How AI Is Changing Email, Part 2 | Bathroom Break #125

Welcome to a new special series called "The Bathering Ring". 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 Schwettelsen from the do-this-not-that-podcast-and-subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over. With 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. We are back with another bathroom break. I am here with Jay Schwettelsen. I wanted to bring this up to you, but I don't know how to. But I really think that your hair is getting a little too long right now, and I think you need a haircut, and I know you're thinking about it, but you haven't done it yet. What is the dilemma that's going on in your head about getting a haircut? Why haven't you done it yet? Because you do have the best hair in marketing for right now. Thank you for that. So I have a dilemma, but this is a real problem. I want to make a take on this. I absolutely need a haircut. I look at a disaster, but here's my problem. I get a haircut from the same dude all the time, and he's in the salon that has a bunch of other people working there, and he's fully booked up. I cannot get a time with this dude, and the problem is I want to go to some other dude in the salon and cheat on him. But the amount of anxiety that that gives me, if I book with somebody else and then I walk in, I see him, and I go, "Oh, I'm going over to that chair." I feel like he's going to give me the death stare, and then he won't want to work with me again. So I don't know if I can cheat on my haircut, dude. What do you think about cheating on your haircut, dude? I have two potholes poses, because I ran into this problem with having a trainer, and they were booked the whole time, and I was like, "I've been texting them, and I want to go to a time of their booked all the time." And then I'm like, "Screw it, I just need to do this." But I do think you should just go to another salon, so they don't know. That's a good idea. They probably go to the other salon, but they don't know. That's better. The other one, I would go and be like, "I tried, I called your salon, I texted you, I really need a haircut for next week, you fully booked, sorry, I just need to do that, but if you don't want to make it awkward, I just go to another salon." Yeah, I have to go move to another state, or something. Like, Jay, why is your hair so short? It's not growing anymore. Whether you got three months to go with me, I have actual anxiety over this topic. But what we're going to talk about today is actually a part two. So we did an episode last week about live text, and how it's impacting email marketing, and basically what's showing up in the AI summaries, and there's a lot more to cover. People seem interested in it, Daniel, is that what we're talking about? Yeah, people responded to the podcast, and I wrote a little bit about it, and my news there about it, and people were asking a lot of questions about it, but also they were just wondering, "Okay, we gave some tips about it, but what are the things that they could do to make sure they show up and AI overviews for email?" So what does something do you say? Yeah, let me rip through some things that people aren't aware of. So we're really talking about again, and this applies to business consumer, non-profit doesn't matter who you market to, and this is going to become a bigger and bigger topic that when you send out your emails, promotional emails, doesn't matter sales emails, whatever you send out, graphic heavy emails, the different Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, they're all using AI summaries to grab the most relevant parts of your email, and either put that in the preheader, that second subject line, or they're putting that into a summarization above the email in the inbox. Now, we talked last week about certain things that you can do, I wanted to talk about a few other things that people don't realize. So first of all, the average number of words that the summary polls is actually 29 words. That's the average number of words that the AI summaries are pulling into their summarizations. Now, here's what we found to be the most important thing that you could do. The first 150 to 200 characters of actual written live text characters are what matters most, because that's what it's scanning, but if you do this combination specifically, and I'll give you examples, action plus product plus deadline, that's the formula, action product deadline, and you write that in your first 200 characters, we're seeing that increased click through rates of business and consumer emails by about 19%, so what does that look like in practical sense, what does action product deadline look like or sound like? So if you're a consumer marketer, it would say shop 40% off all Nike running shoes through Sunday night, through Sunday at midnight, or start your 30 day Peloton free trial by September 30th and get full access to all the classes. Or on the business side, register for the 2027 HR compliance briefing by Friday to learn about these five changes in HR, it's this idea of the action plus your product plus the deadline, you need to be getting that out in those first 200 characters to really have an impact. And it also sounds that I think that the overviews to me are two different things. It's like one people want to know something that's urgent, like urgency, like I need to like hop on this now, or like there's a deadline, like like something that's happening now because they're trying to pop up and if you're, if you have something urgent happening and you're not, that urgency's not showing up in the overview, you got a problem because that's where, like as a consumer, they're going to respond to this, or it's something that is like very personalized to them and feels like this is something I need to do right now, or I need to read this because this is very interesting to me. So I think those are like the two things that will trigger someone to like want to dive in deeper from the overview, but what are like, what are some other things that they could do? So I would say the most annoying thing that's working really well, but it's the number one thing is actually having bullets in your emails. So here's the data, which is pretty wild. In Gmail, 77% of Gmail, uh, promotional emails that go out that have bullied content, 77% of bullets are being pulled into the summaries. In Apple mail, it's 84% and in Microsoft, co-pilot summaries, it's 92%. So if you include bulleted items in your emails, the AI summaries are going and they are grabbing that stuff, why do I say that that's terrible and annoying because, you know, we try to design these beautiful emails, these e-commerce emails, whatever. And you're like, I'm going to stick bullets in that. And in some ways, we're back to 1995, you know, where emails are going to look a little bit, not like the greatest thing of all time, because if you can't get that stuff in the summaries, no one's going to look at your emails, open your emails, read your emails. So the game now is not what's the most beautiful email, but what do you have to be doing light bullets like the first 29 words? What do you have to be doing to actually be showing up? And you know what I actually think it's going to stop, what you probably need to do more of is there's going to be less of the like spammy headlines that people did where I was like, this is crazy or like this, like things that are like a little too catchy and more, and you have to be a little bit more, you could be, have the urgency and stuff, but you have to be a little bit more descriptive than at the same time, because I think if you just say, this is crazy and there's nothing pertaining that people are like, what is crazy? What is in my email, that's crazy that you're trying to do. So I think being with your headlines and your email, you should be a little bit more descriptive of like what they're getting out of this, this email that they're trying to do. Yeah, and along those lines, I want to know you're taking this, there was an article that came out last week from media post, they did a survey and they asked people specifically about AI summaries and email and they asked, how comfortable are you with an AI tool reading all your emails to surface deals and recommendations? And would you, I couldn't believe this, over 70% of people said they were either very comfortable or somewhat comfortable with the email tools summarizing their emails so they can get the deals and recommendations like assorted for them. I always shocked about how high that percentage was, are you shocked by that? I think that there's so many people who have such cluttered inboxes that they want, they just want to find what is useful for them quickly. I do love that they, I know this is like a little old, but they add that like, what is in Gmail, like it has like a like purchase tab, so you can go like to all your like, which should like before you had it like go into like promotions or updates and find it and now they have it. So I think like there's never been really that good at sorting and AI is really good at sorting. So like, and Gmail is going to do it anyway, like the part of Gmail, they're going to scan your emails anyway. I think the only people who probably aren't okay with this is probably businesses like they don't want to do to scan. in my emails to figure out like strategy that is in my emails. So I think consumers more on the B2C side are probably more entailed to not care. But it's still scary. Like you're some people get their taxes sent to the email and they're scanning those emails. So just crazy. Oh, I know totally. I know people they get all sketched out. So I've one other random question for you. Related back to the haircut situation. Here's something I hate and I'm very weird. So when you go to get a haircut, they take you got there to like, you know, put shampoo in your hair and then, you know, massage your head and all this stuff. So literally every single time I go in there and I say to the person, all I want you to do is the fastest shampoo ever. And I have absolutely no interest in the rest of all the stuff that you do. And it always look at me like watch. And I still get the tip. I'm not like not giving them a tip. But I say, I just want rapid shampoo. That's it. These people go back to and they want this full blown massage and I'm not into it. What do you think about that? To be honest, I might need to snap right by you have good hair because I got like a barbershop and like, you know, like they're like to go quickly and then they're like, they don't touching me. Like, so I don't really get like that fancy hair cover. It's like, like, I'm busy. I didn't know I was busy. Yeah, you're a busy hair, but he's hair is great. So I might need to go to like one of these salon. But I don't think like, I don't think a lot of these people's specialty is like giving massages. And when I want a massage, I want to like, like, deep tissue and like, like, I hate massages. I know you hate people touching you. So it's disgusting. It's like enough. I don't need you just, I don't need you doing that. It's unnecessary. I had a haircut place. I don't know how much I want someone to do that. You know, there's no things where they have like, I don't know what it's called, but like, you can go on your hair and they go like, like, massage your hair, but they don't touch you. You know, like, they do it with the five like metal things. Yeah. That's good. I would do on that. That's fine because you do it to yourself. That's fine. But I don't want someone touching like my head like that. Sorry. Okay. Well, we've covered a lot. Once again, another great episode. Listen, everybody leave Daniel and I some comments. Let us know other topics you want us to cover because clearly nothing is off limits. And we'll see at the next one. Daniel, come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. While he's still in there 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 I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. It's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the marketing podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week. The bathroom break. We talk about marketing 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 shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.