E-mail is not dead! Get Better Engagement with Your Clients – Jay Schwedelson
Today's Guest
Jay Schwedelson is the president and CEO of Worldata Group, a multi-brand marketing services company whose portfolio includes SubjectLine.com. Jay is also the founder of Subjectline.com, a leading free subject-line rating tool ranked in the top 1% of all websites worldwide. Jay is a highly sought-after speaker known for using his straightforward and energetic style to present actionable, data-driven marketing best practices. Having a strong subject line in your email campaign is essential to capture your audience’s attention. Jay’s free tool, SubjectLine.com, scores your email subject line and incorporates AI to provide stronger suggestions. Many small businesses struggle to capture the attention of their audience with emails; resulting in poor click-through rates. In today’s episode, you will learn some ways to strengthen your emails, how important it is to leverage this cost-efficient tool, and why you should collect your client’s emails.
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Episode Transcript
(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)
Gordon Henry: Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street. You know how some email subject lines just grab your attention. Wish you could come up with some catchy subject lines too? Well, now you can. Jay Schwedelson is the founder of subjectline.com, the leading free subject line rating tool. It's ranked in the top 1% of all websites worldwide.
Having led subjectline.com through the testing of more than 15 million subject lines. Jay uses his knowledge to guide organizations through multiple industries on how to implement impactful email marketing. He's also the president and CEO of World Data Group, a marketing services company whose portfolio includes Subject Line, Outcome Media, and Guru Events, which puts on the Guru conference world's largest email marketing event. Jay also has his own great podcast, check it out, "Do This, Not That."
What should listeners get out of this episode? There really is a science behind marketing. By listening to Jay, you should get ideas about how to improve your own marketing. You may even want to hire Jay and his firm, World Data Group. So Jay, super excited to meet you. Let's dive in. Maybe you can start by just walking us through your career journey. What led you to where you are today?
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, it's exciting to be here, and love talking about all this crazy stuff that you could do to make big impacts without doing too much. So how do I get into all this? I have this agency that I've been doing forever called Outcome Media. We don't just do email, we do direct mail, we do podcast advertising, we do all sorts of media, all focused on demand gen. But over the years, our clients would always come to us and say, when we were doing their email campaigns, "What should be the right subject line?" And it became a big thing in our company, and eventually like, "You know what? Let's make a little tool for our clients so they could use all the best practice information about what you should put in the subject line." So back when, I bought a domain when it didn't cost anything, called subjectline.com, put this tool up for our clients, and lo and behold, other people started using it. And we said, "This is something, with all the data that we have, that we can have for the industry for free."
And that's what it is today. It's this free tool that marketers can go to, where they could put a subject line, and tells them if it's good or bad, and then actually now it even rewrites your subject line using AI. My business is my agency. Subject Line is a free tool we put out there for the industry. And then we also have a conference business where we put on really large scale free marketing conferences that are virtual. Guru Conference is the world's largest email event, and it's virtual, have about 17,000 people there, and it's free. And that's what we try to do. Try to give back to the industry and just share the little things that you could do, especially in your subject line and in your email, that can lead to massive changes in your overall performance.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, terrific. The Guru event is, if I'm not mistaken, coming up pretty soon, right?
Jay Schwedelson: Is coming up November 8th and 9th. We got Martha Stewart who's going to be there and a zillion major brands. And it's really an opportunity. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, again, it's free, for you to really learn the latest of what's going on in email. And people think email has been around forever. "Oh, is email dead? Is it legacy?" And the opposite is true. It's never had better engagement, and we rely on it. All of us do. And it's always changing. Even though it feels like it's been there forever, there's always new stuff. And that's what we're always excited to talk about.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Excellent. Tell us a little bit about World Data Group. What does World Data Group do?
Jay Schwedelson: It's a demand generation agency, so we really focus on driving pipeline for business and consumer marketers of all different shapes and sizes. If you are trying to... You're a business, you're trying to get more people to hire your home services company, we want to help you target those consumers that need those services. If you're a B2B organization, you're trying to get people to download your white paper, attend your webinar, we want to find the right media, the right executions, to drive that demand. It gives us this kind of view into what's working, whether it's in social or email or direct mail or any kind of media, what's working now and what's not, a pitfall to avoid. And that's what I spend my day doing. We're about a hundred or so person organization.
Gordon Henry: Wow. Pretty substantial.
You mentioned home services. A lot of our listeners, and a lot of Thryv's customers, are home service businesses, everything. Contractors, plumbers, roofers, as well as auto mechanics, other types of service businesses, where we're providing some service for consumers. I wonder, if I can put you on the spot and tell us a couple of tips for small business marketers, these kinds of local small business, not tech startups, but local small businesses, what are a few tips that you would recommend that they'd think about to improve their marketing?
Jay Schwedelson: When we talk about things that you could do right now to make a difference, let's talk about email specifically for a second. And oftentimes marketers make the mistake and they focus on what it is they're going to send out, what's inside the email, what's the copy going to be, what's the images we're going to have? And that's all well and good, but we need to get that email open. And if you're in the home services category, the auto category, whatever it may be, there are little things that you can do, in the subject line for example, that can radically change the number of people opening up your emails. It costs you no money. It doesn't matter what platform you're on, and it takes five seconds. I'll give you some examples. You can put in the subject line... Nobody actually reads the entire subject line, right? They only care about what's in the first few characters, the first word or two, because we're all living fast. What you put in those first few characters will determine whether or not somebody opens it. I'll give you an example.
If you put a number to start your subject line, the three things every new homeowner needs to know, the five pitfalls to avoid when hiring a certain contractor, you literally start your subject line with a number, you'll see the percentage of people that are opening up your email increased by over 20%. It's not that somebody's going to look at the subject line and be like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. I see a number." Nobody's going to do that. No, but it's in the subconscious and it grabs your attention and numbers are very authoritative and they really make you think, "Oh, I can digest this fast."
If you capitalize the first word of your subject line, just capitalize it. Or the first phrase, it could say "Today," it could say "New," it could say, "Now." Just capitalizing that first word in the subject line will also boost your open rate by about 15%.
You can use brackets to start your subject line, put in the most important thing that your offer is promoting. A big sale, new content, whatever it is. You put it in brackets. Again, it stands out right at the start of that subject line. You could even use an emoji. The biggest mistake that marketers make now, and small business owners make, is they go on Google and they go, "Email best practices. What to do if I'm sending out an email?" And they'll see things like "Avoid these spam trigger words." Okay? And you'll see these lists of words and things you have to avoid, like the word free and all this other nonsense. And to tell you the truth, that is a regurgitation of information from 10 years ago. That's not true anymore. That was true 10 years ago. You had to avoid these words and symbols because those words and symbols 10 years ago caused you to go to the junk folder, caused you to go to the spam folder.
You don't go to the junk folder and spam folder anymore for that. It's more of a technical thing. So don't believe everything you read or hear, and know that you can feel liberated and use the word free or use an emoji, or capitalize a word. It's not going to cause you to have any deliverability issues, but it will cause you to get an increase in engagement, which is what we want.
Gordon Henry: Fascinating stuff. Now, I just heard one of your new podcasts where you talked about the importance of getting your first email opened. Why it's so important to get that very first email to your new customer open. Why is that? Tell us.
Jay Schwedelson: First, thanks for listening. A lot of times, when we go through setting up our different things on our website or in our marketing, we're going through the motions, right? You get somebody's email address, you put it into your CRM tool, right, or somebody goes through a form on your website. They fill out a form or they buy something from you, and you've set up, in your infrastructure, you've set up an automated email that's going to go out to the person the second that they come into your email universe so to speak. And usually that email says something like, "Thank you very much, thanks for signing up," because that's a normal thing to do. You're checking a box that you said thank you, but really, that first email is not a thank you. The first time you email somebody, there is a technical relationship that's being established between you, the company sending, and the recipient, and their infrastructure that they're receiving the email.
If the recipient that receives the email... If they open up that very first email they get from you, that they've never gotten an email from your organization before, if they open it up, the likelihood of you then staying in that person's inbox goes up by over 80% as compared if they don't open it. Now why does that matter? What should we do about that?
It matters because, in the future, you're going to want to send them more stuff. You're going to want to send them stuff about new sales, promotions, all this stuff, and you want to stay in that inbox. So getting that email open tells the network, your network and their network, "Hey, this person likes getting email from this new sender. Okay, because they opened it up. Let's make sure their email stays in the inbox."
So what you need to do, as opposed to just saying thank you when you send the thing, you need to have the most amazing subject line of all time to get them to open. You want it to say "Thank you. VIP gift inside." Or the subject line can just say, "You need to see what's inside," or "Thank you. Something special for you..." Something that gets them to open that email and click on that email. And it's not about selling more at that moment, it's about paving the way for the future for all your future communications, and so it's not a receipt, it's not a thank you email. It's the start of your dialogue, and you got to treat it that way.
Gordon Henry: Are there any particular things small business marketers do badly that you've noticed that they get wrong? Or are there any things like you see over and over that people should just know do not do this?
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I would say a couple of the biggest things they missed the boat on, no offense, is number one, their call to action buttons. Okay?
So you open up an email, all right, and in the email, great, they finally opened it up and you are selling something, you're promoting something, right? Let's say you're trying to get them to download something, or maybe you want them to register for something. You write up your email and then you have a button in your email and it says the word "Register." Okay? I mean, there's not a more epically boring word than the word register. Instead of saying register, if you write your call to action buttons, the buttons in your emails, and they could be as long as you want, if you write them in the first person, your click-through rates go up by over 20%. What I mean by that is, if it was something you're trying to get them to register for, instead of "Register," what if it said, "I want in," or instead of, "Register," it said, "Save my spot."
What sounds better to you? "Register," or, "I want in." Right? "Register," or, "Get me my 20% off."
Getting that excitement going, getting the person to feel like they're part of it, that call to action button is critical. And then when you take them to the destination page, whatever you're selling, that button, that final button after they're filling out the form, please don't let it say, "Submit." Submit has to be the weirdest word in the history of marketing, that we all decided it's normal to put, "Submit," on our websites. Close the deal. That's the closing argument. That button? That button needs to say, "Yes, I want it. Yes, get me my deal." Whatever it is, repeat the offer in that call to action button and you'll do incredibly well. The last thing I would mention, I don't think that small businesses do enough, especially in home services and automotive and all these things, is almost in every case, all the businesses in those categories have a happy customer.
They have at least one customer that can give them a testimonial, at least one. You could take one testimonial and you could ride that to the finish line and it can totally change your marketing. What I mean by that is inside your email, right near the button where you're asking people to click, you put that one quote either next to it or below the button, and it says, "This is the best service ever, said Susie." We don't realize it, but that vote of confidence, that subconscious thing, it makes us click. And then on the destination page, again, you put that testimonial right by the button where they're thinking about should they do it. Say, "I love working with this company, said Bill."
This social proof, right at the point of decision making, radically changes engagement. Everything we've talked about here doesn't take a lot of time. You already have it. Costs you nothing. And it really changes the game.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, this is terrific.
I hope people listening realize, as you're going through this, that it's not necessarily one thing that makes your email successful, or for that matter, any of your marketing successful, but it's all these little nuances, all these tiny little things when you add it up, 10th of a point here, 10th of a point there, that starts to make the program work.
I remember when I started in the business. Back then, it was more printed direct mail pieces. And I still remember, one of the things that made an impression on me, when you were sending out mail, if you put a real stamp on the mail, like a physical stamp as opposed to one of those little blocks that said, "Prepaid mail," you would lift your response rate just by... And it was the same price. You'd get the postage stamp at the same price, but it had this aura of official, and it would make people open the mail.
And that was those days. Maybe it's different now, but there's all these little things that sometimes you wouldn't even think about, but that make a difference. Which leads me to ask you a question. Speaking of that, do you still believe in direct mail, physical direct mail?
Jay Schwedelson: Oh, direct mail is a huge part of my business, absolutely. And direct mail has really evolved. Not to get too into the weeds and how sophisticated it's become, but a big portion of direct mail is marketing automation direct mail. What I mean by that is we're very accustomed to, now, somebody goes to a page on your website, they fill out a form and they go look at a pricing page, and an email gets automatically sent. It's a trigger based email.
That is going on with direct mail now. We do that all day long, and it is phenomenal. Because you can literally, if someone goes to a pricing page on your website, you could have, in an automated trigger fashion, a postcard out in the mail within 48 hours, delivered in their home or business within eight days. Or if they fill out a form or whatever, the same idea. Marketing automation has made its way to direct mail, and it is doing incredibly well, and now you have QR codes that everybody knows how to use and so on and so forth. So yes, big believer in direct mail. It's more of... I think, back in the day, it was more of a shotgun approach where it's just like, "I'm going after this audience and this geography," just mailed to everybody. Now it's very much very, very specific, which brings your costs down, but it can do incredibly well.
Gordon Henry: Right. And I would imagine there's a lot less direct marketing, or sorry, direct mailing going on. I know my mailbox is much less cluttered than it used to be, and so what's in there does kind of stand out more, right?
Jay Schwedelson: A hundred percent. And what's also interesting to see, even business marketing offers at home now, because so many remote workers, you don't really know who's in the office and who's not. You're seeing a real interesting time period for direct mail. But absolutely the catalogers, there's very few catalogers that are still sending stuff out at scale, so your postcards can really stand out, and I think that's the format that's working the best right now.
Gordon Henry: Yeah.
You mentioned marketing automation, and I am curious to talk to you a little bit about that. Thryv makes a CRM program with marketing automation embedded in it. What are your thoughts for small businesses, one, two, three million dollar businesses about using marketing technology or CRM technology? What do you recommend to them?
Jay Schwedelson: So marketing automation with Thryv's offering is fantastic, because what it lets you do is set up programs that are always on. Especially as a small business owner, a lot of the times you have to be real with yourself. You say, "Okay, I'm not going to always be able to set up these campaigns and get this all at the door." So if I set certain things up that are just always on, that if somebody visits this page, they're going to get this email. If they fill out this form, they're going to get that email. Whereas these automated trigger-based things, that can be like an army for you that's going to generate all this business. But there's one mistake I think that everybody makes, and I've made two, it's not utilizing evergreen content and evergreen offers in your automation.
Look at the time period, we're now towards the end of 2023. If you have a piece of content, fast-forward, now it's February, and you have this automated content that was talking about what's the outlook for 2023, even though you're in 2024, if that goes out, it does more damage to your brand than if you never sent anything at all. So when you're setting up your automation, you really need to get real with yourself and say, "You know what? I may not have the time to go back and look at and audit everything that we're sending out, so whatever we're putting in there as these trigger-based notifications and emails, they have to be able to stand the test of time, so that way I don't look like a fool and I don't ruin my brand." But if you do that, you can be really successful in driving a ton of business while you're sleeping.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, great point. It's funny, I was listening to CNBC the other morning. I was listening to the Squawk Box and there was an ad on. It said something like, "It's summer '23. You should be wearing these cool pants," or something. And I was like, "Dude, it's like three months over."
Even big brands kind of lose track of it. It's funny.
Jay Schwedelson: It stuck with you, right? You remember?
Gordon Henry: Yeah. You notice it even more than if it was the right time period. It's so-
Jay Schwedelson: A hundred percent.
Gordon Henry: Here it's like... Up here where I am, it's 50 degrees out, putting on your fall weather. Fall gear.
Let's talk about spending pattern for small businesses, how much small businesses should be spending. I mean, I think it's a very common question. "I'm a $2 million HVAC business. How much of my revenue should I be spending on my marketing campaigns?" Do you have any rules of thumb people should be thinking about?
Jay Schwedelson: Well, I wouldn't necessarily say I have a rule of thumb. I would look at what is the most cost-effective thing. I will tell you that if there's a difficult economy up ahead, everyone's forecasting that we're about to have a more difficult economy, in terms of your marketing spend, what you're going to be looking at is "What can I get the most bang for my buck? What's going to go the furthest in terms of my spend?" And when you're thinking about that, the reason you really want to be thinking about email is it is the only channel that exists... And I know I may seem like I'm biased, but I'm not, because I do every channel. Email is the only channel that exists where you can reach your entire audience without spending a lot of money. When you hit send to your entire database, it doesn't really cost you that much.
If you go on social media and you post stuff, it's going to go to maybe 10% of your network, because the algorithm just doesn't circulate it more than that. If you wanted to reach everybody, you got to spend a lot of money. If you want to go on search, you got to spend a lot of money. You only do direct mail, that costs a lot of money. So email is the only channel where you can communicate to everybody... And we see this.
Every time there's a more difficult economy, business owners and marketers rely more on email, which is why what we're talking about today is important, because the littlest thing in email can have an impact on why it is or is not successful. It always bothers me when someone says "Email doesn't work for me." That means that you're not trying to do all this little stuff. That's too global of a statement. So in terms of how you should think about your marketing budget, I would think about it more as, "Okay, I need to have coverage of everybody, and I'm not going to be spending as much money, so where can I get the most coverage?" And channels like email are really important.
Gordon Henry: Right. Really cost-efficient. Now, when you're saying you can reach everybody with email, I think you're... Tell me if I'm wrong. I think you're talking about you can reach your existing database, which will mostly be people who know you. Existing customers, or maybe people who left you their email address. Maybe they bought, maybe they didn't, but you got their email address. If you're worried about new customers, bringing new customers in the door who you don't know yet, somebody you haven't met, presumably you don't have their email address, and it's going to be very tough to email them cold without ending up in the spam folder. What do you recommend in those cases? "I'm trying to bring in a hundred new customers over the next six months. How do I reach them?"
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. I'll tell you one thing I don't think that people do enough of, which is, and it's always hard for me to get out of my mouth, pop up contact captures. That's when you go to a website, and it pops up a little window and it'll say, "Hey, you want to get 10% off? Give me your email address." Or, "Hey, you want to see the latest trends, give me your email address." And I will tell you, they work incredibly well. You can grow your database fast by doing that. Now, people will make this mistake and they'll say, "Oh, I don't want to do those, because those annoy me." They annoy me. But then I always turn it back to the person and say the following. I say, "When you go to Nike," and they do this all the time, "and Nike pops up that little window saying put this in, you give us your email address, you get 10% off."
Let's say you don't like that thing, what do you do? Do you click the X and get rid of that window and then go on to buy your sneakers? Or do you say, "Oh, I hate Nike. I'll never work with them because they did did this little popup," and you move on to another website? No. Nobody ever does that. They just click the little X and they go on with their day regardless if they were annoyed or not.
So the reason you want to do that is you'll really grab a lot of net new contacts, and across the board, what you really want to be doing is, whatever that offer is, 10% off, a special piece of content, whatever is that super top of the funnel, that super thing, that can just grab people so you can get their address, you want to be promoting that on social, on everything that you're doing. You want to be capturing email addresses everywhere you possibly can. Then you could really hit them over and over and over again. I would say, in general, marketers make the mistake, is they'll say, "I don't like it, so I'm not going to do it." Well, you're not your database and that's going to put you out of business. That's why you got to test everything.
Gordon Henry: I'm wondering if you could give us any great examples of marketing today. It could be advertising, it could be direct mail, whatever. Just cool stuff you're seeing out there that really is a good example of what somebody smart is doing.
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I'll give you some different examples. I think that there are marketers that go in different extremes, okay? If you want to see extreme versions for example of email marketing, you can sign up for Wayfair. Wayfair is basically communicating in hieroglyphics. They literally, their entire subject line is emojis. It is totally wild. It is unbelievable what they're doing out there.
But one thing that I would recommend for small businesses that are doing... Let's talk about email marketing. It's working really well. It's a newer trend, is you send out your offer, whatever it is. The common way that marketers do email is they send out their offer and they go, "Click here, go to this page, buy, subscribe, do." But there's a big shift going on with email, especially in the small business world that says...
Let's say you have a discount, a 20% off discount. Instead of saying, "Click here to get your discount," it is, "Reply to this email with a word, and write the word discount, and we're going to get that to you." It is asking people to actually reply to the email that you're sending. And we are seeing this method, instead of asking people to click, asking people to reply and mention the word. "Reply and say discount. Reply and say white paper." Reply and say whatever it is, it's increasing response rates by over 300%, and then instantly you're in a dialogue with that person. So we're seeing a lot of brands starting to test that, which is really fun and cool, especially for small businesses. They're always looking at how to engage and how to do different things.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, interesting. I find in the small business space... Our whole world at Thryv is small businesses. One of the simple little things that distinguish a good small business from a not-so-good one is just being responsive to customers. There are so many companies out there, you'd think everybody would be beating down the doors for business, but there's a surprising number of businesses you call them or even email them and you just don't hear back. Days and days and days. And God forbid you leave a voicemail. It just never... So I would think that somehow making it clear that you're a responsive company, like, "You need an estimate for your fall gutters to be cleaned, we'll be out there tomorrow at noon," kind of thing. Just let me know that you're going to be responsive and that'll put you ahead of the pack.
Jay Schwedelson: Not only that. I would say, let's say you are running around, you're like, "Oh my goodness, I can't even get to all these emails. I don't have time. I wish I could reply back and whatever." Even managing the expectation, setting up an auto reply that says, "Listen, I got your email. We are so excited to talk to you," and talk like a human. Don't just make it like a boring auto thing. Say "You'll hear from us in the next 12 hours," whatever it is. "Stay tuned. It's going to be great."
Just getting that acknowledgement will really buy you that time, and a hundred percent, it's like anything. If you go to a website and you take an action, you fill out a form, you do whatever, and then 15 minutes goes by, that's actually the window of time. If you go along in 15 minutes without hearing back after you filled out a form, we see a future engagement fall off a cliff, drops by 50% for the lifetime of that individual. Because whenever we do anything, you go online, you fill out a form, if you don't get something, you immediately go, "Did it go through? Do I have to call customer service?" What happened? Right? You lose your mind.
Gordon Henry: Exactly.
Jay Schwedelson: And so there needs to be that immediate thing. And on the flip side of that, there's a polar opposite which small business owners make this mistake, which is that there's a very, very, very long tail for the offers that you're putting out there. And I'll give you a crazy stat. About 22% of all click-throughs on emails happen, occur, after the offer period expires. So if you have an offer that says 20% off discount, or whatever, expires this Friday. On average, about 22% of all clicks are going to happen after that offer expired. Expired on that Friday. And why does that matter? We actually see the lifetime value of customers that come in, that click on something after your offer expires, to be exponentially higher, because these people either save the email or they went back to the email and they're still interested.
And the problem that we make, small business owners make, is they're not thinking about what is on that page after the offer expires. A lot of times, they click through the offer expired, it says, "I'm sorry, it's no longer here," whatever it is. And you're like, "Well, that stinks." And you leave. It should say, "Listen, that offer's not here, but this awesome thing is," and it might even be better than what you were looking for in the same ballpark.
So thinking about the traffic that occurs after the offer expires is super valuable to really getting those great prospects.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, really interesting. Super actionable insights from Jay Schwedelson. We'll be right back in 30 seconds. Don't go anywhere.
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Gordon Henry: And we're back with Jay Schwedelson, guru of email marketing and all things marketing. Really fascinating conversation. Nowadays, it seems like we're all carrying around these computers in our pocket called cell phones, smartphones, and it seems like everything is marketing. Social media is marketing, email is marketing, pretty much any website has marketing. Still have spam. It sort of never ends. Years ago, you saw marketing if you turned on your TV. Now it's all around you all the time, 24/7. Are we overmarketed to? Are response rates going down? How's this all playing with our heads?
Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, it could definitely feel that way. And not all channels are, in my opinion, important. Especially social media is a tricky thing when you're a business owner, because a business owner makes the mistake that they think that, in order to be relevant, they need to have a presence on every social media platform. That if they don't, for some reason their customers are going to think that they're not there. They're not relevant, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
And as a small business owner, what you really should be saying to yourself is, "It's more valuable for me to go deep on one social network than to be thin across all of them." Because if you're deep on one social network, you can really present yourself to be a thought leader, an industry leader, a market leader, and have a really strong following, and large numbers in your following. If you try to go across all of them, you're going to look weak everywhere. So I try to focus my clients, say, "Listen, let's focus on this social network, because it's where your customers are, and let's go aggressive there. We don't have to worry about Threads. There's four people on Threads." You know what I mean? Think about how much time you have available and you don't need to be everywhere to be successful.
Gordon Henry: Okay, got it. What's your favorite marketing campaign of all time?
Jay Schwedelson: Oh my God, that's a loaded question.
You know what? I've been on a thing lately where I've been thinking about how marketers get business, and I think this applies for a lot of Thryv customers as well, which is if you look at a company like Bombas. And I say Bombas, the first thing you think of is socks. If you think of Ring, the first thing you think of is their doorbell. If you think of Apple, the first thing you think of is their iPhone. And the reason I say that is, I think that small business owners make an ongoing mistake, which is they have an offering, they do 10 different things.
And they go out to market and say, "We do these 10 things." And a lot of times, they don't get the business, because the prospect they're talking to is like, "Well, I just need this one thing. Do they do that really well? Because there's a hundred things they talk about on their website," whatever.
And so I think the campaigns I love the most, the businesses I love the most have an entree point in. They get known for something, like the iPhone, or the socks or the Ring doorbell. And I'm a big believer that if you are trying to be known for everything, you'll be known for nothing. It is when you're known for something and then somebody says, "Okay, I'm going to give you a try on that thing," and then you do a great job, and then they say, "Well, what else do you do? Because you're so awesome."
So the campaigns and the businesses I love are the ones that are kind of using that entree point in and then permeating. And I think, for a small business owner, that's what I would try to focus on, is being known for that thing. It's like my business. People know me for email. They think I'm this email guy. I got subjectline.com, I'm email guy. And I did that on purpose, because 20 years ago, I would go into a pitch and I'd say, "I do direct mail and email and digital marketing and 75 other things," I'd walk out of there with no business. I'm like, "What happened?" And then I flip the script and said, "I do email," and they hire me for email. And then they say, "Well, you're good at that. Let's do seven other things."
So this idea of being known for something is really important. And those are the campaigns I really love.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, really good point. I like that. So what's next for Jay Schwedelson? Where are you going next? What's the future look like?
Jay Schwedelson: Well, we got lots of stuff going on.
I'm always trying to grow my agency business, more clients there. And then this idea that we're putting on these really large scale virtual marketing conferences for free, we just did one about direct mail called Delivered, which was great. And then we have Guru Conference, which is all about email. It's going to be, like I said, I think 17,000 people. We want to grow that business, put on more of these free virtual marketing conferences. And just like you, we have this podcast, Do This, Not That, which has been fun to learn this whole podcasting world, because it is a world unto itself.
But as you know, interesting about podcasts is you put out these podcasts and no matter what you do, I don't care who you are, you can't track, you don't know who's really listening. So it's like all of a sudden, you'll come across, "Oh, I heard this," or, "I listened to an episode from three months ago."
So it's an interesting channel to be in. I just like testing all sorts of stuff.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, very cool. How should people get in touch with you who might want to hire you?
Jay Schwedelson: My place of choice is LinkedIn. If you find me on LinkedIn, I post there almost every day. You DM me, connect with me. It's a prime example of going deep on one channel. That's where I focus my energy. To me, it is the absolute best social network, doesn't matter what business you're in or what size you are. Would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Drop me a note, and yeah, we'll have some fun.
Gordon Henry: Okay. And if people do want to sign up for the Guru show, where should they go?
Jay Schwedelson: guruconference.com. That's the URL. It's a hundred percent free. I think you'll get a lot of value out of it and you can watch it from anywhere in the world. And look, Martha Stewart's going to be there. She knows what's going on.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Very cool. Well, Jay, I want thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great and a lot of actionable insights, so I know people are going to appreciate it.
Jay Schwedelson: Thanks for including me. It's great. I've listened to a bunch of episodes and I appreciate you having me on.
Gordon Henry: Cool, thank you.
I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman, and our coordinators Diette. Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends, and family to subscribe. And we'd love it if you'd leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. Helps us in the rankings.
Small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo at thryv.com/pod and check out our new free product, free, commandcenter@thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.
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