If you’ve ever wondered how to revive a dead email list or why people make a hard left into the airplane bathroom before takeoff, this one’s for you. Jay Schwedelson dives into his two favorite tactics to wake up unengaged subscribers before year-end—plus manages to work in an oddly passionate defense of Spirit Airlines. It’s classic Jay: part marketing brilliance, part relatable chaos.

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Best Moments:

(01:32) Why year-end is the best time to send “letter-style” emails from an executive

(02:00) How a “note from the founder” subject line boosts open rates by 40%

(03:00) The secret power of “verification” emails for reengagement

(04:24) Subject line examples that actually make people click again

(06:15) Jay’s unexpected love story with Spirit Airlines

(07:41) The mystery of people who immediately use the plane bathroom

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Jay: We are back for ask us anything from the do this, not that podcast. This is our short episode. We're all week long. We getting in questions, we getting work questions. We get in ridiculous questions. We try to tackle one of each. And if you wanna submit a question, you'd be extremely awesome. Just go to j sch swen.com.

Jay: There's a button that says, uh, podcast and other one says, ask us anything. And we, we love the question. So let's do the work question first. We got a question in from Jenny. From Lake Placid. I like Lake Placid a lot. It's in upstate New York. If you've ever been there, I'm telling you, I know nobody asked. I went on a family trip there, uh, with my kids.

Jay: Everything there is about the Olympics, it is like going to hot tub time machine, which by the way, great movie. Um. And if, uh, it should be on your radar. So, Jenny, I didn't know people actually live there. No offense. That's kind of rude. But Jenny, what is your question? From Lake Placid Jay, we have a ton of contacts in our database who have not opened or clicked on email in over a year.

Jay: How do we wake the dead as we go into the end of year? All right. Good question. I got two secret sauce things to wake the dead in one of them. Everybody sleeps on. Here's a little known fact that people don't realize this is for both business and consumer marketers. Okay? From November 20th. Through December 20th.

Jay: Alright. Letter format, emails that come from an executive in your organization. Again, this could be for a consumer brand, business brand, a nonprofit, doesn't matter. Letter format, emails that actually come from a founder, A CEO, an executive director, a senior vice president, whatever, from November 20th through December 20th, actually have a 40% higher average open rate.

Jay: Then regular emails do when you are sending to people that are not engaged, people have not opened or clicked in the last 12 months. What am I talking about? All right, so when you get an email and the from name is not the brand, it's not acme, the from name is John Smith, founder. Okay. John Smith, SVP of whatever, that's the from name.

Jay: And then the subject line directly ties into the fact that, uh, you know, that they haven't opened one of the emails in a really, really long time. So you'd have John Smith founder and says, a note from our founder in the subject line, or John Smith, and the subject line says, you disappeared, but I get it.

Jay: Or John Smith, one time perk for our lost friends. And if you're a consumer brand out there, you're like, oh, no, no, we can't do that. But that's not true. All, all year long consumer brands do this. I mean, Allbirds has letters coming from their CEO three or four times a year. Glossier has it coming from Emily Weiss a couple times a year.

Jay: The big, uh, makeup brand, all the big brands do it on the business side. Everybody does it, but this is the time of year to do it, okay? Because everybody's on your list for a reason, and when you get this kind of letter format. Email style, email from somebody really important and they're saying, Hey, we kind of want you back.

Jay: That's what you really need to be considering now. The other big obvious thing that you need to be doing if you're not doing is verification style emails. So verification emails, I'll give you examples in a second, but verification emails to non-engaged 12 month non-engaged contacts, people have not open.

Jay: Clicked on an email and over 12 months. All right. If you do a verification style email, it lifts open rates by 27% of the consumer side and 31% on the business side according to World Data Research. And what does that look like or sound like or feel like? So on the business side, your subject line would be something like, are you still with?

Jay: And then you put in the company name of the contact that you are emailing to. You dynamically put that in. You personalize every single email in the subject line. Are you still with Acme? Right. And then when you do that and the person gets it, they're like Uhoh, and they open it up and then you say, um, uh, okay, great.

Jay: You're still with Acme. We have this special thing for you. You gotta check out this piece of content. So glad you're still there. Or you can do really basic, you don't even need to personalize. You could just have the subject line say, verify your active status.do. Now what will happen is this will work really well and you're gonna get a lot of people to wake back up, but you're also gonna get a high unsubscribe rate 'cause it's gonna really annoy some people.

Jay: 'cause they stopped opening your emails for a reason and now you're kind of like near it. It's a little gimmicky that you're trying to get them to open it. So you just have to have a little bit of thick skin knowing you're gonna get some zingers of people saying, take me off your list. On the consumer side, this is it.

Jay: This is the time of year to do verification. 'cause all those people that are sitting on your list waiting for that offer, that holiday time offer, right? You wanna have a subject line that says something like, verify your VIP status, dot, dot, do or still want free shipping question mark or wanna make sure dot, dot, dot.

Jay: Now, these verification emails do not. Come from the executive, like I talked about earlier. They come from your regular brand emails, but you are basically doing a verification that they still want to get your junk. Alright? So if you've never tested that, you absolutely should. Alright, let's get into the absolute ridiculous question here 'cause that's what we're good at.

Jay: We got a question from Tate from Los Angeles. What do you got, Tate? Jay, what is your favorite airline to fly? Okay. I'm not gonna do a commercial for any one airline. Oh, okay. I'm gonna say this though. Uh, this is gonna come out. I'm gonna sound so bougie. Can I say bougie? Is that a bad word? I don't even know, but this is gonna sound very bougie.

Jay: So. Um, this is so bad. For a really long time, I used to avoid flying Spirit Airlines. And by the way, I'm not affiliated with any airline. Nobody's sponsoring me. Nobody cares about what I'm saying about these airlines. But I used to avoid Spirit Airlines because I thought that Spirit was like some sort of inferior brand, that if I flew on spirit, I wouldn't make it to my destination.

Jay: I'd have to wave goodbye to my family and that would be the end of me. That's how I felt. Judge me, I don't know what to tell you. Um, and then I. My son just started going to school in New Orleans and from South Flower, new Orleans. Like the airline to fly is spirit if you want to get there, okay? There's just no other planes that are really going there, so I had to have this real meeting with myself.

Jay: I said, Jay, you gotta get on board with Spirit. And he let me. I'm here to report. I'm here to tell everybody, nobody cares. Spirit is great. It is awesome. First of all, their planes look cool. They're yellow. That looks cool. Second of all, I have gotten there multiple times. I'm still alive. That's a win. On top of that, they've been on time every single time.

Jay: I have nothing but positive things to say about Spirit Airlines, so I, although I will say in the most recent flight, I don't understand something, I was on one like a week ago. This has nothing to do with Spirit. I don't know what I'm about to come out of my mouth, but I don't understand when people get on the plane.

Jay: And then some people are like, they need to immediately use the restroom. I'm not talking about like the planes like midair, like we're now like 10,000 feet up, whatever I'm talking about. You are boarding, you have your bag in your hand, you're trying to figure out where are you gonna put your bag. And then somebody's, instead of going down the aisle, someone's making a hard left and they're going, Hey.

Jay: And they ask the the attendant, can I use the restroom? First of all, that just happened. The flight I was just on, but I've seen this now many times and I'm always like, I don't get it. Like we are just getting on the plane right now. We like, you could, what, what were you doing? Like what were you doing 10 minutes before this?

Jay: And, and I know that's wrong. Maybe people have issues and medical issues and I shouldn't judge them or whatever. And if that's the case, okay, fine, whatever. But if that's not the case, like nobody should be making a hard left when you're getting on the plane, you should be going down the aisle and finding your seat.

Jay: I just think it's a strange time to have to do that. What am I talking about legitimately? What am I talking about? I don't know. I actually don't know. So what have we gotten out of this episode? Number one, send emails to people that have not been opening or clicking them. Good luck with that. Number two, fly Spirit Airlines.

Jay: There you go. That's my commercial. Uh, number three, go to the bathroom. That's when I got outta this episode. I don't know what's going on anymore. I appreciate you being here. Uh, be awesome.