referral. So we do very, very limited marketing.
Jay Schwedelson:
So put that one aside, but for my media company, with the events, especially with Google conference, and all we do an incredible amount of marketing and we are constantly testing everything. So testing email in every capacity, what we're sending to non engaged, engaged, subject lines, time of day, all that stuff. We are trying every new ad vehicle on every social platform. Whatever LinkedIn comes out with, we're testing it to see if it what it does, if it's good, if it's bad. The same thing on Instagram and meta and everything.
Jay Schwedelson:
We're testing everywhere just to see, you know, what works when. But we happen to be really deep right now. I think there's been a resurgence in email newsletters in terms of their performance, in terms of kind of the native ads and email newsletters that seem to be doing really, really well in the last year or so. So we're just trying to ride whatever marketing wave that we see out there. And the nice part for me is it gives me the ability then if I go out there and do a bunch of sessions at different conferences, I'll say, listen, this is what's working and this is what's not working because we're actually doing it.
Jay Schwedelson:
We see real data on it. So don't do this and do this because we're putting our money behind it. And then that's it. It's all about testing. And the crazy part, especially when getting into email, and the thing that always makes me laugh is people say, you know, email's legacy, email's old, email's dead.
Jay Schwedelson:
Yeah. The thing that is always shocking to me is how it's always actually changing. It's not this like static channel that whatever you did 10 years ago, you could just be doing that same thing and it's gonna work exactly the same way. People change, reactions change, our inboxes change. So we're constantly testing and seeing what's working, what's not working type of thing.
Dave:
I guess the question is like, how do you find the time for marketing then? It seems like ingrained in you, like you are a marketer. And so maybe it's a little less of a thing that you're like, oh, we gotta do this. But I guess, what does that look like for you? Like, what is the team that you have doing that?
Dave:
What are you doing yourself? Like, what do you have other people working on? Like, how does that all play out for you?
Jay Schwedelson:
Yeah. We look at 10 people in our marketing group. And I would say the majority of what we have, I don't touch at all. It's they have regular newsletters going out, social posts going out, content they're creating, trying to drive, people filling out different forms and I'll see stuff and like, oh, that looks good, that doesn't look good, whatever. For me personally, I have my own newsletter, which drives me a little crazy because it's always hard to get to.
Jay Schwedelson:
It's a good outlet for me to try to capture what I'm saying. I have a podcast that I only started about 4 months ago or so and I ended up, it's one of those things I wish I would've started even longer ago. I know you've been doing Oh, yeah. Thing for, you know, a while then.
Dave:
Yeah. For a while now. Yeah.
Jay Schwedelson:
It's been a phenomenal outlet for me to meet people and engage with people and do all that. I didn't know that. It is a little time consuming. I won't buy it. That's part of what's on my marketing plate.
Jay Schwedelson:
And then at 15 minutes a day, I should have told you this is because about my day, 15 minutes a day I spend on LinkedIn in the morning. When COVID hit, I had maybe about a 1000 connections. And as a business owner, I was like, oh my God, what is this? Am I gonna do a lot of business? Like what has happening?
Jay Schwedelson:
The world's shutting down, I had payroll, what is gonna happen? And then I remember one morning I woke up and I was like, I need to meet a 1,000,000,000 more people So that way I can get a lot more clients because if not, I might go out of business. This was like my light bulb. So that day came to where I go, I need to get on LinkedIn and I just need to meet as many human beings as follow and start posting. And before that, I never posted.
Jay Schwedelson:
I just didn't. So then I just started posting and random stuff. And I was like, woah. If you start posting, people start interacting with you, meet really cool people and without doing much. And so I decided I gotta lean into this thing.
Jay Schwedelson:
And then over the last, I don't know, 2, 3 years, whatever it's been, I started posting 4 or 5 times a week. I spend 15 minutes a day on it. In the morning, I like, comment, whatever. And it has transformed my business. Just by doing that, I have a bunch of followers and people I'm connected with now and it's like I post something and anytime I post them, I get people writing me, hey, can we talk?
Jay Schwedelson:
I'm like, this is crazy. So I encourage anybody who's not deep on LinkedIn, do it because it's not hard and it is bananas. So that's not part of, like, my marketing journey. Can we
Dave:
dig in a little bit there? Right? Because I think one of the difficult things, particularly with social media, is that in many levels of beast, you have to feed. You have to be involved. You have to be doing thing.
Dave:
Again, consistency is gonna come up. And so I love that you're saying, yeah, you've got 15 minutes. So is that 15 minutes actually scheduled in your calendar?
Jay Schwedelson:
Every day, 15 minutes. And then I do it, generally speaking, from 8:30 to 8:45. And the reason being is posting something from 8:30 to 8:45 is the best time to post something on LinkedIn, period hands down. It's not before 8:30 and it's not after 9 o'clock. It is that window.
Jay Schwedelson:
So that's when I want to post something and then I'll go back to anything I posted previously. Hey, if I like commented, whatever, I'll try to react to it at that time. And I try to go on other posts and interact and whatever. And what people don't understand about LinkedIn is they think that things have to be slick and they have something really important to say, and they need to have this amazing thing that they're and that's not the case. It's literally like one quick idea or this is something I read that's really interesting or here's a stat I saw that's really interesting or here's a meme that I think is funny and then move on to the next day.
Jay Schwedelson:
And who cares if you got a like a lot of interaction or not, you just keep on going. And if you do that consistently and you don't stop and you post 4 to 5 times a week consistently for a year, I promise you, you're gonna meet a lot of people.
Dave:
Do you have a particular so you have a time set, obviously, that's scheduled. Yeah. Is there a plan beyond that?
Jay Schwedelson:
For me? No. I have no plan. I generally have no idea what I'm posting that day. I will look down.
Jay Schwedelson:
I'll read something like, this is interesting post. And then or if I'm sitting on the couch, this week, I was watching the dolphin game, they were losing. And so it was terrible. So I'm sitting there and I will make a meme and then I'll have it in my phone and then I'll look at my phone. Did I make a meme this week?
Jay Schwedelson:
Oh, I did post. And that is literally the the level of depth that goes into whatever it is I put on mine.
Dave:
Yeah. I wanna kick us back to email here for a second. So you mentioned your personal newsletter, which is the one that is difficult. And I find the same thing. And and what I've learned this year as because I've I've done newsletters in the past, and I've started a new one, I guess, this past year.
Dave:
And so I found, obviously, through these conversations is that what I didn't do was actually I didn't plan enough with them because I'd be like, alright. I'll see what comes up. Like, I know when I was gonna do them, but then because I didn't know what I was gonna do, it was very easy to not do it. And so that's the situation which I'm remedying for the new year. I'm curious.
Dave:
For you, is that similar, or do you approach that differently than you approach social? Like, how does that all come into play for you?
Jay Schwedelson:
Yeah. With my newsletter, what I try to do is I capture thoughts or trends. I publish it once a month right now. I should be doing more. Anything that seems of interest, I I I have a folder on my phone, put it in there, and then once a month, I say, okay.
Jay Schwedelson:
It'll be like a Sunday. I'm like, we're locking in. We're gonna do this. I will tell you the newsletter hack that people don't do enough of that I think is incredible is LinkedIn newsletters. And I'm gonna give a commercial for LinkedIn newsletters for a second because people don't understand why it's the most powerful thing in social media and it's an email play.
Jay Schwedelson:
So I take my newsletter, whatever it is I said hit send on, and I also publish it as a LinkedIn newsletter. Now you're saying, who cares? Nobody cares. And it's really quick what a LinkedIn newsletter is, is that if you go on your profile, all you need is 150 either connections or followers on your personal page or your company page. And I don't work for LinkedIn, so I'm not getting any doubts, right?
Jay Schwedelson:
If you go and you literally hit control C, you copy whatever newsletter you have and then you control v, you go on to Linkedin, you click on the same thing you would do when you do a post. It says write an article, you click that you want to publish a newsletter. You publish that newsletter the first time, could be on your personal feed or your company page feed, okay? And you're literally just taking the same content that you mail out and you're publishing the newsletter. 2 things happen.
Jay Schwedelson:
It does a post on LinkedIn. That doesn't matter. But when you publish one newsletter on LinkedIn, what it does, it first of all, invites every single person that you are connected to or that follows you to subscribe to your newsletter, which is crazy. And then without you ever doing anything ever again, it invites every single person that follows you or connects with you or your company to subscribe to your newsletter if you publish the first one. So let's say you publish a newsletter today, first one on LinkedIn, and then you don't publish another one for a year on LinkedIn.
Jay Schwedelson:
You never do. Every person that follows you is still gonna be asked if they wanna subscribe. So when you publish that first one, okay, you're gonna be building up a subscriber base of your newsletter without doing any it's the only thing in social media that actually beats the algorithm. So to give you an idea, I realized this not too long ago. I published my first newsletter on Linkedin.
Jay Schwedelson:
Never thought about it. Okay. Without asking anybody, I now have 17,000 people that are subscribed to my LinkedIn newsletter. That's not even my regular newsletter. And then when you hit send, it emails out the newsletter.
Jay Schwedelson:
It doesn't just post it, it emails it up as an email. So to me, what you wanna do is publish your newsletter like you regularly do, your email 1, then simultaneously put it out on LinkedIn. You get 2 bangs for the same buck. It's awesome. It's a win.
Jay Schwedelson:
So there you go.
Dave:
Gotcha. Good tip there. How do you reconcile or maybe it's not even reconcile because I I mean, it is about awareness and and things like that. But, like, there's an argument to be made for, I guess, ownership of those contacts.
Jay Schwedelson:
Yeah. Right. There's a big issue, which is why email is the most important thing on the planet. Your email is the most important asset in your company. No questions asked.
Jay Schwedelson:
Okay? It is the most important thing and to your point why? Linkedin, Meta, whatever, that is rented proper. Any day of the week they could turn the knob off and you are done. So every day you need to have a program in place of how am I growing my email list?
Jay Schwedelson:
Because that is the home that you own, right? Not the thing that you're renting. So always the priority is your email list, grow that email list, get the person subscribed. But in addition to you want to be, on the rented property as well because there's a lot of exposure there. But if you have a rock solid plan in place every day in place to grow your database, your email database, you should stop what you're doing and that should be your absolute focus.
Dave:
I guess what are the top things that you're seeing working in email today based on all the data that you have? Do you do do any new nonprofit work at all or just A
Jay Schwedelson:
little bit. No. It's not.
Dave:
A little bit? Yeah. So, you know, I'd be curious just even if you were to think what's working, what's not, and then even is there a breakdown between b to b, b to c nonprofit? What's the differences there?
Jay Schwedelson:
The way I always like to look at is what are things that marketers can do that are really easy that costs no money that they could do in like 5 seconds to have an impact. That's what really matters to me. I, of course, like to look at the subject line first because the subject line, you know, people always be like, well, it doesn't matter. I mean, people open. It's all about click and respond.
Jay Schwedelson:
I'm like, well, if they don't open the email, we got a problem here. That subject line is crazy important and people say, well, how many characters can have in the subject line? I'm like, well, who cares? It's not about the number of characters or subject line. What it's about is nobody reads the whole subject.
Jay Schwedelson:
They're reading the first few characters. That's when they're deciding. So people don't spend enough time thinking about what are literally the first few characters or the first word that you're putting in that subject line and we see it make a massive difference. So for example, if you start your subject line with a number, we're seeing this for the last year for sure, with a number it does incredibly well. The 7 things HR pros need to know.
Jay Schwedelson:
The 3 biggest fashion trends for the winter. It's authoritative, it feels like it's definitive, it feels like oh I'm going to get something out of this And just by starting with a number we see an open rate increase of over 20% just by doing that. Same thing if you start your subject line with an emoji or you start your subject line with a capitalized word like the word new or the word today. I think one of the biggest fails in the world of email marketing is the spreading of misinformation through old best practices. If you go right now and you Google spam trigger words you'll find these lists, these crazy lists of like 300 words words you can never put because you'll go to the spam folder.
Jay Schwedelson:
So you put them in your subject line. And that is information from 10, 15 years ago. And And it's like you wanna bang your head against the wall because, yeah, that was how you wanted the junk folder 10, 15 years ago. That's not what's happening now. We need to liberate the world, man.
Jay Schwedelson:
You could write like a regular person in the And so capitalizing that first word, using an emoji, using a And so capitalizing that first word, using an emoji, using a number, using brackets, using exclamation point or a question mark, these things in the subject line really boost interaction. So we're always focused on that. And then when you get inside the email, I think the other secret sauce thing that people mess up on and nonprofits is a great example is the call to action button. If you are a B2B guy and you are trying to promote a piece of content and you're trying to get people to download it, what are you putting on that button in your email? You're putting the word download.
Jay Schwedelson:
If you're trying to get somebody to go to an event like a webinar, what are you putting in that word? You're writing register. If you're a nonprofit, what are you putting on that call to action button? You're writing the word donate. All of these things are a benefit to you, the marketer.
Jay Schwedelson:
It's not a benefit to the recipient. And so what we've seen is if you write your call to action buttons in the first person, it'll actually lift your click through rate on those buttons by about 25%. So if it's a non profit, instead of the word donate, it's saying I wanna help now. It says count me in. If it's an event, instead of saying register, it's saying save my seat.
Jay Schwedelson:
It's these things that get people excited that make them feel a part of it and it's in the subconscious. It's not like somebody looks at the button and says, this is the greatest button I've ever seen. I love it. But it gets them going. So those are things that matter, that impact results that we're constantly, you know, trying to push.
Dave:
Love that. So big question for you. This is probably the most important question of the whole time because I know you're into this reality TV. If there's one thing I know about Jay, I think that's what I got around at things. Right?
Dave:
So if you were to recommend a reality TV show to someone who's never watched any reality TV, and it can be of any time, what would it be and why?
Jay Schwedelson:
That's actually one of the greatest questions I've ever seen in my life.
Dave:
I knew you'd like that.
Jay Schwedelson:
I would say the starter pack. There's a 2 bold starter pack. 1 is anything in the bachelor fan franchise. Okay? Obviously, the the new season of the bachelor is coming out in January.
Jay Schwedelson:
This guy, Joey, is gonna be the bachelor. I think it's gonna be one of the best seasons. So The Bachelor is kind of the OG, reality show. And if you've never gone down that rabbit hole, check out the show in January. And second to that now is Love is Blind, which is on Netflix.
Jay Schwedelson:
And they're coming out with the next season soon. It's hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey. It is a great show. When I say great show about any of these shows, they're all horror. You'll lose your faith in humanity.
Jay Schwedelson:
You will doubt why you're even existing on this planet. But it's also very relaxing. That person. Right. You feel better about yourself.
Jay Schwedelson:
You feel better. But they're like, I'm that person. Yeah. You
Dave:
feel better about yourself. You feel better.
Jay Schwedelson:
You feel better. You're like, I'm not there. I'm not that desperate. And so you like to sit up a little like, alright, I got something going on. I'm not that person.
Jay Schwedelson:
So I love it. And it's just I don't know why it's relaxing to me. And it's, I don't I root for all of these people on the shows. I hope they have great. Do you watch it?
Jay Schwedelson:
Do you watch any of it?
Dave:
The closest I get to reality TV is cooking shows, and I would say what's getting there is, like, kitchen nightmares. Like, that's really those I enjoy. Right? But even that is, like No. It's bad.
Dave:
Oh, yeah. I just started watching it, and it's it they're ridiculous. It's it's so, like, over the top now. Like, the whole setup, I just
Jay Schwedelson:
I love Gordon Ramsay. I love that guy.
Dave:
Yeah. I mean, he's the best. He's great. I get to so, like, I like the cooking stuff. That's the closest I get to, like, reality reality.
Dave:
But to your point of, I guess, feeling better about yourself is one thing, but for me, it's it's almost the opposite that I feel so sorry for this world watching other things that I'm just like, man, I can't do it.
Jay Schwedelson:
Just because you're a good person. That's because you're a nice person.
Dave:
Jay, business owners listening today, anything you want them to kinda keep in mind, walk away with, what could you leave them with?
Jay Schwedelson:
Just going back to something we said earlier is just get it out. If we're talking about email, just hit send. And also don't think that you're sending too much, you're not. And then the other piece of it is don't let the loudest voice in the room dictate your plans. What I mean by that is a lot of times business owners that maybe aren't close to email and things, maybe they'll send out an email campaign and they'll get back 1 or 2 of these replies to say, why am I on this list?
Jay Schwedelson:
This is terrible. This is unacceptable. Why are you sending me so much email? And it's like this nasty gram. And then you get it and it literally you can't you can't get it out of your mind.
Jay Schwedelson:
And then you'll go back and you'll change your plans because you got this one email or two emails from this very very angry person. That's really not reflective of your overall database and everything that's going on and so don't let somebody that's having a bad day totally change your course and what your plans are because you're doing the right thing. Keep on going and stay consistent.
Dave:
Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, don't be afraid to fail in marketing. Now it's likely you've experienced failure in some parts of your business, and I'll bet you also learned something from those failures. It's the same when it comes to marketing. You need to do things to find out what works for you and your business.
Dave:
So don't let fear of failure hold you back. As Jay mentioned, thanks to failure, he has a really good idea of the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't work because he's done it. He's tried it himself. The only way you'll ever know is if you're acting on the advice you consume. Number 2.
Dave:
Just hit send. Jay rightly mentions that perfection is the enemy of progress. If we're talking about email, just hit send. Maybe you find yourself in waiting mode. Waiting to have the most perfect thing set up, the most perfect email workflow, email design, or the newsletter that's written perfectly.
Dave:
You always want it to be just right. Jay's advice, just get it out there. Iterate and keep going. Consistency wins out if you do that. You'll beat 95% of everybody else that you're competing with just by being there and doing it.
Dave:
So keep going. And also, don't think that you're sending too much. You're not. Get the email out and get another customer. And number 3, don't let the loudest voices dictate your plans.
Dave:
Now Jay recognizes that sometimes you may get 1 or 2 replies from someone who says, why am I on this list? This is terrible. Why are you sending me so much email? Well, a nasty gram like this can really ruin your day. And then you'll go back and you'll change your plans because you've got this 1 or 2 emails from this very angry person that's not really reflective of your overall database.
Dave:
Jay's recommendation, don't let somebody that's having a bad day totally change your plans because you're doing the right thing. Just keep going and stay consistent. Here's your action item for today. What's the one thing that really resonated with you during this episode? Take that as a sign to take action.
Dave:
Implement something so you can fail or succeed. Either way, you'll have something to pull from in the future. Keep going, friend. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
Dave:
You can email me directly at dave.charestt@constantcontact. com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.