Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break.

That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom.

Or both.

But I don't recommend both.

But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics.

And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it.

Thanks for checking it out.

Welcome back to another Bathroom Breaks.

I am Daniel Murray and I'm here with the king of email, Jay Sweddleson.

There's nothing more to say than the king of email.

Really?

I can't even think of anything else.

The fakest statement of all time.

But that's fine.

I have a question for you and we don't.

We didn't talk about this ahead of time, so I'm just curious.

I. I never know.

Are you a big nerd?

What I mean by that is like, are you into Star Trek, Star Wars?

I don't mean that you're a nerd.

If you are, because I'm into all that, like Marvel movies.

Is any of that your speed or are you like, no, no, no, I'm too cool for that.

I would say I'm considered like an underground nerd.

I don't portray myself as a nerd, but Ari thinks I'm the biggest nerd and she hates all that stuff.

If I'm going to watch Star Wars, I actually think I'm more Marvel movies first.

I've always been a Marvel, Marvel DC Comics type person first.

And then I would go to big Harry Potter guy, big Lord of the Rings.

Now also Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.

Shout out to everybody's watching that.

I actually never got into Star Trek, though.

I couldn't.

I don't know why.

I just never got into Star Trek.

Do you know I've never.

Oh, first of all, I watch everything you just said, except I've never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones ever.

I mean, you're probably saving yourself a little bit of pain and anguish, but the first couple seasons are amazing.

And then you just cry at the end.

I only cry during reality tv.

So let's jump into what we're talking about today.

Today we're talking about win back strategies.

Everybody's like, oh, no, A portion of my database, they don't open or Click or engage or do anything.

How do we win them back?

So we're going to talk about actual win back strategies that work and other ones that are just garbage.

So Daniel, what do you got man?

How do we win people back?

I think first we should talk about is when to start winning people back.

I think that is the key because a lot of people overdo it and a lot of people underdo it.

So there's a fine balance.

But I think.

And a lot of people don't do it, which is even a bigger sin.

It's like a lot of people, you want to, you want to get those people reactive on your list.

Re engage re doing things.

But I'm a big fan of doing it within no activity in the last 90 days.

I think too many people wait too long.

If they have not been opening for a year, they're probably never gonna open ever again.

So you need to get them back re engaged as fast as possible.

So 90 days without doing anything.

If you, if they don't re engage after our one back campaigns, they're goners.

They're unsubscribed, they're sitting in a list of unengaged people.

And we will never email you again.

I'm sorry.

Well, I have to tell you, the win back strategy that I absolutely hate is when I get an email that says we miss you.

If you're about to hit send on a we miss you email, I want you to stop listening and I want you to pause that campaign because you don't miss these people.

It's the most contrived, ridiculous thing of all time.

So what we see work the best is what I like to call verification emails, where I know this sounds bad, but you're kind of scaring the person a little bit.

And what you're asking them to do is open the email because they have to verify something.

So for example, on the business side, if somebody has engaged with any of the emails, we may send them an email that says are you still with Acme?

We put in the company name or are you still in the retail industry?

Right?

And all this person gets freaked out.

You're like, yeah, I'm still with Acme.

What happened?

Did, did HR tell you something and then you opened up the email and it says, oh good, because we wanted to share this with you, whatever.

Or on the consumer side, you say something like do you still want VIP status?

And you're like, wait a minute, am I going to lose VIP status?

And the person has to take, you know, open it up and Check out the offer.

But this idea of verification gets the person to kind of wake back up and it jolts them into checking it out.

So that's a strategy that we see work incredibly well.

Do you separate the types of re engagement?

For example there's, there are people on your list that were really active and then they stopped being active versus the people who were kind of active and then they didn't.

Should people think about because for someone who is really active and didn't became unactive, you kind of want feedback.

What, what happened?

What happened to you versus someone who opened maybe one or two your first emails and maybe the content wasn't for them or the emails weren't for them or you weren't the company for them.

I feel like different messages should go to those two different lists.

But what are you, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, and I think it spreads even beyond win back.

So we have something that we call super lists that we do where it's, it's very similar to what you just said which is for that are engaging with let's say a ton of our content.

Ongoing opening clicking or like are super fans of whatever putting out there.

We segment them out separately and we actually give them additional content, special content because there are people.

But to your point, if we lose super fans we actually have individual human beings who will send like a one off email saying what's going on?

You know, do we do something wrong, what's up, whatever.

And a lot of times people say oh my job changed, my role changed, whatever, and that's fine.

But you know, and you've talked about it on other podcasts where you say you kind of do the do the unscalable thing right.

And these one to one communications are exactly that.

But usually the majority of the business your company gets is from like a small group of companies or people.

It's not the masses that you're emailing out to.

So that's why I'm a fan of handholding, stuff like that.

I mean do you ever handhold contacts in your data?

I'm big on that because I think the goal of an email list, and this is my goal of an email list is to get a base of who I consider my target audience.

So for example, like I don't mind who joins the list.

Like I want everybody to enjoy the content but I do care more about people that I think are more valuable to the list.

So having a, a pre list of companies that or companies that you think are your target audience and matching that to your current email is and seeing how engaged are that is very more important to me.

So if one of those people are not engaging and they were engaging before, I really want to spend extra time because winning them back means a lot to me.

So I think it depends on how valuable they are to the value of the list versus not the value.

I have a question with what you said before.

You said after 90 days you do a win back.

If they don't react to the win back they go goodbye, they don't get anything from you, that's it, you're done.

Is that like literally goodbye?

Like there's no one time a year we just send to everybody in our database or we use them for retargeting on social campaigns even though they're not getting our email.

Are you literally not leveraging that data anymore once they don't react to your win back?

No, I. I think it depends.

So if you have different type of email subscription preference center so they're not responding to your newsletter anymore, I'm just going to take them out of the newsletter that but if they still haven't opted out to like marketing it doesn't hurt to just keep sending them marketing stuff.

I got you.

It depends again of the retargeting because if they were someone who was in the list unengaged not target audience it doesn't matter if we plug them into paid social again and or paid to re engage them or pay to do something else.

But it does.

But if it is a target audience I think keeping that data in the list is always good to know.

I think storing data is the most valuable thing you could do now first party data is more valuable than gold when it comes to marketing right now I like third party data is harder and harder to come by so keeping them in the database figuring out other things you could do because there's a lot of other things you could do besides email with them like paid social try do some other campaigns.

So I I still will re engage them in other omnichannel approaches.

It's just if it's a newsletter or a marketing channel a marketing email marketing just marketing campaigns we're doing to them.

That's why it's I think big mistake when people only have one opt out on the preference center.

Big time, big time.

And by the way one other trick related to the opt out in case anybody out there still doing it and people get confused by this because some of the new rules in Gmail and Yahoo and all this stuff that you have to have a one Click unsubscribe.

The one click unsubscribe, that's at the top of your email.

That's a technical thing that you could bake into your email.

But the bottom, where you have your unsubscribe link in your email, the regular one that you have, you do not want that to be a one click unsubscribe.

They should click on it and then they go to a page where they have to confirm the unsubscribe.

And the reason being is if you have a one click unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and the bots scan your email, which a lot of your emails now are getting scanned by bots, what the bots are doing is they're automatically clicking on, on every link in your message.

And so every time you send out your email, if you have a one click unsubscribe, a portion of your database is going to be automatically unsubscribed because of the bot click, which.

And the bots are really just tracking for intrusion software like viruses and stuff.

So you do not want to have as your primary unsubscribe a one click unsubscribe or else you will crush your.

Your email database.

A lot of people don't think of that as like a branding opportunity or a fun opportunity or something to do cool there.

And they just think of it as just do the default unsubscribe.

And it's a good way to like be funny.

Like, for example, like our unsubscribe link says, like, want to ruin our day unsubscribe here.

Like, we just make it a little funny.

Like it's part of our great.

It's part of our brand.

That's good.

So I like that.

So, like, do something be.

It's funny to do.

You could be fun and still brand and still make it unsubscribe.

A lot of people ruin my day, I'll tell you that.

But it's okay.

I. I forgive you guys.

I love it.

Well, hopefully this, this episode didn't ruin your day.

You like that transition?

That was so pathetic.

We got more of these coming up, so check out the bathroom break next week.

Daniel, see you later, man.

Bye.

Bye.

Daniel.

Come on, man.

I gotta get back to work.

Get out of there.

All right, while he's still in there.

This is Jay.

Check out my podcast, do this, not that, for marketers.

Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try.

Oh, here's Daniel.

He's finally out.

Back from my bathroom break.

This is Daniel.

Go follow the Marking Millennials podcast, but also tune into the series.

It's once a week, the bathroom break.

We talk about marking tips that we just spew out.

And it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world.

We'll talk about it.

Just give us a.

A shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear.

Peace out.

Later.