One of the hardest parts of our three-lesson format is deciding what NOT to include, and a lot of really useful advice is gathering dust in my Google Drive.
This week, I’ve got three lessons I just couldn’t waste from the most-shared interview in the history of Masters in Marketing. Email marketing expert Jay Schwedelson is back, and this time he’s coming in hot with what you’re (probably) doing wrong with your email marketing.
And, in all honesty, I’ve committed some of these sins with this very newsletter. (Oopsie!)
Lesson 1:
Get the dang thing opened. To kick things off, I asked Schwedelson what common email advice gives him the twitchy eye.
“There’s always so much focus on what’s inside the email. What does the copy say? Is it compliant? Is it on brand?” He playfully grumbles. “But on average, less than 50% of people are going to open your email.”
In fact, 50% is dreamy. The average marketing email open rate across industries is closer to 42%. (Ours is a lil higher, but that’s because our readers are so smart and cool and good-looking.)
“So the first focus should really be: How do we get the email opened?”
Which isn’t to say you slack off on the content of your emails. If we suddenly pivoted to stories about dryer lint, our open rate would probably crash, right?
Just make sure the elements with the biggest impact on open rate — details like your subject line, preheader, and send time — aren’t just afterthoughts.
“If you focus on getting the email opened with as much energy and intensity as you do on what’s in the email, it will radically change the outcome of your marketing performance.”
Lesson 2:
Throw out your banned words list. “One of the biggest myths is that what you write in your subject line is the reason you’re landing in the junk folder. This is information from the year of the flood.”
He’s caught me on this one. When we ran a recent giveaway, I told the team we absolutely could not use the words “prize,” “winner,” or “you’ve won” in our subject lines.
Like me, you probably also fear the word “free” and using exclamation marks. All caps? Neverrrrrr.
“That is not going to get you filtered. It used to, 10 years ago, but technology changed. So I want to liberate everybody. Write whatever you want to write to get the email opened.”
So, what does put you on the naughty or nice list?
“It’s all about engagement. The more you get people to click and interact with your emails, the greater the likelihood is that you will stay in the inbox. That’s what the receiving email infrastructures want to see: Hey, this recipient likes interacting with these emails.
“And the irony is that the very tactics that people avoid — the word ‘free,’ an exclamation mark, an emoji — those exact tactics are gonna cause you to get more engagement and stay in the inbox.”
Read the rest of this article: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-youre-doing-wrong-in-your-marketing-emails-according-to-an-email-expert
By: cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)
Publication Date: 2025-06-04