Danielle – 00:00:03: Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity. We’re your hosts.
Guy – 00:00:09: My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle – 00:00:11: And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. Hello. Hello to this third episode of Email After Hours. And we’ve got another fabulous topic for you today. The email climate is tough right now. On the one hand, marketers are having to do more with less. And on the other hand, we’re talking about lofty technological goals like what AI is going to do for the world of marketing. But today we’re going to discuss some quick wins, which I’m really excited about. Guy, how about you?
Guy – 00:00:48: I think it’s going to be awesome. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. So I feel like we should start off with a quick introduction then. So a real pleasure to have Jay Schwettelson with us today. So I think for the benefit of our audience, let’s start with who you are. Let’s talk about your experience in the world of email because it feels like you’re almost as much of an email geek as we are. So let’s tell the audience all about it.
Jay – 00:01:12: Sure thing. So I love being here. I’m already a listener. I know we’re in episode three, but I’m already a listener and I love this thing. So I’ve been in the email space for almost 25 years, which is real long time. It’s changed a lot. I have an agency called Alcomedia. We do a lot of email work for both business marketers and consumer marketers. We send out, working with our clients, about 6 billion email messages a year. So that’s a lot of email. But a lot of my world of email also is coming from subjectline.com which is a site that my company has that allows any marketer to go check a subject line to see how good or bad is where it goes out. And the reason we started that site was that, you know, we’re big believers that the subject line is such an important factor in driving engagement that is often a little bit overlooked. So anyway, that’s kind of my passion. I love all this stuff. And email is the last thing it is, is dead. It is the most alive thing if you really just give a little bit of attention. So I’m happy to be here.
Guy – 00:02:05: We’re delighted to have you, but let’s pick up on that because you’re right, it’s absolutely not dead, but it’s certainly challenging. And yes, you see email from a lot of different perspectives. When you think about the world of email, is there one thing that sort of really keeps you up and awake at night worrying about it?
Jay – 00:02:22: Yeah, I think the thing about email is, a lot of times marketers have their hands tied by things that are not necessarily things that they should be worried about. Right. In the world of email, there’s a lot of what you call best practices. And as email has evolved, those best practices, some of them that are still being promoted are not in fact real anymore, right. Or not in fact accurate. And some of them are things that we’re told to avoid. Right. So markers. Yeah, it’s tough to get into the inbox. It’s tough to get your emails open and clicked on, but we are not doing certain things because we think it will hurt our performance, like words on the subject lines or characters or frequency and things like that, when in reality that’s information from ten years ago. So one of the things I want for marketers to be able to find more success in these challenging times is to be liberated, that they can do more.
Danielle – 00:03:14: Yeah, I think in our debut episode, Guy lamented about heuristics and just how people are still sort of paying a lot of attention to that, right. The words as opposed to the content, the personalization. So given that and how much has changed, what’s happening in 2023? What makes now a particularly difficult time for marketers? Give it to us straight.
Jay – 00:03:36: Well, first off, I mean, look, we are inundated from every type of marketing channel, right? We’re getting it from every angle. And then as sales start to go down, whether you’re a business market or consumer marketer, what do we all do as marketers? We look to the channels that are inexpensive to market in, right. If you want to run a paid social media program, you have to spend some money. You want to run a display campaign, you got to spend some money. A search campaign, you got to spend some money. If you want to do more email. The cost in doing that is very, very low as compared to all these other channels. So because of that, in a difficult economy, you see marketers say, okay, well, email doesn’t cost us a lot to get out more, let’s just send more. Right? And so our inboxes are flooded more. It’s harder to stand out. So it’s a much more competitive environment in a difficult economy for email, more so than almost any other channel. Which is why we need to do the little things that actually have a big impact to drive that engagement. At least that’s what we see.
Danielle – 00:04:32: And is that what you’re finding marketers are doing to adapt? How do they stand out? And what role does the subject line play in that?
Jay – 00:04:40: I believe the subject line is enormous. And what we see with our clients is they spend like 90% of their time on developing the greatest email, the greatest creative, all this stuff, and they’re like, okay, we got to get this out. What should the subject line be? Oh, I’ll spend 3 seconds, I’ll write a subject line and there’d be no consideration. This thing where it’s backwards, if nobody opens up your email, who cares? Who actually cares what’s inside of it? Nobody opens it, right. So what can you do in that subject line to stand out? First off, you can use special characters, right? If you are a business marketer and you’re promoting an on demand video and you put in brackets to start your subject line, watch now it’s going to stand out a little bit. Can you use emojis to stand out? Absolutely. Can you capitalize a word to stand out? Yes. And you won’t go to the junk folder, the spam folder for doing this. Okay. And the game is people say, well that’s a gimmick, that’s not real marketing. Let’s say when somebody is scanning their inbox, you have a millisecond to grab their attention. What are you going to do so your email stands out and not the other person’s. And these little things, while they may seem gimmicky, they work. And that’s kind of the liberation that I want people to feel when they do email marketing. I don’t know if you guys see that as well.
Guy – 00:05:51: We absolutely do. And I think Danielle and myself, one of our favorite toys is MailCharts. And I’m always looking at effective subject line treatment from all the literally thousands of different brands that we monitor. But let me put you on the spot then. Let’s boil this down, but I’m sure you get this question millions of times, but if you are giving one piece of advice to your customers on how to write a perfect subject line, what would it be?
Jay – 00:06:15: So the most important thing you could have in your subject line is a sense of urgency. And the reason being is human nature is we don’t want the thing that’s going to always be there. We are very interested in the thing that may not be there down the road. So any form of urgency, not the word urgent, but any form of urgency in the subject line is going to be the number one determining factor. So two days left, last chance today. Even if you don’t have urgency, right, simply saying something like don’t miss out. Subtle urgency like that will help drive performance. The other thing that really works is any form of personalization, but I don’t mean where you put in the subject line Jay, comma, check this out. That personalization to me is like kind of nails on a chalkboard and it’s so overdone. We actually saw a recent study that said name in the subject line actually pulls down engagement because it’s so overdone. But personalization, anytime you could tell the person who they are, then they’re interested. And that’s on business or consumer emails. Meaning, let’s say it’s a consumer email. This is just for homeowners. I just bought a home. This is for me, right? This is perfect for new grandparents, right? This is just for you. Literally, by saying just for you, it increases the open rate. And on the business side, if you put the person’s job function or title in the subject line, this is for CFOs, for HR directors, marketers need to know this for small business owners, anytime in the subject line that you could tell the person that this is for you, this is not for everybody. And you get an email, let’s say any of us got an email and says, this is perfect for email marketers, I’m opening that up. That’s what I do. I got to check that out. That’s what resonates. So those are the number one things that we see that drive performance.
Danielle – 00:07:59: Totally. I think I speak for Guy and I in saying, yes please, that tokenization, that name. Oh man. And sometimes they get it weirdly wrong too, where like for me, I get Gallant check out these deals. It’s my last name. So thanks everybody for that. So, yes, fully onboard with personalization and urgency, but there are these tools, as I’m sure you know, that exist, free tools for senders to test their subject line, right? And there’s often a score that’s sort of associated with that and the score is based on word choice capitalization. It doesn’t always take personalization into account. What do you think of those tools? How reliable are they?
Jay – 00:08:39: I think any writing tool you could even throw Chat GPT in there is really a starting point to me. It’s eliminating mistakes that are like low hanging fruit. It’s kind of like the way when Canva came out for design, everyone’s like, oh my God, I’m a designer, I’m not going to have a job. That’s not what Canva did. It was, it allowed you to get started to think about things a little differently, to get inspired. And I think that that’s really the way to use any tool, especially as it relates to copy or design for that matter, that you say, oh my God, I almost didn’t think of that. Right. But to take it as the Holy Grail, like, this is what I’m going to use because this random tool wrote it, I really don’t think it’s doing the job of a marketer. So they’re very useful. I mean, I have one of them at subject line, right? But I don’t think that they are really where you end it’s just where you start.
Guy – 00:09:29: I think that’s a great point and it’s interesting you mentioned Chat GPT. We’ve been playing with it a bit and using some of the outputs in our recent webinars. And listen, it’s very, very clever, but you suspect that despite those sort of 175 billion data points, it doesn’t necessarily always have the context or the human touch that you’re alluding to. So we’ve spoken a bit about subject lines, but there’s a missing piece which a lot of email marketers often seem to forget, which is the second subject line, the pre header. And you still see a lot of emails with a killer subject line promptly followed by, if you can’t see this email properly, click here for the web version.
Danielle – 00:10:09: View in browser.
Guy – 00:10:11: That’s right, yeah. Because it’s such a great piece of real estate. So how do you think about that, Jay? How should a good pre header complement the perfect subject line? What’s the secret sauce when we’re putting those two ingredients together?
Jay – 00:10:24: Well, I love that you bring up the pre header because I agree with you, it is incredibly valuable real estate, okay? And there are basically three things that happen that people do in the pre header. They either do the format issue link, like if you can’t see this, click here, which is so old school. If you’re doing that, I want you to stop listening right now, stop this podcast, and go and erase that because you don’t need to do that. That could be your second sentence of the pre header, but not the first, okay? If they can’t do your email, good luck to them. All right, so we don’t want to do the format issue link. The second one that happens very often is what I call goblin goof, a mess. You see the broken code that sometimes is in the preheader. And the reason that code shows up and you’ll see it when you go and look at your phone, you’ll see weird code. Right underneath the subject line is that when a designer is designing their email, they’re using what’s called spacer gifs, these invisible images, to move around what their design looks like. And what marketers don’t know, unfortunately, is when you are sending yourself a test message before you send it out. Okay? If you look at it on your desktop, the test message, you won’t see that code showing up in the pre header. If you look at it on a mobile device though, that’s where you see that code, that mistake code showing up in the pre header. And the reason I bring that up is when you have that code, which happens on almost 25% of emails that go out for major brands, when that code shows up as your pre header, your open rate is depressed by almost 35% because people think it is. Maybe it’s spam, maybe it’s a virus, because there’s no way some major brand would have this weird code, right? So I encourage everyone to always be looking at your mobile version of your test. But the last piece is, what should you do with the preheader? And that means it has to have offer information, it needs to build on your subject line, it needs to drive the point home of why you should open it. And you could do all the things that you do in the subject line, capitalization exclamation points, emojis in the pre header, which is working great, right? You could do all of this in the pre header. You have about under 85 characters where you want to be, and it’s a huge win to test that as another AB test that you have out there. So, yeah, love free headers. That was my rant. I was just on a soapbox. I’m sorry.
Danielle – 00:12:39: I feel like anybody who’s listening, who’s a marketer is furiously scribbling down all of the stats and notes that you just put out. That’s so awesome. And you ended with an offer continuing that offer. So from your point of view, what makes a compelling offer and what’s outdated to get into it? I know that we’ve already talked about sort of the dated versus the 2023 version and what are you seeing that’s compelling to you now?
Jay – 00:13:05: You know what’s really interesting about offers? Let’s break down consumer versus business offers first on the consumer side. And we saw this coming through the holidays as well, believe it or not. We see not the largest percentage off offers doing the best. Meaning, like, if you have an offer and you’re promoting 50% off versus an offer that says 20% off, you would think by human nature, oh my God, 50% off is going to do so much better. But there’s a perceived value that people say, oh, that must not be so great if it’s 50% off. And we actually see stronger engagement with lesser percentage off things, little things like that have a huge impact. So also on the consumer side, when you’re sending out an offer and you have a percentage off, let’s say it’s either up to up to 20% off or it says 20% off up to will actually depress your engagement as well because people want to know what they’re getting themselves involved with. So these little things have a huge impact. And on the business side, content is radically changing every few months. So if you look back two years ago, webinars were the go to offer. You put webinar in the subject line, right? Now you might as well give up what works really well because we all still use webinars and to drive performance, right? Believe it or not, is not the same thing goes for ebooks. Ebooks are like the most boring thing ever, but we still use them. What works really well to drive performance with offers is talking about the topic of what your offer is, but not the actual offer in the subject line. So let’s say you’re promoting a webinar and it’s about how to get your emails delivered. In the past, you’d leave that subject line and the first word would be webinar colon how to get your emails delivered today, right? You don’t want to do that because as soon as we see webinar, it decreases the open rate because nobody wants to put it on their calendar. So now the subject line to win is how to get your emails delivered, check this out or something like that, where you don’t say the word webinar, you don’t say the word ebook. The person is interested in the topic, they open it up, oh, it’s a webinar, cool, I’m already involved, I’ll register. So it’s kind of like rethinking the way that you’re trying to promote your content and your offers because the littlest thing you’re always like, oh, I must have a bad list. I must be going to the Jungle poll. No, you’re just promoting it. Wrong.
Guy – 00:15:17: Got to tell you, Danielle, I think when we feedback these comments about ebooks and webinars to our marketing team, we can raise a few eyebrows.
Danielle – 00:15:24: I know I’m thinking of my clients and I go, no, I got to raise this with them for sure.
Guy – 00:15:30: Now, this is such a good conversation about offers. I want to talk about a very specific type of offer, the CTA, because if you think about it, probably the majority of email programs, their purpose is to get their recipients so excited about what the email is promoting that they click through and generate traffic to their websites. And you still see far too many buttons which literally says ‘Click here’. It could be so much stronger. Marketers could be doing so much better with that prime little piece of real estate.
Jay – 00:15:59: I mean, the call to action button is so important. First of all, I hate the word submit, by the way. That should never be. I think it’s so weird that it’s in the vernacular moment with you when you take a step back. What is that? That’s odd, right? But in general, a lot of times our call to action buttons are of the same vein. We’re saying download, register, click here. You’re telling somebody what to do rather than stating the benefit of what they’re about to get, right? So if you are promoting a webinar, let’s say, or an event or something like that, is it better to say register or save my seat or “I want in.” The thing that gets the person excited that they’re one step closer to that thing? But in general, the CTA can be really big, right? It doesn’t have to be that little rectangle. It can be a really long rectangle. The more descriptive you are, the more that you are saying fully what your offer is in that call to action, the higher the click through rate is going to be. So if you are giving some sort of free trial of some kind, right, you don’t say click here. You say, start my 30 day free trial, literally the entire thing in that call to action because the person tell you, yes, that’s exactly what I want and I’m going to do that. And then you repeat it again on the landing page, throw in some nice testimonial around it, a little social proofing, and you are on your way. So, yeah, if you’re not AB testing, your call to action months, both in the email and on your destination pages. You’re holding back your performance massively.
Danielle – 00:17:32: I love that even folding first person language in there, too, into the CTA, right? So circling even back to what we were talking about with the subject line, but you’ve brought us into the actual email template, so let’s talk templates. How have subscriber expectations changed when it comes to email design. I know from my clients get a lot of questions about accessibility and rendering. And of course, we like, Everest has a great design and content testing tool, but I find that they’re like, okay, what am I actually looking for here? Because it looks fine. So what’s the next step there?
Jay – 00:18:09: I think the most important thing as it relates to the body of your email is to not think of your audiences all the same. What I mean by that is, if you take your database and you have your ongoing customers, the ones that are really engaged with you, probably ten to 20% of your database, they like you. They care about what you have to say. You can be verbose with them. You can have big paragraphs right? Things like that, when you’re talking about the rest of your database, people that either just came on that are not really engaging, people that are kind of, like, haven’t engaged in six months. Twelve months. Whatnot? Or even somebody new. They don’t care about you. They barely opened the email. They like, I’ll check it out, and then they open it up. And if I get a text from one of my relatives or friends, and it’s a big block on my phone, like, whoa, I am not looking at that right now. That is a later type of thing. It’s the same thing with email. How many words you’re putting in a paragraph to people that aren’t your most engaged. Right. You need to keep it less than 75 words. Really using bullets, even looking at believe it or not, we look at the number of syllables and words, it has to be something you could digest fast. So the biggest mistake marketers make is they take their best performing emails that they’re sending out to their core customers, and they go, well, this is going to be great to everybody else. They send the same thing to everybody else. You’re talking about two different populations of people. So I think it’s super important to kind of really get your mind around who you’re emailing, because they’re not all the same.
Guy – 00:19:34: What I wanted to throw into the conversation is another of our favorite email tools that Danielle and myself and our colleagues use is a predictive eye tracking tool we love. It sort of fires in the email creative. What are your readers looking at first? Which bits of the content stand out the most? And often the results are completely counterintuitive. It’s like, wow, the single most important elements of that email right down at the bottom, out of sight, out of mind. So let me throw that at you. I mean, if you think about what are the most important elements of an email that absolutely should be visible to drive engagement and attention?
Jay – 00:20:10: Yeah. And by the way, I do want to give a little plug to Mailcharts. Not that he told me to do that. And I’m not just talking about the eye tracking stuff is that I love that tool, by the way. So if markers don’t use it, you got to mess around. Mailcharts. It is one of the coolest tools that’s out there. So coming back to your question, awesome.
Danielle – 00:20:23: Strong agree.
Jay – 00:20:24: Yeah, right? Strong agree. There’s two things in an email, I think, that people don’t give enough consideration to. When you’re talking about eye tracking, what people do in the email. One is the logo your designer makes your email. And what do they do? They take the logo in your email and they drive it to your home page. That’s what everybody does. What marketers don’t realize is that about 19% of all clicks that occur will actually be on the logo in your email, right? When you’re sending out an email, I always like to say, what is the goal of this email? What do I hope happens when I hit send? If the goal is to get something sold or downloaded or consumed, it’s an offer related email. It’s not just transactional, it’s an offer related email. Your goal is to get as much of that thing done right. So if almost 20% of your click activity is going to happen on your logo, why send them to your home page? Drive them to your offer destination page? Every link in the message needs to be considered, right? So that logo is like it’s just a secret win. Another secret win that markers don’t do enough is the PS, especially in letter format emails at the bottom, promoting anything. Right? At the bottom you add a PS, I hope you check blah blah out. We see. PS, when they’re utilized, can have up to about 12 to 13% of the click throughs in a message because people are like, okay, don’t care, don’t care. Oh, what’s this last thing? Right? And this is all about testing. Everything that we’re talking about today is testing. If we talked about ten different ideas and you try them all and three of them work, you’re going to say, oh, Danielle, Guy and Jay, they’re a bunch of dummies. There’s only three words. But I would say that’s a huge win because now you got three new things in your arsenal that you didn’t have before. And that is, to me, email marketing, it’s all about testing all this stuff 100%.
Guy – 00:22:06: So that kind of leads on perfectly to the next question because as you’ll know, sort of pretty much every email sender we work with, at some stage they’re going to ask the question, hey, when’s the best time to send an email? Is there a best day of week? And I guess broadly speaking, there might be. We’ve definitely seen that change hugely over the last couple of years, especially as we went through the pandemic and suddenly the Work from Home Revolution really sort of changed broadly when people were engaging with their emails. But how do you respond to that one.
Jay – 00:22:36: Yeah, I agree with you. There’s a lot of data out there this day. That day what not here’s where I land on it. There’s two important things you got to do. Number one, all your emails are not the same. You have your newsletters that you send out, you have your offer emails that you send out. You have other type of transactional, important messaging to send out and they’re very different. And you can’t be like, oh, my newsletter gets a great open rate, or click the rate, I send it out at 8:00 a.m. So I’m going to send out my offer emails then too, because it’s a very different mindset of the person that’s interacting with those. Right? So the first thing is to break out the types of emails that you’re sending out before you get into what’s my favorite day. Now you have the types broken out. No matter what metric you see from any important company on the planet, the most important metrics you have are your own, right? So the most critical thing you can do is benchmark your own performance. What is my open rate? If unclick the rate, if I send my newsletter out at Monday at 8:00 a.m, I’m going to test it now, Wednesday at 11:00 a.m, did it move the dial up or down? And it’s like being a swimmer or a runner. All you’re trying to do is beat yourself, right? You’re constantly trying to beat yourself. Like when people say, what’s the industry average? Blah, blah, blah, blah, I’m like, who cares? You know? Yeah, great, what’s that going to do for you? You got to beat yourself because you’ll beat yourself. Doesn’t matter what the industry avenues are. So I don’t land on a particular day or time I land on. You got to keep testing and break your emails into groups. Do you guys have a day or time that you think is the win?
Danielle – 00:23:58: Oh, man, for me it’s morning or evening. I know that’s broad, but I’m one of those people, I look at my phone immediately after I wake up, so if I’ve got something in the morning, then definitely my eyes are going to be on it before the mailbox is inevitably full.
Guy – 00:24:15: My answer to that question every time I get asked is just beware of avoiding confirmation bias. If you’ve got a load of data sort of based on, best time your customers open an email, but you’ve only ever sent to them between six in the morning and midday, right? How do you know that? It might not be double that if you sent to them early evening, for example. Danielle, I know you got another question you want to put in terms of optimal numbers.
Danielle – 00:24:40: Well, I do. And so we hear a lot about the human attention span, right? Everybody throws out these stats about like 8 seconds. We’re only paying attention to something for 8 seconds. You mentioned you’ve got a really quick time frame to grab attention. But is there an optimal or effective size for an email? Is there a number of words or images? I mean, we know certainly that for Gmail, we don’t want an email to be clipped, but does that exist? Is there a perfect number of words and images, special secret sauce for an email?
Jay – 00:25:15: It’s a good question, and I think it could be debated in a lot of different ways. I think that for newsletters, email newsletters, you have the opportunity to send a lot more, especially if people like engaging with your newsletter. So I almost put the newsletter off to the side, even though it’s a critical piece of the email puzzle. When you’re talking about offer related stuff, we actually see the fewer images. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t have images, it should be very HTML graphic intense, right? But the fewer images, the better. Less than three images we see it perform a lot better. Oftentimes one hero image is really all that you need. And we do see that number. Under 75 words in a paragraph is essential. Anytime you go over that number, we see performance just really fall off a cliff. But it’s difficult. The same thing for, again, like the subject line, for example, not to go back to that, but in terms of number of words and characters, ironically, less than 10% of emails have under 20 characters in their subject line and less than I think 10% of emails have over 65 characters in their subject line. So two ends of the subject line in terms of size. But if you can either keep your subject line incredibly short or actually make it super long, you actually will stand out a little more. You’ll see a better performance. So, you know, to Guy’s point earlier, if you think you found the secret sauce and that’s what you’re staying with and that’s what you’re going to do, that’s probably when you know you need to try something new. As soon as you think, oh, this is great, that’s when you’re like, all right, back to the drawing board.
Guy – 00:26:41: Which kind of brings us back to the point. I mean, several times in the conversation already you’ve spoken about the importance of testing the hypothesis. Actually, a couple of months ago we had Deborah O’Malley from Guess The Test came and joined us on one of our webinars and she gave us a testing master class. It was fantastic. I think one of my favorite examples that stuck in my mind, she talked about a pet accessories business that she worked with and they tested personalizing the subject line with the pet’s name and absolutely shot the lights up. People love their pets. So what about you? It’s great talking about testing, but you can do testing right or you can do it wrong. What’s your guidance in terms of best practices to run a good test?
Jay – 00:27:20: By the way, I love the pet name as a personalization. And by the way, on the business side, putting the name of the company that you are sending to is a fantastic personalization to use as well. I mean, just the idea of any type of personalization, that’s not the person’s name. Big fan. And never use somebody’s last name. That’s a big number. You’re on subscribe will go into the stratosphere, which freaks people out. I think that when you’re setting up a test, you want to make sure that you can’t test everything all at once, oftentimes. Markets. All right, we’re going to test the subject lines here, the day of the week, this call to action, these seven things. So pick and choose your battles of what you’re going to be testing. But I always try to encourage every time you hit send, that is an opportunity to test something. If you are just getting the email I hate that phrase, right? It’ll be like 4:00 on a Thursday. Legal just finally approved it. All the landing pages are live, the APIs are firing on whatever, and you’re like, should we send it out or should we wait until the morning for a better time? And everywhere around the planet, marketers say the same words, oh, just get it out, just get it out, right? They just say that and it’s like it is so painful for me to hear because it’s basically just raising the white flag. Like, I don’t care, I don’t need to test anything, I just need to check it off so everyone knows it went out the door. Stop. Set up your test properly. Every time you send an email, it’s an opportunity to test. And if you are uttering the words just get it out, that’s the moment. Wait a minute, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to pause because that’s where emails go to die.
Danielle – 00:28:57: And I can’t let the testing question go without asking about Apple’s MPP. So brief recap for people who maybe aren’t familiar with this, Apple’s mail privacy protection came out a little while ago and it skews or obscures legitimate opens, right? How has that impacted subject line testing?
Jay – 00:29:18: That’s a great, awesome question, and I’m not going to be in agreement with probably 95% of email experts on the plan. And I don’t claim to be an email expert, by the way. What I mean by that is when MPP came out, all the email people out there said, well, the open rate is dead. Focus on the click through. Who’s cares about open rate? It’s not a real number anymore. You can’t rely on it. We should just focus on the click. Which is a great thing to say, except on average, what do you see? 3 to 5% of your people clicking through. So what, are you going to ignore the other 95%? That’s not a realistic way to handle marketing. So yes, email opens. How often people open up your emails is an inflated metric now, it’s not accurate. That’s an absolute fact. It’s not debatable. But what is also a fact and not debatable is that now that we’re in this post MPP world, it exists. Email open rates. Instead of being an absolute metric, 12,322 people open this email. We don’t know that anymore. Okay, but when it says okay, 30% of the people that you sent to, it says 30% open rate. We know it’s not really 30%, but if you did an AB test on a version A, you did a subject line and you got a 30% open rate. And then version B, you had a different subject line and it had a 40% open rate. Directionally, not absolute, but from a directional standpoint, you know, that version B did better. More people opened it up. And that is why the open rate is hugely important still, because it is a directional metric that it’s almost like a survey that you’re doing saying, which one do you like better? We see something that comes out and says, who’s the most popular soccer player on the planet? And they survey 1000 people. They go, Messi is the most popular football player or soccer player on the planet. We have 1000 people. And we all go, oh, that must be true. The same thing for opens. It’s a survey, it’s not an absolute. And you need that information. It helps you dictate the best time of day, day of the week, subject line, all this testing stuff. So, yeah, Apple mess things up, but it’s still incredibly important to track opens. That’s where I come from. I don’t know if you guys are on the same vibe or not.
Danielle – 00:31:20: I love any answer that’s this passionate I’m invested.
Guy – 00:31:25: I just feel as somebody sitting on the European side of the Atlantic, we need to do a subject line test on whether football out performs soccer.
Jay – 00:31:33: So I caught myself, I knew that. I knew I screwed that up. I’m like, Wait a minute. Oh, man. I’ll call it football. No.
Danielle – 00:31:43: Now, Guy, would you like to put Jay on the hot seat here for some of our quick fire closing questions before we hop off today?
Guy – 00:31:51: Absolutely. So, Jay, this has been such a fun conversation, and we love to wrap up with just a couple of standard questions, which we put to all of our guests, and this one’s a little provocative. You can decide how provocative you want to be in return, but we always sort of get very exercised by examples of bad email marketing. We sort of look at it because we’re the professionals. And what’s the worst example of a marketing email you’ve seen recently and why?
Jay – 00:32:19: I hate people. This is true. So never talk to me. If you’re these people that do the fake reply, the row colon, if that is in your marketing strategy in any capacity, I want you to unconnect me. Unfriendly, unlike me. Whatever. I don’t like you. It is horrible to trick people. And it seems like that’s a growing trend. I can’t believe it’s even a thing. So that’s the worst I can’t take it. And to me, it’s incredible. Horrible. Spam.
Danielle – 00:32:47: You’ve lost a subscriber and a friend if you’ve done that, guys, you heard it.
Guy – 00:32:52: That’s right, I’m with you.
Danielle – 00:32:54: Bet.
Jay – 00:32:56: Hate it.
Danielle – 00:32:57: Well, yeah, and I mean, this has been so awesome. Truly. I have notes. I have notes from this quick wins that these are legitimate quick wins. I’m going to take these back to my clients. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Jay, thank you so much for being here.
Jay – 00:33:13: Oh, I can’t thank you guys enough. I know sometimes I can’t stop talking and I just keep on rolling here. But you guys, we all kind of play in the same sandbox here. So it’s a pleasure to be with you. And, yeah, a lot of fun.
Guy – 00:33:26: Thanks for having been awesome. So, Danielle, that’s another wrap for email after hours. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.
Danielle – 00:33:39: To all you sleepless senders out there, thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.
