Jay Schwedelson drops a lot of truth bombs in Marketing Smarts Episode 511, and the most impressive one might just be that so-called "experts" aren't always the best source of information on email marketing.

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"Most of the so-called experts are regurgitating old information, and you testing things is going to be your best path forward," he says. "You must be testing something every time you hit send."

Technology is changing. Things that were true 10 years ago no longer apply. Jay and host George B. Thomas refer to the world of email marketing as "the wild wild west." "There are no more rules," Jay says, and then proves it by taking controversial stances.

Here are a few of them: Open rates can be valuable (what?). Unsubscribes are a good thing, so don't let them freak you out. There's no such thing as ultimate success with email, and if things don't suck, you're probably doing fine (whew).

The episode also emphasizes the importance of segmentation, A/B-testing, and CTAs that offer a benefit instead of a task.

Listen to the entire show now from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode.

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This episode brought to you by Casted.

Casted is the B2B Podcast and Video Platform used by some of the best B2B marketers from companies like Salesforce, PayPal, HubSpot, Drift, and more. Casted's platform empowers you to activate, amplify, and attribute audio and video content while increasing brand awareness, driving lead generation, and bolstering customer engagement.

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"Marketing Smarts" theme music composed by Juanito Pascual of Signature Tones.

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Full Transcript: New B2B Email Marketing Techniques That Work Right Now

George Thomas: I am super excited because today we are going to have a conversation about new B2B email marketing techniques that work right now. For all of you that are listening and you think email is dead, we're going to flip the conversation and give you techniques that work right now. I am talking with Jay Schwedelson. We're going to talk about what keeps him up at night, we're going to talk about quick wins, we're going to get some words of wisdom. This episode is going to be absolutely amazing.

Jay is the founder of SubjectLine.com, the leading free subject line rating tool ranked in the top 1% of all websites worldwide. Having led SubjectLine.com through the testing of more than 12,000,000 subject lines, Jay uses his knowledge to guide organizations across multiple industries on how to implement impactful email marketing. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Marketing Smarts listeners, that's what we're going to talk about today.

Jay is also the president and CEO of Worldata Group, a multi-brand marketing service company whose portfolio includes SubjectLine.com, Outcome Media, and Guru Events, which puts on the Guru Conference, the world's largest email marketing event. Enough with the shenanigans, let's go ahead and get into this great episode with Jay Schwedelson on B2B email marketing techniques that work right now.

Jay, I always like to start these episodes with what I think is kind of fun but sometimes freaks people out, and that is the what keeps you up at night question. When we're talking about B2B email marketing, what keeps you up at night?

Jay Schwedelson: The world of B2B email marketing has gotten a little bit crazy ever since the pandemic started. Marketers are so anxious to fill a pipeline and get all sorts of stuff going on that they literally don't care anymore. What I mean by they don't care is there are no more rules. They'll do the fake Re: or the fake Forward: before an email they send out. They'll just send out as much as they want whenever they want.

There's this don't care attitude, and it drives me a little bit crazy because I'm always trying to follow best practices and do all of these things the right way. It's like the Wild West in the last two years. Trying to rein people in, make sure they're focused on what works, that's kind of where my head is when I put my head on the pillow.

George: I like that you said it was like the Wild West. Here's the thing. One of the big changes in a year, or a year and a half, but we all saw it coming maybe two years ago, is this whole privacy-first world. When we think about that and we think about email, I really want to get your take on open rates now with everything that is going on with Apple and Google and all of the things.

Jay: This is going to probably be opposite of what most people say. I think open rates are incredibly valuable. People say you can't track them properly, there are bots, and now Apple is screwing up the open rates, and they're not really a number.

Here's the story with open rates. When you send out a campaign and you have two different versions of, let's say, a subject line. You have an A version and a B version, and you send it out. Let's say you send it out to 100,000 people in your database. The A version gets a 40% open rate and the B version gets a 30% open rate.

Sitting here today, I know for a fact that 40% of the people I sent it to did not open it because of all the things going on in the world, because of Apple, because of bots, because of whatever. Conversely, I know that 30% of people didn't open up the B version. Here's what I do know, and why open rates are magical and so important. I know that A won. I know that more people – I don't know how many, but I know more people liked A versus B. It gives me a roadmap on where to pursue and what to do further.

When marketers say, "Open rates are dead to me. I'm only focused on the click," well, you're clueless because you're going to get, at best, a 3% to 5% click through rate, so 95% of the people you're just not going to care about what they're doing. That makes no sense. You get awesome directional information from open rates, so I'm a huge believer in them.

George: I think I'm going to go off the beaten path for a hot second from where we were headed with this interview, because what I heard you say is that something used to be 'maybe do that,' but there is something that it's absolutely do this now moving forward because of this privacy-first. It just rolled off your tongue so fast, and I don't want the Marketing Smarts listeners to miss it.

That is A/B testing. Pertaining to B2B marketing email and sending out, talk to me about the importance now more than ever of A/B testing your emails.

Jay: The littlest things in email marketing have the biggest impact on performance. So often marketers have it backwards. They'll work on a piece of creative, they'll work on offer, they'll work on legal has to approve everything, they get it all set up, and then they go, "We're ready to send it out." What's your subject line? They'll be like, "Oh, hold on, let me write that," in the next four seconds, and they give no thought to it. It's totally backwards.

If you look at just the subject line as one variable, doing A/B tests on the subject line, what you do in that subject line doing A/B tests can be the difference between your campaign being successful and it falling apart. Every time you hit send on any email campaign, you must be testing something. It's an opportunity to test, and to give up that opportunity is just a waste of an exposure.

George: Giving up on that opportunity is a waste of exposure. You mentioned email campaigns. We know that we need to A/B test, we know that we necessarily shouldn't be worried about bots, this, that, and the other thing, because if we're testing we can see this one still is the viable winner moving forward. Again, on email campaigns, there's a little bit of a war that is out there on the interwebs of you're sending too much or you're not sending enough. What camp do you live in or should B2B marketers be in, and why, as far as sending too much or sending too little?

Jay: I live in two camps. One camp is, believe it or not, I don't think people are sending enough. I'll get into that in one second. It's totally counterintuitive.

Before you can decide if you're sending out enough or you're sending out not enough, you need to be relevant. That's very obvious. If you're sending out stuff that's not relevant, then you could send out a lot or a little, it doesn't make a difference, nobody is going to like what you're sending. Let's start with the premise that whatever you're sending out is relevant, it's good, it's content that people want to digest or offers that people want to digest. Let's go with that premise.

Now that we know you're sending out relevant stuff, I will tell you the most successful marketers are also the ones who are sending out the most frequently. So often I'll talk to somebody and they'll be like, "We decided to send less because that's the reason stuff wasn't performing, we were sending too much." The only reason it's not performing is because people don't like what you're sending. If they like what you're sending, they're going to want to consume that.

I think the other problem is that marketers treat their entire database as one population. I don't mean just segment a certain job function or a certain employee size, but segmentation based on activity is really important. If somebody hasn't opened up an email from your organization is 60 days—people wait too long, they say six months. Let's say 60 days they haven't opened up an email. You can't treat them like somebody who opens up your email on a weekly basis. Those are two very different populations of people.

Having your email speak to those audiences, continually sending to those audiences, sending more, not less, is actually the path to success.

George: I love this that we're diving into list segmentation and this micro on not only who are they, but also what are they doing, when have they done it, and I might even suggest there's probably about 27,000 other ways that you might want to be segmenting your list because, at the end of the day, list segmentation equals better communication. You can tweet that out, folks. We'll wait. No, we're not actually going to wait. We're going to move forward.

Jay, as soon as you're going into this mode of maybe it's about sending more, and of course it's more of the right stuff, but maybe it is about sending more, then B2B marketers' biggest fear, they don't eat, they don't sleep, they probably break out in cold sweats, the unsubscribe. Talk to me about the worry of people unsubscribing from your email campaigns, your email list. Is this great, good, poor, what mentality should B2B marketers have here?

Jay: That's an awesome question. Let's first delineate between unsubscribes and spam complaints, because they get conflated, people think they're the same thing. Spam complaints are bad. You don't want to get spam complaints. Put those over here. The vast majority of what you receive are unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are actually a good thing. I like unsubscribes, and here's why.

First off, let's talk about the worst version of unsubscribes, and those are nasty-grams. Nasty-grams is you send out a campaign, and then you get two or three of these emails that come back and they say, "I want you to die. This is illegal. You are going to go to spam jail. You're a horrible person." These are nasty-grams, and you get two or three of these. What happens when you get these emails? They float around your organization, they get forwarded to the CEO or wherever, it goes crazy internally.

Invariably, a meeting is called and they say, "Stop sending. We're doing something wrong. We got these horrible emails." But in reality what's going on there? Anybody who sends an unsubscribe with these vicious words in it are very strange people and they're having a bad day, and they probably sent seven of those to seven different companies. Having your marketing programs dictated by these nasty-grams, by the loudest voice in the room, is an epic fail.

Just know that if you're in marketing, yes, you're going to run across a couple of these things. Take them for what they're worth. If you get 50 of them, that's weird, that's odd, deal with that, but nasty-grams get put to the side.

Unsubscribes in general, why are they a good thing? First off, most people, in general, don't unsubscribe from one email in one day and then move on. They're unsubscribing like, "Oh my god, my inbox is so flooded, I have too much." It's like you're cleaning out your refrigerator. "I have to purge and unsubscribe," and you unsubscribe from seven different things because you need to purge.

Generally, they're unsubscribing because their job changed, you're no longer relevant to them. Maybe you're sending out bad emails, that could be, too. Their life has changed, they're no longer in the market to buy the product or service that you're promoting. That's generally speaking why they're unsubscribing, unless you're doing aggressive tactics that really stink.

Here's why I say they're good. Number one, people don't realize this, for somebody to unsubscribe, what do they need to do? They need to open your email, they need to click on something in your email. In the world of email tracking, that open and click is actually viewed as engagement. Ironically, it's going to help your deliverability because you're generating an open and click. That's not the reason to like unsubscribes, but it's an ironic component.

The other thing is you're getting somebody off your list who doesn't want to be on it, who is not ever going to respond to your offers. You can then say we need to find a new contact at that organization, this is not the right person, whatever it may be. It doesn't hurt your deliverability at all, only spam complaints do. So, unsubscribes are not bad, they're good, don't let them freak you out.

George: I love this because it also goes into an inflated list is an inflated ego. It's dastardly to the data that you're trying to pull out of it because you're like, "Why is not engaged?" Because you have a crap list. It goes back to list segmentation, it goes back to A/B testing, it goes back to the things that we've talked about thus far.

Let's get into some of the payoff. We always do the title a certain way so that people will want to click on it and listen to the episode. We talk about email marketing techniques that work right now. With some B2B email quick wins, when you think for the Marketing Smarts listeners these are two, three, four quick win things that you should be thinking about, where does your brain first go?

Jay: There's a few things. I like things that are really easy to do that you get significant performance boost from. Let's talk about the subject line first for a second, what you do in that subject line that is going to significantly boost results. Number one, whatever is the most important part of your subject line has to be the first thing in your subject line. You can't put the offer or whatever you want to say at the end of your subject line. It has to be right there in the front.

The start of the subject line, the things that are really doing great are things like brackets. Take your offer, you have a webinar, you have a whitepaper, you have an event, you have a piece of content, whatever it is, you write that word. You write [ Webinar], you capitalize that first word, you put it in brackets, you make it stand out. You need that to stand out. You have your offer really shine right there in those first few characters and then you can go on. It's doing really well. If you look at, for example, Meta with a lot of their B2B emails they send out, that's what they're always doing, a tactic that they're always doing.

Some of the other things to focus on is how you're saying things. Your call to action button in your actual email. You open up your email, there are buttons in your email that are driving people to your destination pages, your landing pages, whatever they may be. Words that I hate in email marketing, I hate the word register, I hate the word download. These are me the marketer telling you the recipient 'do this' like some sort of weird robot, 'download now' or register now.' No. It always has to be what's in it for me.

By altering the call to action button, the actual language, the words that you put on that button, you can see a radical increase in click through rate. For example, instead of 'register now,' you say, 'save my spot.' You could say, 'I want in.' You're letting the recipient feel like they're one step closer to getting what it is that they're interested in, and they get excited about it.

If you have an on-demand video, on-demand is the most boring way to talk about content. On-demand might as well be like you're going to the doctor, you're going to get a shot, and it's just going to be terrible. On-demand equals boring. 'Watch now,' now you feel like you're watching Netflix. Netflix isn't on-demand, Netflix is watch now. Having that call to action when you have a piece of video content, have that be 'watch now,' it's instant, they know.

These little things have huge impact and cost you nothing to implement.

George: I love this. We have the subject line, we have important words in brackets so they stand out, we have the call to action. When you went into this what's in it for me, or let's spin that to what's in it for them, I totally agree with you. I hate subscribe, register, download. The way that you humanized it, I heard you say these words, your and my, because they're reading it, it's ownership to that call to action.

Is there maybe one other super ninja quick win that people can do over subject line and call to action?

Jay: Yes. One of the things is constantly be telling the person who they are. What do I mean by that? For example, in the subject line, let's say you're marketing to human resource professionals, you want to tell them in the subject line, "Just for HR professionals," or, "This is for human resource professionals." Why do you want to say that? We want an instant connection with whatever the marketing is that we're looking at because we're getting inundated with marketing everywhere we go. We want to know that this thing that just popped into my inbox isn't for everybody. I'm an HR professional, this thing says it's just for HR professionals. You almost feel like you're not doing your job if you don't open it up.

You see radical boosts in your open rate by doing that. But then it's repeating that. In that headline, it's repeating that this is for HR professionals. Then you get to the destination pages, "This is for HR professionals." You're constantly reiterating this is not for everybody.

That type of specificity, that type of personalization, people get confused, they think it has to be like, "Jay, check out this whitepaper." That's not personalization. Personalization is you can mention this is for small business owners, these are for enterprise level marketers, this is for CFOs only, are you aware of what's going on at Acme Company, and you could actually put the company of the person that you're marketing to. Personalization in B2B takes on many forms, and it absolutely boosts performance.

George: This whole conversation is just getting me excited about email marketing. I have to be honest with you, that last piece that you shared, just ringing in my brain was specificity wins the day. This idea of tell them who they are is so great.

We've given the audience some quick wins, we've told them how important list segmentation, A/B testing, all of that good stuff is. Still, I know people will step out of the podcast, they'll step behind their desk or sit at their desk, and they'll start to do this thing that is B2B email marketing. I always like to diagnose some hurdles. When I say hurdles, in my head I imagine a 10-foot pit with spikes and snakes and something that's really hard to get, or it could be that you're just jumping over a hurdle, it is what it is.

What are some of the hurdles you've seen that B2B marketers make around this email conversation that we're having today?

Jay: There are definitely some pitfalls that marketers fall into that they don't always realize why campaigns are being hurt. I'll give you a great example. You get an email and your creative has coded it all up or you've coded it up, it's ready to go, and you send yourself a test email. When you send yourself the test email, you look at it on your computer, it looks good, and you say let's send this thing out. Then you send it out and it didn't do well. You think something is wrong, "I don't understand. Nobody is opening it," whatever it may be.

An interesting element of email is if you're not testing your email and looking at it on your mobile device… About 70% of all primary opens, the first time an email gets opened, is on a mobile device. Now, of course you want to look at it on your mobile device because you want it to be mobile-friendly, but that's not the issue. The issue is with the way that a lot of people that do email creative, when they design an email, they use what's called spacer GIFs to move around things in the email. Have you ever seen when you get an email and you look at it on your phone or whatever and you see all this gobbledygook kind of like code in what is the pre-header area, below the subject line, and you're like that looks like garbage? The reason that's there is that's actually just invisible images that your creative people put together, but you actually can't see it as a marketer unless you are looking at your test message on your phone because it doesn't show up on your desktop test.

The reason I bring this up is it's one of the boat anchors for people opening up emails. What happens is when you send out that email and the recipient gets it and they see that gobbledygook code in the pre-header, they think it's spam, they think it's not real, they think no legit organization is going to have that type of messed up code, so they avoid opening it because they don't want a virus, malware, spyware, or whatever.

Little things like looking at your test messages on your phone and not just your desktop are massive pitfalls to avoid in the B2B space specifically.

George: This is so good. Again, it comes down to perception. You might be the best company in the world, you might be sending the best offer that they'll ever see for the rest of the year, but the perception is, "This doesn't feel right." When as a user you get "this doesn't feel right," now I don't have trust. If I don't have trust, I don't have purchase. What I mean in this case is you don't have click.

I love that you're like test it on mobile. Test it everywhere, but definitely mobile. Also, this might be something where they have to reimagine the actual creative process so they can build the emails out in a way that is garnishing trust, is working on mobile, is doing the things that they need them to do. Great hurdle for them to pay attention to.

Jay, I want to circle back around to something you said. You were talking about on-demand, watch now, that whole thing when we were talking about call to action. You sparked a thing in my brain of that's another internet war that is happening. I'll just ask the question, because there are people who are like put video in your email, and there are people that are screaming no, don't put it. So, here's the thing. To video or not to video in your emails, what say you?

Jay: Love the topic. Let's break out video versus animated GIF. Animated GIF all day should be in emails, it works great, no deliverability problems, will increase your click through rates. Animated GIFs are real simple, they're just three or four images stitched together that rotate on a circle. That's fine, put that in your email all day long. Video, I know that there's a hundred companies out there that have cool technology that will embed video in your email. They'll have a booth at some conference and you're like, "This is so cool." They'll tell you all these wonderful things that will happen. Don't fall for that.

Here's the thing. By putting video in your email, yes, you'll probably have deliverability problems because of file sizes, yes, it will get flagged by incoming networks that it has video, and etcetera, but that's not the only thing. You don't need to do this, you don't need to have the video in the email, because we are not trained, humans are not trained to watch a video in the email. What we are trained to do is if we find something compelling, we'll click on something and watch the video on the destination page.

The question becomes if we're not embedding the video, how do we get them to really click and watch the video, because that's what we need them to do? Here's the easiest way to make this happen. You take a screenshot of the first image of your video, real simple, and then you make a big red play button like the ones you see on YouTube, you take a big fat red play button and you stick it right in the middle of that image of the start of your video. You take that image with the big red play button and you put it as your email creative, you send it out and say, "Check out this great video," etcetera.

We are like Pavlov, we are trained that when we see that big red button, we have to click on it. If we don't click on it, our computers will explode. We have to click on it, we are trained to click on it. We see that big red button and we click on it, and I will tell you that you then have the same video right there on the landing page, you get all of the views that you want, you generated engagement, you generated click through, no deliverability problems. So, don't embed video. Big red play button for the win.

George: I love this. Big play button, me human, me click. That's just kind of the mentality that happens, especially when you're painting that picture.

I know you mentioned big red button. You might use your branding color, you might keep it red, you do what you want. I'll tell you what came to my brain that I want to test, and maybe you have, is you mentioned GIFs of actually maybe it looks like the video is playing but that play button is over it, so now you're adding the one-two punch of both of those. That might be something that you want to test, for sure, you B2B marketing ninjas out there.

Speaking of B2B marketing ninjas, we've talked about hurdles, we've talked about some great quick wins that we can do. One of the things that I love to do is paint the picture of the mountain top, you've arrived, it's the zen moment, you can sit back and take a breath and relax. What I mean by that is how do you know what B2B email marketing success looks like?

Jay: That's a journey that will never happen. You will never. Rest assured, in your career, you will never be like, "Wow, everything is going great." I've been doing this for, I don't know, 25+ years, I'm shooting for good, things are good, and I barely get to good.

You'll never get there because, ultimately, if you have your act together, you're really doing great, you have your workflows and your marketing automation streams, your salespeople are happy with the lead quality they're getting, and you have an overabundance of content coming in whenever you want it, and you just have everything going great. That's when you probably realize that my newsletter is stale, uh-oh, our marketing automation streams have content from three years ago that we didn't realize was there, we left up the wrong destination pages, our database has a high bounce rate.

Then ultimately what every marketer does is they say, "You know what we need to do? Why don't we get a new email platform? That's a fun idea. Let's go down the path of finding, let's switch our platform from this platform to that platform." They blow everything up and they start all over again. So, no, you'll never get to the mountain top. You'll die trying. That's okay, that's what we do, that's our lives, it's fine.

George: It's such a fun conversation. As I listened to you, of course, listeners, you're probably getting your own thoughts and jotting your own notes, but I'm thinking success is if it doesn't suck. That's great, let's move forward. I haven't put my keyboard through my monitor or thrown my computer across the room today, so we're good to go.

Let's pivot a little bit. We have two more questions as we close out this episode on B2B email marketing techniques that work right now. Let's talk about the myths or myth, it's totally up to you if there's one or two. What are these things that we probably need to debunk before we let people get back to their regularly scheduled day?

Jay: That's awesome. Email has been around so long, so there are myths that are tied to the past. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Let's talk about words. If you go ahead and move around spammy words to avoid in your subject line or in your body copy, you will probably find a thousand articles that give you these lists of words and these symbols, exclamation points and question marks, and emojis, and the word free, this word and that word, and you have to avoid all of these things. By the time you avoid all of them, you can't have an articulate sentence that you could actually write in an email.

The reason that drives me nuts and the reason I call that a myth is that relates to 10 years ago. Ten plus years ago, the reason you got filtered, you were in the junk folder, you have reputation issues was because of the content that you were sending out, words and things that you were sending out. Technology has changed. You get filtered, you go to the junk folder and the spam folder because of the sending reputation of the IP address you're delivering from and the engagement, how many opens and clicks, and all that stuff you have with the users that you are marketing to, not because of the content. When you see these lists of things to avoid, the ironic part is the very things that these lists tell you to avoid, which is not true, they don't have impact on what you're doing, they are the things that actually give you the boost in performance.

Here's what I'll tell you to actually get peace of mind and you'll also swell up simultaneously. On average, I don't care who you are, I don't care if you're the biggest marketer in the world, on average 20% of all the email that you send out will go to the junk folder and the spam folder. It will. That is because of the nature of the internet, the burps of the internet, all of the different things that are out there.

What happens is a marketer sends out an email and it will go to the junk folder, and they're like, "Oh my god, why am I going to the junk folder?" and they'll lose their minds, they'll dissect it and change twelve things. When in reality that's the world that we're in. Realize some stuff is going to go to junk, but it's not because you put a question mark in the subject line.

George: So good. I love this idea of you always have to be paying attention to the technology as it's changing. Again, usually this is framed in what once worked doesn't work anymore, but maybe it's what didn't work once now works. Think about the title that we just got you to listen to this podcast episode with, what is working right now.

As we quiet down and get ready to get the last question, I love that we can learn from other people. I love that everybody has their own journey, and on their journey, they have grabbed these things, this element that is wisdom. Jay, pertaining to either this conversation or just life in general, I like to open it up to whatever comes to mind when I ask this question. What are some words of wisdom you want to share with the Marketing Smarts audience?

Jay: You're all wonderful people, number one. In general, don't always believe what you read, don't always believe what you hear from people like me. In the world of email, most of the so-called experts are regurgitating old information, there's not a lot of new things out there. Testing – you testing things is going to be your best path forward. Not only because information is old, but the variables of who your business is, what your content is, what your brand reputation is, what your database make up is, it's all you and you are unique.

Testing and learning for yourself and then creating internal benchmarks that you beat. Make your own ecosystem. Don't rely on just metrics that you see in the outside world, because you are your best environment to learn from. Be empowered by that.

George: Marketing Smarts listeners, did you take lots of notes? I have to ask, what is your one thing, your number one execution opportunity after this podcast episode? Make sure you reach out and let us know in my inbox or on Twitter using the hashtag #MPB2B.

Also, I have to ask are you a free member of the MarketingProfs community yet? If not, head over to Mprofs.com/mptoday. You won't regret the additional B2B marketing education that you'll be adding to your life.

We'd like it if you could leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, but we'd love it if you would share this episode with a coworker or friend. Until we meet in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast where we talk with Paul Hintz on being flexibility focused for B2B marketing nirvana, I hope you do just a couple of things. One, reach out and let us know what conversation you'd like to listen in on next. Two, focus on getting 1% better at your craft each and every day. Finally, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble B2B human. We'll see you in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast.

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Published on September 1, 2022