Is there a difference between B2B vs B2C email marketing? What works best? And can we take some of the best strategies from B2C and apply them to B2B?

Let's have a big ol' email showdown and find out which type of email marketing wins!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:29) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(3:23) What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C?

(6:50) The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing.

(9:46) What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?

(12:13) Who is sending your emails?

(16:06) How do people join your list?

(19:33) What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?

(24:20) Subject line of the week.

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What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C? 

We believe there are three categories of businesses when it comes to selling:

• B2B - business to BIG business.
• B2b - business to small business.
• And B2C - business to consumer, where you sell things to do with people's hobbies and lives.

Most of the businesses we sell to are B2b, which means we sell to owner-run businesses or a one-person band. The owner may be working with a partner or a small team, but the business is small. And we consider ourselves one of those businesses too as unless you’re making more than $10 million a year, you're still a small business.

The key here is that businesses in the B2b category behave like consumers. When buying products or services for their company, business owners tend to use their own money. So it's worth bearing in mind that at the end of your emails, there are human beings who expect to hear from you in a certain way.

The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing 

Let's say you're a large government lobbying organisation to do with climate change. You'll be expected to show up in a way that's very different from the way we show up in people's inboxes, for example (i.e. with rude jokes full of innuendo and swear words!) The reason we act the way we do is because of our understanding of ourselves and our market. We show up in a way that’s acceptable by our market but that’s also different and makes us stand out.

A large government lobbying organisation will communicate with its clients in a completely different way. They still have to build trust and authority, just like all of us do, but it’s done differently. If they started going off on a tangent about something silly (like we do in our emails), that wouldn’t give the right indicator for them as a company.

And it’s not just about the words because those only contribute to a small percentage of the way someone may interpret that message. How you say something is what allows people to read between the lines and get the real essence of what you're like. You can build trust and authority by showing testimonials and social proof, but you can also do it through the tone in which you speak. If you get an email that reads as if a college professor wrote it, it'll have a different level of credibility than something jokey.

The words aren’t that important. What matters the most are the campaign structures that you create, the stories you put together, and the tone you use. They can be ridiculous and funny (if you want to) for B2C but more authoritative and professional if your market is more serious. And the beauty of the campaigns we offer inside our membership The League is that you can take the emails and change the words without breaking the whole thing.

What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?

Sales cycles may take a little longer for B2B compared to B2C. With B2C (and possibly B2b), you may find that consumers have the ability and the power to buy a little faster. And yet, they will still need your product to be presented through different offers before they buy.

For example, in B2B, you could use different email sequences or email engines (as we call them) for different phases of the sales cycle to move your prospective clients through the cycles. We often talk about having three email engines:

• The lead or subscriber engine is designed to get leads to become first-time customers.
• Then you have the customer engine to get people to buy from you again.
• And then you have the winning customers back engine, aimed at the people who haven’t bought from you for a while.

With B2B, you may even have multiple phases of a sales cycle. It could be that you've identified some leads, then booked an initial meeting, then maybe booked a demo, followed by a consultation period. After that, you may need to go through Ts&Cs and the specifics of the product the client is going to buy, and then finally you seal the deal. You may even have a maintenance package after that. So you might need a bunch of email campaigns to move people from one phase to the next. That’s what email marketing helps you do. It helps you move people from where they are to the next step until they’re ready to buy. It’s a bit like a game of rounders or baseball, where you need to focus on moving from one base to the next. 

Who is sending your emails?

Something we recommend for B2B and B2b as well as B2C is to be consistent with who the email comes from. Because people buy from people. When you send an email with the objective to move someone from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next, you want that email to be from a human being.

That's why we recommend you use your name, the salesperson's name, or even a fictional character’s name if you want. Whatever you do, use an actual name, and you'll see your open rates go up. That's because the level and depth of your relationship with that person are going to increase. Relationships are established with people and things we can relate to. So both the person sending the email and the copy of the email itself have to be something that people can relate to.

Think about it - on a day-to-day basis, we all get emails from a lot of institutions and organisations (such as banks or credit card companies), and they all tend to come from the company. But we think that should change - emails should come from a person. Because that allows us to establish deeper relationships and feel like we're communicating with actual humans.

In the past, small companies would pretend they had several members of staff to make themselves look bigger. Faking having bigger operations was a thing! But it's not anymore, and small businesses embrace having that personal touch. The world has shifted, but big businesses continue to try and look like big businesses. Remember - there's power in being seen as an individual. In a world that's being taken over by robots and AI, you want to know that there's an actual human being behind the emails you receive. If all big businesses started doing that, it would be powerful.

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How do people join your list? 

What was your relationship with that person in the first place? If someone joins your newsletter with the expectation that John will be sending daily tips about DIY, make sure John sends daily tips about DIY! Don't have the emails suddenly come from a company people can't even recognise. 

Also, always remember you're sending emails to human beings. People in B2B or B2b might be buying your product because they're trying to help their business or the company they work with, but they’re also serving themselves. So how can your lead magnet, your email content, and the offers you make benefit the person directly? Can you save them time? Can you make them look better with their boss? Help them get a pay rise or a promotion?

Think about serving the individual at the end of each email, even in B2B and B2b. We have a structure we teach our clients that is a way of extrapolating and communicating the benefits of something in a deep way that resonates with people. So if you're selling a solution that helps people grow their business, you can mention it'll get them more employees, or it'll afford them a better live streaming setup, for example. These are all business benefits. But because you're talking to the human being who’s running the business, you also want to mention the personal benefits to the individual.

For instance, we may say that by building our SCORE email engine, you’ll be able to grow your business, but also for you personally, you’ll know that every new lead that comes in is being taken care of and always presented with the best possible offers and opportunities to buy without you having to be physically there. A great personal benefit is that you can be at home with your family and spend more time with them, for example. Your business will be growing, amplifying, and compounding the sales while you take the dog for a walk or your children swimming.

What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?

Largely speaking, B2B needs more personification - we need to bring some elements of B2C email marketing into it. How? You can get creative and use a mascot or someone who works in your business and push them to the forefront of your marketing. You could even create characters to establish an emotional bond with your audience because that's essential to be able to relate to someone. And without a human being, there's no connection. How can you connect with a brand if you think of their company in terms of tall glass skyscrapers in the middle of some city? 

People in the UK will be familiar with comparethemarket.com, which have a meerkat as the character that’s front and centre of their marketing. They personified an insurance company, which is traditionally something very dry. And that's genius because the meerkat allows us to create an immediate emotional resonance with that brand. And that takes up more space in our brains than a company without a person behind it. Or think about gocompare.com, whose face is a Welsh opera singer. You may not want to go to these extremes, but whatever you do, show up as a person.

You could do that by introducing people from your team and sharing something they said, for example. If you look at a lot of what comedians do, they share naturally funny stories inspired by their family or friends. All the comedian has to do is deliver the story in a way that doesn’t remove the funny aspect of it. So you could share things that your team or your customers say. They don’t have to be funny - it's just about using natural content from what’s around you. Because these are the things that build relationships with people. It’s about humanising your content because you’re human and your customers are humans! And it’s time to push a more H2H (human-to-human) type of communication in email marketing.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “I’m spilling the tea…” which is a phrase that commonly refers to gossiping. But the story in the email was genuinely about Rob spilling a cup of tea on a plane! And this makes the subject line interesting. You take a commonly used phrase that means something, and you use it literally in your email. It doesn’t feel like a tricky subject line. But when you read the email, you find it goes in a different direction than where people expect. And that's what works well, so check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

5 MAJOR Problems With Your B2B Email Marketing (And How To Easily Fix Them).

EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Email Marketing And Storytelling To Write Emails That Sell Like Crazy.

How To Send Personalised Email To All The Right People – Getting Friendly With Joe Fier.

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If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

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Try ResponseSuite for $1

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Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

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Unknown 0:11

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello

Unknown 0:12

Today on the Email Marketing Show we're talking about well, we're gonna have a big ol email showdown. It's a holdout. It's a showdown. It's a showdown. What's the difference between a showdown and a holdout? And also, what's the difference between b2b and b2c emails? What the difference is who wins and who's gonna who's gonna be the best what's the what's the point? What's the difference? Who knows? We're gonna find out I've just made a Red Bull Can

Unknown 0:32

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Unknown 1:04

Lovely. His dog has a new Dicky bow tie. What's wrong with his bow tie? We'll find out it's company evidence Robert temple

Unknown 1:10

and he flew Virgin Atlantic for the first time recently. I feel like this is my fault. I didn't like it. It's like a logical mind reader candidate.

Unknown 1:18

So I'll, I'll see the cockapoo cover Prokopenko. I'll see the cover blue. I'm not surprised your prominence. Why is he gonna die? Well,

Unknown 1:33

you know, sort of mostly for family gatherings and that kind of thing. You have to look smarter. The very dapper look in both eyes. But I'd probably call this a tag thing. I didn't know that the word Dickey translates around the world as being like in the UK, so I mean towards quite a bit wrongs. Now we've got

Unknown 1:48

a little bit iffy. It's

Unknown 1:52

by recommendation, you recently flew Virgin Atlantic for the first time. But in full disclosure, the last time I flew with Virgil, I think when I used to fly with them a lot, years, a million years ago, we couldn't afford to justify or wanted to fly business class. And so you experienced that upper class for the first time and it wasn't you know, because

Unknown 2:07

you flying on a diagonal. Basically the seats are all on a diagonal. So you basically take off sideways and you want like crammed in like, like it reminded me I grew up in the summer I used to help my uncle on his farm. I say help. I was there. I was probably under way. And he was he was a dairy farmer. So they had like all the cattle coming in in little rooms and little stalls to get milked. And it was I felt like I was gonna get milked last extract Hello, every week I'll show you how to make more sales or earn more money from your email subscribers. We'll talk about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make more sales online, making you the email marketing hero in your business. We've got a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday to make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player to have it download to your device automagically now

Unknown 2:54

we get loads of people talking to us and saying you know my stuff's different. My business is different because I sell to businesses and then I sell to consumers or I sell their businesses where there's a huge lead time on the buying because they've got to have a meeting and things to $500,000 You know we don't get that forever but you know, the thing is expensive there's a bit I sell to or I sell to an obscure isn't exactly a business but it's it is b2b in that I sell to like schools or you know somewhere where there's a bit of a process in place. Yeah, government organisations, that kind of thing. Yeah. So let's have a chat about what do we mean by b2b and b2c? We've said this before, but we'll recap it again. here because you're on this episode. And on the episode we said it before, which is about the fact that we think of there's really three categories. There's b2b or b2c, which is obviously business to consumer you sell to people about things to do with their hobbies, their lives, their stuff. There's b2b, but we divide b2b into two. We divide b2b as beta, big uppercase B, and B to small lowercase b. What we mean by that is most of our business most of the people we sell to as email marketing heroes are what we call and this is not meant to sound derogatory at all, because we consider ourselves this as well beat a little BB to lowercase b. What we mean by that is we sell to people where they're typically owner run businesses. It's a mom and pop type, you know, enterprise, it's a man or woman person working from home, making things and selling them on the internet, maybe with their partner like their life partner, maybe with you know, the help of others, maybe on their own with the help of a virtual assistant maybe on their own but with the support about this binary like lampshade with the help of this sort of partner whom, you know, it's it's really a multi it's small micro micro business. And again, we factor ourselves in that like, you know, unless we were making probably north of $10 million a year and even then, I think I would probably still consider myself on the smaller end of business. So

Unknown 4:29

I think the way the reason we think of it this way, just to clarify, so we did not mention this in the past is when someone is B to lowercase b, they think they very much buy and behave like a b2c company, because there's a reason the money the business business, so when they're thinking of buying something, it's either they buy that thing, or they have that money in their pocket. To do their own thing. And that's the reason we think of it that way. So that's what we're sort of talking about. The kind of people we tend to bring into our world is betta small b. That's kind of who obviously email marketing is not for it's not a hobby market like you did I mean, like you might, you might sell to the hobby market, but you don't have an email list to do email marketing to an email list. Exactly. For the fun of it. So although it's fun, let's not have you think it's not fun, because I'm sure it's flatter. So that's a little bonus bonus tip that So the big thing that it's really important to remember that when when you're when you're talking about emailing to either other businesses, whether you're again, we're gonna we're gonna help you with b2b, b2b, lowercase b, lowercase b, lowercase A and C. At the other end of those emails are definitely going to be human beings, but let's not forget and brush over the fact that how will they expect to hear from you is different and you have to balance your understanding of the market. So let's say for example, you're a government lobbying organisations one of our clients is a government lobbying organisation who helps with lobbying governments large organisations to do with climate change. Alright, so the way that they want to show up is going to be different to the way that Rob and I show up in your email inbox when you're on our email list where we do innuendo rude jokes and swear the reason for that is just to do with our understanding of ourselves and our market, we're going to show up and cut through the noise and we are going to show up differently in the way it's acceptable. But truthfully, if I was going to like now go and want to go and do email marketing, which targets governments and I like the way that you know, if you look at Barack Obama and Trump and others all have email marketing campaigns, but again, what they're going to communicate and the way they're going to communicate the words they say, have to do something different. And they have to build trust, they have to build authority. If though if those people showed up or just went off on a tangent about something really silly, that's not going to give the right indicator. It's not the it's not the thing. That's got to be the best way of communicating because it's a whole thing of the words you say only a small percentage of of the response somebody gives you right of, of how somebody interprets that message. How you say it is really when you're reading between the lines and getting a real essence of that nuance of what you're like so if your whole thing is about building trust and authority, you can do that. By what you say and love. People talk about build trust, build authority by saying I'm the author of this book. And here's my testimonials and here's some social proof. I was interviewed by Oprah and I was on this podcast and stuff like that. But another way of showing your authority is by the tone in which you speak. If you get an email from a very sort of professional real like read like a college professor wrote it you got to really take a different bunch of credibility and credence than if it was all quite slapdash and jokey. Right?

Unknown 7:18

Absolutely. And I think one of the cool things about this and this is why this way our approach to email works so well regardless of whether you're b2b b2c Big to big B big to a little bit it's hard to say is because of this thing about the words are not all that important. What's important is things like the campaign structures and how you do things and what that what that means is you can take a campaign structure that we create, and you can put make the words fun, interesting, tell funny, embarrassing, ridiculous stories if you want to sell to, you know, John and Carol who want to learn gardening but you can take those those same structures and change the words to be authoritative and professional and professorial if you need to for a market that it is something much more serious and not that I'm not taking John Carroll's gardening lightly, obviously, but something much more serious and be they are serious about the cleanliness. Exactly. You can take the emails and change the words without breaking the whole thing. Likewise, the way that the sort of the sales cycle may take a little longer for a b2b thing and that's okay too. Like again, if it's been a big B, you can have multiple campaigns stacked together, which is another big thing that we teach because even though consumers may have the ability and the power to buy a little bit faster, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will, they still might need to see the thing presented from a different offer.

Unknown 8:17

For example, in a larger sort of b2b, bigger cell, you might have different email sequences or we will call them different email engines for different phases of the sales cycle to move them through it. So you're going to have a different in beat a small b and b2c. We often talk about having three email engines you've got your lead engineer, your subscriber engine, which are designed to get people who are just a lead on your list to become first time customers. The customer engine designed to get people to to buy again once they've bought before and you've got your sort of winning customers back end. And that's bringing people back who haven't bought for a while. But if you've you could extrapolate that further, aren't you? You could if you've got a business which has multiple phases of a sales cycle. So for those businesses that might be yes, we've got some leads identified, then it might be there was an initial meeting booked, then there might be a demo booked, then there might be a consultation period, then there might be a period of going through the T's and C's and the specified specifics around the product they're going to buy and then finally it's going to be the deals over the line. And then after that is is maintenance package selling and stuff like that for each of those several phases that are just sort of made up on it on a sort of standardised cycle, there will be a bunch of campaigns that you're going to use to move people from this phase to the next phase. That's all we're doing in marketing and in sales is we're just moving people from where they are to just the next step and let's not get caught up in moving people from where they are to buying. That's crazy, right? Think about it a bit like a game of Rounders or a game of baseball, right? Getting a home run running around the whole thing is a special thing because it doesn't often happen, right? Whereas if you can stop at each base, all you need to do is focus on getting from this base to that base. You might skip a base every now and again. And that's totally cool. So think think about these email campaigns as moving from one base to the next phase to the next base. That's the whole thing. One of the things that we do want to make sure we're consistent on is thinking about who the email comes from. Right? I think this is really, really important. And whether you're in b2b b2c, whichever kind of b2b You're in, remember that the person buys from another person it's really old stuffy marketing and sales speak right? But it's it's just true. When you send an email moving people from one stage to the next stage, have it come from a human being have it come from your name or the salespersons name or fiction, a fictional person's name or representatives name or whatever. Have it come from a human being because your open rates are gonna go up your level and the depth of your relationship with that person is immediately going to go up because they now having a relationship we can only have relationships with things we can relate to. That's what a relationship is. It's about relating to something and yes, there are still people who are married to their pets and having relationships with AI technologies. Yes, there are still those people who are having relationships with things but the reason they can is because they find something even in that thing that they are related to. So let's make sure that not just the from name, but the content. The email copy itself is something that is relating

I mean if I could if I could become president of the World, my first activity in office would be to make it law that all companies have to send emails from the person sending the email email is not the person who physically sits and sends it a person who has to come from a person and then have the brand name sort of secondary to that because I just think about my personal email inbox where I don't subscribe to a million newsletters. It's largely just very official sorts of things and real communication with people. And honestly, on a day to day basis, you get emails from the bank, you get emails from, you know, my favourite Shirt Company, I get emails from all these things, and they all come from the company name and I just think that that I just think that should change because I think it's gonna be better for everybody in the world. If we feel like we're having deeper relationships and communications with humans sending emails rather than companies I think he must it raises an interesting point I remember back in the day and maybe still today I think less so but but certainly years ago, all small one man one woman one person businesses used to try and operate and sound like huge companies right so they all go we will do this and we will do that called John John Franks and Sons gardening we will and Johnny John Frank's you know, like it's gonna it's all that and like they would, you know, have really like official looking phone numbers that people could dial in, you know, maybe even call handling services, which one

of our team will be delighted to answer your call? Probably

John, because there's only John there. So I think like that used to happen, right? I think less so now. But that definitely used to happen and we've been asked in the past like, you know, as a guy who used to work for us, and you were asked recently, in several businesses and us recently, was he real? Or was that just you under a different name? People were cynical about that, because we all know that people used to fake having bigger operations than they actually were forgotten. So I think there's an interesting thing though, well, what's happening is small businesses realise they should stop doing that. But big businesses are continuing to dry and operate and look like big businesses rather than just going actually there's obviously a power here that the world has shifted. There's obviously now a power in being seen as a as a as an individual. So for me, it sort of makes me think that instead of being be to be if you're a big business, ideally, you really want to try and make it look like you know, you're an individual to business like you're an individual like almost make it look like you know that you are there's a human there. That's doing so because there is right right now until the robots take over completely. There is still a human writing and sending those emails so make it look that way. I can't describe the power I think that will have on the world if big business if all businesses started doing that. Yeah,

I think the other thing to think about is to always think about what whoever you're sending your emails to whichever beat or whatever you want to think about. Always think about your emails in terms of how do people get on your email list? What was their relationship to begin with? Because if they join your email list, and they're expecting John from the offices handy dandy toolkit, tool tips and you're like it and it's coming from like a large supplier of like wood and DIY stuff, then they should get an email from John. Not from amazing tools dot What's it right, I think you've got to think about when they join your email list. How will they get around to that? The other thing to really think about when you're selling whoever you're selling to is remembered the human being who's receiving the emails is not only trying to serve the good of their job and like their business that they work for, but they're also trying to always also serving themselves. So how can you how can the lead magnet? Or how can the How can the email content and the offers that you make people and the things you talk about and the offers that you're making them? How can they serve the business and get their business to say yes, I approve you to go and buy the thing, but also how can you get it so that the person themselves benefits? How does it make them look better? How don't save a bunch of time how does it save face? How does it get the potentially a pay rise? Or how does it get them to potentially get a jump in their career like a promotion? So think about serving the individual at the end of that email always like how is it going to serve their business, and it's an even b2c. This is not true to think for b2b Because in b2c, it's easy to think I'm going to show them the benefits to their business. So when you talk about we have a structure that we teach called fab T, right? Which is a way of extrapolating and communicating the benefits of something in a really deep way which resonates really deeply with people. And one of the things that people will often do with that is they'll just say so say for example, we're selling a solution, which helps businesses to make more sales. With their email marketing, in our case, right? What we could do is we could just tell them that this will help your business grow, and you will be able to get more employees and you will be able to afford a better live streaming setup. These are all very business benefits. But we're going to remember that as a human being who's running this business or who is doing that part of the business. So we also want to talk about the personal benefits to that person. What are the personal benefits that that person's gonna get from it? So yes, by building our score email engine, you will you will you will grow the income of your business by up to 1800 plus percent, but also for you personally, you will know that every single new lead that comes into your business is being taken care of and be presented the best possible offers with the with the best possible opportunity without you having to stay up all night or wait, work late to follow up with leads so that you can get home on time so you can spend more time with your family. So your business is growing and amplifying and compounding the sales so you while you are taking the dog for a walk while you're at the park with the kids or taking them swimming. So making sure that the benefits we communicate are not just the business benefits. They have to be personalised benefits too.

Yeah, for sure. But I think largely speaking, what we really need to do is to personify the b2b side of things to try and bring elements of b2c marketing into it. And I think that's really the big difference that we're pushing forward with everything that we've talked about over the course of this episode.

Yeah, and I think I think what we do we do that is we think about you can get creative there are some brands which are really cheeky or they do bring forward a mascot person like this is you know, there was some ads we saw for a marketing company and they personified this one character of a guy in their office and they kept showing up in their ads and doing like, you gotta walk past and pull a funny face or there'll be a clip of him fallen over because it was so you know, it was so in front of you that you could almost trip over it and like you can create characters and put them and push them to the front too. They've done this with like things like insurance companies have done this by again, creating an emotional bond. And the thing is, we can't have emotional bonds with things we don't relate to. If there's no human being, if we just think of a company for most of the time. Think of your bank. What do you think of you probably think of a big tall glass skyscraper in the middle of some city and you sort of see some shirt ties and suits and and white collared shirts through the window, but there's no real people in that image. Whereas if you think of that was a TV we actually got to see the guy from the Bank of Dave, which is nothing on Netflix. I think it's all about this guy. And he acquitted this person this human it doesn't have to be a person like this. In the UK we've got compare the Meerkat, which is a play on compound the market.com insurance comparison website. Again, they have quite an emotional connection because you can't What do you think of insurance? What do you think you think of big stone buildings with with sort of not that you know, it's just old, stone crusty buildings and charts and spreadsheets. Whereas if you think of compare the market, you automatically think of compare the Meerkat, which is these whimsical, funny Meerkat characters. There's an emotional resonance that happens inside of our brains inside of our bodies, which allows us to resonate with people and that takes up more space. That was so successful. I don't wish around came I don't know if it's chicken or egg but another company decided to go with go compare and they needed to personify their insurance comparison website and they decided to go completely differently that a person who was this Welsh opera singer who would sing the gocompare Jingle again, personifying these these things. Now, I'm not saying you have to go with a ridiculous opera. Singer or talking me a cat or a family, a dog and meow cat. I'm not a guy who trips over stuff at the office. But what we're talking about here is remembering that we have to go beyond talking to the business we have to talk about the personal benefits, talking about the person and the people and you and more most importantly, you showing up as a person. Yeah, for sure. This is people do this by like introducing members of that team, hey, this is this is this person, they do this on the office, and they've said this today or whatever.

I mean, on just on that note, I had an interesting thought the other day, I was watching some comedians on YouTube, and I noticed there's a lot of comedians in the UK and probably around the world who get a lot of material for their comedy, not by telling jokes, but by telling stories that are just independently they're just naturally funny stories that I've had that that their friends have said or that their family have said, and they actually haven't had to apply a lot of comedy in order to deliver that content to people. In other words, it was naturally funny. All they have to do is make sure they don't remove the humour from it in delivering and when I say only what to do, they have to protect their comedic skills and just make sure they tell an already funny story in the most luxurious way. And I think what's interesting is the minute you what that what you bought made me think of is that when you take things about your team and your customers and the people around you, they give you so much natural content for your emails just by doing things saying things that the individual interactions if you look up, and because those things aren't very naturally, again, build deeper relationships with people by talking about

funny I'll just make sure we clarify that somebody's funny. John from from Switzerland email today to ask nothing funny just this is what we're humanising. We're saying our customers are other humans were humans. You're humans. We're all humans.

Yeah, it makes us feel a bit sick animals. But ultimately, we are trying to push towards a more centralised age to age human to human email communication. I don't like the word human human. But that's what that's the buzz phrase that came around for me and that's what we need to do with this. And it's

so yeah, that's it. That's what you do what you focus on speaking to those other human beings I have now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Rob, have you got it?

I'm spilling the tea dot dot dot, which is a phrase I've come across recently, but it obviously become a trendy phrase to do with, you know, when there's gossip or foot or something like that. And it was literally basically the story in the email was it was genuinely about nearly spilling a cup of tea on a plane. But I think it's interesting if you take if you take a commonly used phrase, not that that is called like commonly use Yeah, but it's increasing in commonality and use it in subject lines, where the story you tell in the email is definitely linked to the subject line. So doesn't feel like a tricky subject line. But it sort of goes in a different direction to where people expect it. That works really well.

That's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Email Marketing Show. We do this every single Wednesday, every email marketing Wednesday, so make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player. Thank you so much for joining us really appreciate it. And if you get a moment we'd really appreciate it if you'd leave us a review on your podcast player, because it really helps us to spread the word and get this information into the ears and minds and businesses of more people just like you. Thank you so much again, we'll see you next week.