3 min read

📧 Email Mentor Serves Up 🔥 Quick Tips In New HubSpot Webinar

Picture of Monica Caraway Monica Caraway : May 08, 2023

HubSpot B2B Marketing

Increase open rates by catching these quick tips from a new HubSpot webinar as presented by email guru, Jay Schwedelson! Jay's depth of experience and insight is unparalleled. Having tested over 15 million subject lines via SubjectLine.com, Jay has become a trusted advisor at HubSpot's Inbound conference and through his Guru Events. You must check out these tips brought to you from HubSpot's webinar Quick Win Email Tips for Q2 - Everything is always changing!

Test Your Emails!

First and foremost, Jay is a huge advocate (as are we!) of testing your emails. What works for some audiences will not work for others. What works today will not work next month. Audiences are fickle and ever-changing, so you need to update and test the bait you are using constantly.

Through email data from his companies SubjectLine.com, Worldata Group, and Outcome Media, he has overseen the testing of more than 15 million subject lines and the execution of over 40,000 marketing campaigns annually. All this data informs Jay where marketers can find solid bets on what to test.

Email Timing

In the webinar, Jay reminds us that to stand out in inboxes, you want to send at different times than everyone else. And take advantage of when people are known to be working through emails typically.

He says 80% of emails are sent out on the hour, with 70% of email traffic occurring within the first 10 minutes of every hour. He suggests toggling your send times later to stand out, noting that email campaigns not sent out on the hour have an increased open rate of 15% for B2B.

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Jay also says people imbibe content differently. Email open rates can fluctuate based on timing per industry. They can fluctuate based on the personal preferences of when people go through their emails. They can also fluctuate based on the type of email you are sending, such as an offer email vs. a newsletter email. He strongly encourages marketers to test sending times to see what works for their audience based on these types of variables at play. And re-test when your open rates start to dip.

Get It Now: The Truth About B2B Email Deliverability

Webinar Attendance

Jay also offers tips on how to improve webinar live attendance via email action. He says right now:

Sending day of reminders 4 hours ahead of webinar start improves show-up rate by 28%
Rates increase up to 37% for webinars advertised via email as being held on a Friday
Webinars advertised as 30 minutes or less have a 31% higher attendance

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ChatGPT Generated Email Subject Lines and CTAs

With many of us dipping our toes into using variations of ChatGPT in our marketing efforts, Jay urges us to try it out on creating unique email subject lines and CTAs. The results can be very interesting and do not take long to obtain.

Jay explains the reason for this experimentation, saying it boggles his mind that all marketers have seemingly resolved to use the same CTA vernacular—vernacular that fails to spur action and often uses "weird" vocabulary you wouldn't use irl—the latter of which in typical Jay-style, sets him off on a tangent about his pet peeve of the word "submit". Well, his tangents are part of his charm!

Jay encourages listeners to use ChatGPT to generate CTAs that better match an offer's benefits. So, instead of "Download" use "Get the Tips", etc.

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Jay also says it using ChatGPT to generate email subject lines and CTAs is as simple as giving commands such as: "Rewrite 'PUT SUBJECT LINE YOU ARE USING HERE' to be more suspenseful but with less than 50 characters," or "Rewrite this call to action 'Download' without saying the download".

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Jay adds that you should also change up offers, with things like "ebooks" performing low lately compared to previous years. But things like "Get a Top List of X" are doing very well currently.

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The Friendly From

Now we've shared this next tip from Jay before in our post How To Improve Your B2B Email Marketing ROI, and it appears it is still a thriving tactic! Jay says by using a "friendly from", whereby the email subject line matches the offer or topic of the email rather than a standard "from" (i.e. Company Marketing Team). Jay says using friendly froms increases B2B opens by 28%.

He also noted that Ann Handley is a huge fan of friendly froms, and is also an excellent person to follow on LinkedIn for marketing tips.

Matching Graphics

Some of Jay's final tips in the webinar are about using the same image from an email to a landing page to help resonate with readers—creating a theme and helping people really feel like they've ended up in the right place from the email. The tactic makes B2B audiences click through 24% more!

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Thanks Jay, for all your exceptional tips! We look forward to the next conference, webinar, LinkedIn tips, and whatever else you have up your sleeve!!