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*Formerly known as Solopreneur: The One-Person Business Podcast*
Welcome to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the weekly podcast that dives deep into the world of solopreneurship. Join us as we bring you insightful interviews with industry experts and successful solopreneurs who have mastered the art of running their own businesses.
Are you a solopreneur looking for guidance on how to attract clients? Or maybe you're searching for ways to stay motivated and overcome the challenges of working alone. Perhaps you're even struggling with the intricacies of taxes and financial management. No matter what obstacles you face, The Aspiring Solopreneur Podcast is here to provide you with the knowledge, inspiration, and practical advice you need.
In each episode, our hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries, sit down with a diverse range of guests, including seasoned solopreneurs, marketing gurus, financial experts, and productivity specialists. Together, they unpack the secrets to solo success, sharing their personal stories, strategies, and actionable tips.
Learn from those who have paved the way before you, as they reveal their tried-and-true methods for growing their company of one.
Subscribe now and join our community of solopreneurs who are committed to achieving their goals, mastering their craft, and creating a fulfilling and prosperous business on their own terms. Get ready to unlock the secrets to solo success and become the best version of yourself as a one-person business owner.
Want to learn from and grow with other solopreneurs? Join our movement for FREE at https://www.lifestarr.com/solosuite-intro-for-solopreneurs
Would never walk out anywhere and say I'm an email expert, and I don't think anybody that calls themselves an expert in any marketing category actually is an expert. And the reason I say that is everything is moving so fast, and within your own company, your own business, you always have to be testing.
Intro:Welcome to solopreneur, the one person business podcast for professionals ready to take charge of their company of 1 and reclaim their freedom. Join us as we bring you inspiring stories, invaluable insights, and practical strategies from successful solopreneurs and industry experts. Get ready to feel empowered to create a thriving business that aligns with your unique goals and allows you to live life on your own terms. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries.
Carly Ries:Welcome to solopreneur, the one person business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries.
Joe Rando:And I'm Joe Rando.
Carly Ries:And, Joe, our guest today needs no introduction. If you are in the marketing world, you know who this guy is. He is one of the leading voices in it. He is also one of the top experts in email marketing, which is what we are gonna get to today. Joe and I follow him. we listen to his podcast, LinkedIn. We've attended his event. He is wonderful. And if if you don't just want it for the content, tune in to everything he says just for his personality. Jay Schwedelson, our guest is just he's like a cup of coffee anytime you consume any of his content, whether it's listening to him speak or whatever.
Carly Ries:He's just a jolt of energy. We can't get enough of what he produces, so we are so excited to have him on this show so much so that Joe is wearing one of his sweatshirts. And we'll let, Jay, we'll let you talk about that, but, pink is not usually your color, Joe, and you can totally pull it off. You're rocking it. And, Jay, welcome to the show.
Jay Schwedelson:I gotta tell you. I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna make my kids watch that intro because they might actually think I'm remotely cool. Probably not, but I can't thank you enough. I'm super stoked to be here.
Jay Schwedelson:We're gonna have a lot of fun. Yes. Joe is wearing a very bright pink sweatshirt from our Guru conference event. I appreciate you repping the brand. It's a super large free virtual event, and you rock and Carly rocks, and we all rock,
Carly Ries:And we're all parents, and we're all gonna look cool today on this podcast. Jay, let's just start from the beginning. For people that don't know, based on your background, how did you first become we're gonna talk about email marketing. You are such we're talking about guru events, so I'm gonna call you a guru for marketing. You are well versed in so many areas of it, but today we're gonna focus on email specifically.
Carly Ries:So what led you to become the authority in that field?
Jay Schwedelson:Well, I don't know, if I'm bad, but you know, I grew up in a marketing family. So my mom was a school teacher, my dad worked at a magazine, and they decided in the 70s that, Hey, they didn't like their jobs. And they decided to try to start what was then a direct mail business in my garage. And I was very young, I was very short, so I was like 5. And, that's what they did.
Jay Schwedelson:In our garage was this business, this direct mail business. And every night at dinner, that's what we talked about at the dinner table was marketing and return on investment. And you spend a dollar, you try to make $2, and that's what I learned. And so, in college, I tried to start up an Internet business. It went sort of well, sort of, not great.
Jay Schwedelson:That was in, like, the early nineties. And then coming out of that, I was like, you know, email was just starting to get going. Right? Now it seems ridiculous, but it was just starting to get going. You know, people like a Prodigy account and a copy server account and all this stuff.
Jay Schwedelson:And I was like, you know, this is exciting. This is interesting. This is, like, for me, direct mail, but it's now digital. So I decided to go full steam on that. You know, fast forward, I have this agency called Outcome Media where we work with business and consumer clients.
Jay Schwedelson:We don't just do email. We do direct mail. We do podcast advertising, digital media, all that stuff. But the thing that really catapulted me in the email space was that, gosh, about 15 years ago, so many of our clients were coming to us and saying, well, how do you write a subject line for the emails that we're doing with you with you all? And our team would be like, well, do this or do that.
Jay Schwedelson:I'm like, well, this is annoying. We need to do something better than than just say do this or do that. So I'm like, why don't we make a tool? So I was sitting on my couch one night, and then I go on GoDaddy, and I register the URL subject line.com. And I'm like, let's make a tool around writing subject lines, which seemed ridiculous at the time.
Jay Schwedelson:And we put this tool up that used all of our data, and so any marketer can go to this website, which they still can today, put in their subject line, or give you a score, how good or bad it was, and it'll help you to improve your campaigns. That really got some heavy usage. We've checked over 15,000,000 subject lines now, and that kind of put me more and more into kind of, in the email space and try to come out with best practices and information. So kinda one thing led to the other, and I'm I've never done anything different than just be around marketing. So I'm passionate about it.
Jay Schwedelson:I think anybody can do it, and I think just fun to test stuff.
Carly Ries:Well, your passion is so contagious, and, I know you have opinions on a lot of things when it comes to email subject lines and everything these days. So let's actually start there. What are people doing wrong in the world of subject lines and what as of today, what's it's January 15, 2024. What do they need to be focusing on?
Jay Schwedelson:I would say there are 2 things that people are doing wrong. 1 is listening to people like me. Okay? I would never walk out of anywhere and say I'm an email expert, and I don't think anybody that calls themselves an expert in any marketing category actually is an expert. The reason I say that is everything is moving so fast, and within your own company, your own business, you always have to be testing those.
Jay Schwedelson:But one of the things that email experts, still put out there is this big myth that what you write in your subject line, can cause you to go to the junk folder or the spam folder. You know, 10 or 15 years ago, if you put the word free in your subject line, if you capitalize the word in your subject line, if you use a question mark or an exclamation point in your subject line, 10, 15 years ago, all of those things, would cause you to go to the junk folder because the receiving email systems were looking out for capitalization and certain words, like the word free and question marks and dollar signs and all this stuff. You are getting filtered because of content. That has changed. You don't get filtered anymore.
Jay Schwedelson:You don't go to the junk folder or the spam folder because of content. And if you went online right now and you googled, you know, things to avoid in the subject line, you'd see all these lists of spam trigger words, spamming words to avoid, and it's not it's not reality. You don't get filtered for that reason. You get filtered for people not opening up your emails and clicking on them and whatnot. So the first thing that I think people are doing wrong is, unfortunately, relying on best practice information that they're finding online, which is usually, outdated even though it has today's date on it.
Jay Schwedelson:The second most important thing in your subject line that you always wanna be thinking about is the number one thing that drives performance in your subject line is having some form of urgency always if you have an offer. If it's a newsletter, that's different. But if you're sending out something, you're trying to get something sold, whether you're a business or consumer marketer, you need to have some form of urgency because we, people, don't react to subject lines that are just just static. Right? We wanna see somebody that says 2 days left, last chance, only 24 hours, whatever your offer is.
Jay Schwedelson:Right? You wanna include urgency. And even if you don't have something that's expiring, let's say you're promoting a tip sheet or a guide or whatever, and that's always gonna be there, you still wanna say things like don't miss out or hurry because we do not react. We do not open up messages that do not have some form of urgency in that subject line. So those are the 2 things in my mind that I think are most important.
Carly Ries:What would you say drives you the craziest these days when you see it in a subject line?
Jay Schwedelson:I think the thing that drives me bananas is thinking that people will read your whole subject line. Anything in the second half of your subject line is irrelevant. You could literally write in the second half of your subject line, you're a loser. Okay? And it won't matter because no one will actually read it.
Jay Schwedelson:No one's gonna get to the second half of the subject line. And the reason I say that is that a lot of times marketers make the mistake of they'll put the most important thing in their subject line at the end, you know, that 20% off discount or the webinar, registration ends today. Whatever it is, they put it in the second half. Nobody reads the whole subject line. So what you do in those first few characters, or all that matter.
Jay Schwedelson:Right? If you capitalize the first word of your subject line, you'll see an increase in your open rate. Okay. If you start your subject line with a number, you see an increase in open rate. When you do these things at the beginning of your subject line, they stand out, they get the person's attention, and that's how you win.
Jay Schwedelson:And don't put stuff in that second half of your subject line because that's where responses go to die.
Carly Ries:That is such a great point. And I think some people think they just wanna be catchy, especially these days with Chat gbt. They're like, well, chat gbt said, delve into blah blah, emoji emoji emoji, everything that I think they're kinda taking it from AI and putting it in there thinking that that's accurate, and it's just not.
Joe Rando:But but emoji wise, I know I've made fun of Chat GPT for overdoing it with the emojis, but you are a believer in emojis in subject line. Right, Jay? I mean, you think emojis can be powerful in subject lines. Correct?
Jay Schwedelson:A 150,000%, and I'll tell you why. For both business and consumer marketers. Now, look, it's a little obvious for a consumer marketer. Like, oh, yeah. Why wouldn't I have a nice little fun graphical symbol?
Jay Schwedelson:You know? If it's Valentine's Day coming up, I'm not gonna put a heart in it. Why wouldn't you do that? First of all, you should. It 100% increases open rate performance, the percentage of people opening up your emails.
Jay Schwedelson:It's proven a 1000000 times over that it does. On the business side, marketers think, oh, I wouldn't use an emoji. You know, I promote to a regulated industry. I promote to health care. I promote to legal.
Jay Schwedelson:I can't use an emoji. That's embarrassing. That's not reality because we are all just humans. And when we do the social scroll in our inbox, what we're trying to do is what what can we do as a marketer to get our message to stand out against everybody else's? And we have to stop.
Jay Schwedelson:You know, emoji has a ridiculous name. It's almost got bad PR. If it had a different name, right, if on the business side it was called a business icon, you would use it. Like, oh, I wanna put a business icon in my subject line. Right?
Jay Schwedelson:And you could start your subject line with a calendar emoji. Let's say you're promoting an event or just a check mark, and it stands out, and it works. So emojis are super powerful. And if you if you're not testing them, you should. That mean, you shouldn't use them on all your emails because then you become wallpaper.
Jay Schwedelson:But if it's not part of your arsenal, I think you're leaving a really valuable tool, on the table.
Joe Rando:This is so great. I'm working on email right now, like, right before we started this, which should change the whole thing.
Jay Schwedelson:Right. It's all my fault. And, you know, it's all about testing.
Joe Rando:Good. Good.
Jay Schwedelson:You know, we talked today, and we had a lot you know, 10 different ideas, and listeners are like, oh, I'm gonna go trial that stuff, and then some of them work and some of them don't. You can't be like, oh, it didn't work. Those those 3 people, they have no idea what they're talking about. That's not marketing. You know?
Jay Schwedelson:It's always about testing. And what you test today, if it works or didn't work, test it again in 3, 6 months because literally, it's always changed.
Carly Ries:It's so funny that you said that joke because I sent you, like, 5 emails or so to review last night that I wanna send out today or tomorrow. And I'm like, hold that thought. I'll send you an edited version in a few hours. I'll fire them. That's okay.
Carly Ries:I'll get with that. Well, so okay. Let's say people nail the subject line, they go to your tool, they're like, typed it in, rave reviews, let's do this. What are you seeing people doing wrong within the email itself? Because that's one thing to click through to the email.
Carly Ries:It's another thing to get them to convert on whatever your CTA is. So what are your thoughts there again early January 2024?
Jay Schwedelson:Yeah. I would say, the first thing we think about is how visually boring your message looks. What I mean by that is, let's say you're promoting something. You have copy in there. You're trying, you're writing something.
Jay Schwedelson:You want people to take advantage of. We just did this whole study where we looked at literally the number of lines of text in a paragraph in an email. Right? So if you open up an email and there's a little paragraph in there, if it has 3 lines of text versus 5 lines of text, just visually, we see the 3 lines of text lead to, like, over a 20% increase in click through rate versus 5 lines of text visually. Because it's like when you get a text message from a from a friend, right, or relative, and it's got a big block of text, I can't look at that right now.
Jay Schwedelson:You know, and you put it off to the side. You're like, I'm going to come back this later because I don't know what that drama is. I just don't have time for it. And that's the way that you care about, that you're a friend or relative. But when you get an email that you barely cared about, that you barely opened, and then visually you see a big block of text, you're immediately like, and then you just don't even read it, and you move on.
Jay Schwedelson:It doesn't matter what it says. Could say you won the lottery. It's irrelevant. Right? So, visually, you wanna think about how can you be more concise because having that three lines of text with maybe a few bullets, that is how you win.
Jay Schwedelson:And I think marketers are so excited to share whatever it is they wanna say. They don't realize that nobody actually cares. Right? They're just trying to move all over really, really quickly. So, that's the body copy.
Jay Schwedelson:And then, you know, we talk about CTAs and all sorts of other stuff. The body copy to me is really important.
Carly Ries:Well, let's do talk about CTAs because I well, actually, before we get to the body copy, where do you stand with videos and emails and gifts and all that? Are you thinking the the as minimal as you can get, the better?
Jay Schwedelson:No. So, that's an interesting question. First of all, if it's a a consumer email, love GIFs. Anime GIFs for the win, no deliverability problems. That is not a video.
Jay Schwedelson:An animated GIF is really just 3 or 4 images that are tied together. You'll have no deliverability problems, and it's really fun to have stuff moving around on a consumer oriented email. On a business email, especially if you're trying to get video consumed. Right? You wanna get you have an on demand video.
Jay Schwedelson:You have a short form video. You have a webinar on demand. Whatever it is you want your people to digest. Right? You have this video.
Jay Schwedelson:You want people to watch it. There is one way that works better than any other way using email to get people to watch a video, and it is not trying to embed a video in email. Don't embed a video into email. That's weird. You're gonna have deliverability problems.
Jay Schwedelson:I don't care if anybody says it's strange. The other tactic that people do that I don't think is the best tactic is they make an animated GIF, of, like, the start of the video, and they make it look like you open up the video, it's business email. It looks like the video is getting going, and marketers are like, well, we'll do that. Now we will click on it, and they'll wanna see more. Right?
Jay Schwedelson:That's kind of a go to move that a lot of business marketers do. That's not the one that we see work the best. What we see work the best is you take a screenshot, an image screenshot of the start of your video, and then you take a big red play button, and you stick it on top of that image. Okay? And then you send out the email, okay, with the picture of it's literally one image with a big red play button on it.
Jay Schwedelson:And then what do we do? When we see a big image with the big play button on it, we cannot stop ourselves. Right? We are trained. It's like Pavlov.
Jay Schwedelson:We are trained to click that button. We click the button, takes you to a destination page. You have that same image, same play button, and we just hit the button again, and we watch it, and we play. When you follow that path, we see that to be, exponential increase in terms of video consumption, that you're promoting via email. So so that to me is the number one way to go.
Carly Ries:I love that. Yeah. And it makes so much sense. And it's funny because we do just do it mindlessly. It's amazing how much autopilot we get it to do with these kind of things.
Joe Rando:I must watch video.
Jay Schwedelson:It's so true, though. Right? It's like we are we don't even realize what we're trained to. It's weird.
Joe Rando:But there was an arrow on it.
Jay Schwedelson:Right?
Carly Ries:Well, so let's get into the CTA because I feel like at one point, and I'm going back, gosh, 2016 at this point, but
Carly Ries:You need to put a hyperlink to your CTA in the top paragraph. You need to include the CTA at the bottom. You need to do this, blah blah blah. And I feel like for years, people follow that, and I still see that to this day. And I'm just curious, like, what is working in CTAs?
Carly Ries:How often do you put it in there? What format? Yada yada.
Jay Schwedelson:Yeah. For sure. Listen. You wanna add more, not less.
Jay Schwedelson:Okay? The key thing about your call to action buttons, the actual buttons of people clicking on to go to take advantage of the offer is I think the biggest mistake marketers make is the words on the buttons, the actual words on the buttons. Right? So let's say you are promoting a webinar, and you send out your email and you have your button in the email. What does the button say?
Jay Schwedelson:9 times out of 10, it says register. Okay. That's what it says. That's garbage. Okay?
Jay Schwedelson:What we see is that when a call action button is written in the first person, we actually see click through rates increase over 25%. What I mean by that is, let's say you get a webinar promotion. One webinar promotion says register. The other webinar promotion says save my seat, or it says I want in, or it says, yes. I can't wait.
Jay Schwedelson:What are you gonna click on first? Register or save my seat? It gets you excited. It's all that action of you getting involved.
Jay Schwedelson:And the same thing with on the consumer side. Is it, buy now, which is a benefit to the sender, right, or save now, which is a benefit to me, the recipient? Thinking about the language on those buttons. And, by the way, it could be really long. Your call action button doesn't need to just be 2 words.
Jay Schwedelson:It could be 10 words. It doesn't matter. Right? So the language on those buttons can have a huge impact on your overall performance, and it costs you nothing. It takes 3 seconds.
Jay Schwedelson:And it's like, why not? So I'm a big fan of testing everything with those call to action buttons.
Carly Ries:Okay. That is a great point. And I wanna take a step back for a second because I feel like all this is such useful information provided you have a list to send to. And we, if you send an email to one person, it's like, well, who really cares if you get really in the weeds with this? And so for schoolpreneurs, they're a one man show.
Carly Ries:They're doing this all by themselves. How would you recommend they start building and growing their list so that they can be effective with email?
Jay Schwedelson:See, I really love that question because I feel that pain, and and a lot of times you'll hear stuff like, you know, go grow your list. Like, okay. How? Like, literally, how? Like, what how do we do that?
Jay Schwedelson:And so here's what I would do. Right? If I'm starting from literally 0 and nobody knows who I am, here's what I do. I would create a piece of content, at least 1, that is really compelling. Like, give away the store.
Jay Schwedelson:Okay? Whatever it is that you got in your brain or whatever the that piece of content that's gonna be the most useful out there, and you make this, you know, 2 page thingamabob. You know, for me, we started with this thing that we have an email calendar. The vessel where it stays to send out emails. It's this calendar that we send out, and, we use the app to really drive a lot of, list building. So you get a piece of content that you think is really exciting to people. You make it sound really cool too. Alright? And you have to share that everywhere on every social you possibly can.
Jay Schwedelson:And then most important thing you can do is make sure that you have a a a pop up contact capture on your website. Somebody comes to your website, and that pop up pops up and says, hey. Do you want the latest, guide to blah blah blah, or do you want the 10% off discount blah blah? And you say, put in your email address, and we're gonna give it to you. That pop up contact capture, you will be shocked at how fast you will grow your list.
Jay Schwedelson:And out there, somebody listening is like, oh, those are annoying. I don't like those. I would never fill that out. Well, guess what? About 10% of everyone that sees it actually does fill it out.
Jay Schwedelson:And what never happens is people just abandon your website. What they do is when they see the pop up and they don't like it, they click that little x on the top right hand corner, and they go on to your site. But what you get is you get the person's email address, and that's the most valuable asset in your company. So create that piece of content, share it everywhere, everywhere you possibly can, and do the pop up contact capture, and you will grow your list.
Carly Ries:So I have a question for you on that. You said that it collecting the email address is the most valuable asset for your company. So the audience that we're talking to today, they are running every aspect of their business. They're doing operations. They're doing marketing, sales, everything.
Carly Ries:What emphasis should they be putting on email marketing from a priority standpoint versus the rest of their business? Is that a huge deal for growing their whole business or can they focus on other areas and kinda put email as like a secondary thing?
Jay Schwedelson:So that's a good question. It's not that you should be focusing on email marketing, but what you have to have everything focused on is collecting the email address. No matter what you're doing, you have to be collecting and and always be asking for an email address. When you're sleeping and when you wake up, there should be some mechanisms that are going on in your business that are out there trying to get more email addresses for your business. It is absolutely gonna be the linchpin to everything that you do.
Jay Schwedelson:Like, people try to be everywhere. okay. Well, we need to be on Facebook, and we need to be on x, and we need to be on TikTok, and we need to be on LinkedIn, and we need to be all no, You don't. No.
Jay Schwedelson:It's irrelevant. Okay. That's irrelevant. Okay.
Jay Schwedelson:Maybe pick one platform. Be on LinkedIn. Great. Focus on that. But more going than any of that is you must always be collecting, always be asking.
Jay Schwedelson:So when you are ready to do email marketing, you have some you have somewhere to market to. So it's not that you should be focused on email marketing, but you must be focused on collecting.
Carly Ries:Yep. That's a great point and great differentiator there. And so to piggyback off of that, so solopreneurs, they don't have a lot of time. They're they're spread thin, but they they wanna a lot of the ones that we used to talk to, they wanna keep learning. They wanna keep growing.
Carly Ries:So with email marketing, if they'd reach that point after building that list, they should be looking at analytics. You're so great on analytics with email marketing for your company. You guys are doing it all the time. How much focus should they put on that, and how often to get better results?
Jay Schwedelson:So analytics is an interesting thing. One thing I would think about, especially as a solopreneur, is don't worry about industry averages. Don't worry about what you read online. Who cares? Who cares what the random industry average is, whatever industry, and that's in terms of marketing metrics.
Jay Schwedelson:All that matters is beating yourself. It's like being like a swimmer. You wanna beat your your time. You wanna get faster. You wanna beat your time.
Jay Schwedelson:Right? And what I mean by that is, and it's not just relegated to email. It could be any. You wanna benchmark yourself.
Jay Schwedelson:So today, I sent out my email newsletter. I got a 30% open rate and got a 1% click through rate. Okay. Next week, we send out the newsletter again. What am I gonna do to get that open rate up?
Jay Schwedelson:I wanna beat myself. I wanna get it to 34% and 2%. And what you wanna do is benchmark yourself, not just email in general. Marketers make the mistake to go, our email marketing gets a 25% open rate and a 3% click through rate or letter. That's not the way you wanna look at it.
Jay Schwedelson:You wanna take your different types of emails you send out. You send emails out that's your newsletter. You send out offer emails. You send out transactional emails of some kind. You wanna bucket each of them, and then you wanna benchmark for yourself.
Jay Schwedelson:How are we doing in each of these buckets? And then every time you hit send, how am I gonna do a little bit better? What am I gonna test to do a little bit better? So I wouldn't get caught up in, you know, oh, wow. I'm in the automotive sector, and I read the industry averages of 40% open rate.
Jay Schwedelson:Now I'm at 20% of them, and the NERPS breakdown. That's irrelevant. First of all, and your strategy is a garbage, and it only matters if you're doing better in your own organization.
Carly Ries:Mhmm. That's a a great point. Well, and I wanna ask you there. You you talked about those buckets, of types of emails. Where do you stand on promotional versus educational?
Carly Ries:Because I think for a while, it was, like, 75% of the time do educational and and then ask for the other that Yeah. So where do you stand?
Jay Schwedelson:I think that, and we all struggle with this because, you know, everybody always has something they wanna promote, and we do. I mean, I do. Right? Wherever everybody does. But if you're not and it's also with your social posts as well.
Jay Schwedelson:You have to go into some of your marketing a chunk of your marketing with no agenda whatsoever, where I'm going to send out this email, this piece of content, because it's valuable to my database. I'm gonna put this social post on LinkedIn or whatever because it's valuable to people I'm connected with. And you have to do that probably at least 50% of the time where you are just giving. You know, I like Gary v. He says, you give, give, give, and then ask.
Jay Schwedelson:Right? You're giving out content. You're giving out content. You're giving out content, and then you ask. Because when you do that, you build up that credibility with whoever it is you're communicating with, and you're not you're not gonna be wallpapered to them because they are gonna wanna see what you have to say.
Jay Schwedelson:And then over time, they're like, wow. You know what? I'm gonna do this company solid because they give me so much stuff for free that I'm gonna check out whatever it is, you know, that they're kinda selling or promoting. I see it with my own business. You know?
Jay Schwedelson:We put on these really big events that are all free. We share a lot of content that's free. And then once in a blue moon, I'm like, hey. Does anybody wanna work with me? And I'll get a lot of people saying, yeah.
Jay Schwedelson:I wanna talk to you. Good. You're cool. You give out so much free stuff. And so that give, give, give, and then ask, I think, is a real path to success.
Carly Ries:Yeah.
Joe Rando:I just wanna make
Joe Rando:sure we don't miss something because we we've talked about the email and everything, but the actual body, you know, you said don't make the paragraphs too big. I get that. You know, 3 lines, not 5, not 4. What about the number of words, Jay? You know, we tend to write emails and feel like we have to say a lot of stuff in order to make it, you know, an actual communication. what's your take on the number of words we're using in emails typically versus what they should be?
Jay Schwedelson:Yeah. So we actually just did some research on that, and what you really wanna think about in terms of how many words are in your email is you wanna think about, first off, who you're marketing to. Are you marketing to existing customers or prospects or people that you wanna have become, you know, paying customers? And the reason those are 2 different buckets and the reason you have to think about in terms of the the volume of words that you're using is, existing customers sorta like you sorta care about you, and prospects could care less about you pretty much. And so what we see is the secret sauce number is roughly 75 words, especially to prospects.
Jay Schwedelson:That if you have more than 75 words in email to noncurrent customers to prospects and you're more than 75 words, you see, cliff or rain performance fall off in into the garbage can. So you've gotta keep it really, really short. When you go to existing customers, you can go over a 100 words. Right around that mark is about right. I mean, we're not talking about newsletters.
Jay Schwedelson:These are offer related emails. Newsletters are a whole other game, but the moral to the story is you you gotta keep it really short because people barely wanna read what you're putting together. So it's a great question.
Carly Ries:If you saw me looking off screen, and seemingly typing, it's because I was literally just typing those notes into my phone for those emails that I need to resend resend to you, Joe, to review before tomorrow. Then literal note dissolve. Well, so your company, you guys do such a great job to stay on top of all these things. So what are your predictions for email in 2024?
Jay Schwedelson:unfortunately, there are 2 things that make all of our jobs harder. The economy, while it's doing probably better than some expected, it's still gonna be somewhat of a rough year for the economy. Why do I bring that up? When and marketing budgets will likely be cut this year. That's the nature of the beast.
Jay Schwedelson:And when marketing budgets are cut, you look to the channels that give you the greatest reach at the lowest cost. Right? So you can't run more search ads when you don't have the budget. Right? If you post on social, on your organic social, that's great, but only reach about 15% of your network.
Jay Schwedelson:So you can't do direct mail because that's real expensive. So what's the one channel that costs you very, very little, you know, in order to reach your entire population? That is email. So in any down economy, we see email being more heavily used, which means the reason I said it's difficult for all of us, that the inbox is gonna be even more saturated, right, which means we're gonna have to do even more tactics with the subject line and and all this other stuff, to stand out. So be on the lookout for that.
Jay Schwedelson:And then the other thing in the second half of the year that I don't think our market is really a factored into their to their plans is that we are in a presidential election cycle. And starting in about August all the way through till November, we are going to be, all of us, gonna be inundated with Mark from every angle. I mean, it's just gonna I don't care who you like or don't like. Doesn't matter. We're all gonna be inundated.
Jay Schwedelson:And what tends to happen in a presidential election cycle is that, we start to tune out marketing in general because we're like, oh, I can't take it. I can't look at my inbox. I can't go on social media. I can't look at the TV. Right?
Jay Schwedelson:And so marketing performance starts to gets gets kind of lessened, as you get closer and closer to the election. So I think that we're in for some headwinds that marketers are gonna really have to be pretty, do some fancy footwork to to stay ahead of it all, unfortunately.
Carly Ries:Wow. those are such great points. I am a marketer, and I hadn't even factored in the election, which I think I'm also just in denial that it's already back around. So maybe that's why I haven't thought about it because it just happened. But though those are great points and definitely take no audience because that will be, like you said, a headwind coming towards this.
Carly Ries:Wow. Well, Jay, I feel like I could talk to you forever. I have honestly, I was thinking about the question that we have for you today, and the list goes on and on and on. And it's just primarily selfishly driven because we just wanna keep you on the line. But we do wanna we do wanna be respectful of your time today, and so we want to end on a question that we ask all of our guests.
Carly Ries:What is your favorite quote about success?
Jay Schwedelson:Well, there was one quote, and it wasn't a good quote. It was advice that I got that probably changed my business life more than any other. I think that we all have, at least I do, serious imposter syndrome every day. Like, am I really, can I really be doing whatever it is I'm doing? Am I qualified to do whatever?
Jay Schwedelson:And early on in my career, my grandfather saw me, and I was like this. I had my hands in my head. I was stressing out. I didn't know what I was doing. And I remember saying and I go, I don't think I could do this. I don't think I'm smart enough to to do this. And he put his arm around me and he said, Jay, he said, stupider people than you have been able to do it. And I was like, wow. That's amazing. I feel like that's true.
Jay Schwedelson:There's gonna be so many out there that were stupider than me that was able to do it. I go and every time I feel inadequate or whatever, I go, that's what I think of. And I'm like, I'm gonna do it. So that's the motivational quote that I use almost every single time.
Carly Ries:And now we'll print it out and put it on our wall.
Joe Rando:It is not only brilliant. It's historical. That's just really, really amazing.
Jay Schwedelson:It's sad. It's sad. Well I believe it's true.
Carly Ries:Jay, you know that we are huge fans of yours. Hopefully, our listeners have become fans of yours today if they haven't already. So where can they find you, your companies that they wanna learn more?
Jay Schwedelson:Oh, so nice. So please connect me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of nonsense on LinkedIn. If you go to my full name, jschwedelson.com, you'll find links to my podcast. I put out stuff every single week on Do This, Not That, my podcast.
Jay Schwedelson:I love your podcast. I guess the 2 other things oh, thank you. We have subjectline.com, which is free and fun, and also guruconference.com is our big free virtual email marketing event. But if you go to jschwedelson.com, you'll find all of it, and really appreciate you all. I love what you guys are doing.
Jay Schwedelson:I love being here and can't wait to, listen to all the future episodes.
Carly Ries:Well, thank you. And the feeling is very mutual with your show. And, Joe, if you wanna just, lift up your sweatshirt a little bit for anybody watching,
Joe Rando:You bet. Guru Events. I have a hat
Joe Rando:too, but it is the other room.
Jay Schwedelson:I love it.
Carly Ries:Well, Jay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We would love it if you would give us a 5 star review.
Carly Ries:Subscribe on YouTube anywhere you listen to your show and tell all of your friend we love helping you out, and we want to continue doing it forever. So leave us those reviews. And Jay, we'll talk to you soon. See you next week, everybody.
Joe Rando:Bye bye. Thanks.
Carly Ries:You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.