New Year, new gym guilt, and somehow that turns into a surprisingly useful marketing trick: people do what you literally tell them to do. Alongside Jay Schwedelson and Daniel Murray, this Bathroom Break gets into simple, slightly annoying-to-admit tactics that boost opens, saves, and shares when you’re direct about the action you want.

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Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and check out The Marketing Millennials podcast for sharp, no-fluff marketing insights. Subscribe to Ari Murray’s newsletter at gotomillions.co for sharp, actionable marketing insights.

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Best Moments:

(01:30) Jay admits he times the bench press so nobody sees how weak he is

(02:23) Daniel’s all-time max bench press gets revealed, and it’s absurd

(03:00) The “tell people what to do” tactic that works across email, social, and ads

(03:17) “Screenshot this and send to your team” as a sneaky share trigger

(04:30) “Open this email” at the start of a subject line can lift opens by about 15%

(05:00) Adding “save this post” in LinkedIn copy boosts saves in the analytics

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Check out Jay’s YOUTUBE Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@schwedelson

Check out Jay’s TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@schwedelson

Check Out Jay's INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/

Daniel Murray: Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break, that extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marking tips or use the bathroom or both, but I

Jay Schwedelson: don't recommend. But that's your choice. This collab is gonna be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schon from the Do This Not That podcast@subjectline.com.

Jay Schwedelson: Each episode in this series, we are gonna 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.

Daniel Murray: We are back with another episode of the Bathroom Break. I am here with. The Jim Bro Jay Schon, and I am Daniel Murray, and I want to talk about why I call him the Jim, bro, because I just figured out that this guy for the last two years goes to the gym three times a week and he runs Saturday, Sunday.

Daniel Murray: So he's really a. Some sort of athlete out here, so I know New Year's resolutions are happening or Right, right. Um, how do you get to the gym three times a week and how, what do you suggest for people to do that?

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. Don't follow anything I do health-wise. I do go, I've been going for three years, so you could screw off three days a week.

Jay Schwedelson: I go. At around 6 45 in the morning. All right. Which is absolutely terrible. And I'm not, I'm a, I'm a very horrible worker outer. And I also get very embarrassed. So like where I go to this gym in like my community area and I get there and if I go to use the bench press, I'm very weak. So I try to wait until people that I don't know are nowhere near the bench press.

Jay Schwedelson: 'cause I don't want them to see how weak I am, because that would really bring shame to my family. So that's, I'm not thinking about getting healthy or getting stronger. I'm just thinking about how embarrassed I am by how weak I am when I'm at the gym. What, what do you think about that?

Daniel Murray: I, I like that. I mean, I.

Daniel Murray: I've been kicking off tennis again and I've, I've been trying to go at times when nobody could see me playing because I haven't played for five months. So, um, I don't want to get embarrassed when if someone comes and sees and they say, what happened to you? Uh, so I'm, I'm going as early as possible to play tennis these days.

Daniel Murray: So.

Jay Schwedelson: Well, let me ask you something. Me and Jim broke, so if everyone there doesn't know, Daniel doesn't talk about it a lot, but he was a D one college football player, university of Cincinnati. Like real time, whatever. I wanna know something. 'cause you used to have, you were. Big dude, you had a bench press a lot.

Jay Schwedelson: What was your max best bench press in your life? Uh, I think it was like 4 25.

Daniel Murray: Wow. That's crazy.

Jay Schwedelson: That's

Daniel Murray: crazy. You're big. And now, now it's probably like 2 0 5, so we'll

Jay Schwedelson: see. You're beast. That's cra you're like, tough. Don't mess with Daniel. Um, what is your Max Brands press? We should, everybody should know. No idea.

Jay Schwedelson: Six pounds. Um, all right, let's get into it. Listen, what we wanna talk about today is something that works in social media. It works in email, it works in all marketing, and it's gonna annoy you that it works, but it does, which is this idea of telling people what to do and it's in our subconscious, but when you actually tell somebody what you want them to do.

Jay Schwedelson: In your copy, in your social post copy, in your images, in everything, it crushes it. So Daniel, do you use this tactic and how have you tried it?

Daniel Murray: Yeah, I think one way I like to do this is in, um, ads or content and saying it at the end, screenshot this and send this to your team. Um, save this for later. Um, it helps.

Daniel Murray: The one metric I always try in content is. Shareability and getting that, that share button hit, but you sometimes have to remind people to do that. So if you have that at the end where you say, screenshot it, send it to people, especially in, even in my email where I'm like, have a guide or something. Say, save this and send this to your team or as a CTA, um, you, you'll want to screenshot this something where you're going to tell people exactly the action that you want them to take.

Daniel Murray: I think it. Click here. The click here button is. A little bit dead now, I would say, and I don't like to say that buttons are dead, but it's not gonna perform as good as telling people what to do. And there's some other ways that I think about it, but I wanted you to go into some ways you're using it as well.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I'll, I'll tell you two ways that we're using it. We've tested and it's worked really well. So email in this subject line, if you actually start your subject line, and this is from our subject line.com data. If you start your subject line with, open this right or open this email. It actually lifts the open rates by about 15% from what we've seen, which is ridiculous because you're telling somebody what to do.

Jay Schwedelson: But if you've never tested that, that's a great, uh, simple test to try. And it's a little bit annoying that it works. You're like, screw off. I don't wanna listen to you. But for some reason, the subconscious, we react to what we're told to do. And we also have tested this quite a bit on, on LinkedIn, where we'll put out a post, like a carousel post with some sort of, you know, useful tactic and we'll do a test of.

Jay Schwedelson: Including save this post, we'll put that like in the top portion of the copy versus not having it. And when we include save this post, we actually now, because LinkedIn has changed their, what you could see, we actually see a lot more LinkedIn saves. And we could see that in the analytics, uh, when we say save this post.

Jay Schwedelson: So by telling people you know exactly what you want them to do, it will give you a boost in performance.

Daniel Murray: Instead of saying content library, you could say, learn here. Or instead of, um, community, you could say network. Here having a idea what they're gonna do when they click that button is way better, I feel like, than just having obvious titles that everybody is doing. I think you gotta tell people what they're gonna expect when they click that button and when they land on that, that page.

Daniel Murray: And I think I am betting that it will help retention when you, when you say, this is what the action I want you to take, when you do click this button or. Watch this piece of content or view this ad, more people will do that action and you'll retain them longer. Um, that way.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, and in a lot of ways we've been all doing this, but we're doing it in a horribly boring way.

Jay Schwedelson: Like we're telling people, you know, let's say for an event or a webinar saying register, you're trying to tell the person to register, or if it's a consumer offer, buy now. But you're telling them that at the very end, and you're telling it in this very self-serving way as opposed to on the upfront, you know, open this, read this, save this, screenshot this.

Jay Schwedelson: Instead of just doing it at the end of the motion, do it at the beginning of the motion so you can get more people to actually make it to the end. Of the motion,

Daniel Murray: the hardest thing to do in marketing and what our job is to, is to get attention. But once you have attention, the next thing you need to do is invest in ways in capturing that attention because you're, you spend all this money to get this person to a landing page or to your content or something.

Daniel Murray: So, and all I'm saying to do is test these, test different CTAs buttons to make them more action forward instead of. Just generic and see if there's a lift in your content. See if there's a lift in your download. See if there's a lift in your saves. And do like what Jay said, which is something is gold, is if a platform is tracking that metric, like Lincoln's tracking saves, Instagram tracks the share button, um, or remit repost button.

Daniel Murray: If you are you, if you're saying those things and people are doing those action, that gives you signal that you're trending in the right direction.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, so back to our, uh, Jim Bros thing. I wanna know something like. When you are at the gym, are you the type of dude who, if you're using something, you leave a towel on there, on the bench or on the machine, and then you go somewhere else, do something else and you come back?

Jay Schwedelson: Or do you take it with you wherever you go? Like, are you trying to like hold onto your thing? Are you a jerk like that?

Daniel Murray: I think it depends on. How busy the, that place is at the time. So I'm pretty conscious that if, if the gym is busy, I'm just gonna stick to my machine. But if, if it's an empty gym and there's, my worst is when there's two people in the gym and you're, you have a little rotation going and someone.

Daniel Murray: Goes to take that machine when there's a thousand other machines in the gym and they will need to use that machine in that moment, I, I, that's when I get annoyed. The other times, I'm, I'm pretty conscious that, hey, there's a lot of people in this gym. I am not hogging this machine, or if I'm gonna do this, I just say, you can work in.

Daniel Murray: With me and do that. Um, I, I'm pretty, but I think, uh, it's the worst to just save a machine. Um, yeah. For someone

Jay Schwedelson: horrible, horrible, bad Jim etiquette, which is absolutely the worst. But, uh, uh, Daniel's actually going now every single day at five in the morning. Oh, did you see this, by the way? This is so wild.

Jay Schwedelson: I saw Marky Mark, or whatever his name, mark Wahlberg, who's on the news. He was talking about his sleeping, whatever. He gets up at three in the morning, he said. He goes to bed at six 30 at night. Sounds like you're a schedule.

Daniel Murray: I don't know what you're, I don't know what's different than what you do every single day.

Jay Schwedelson: Six 30 is crazy. He is going to sleep. Like that's, that's like, that literally is

Daniel Murray: my baby schedule. My baby goes to sleep at seven and wakes up at three 30 every single morning. So. He's literally my baby.

Jay Schwedelson: But he said he wants to spend more time with his kids, but I'm like, dude, you're going to bed before your kids.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm like, I don't understand. Yeah. Your kids ain't working. Waking up at three 30. No. What's going on? I don't know what's going on. Uh, all right. Again, I don't know what's going on with this podcast, but you guys all crush it. Leave Daniel review. Leave me review. I don't know. We'll check you the next week.

Jay Schwedelson: Daniel. Come on man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. Alright, 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 I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally

Daniel Murray: out back from my bathroom break.

Daniel Murray: This is Daniel. Go follow the Marketing Millennial podcast, but also tune into this 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.

Daniel Murray: Peace out later.