Stop calling it a webinar (Dave's Newsletter)

9 Ways to Get More Out of Your Emails, Webinars, Newsletters, and Podcasts for 2026

Email is dead.

Webinars are boring.

The world doesn't need another podcast.

I've heard them all.

But I've also seen real examples of success with each of those channels too. So who's right?

I'm old enough now to believe that ANYTHING (yes, anything) can work in marketing. But the variable for success is how well you execute on that idea.

"The problem is that we've turned all of our marketing into Netflix. It's always there and no one wants to watch anything."

That's what Jay Schwedelson told me recently, and it hit me like a ton of bricks because for years I've been using the "be the Netflix for B2B marketing" thing as a goal to strive for.

But Jay pushed me to think about things differently and gave me a notebook full of advice on newsletter strategy, webinars, and podcasting for B2B and I'm sharing that with you below.

If you don't know Jay: he's legit. He's the founder of GURU Media Hub, runs the largest virtual email marketing events in the world (30,000+ attendees), hosts the #1 marketing podcast on Apple, teaches email marketing at Harvard Business School, and just had his Guru Conference acquired by Constant Contact.

1. You Don't Have to Call It a Webinar

Jay's team ran an A/B test where they took the exact same webinar, same content, same speakers, same marketing plan, and changed one thing: the name. When they called it a "live insider session" instead of a "webinar," registrations went up 35%.

That's it. Same event. Different label. 35% more signups.

The word "webinar" is stained. It makes people think of a boring 60-minute sales pitch with a Q&A nobody stays for. Call it a live session, a live panel, an insider briefing. We call ours "live sessions" at Exit Five, and it's become a running joke that this is absolutely not a webinar.

The lesson applies beyond webinars too. What you call something matters. Naming is positioning. If the packaging feels boring, people aren't going to show up no matter how good the content is.

2. How to Get More People to Show Up Live

Jay shared a stat that stopped me: when someone attends a webinar live, the percentage that moves to pipeline is about 400% higher than someone who watches on demand. But show-up rates are declining year over year. So how do you get people to actually show up?

His answer: attend-to-receive. You bake something into the marketing that says "if you attend live, you get X." A Q2 summary guide. Beta access to a new feature. A live Q&A that won't be available on the recording. And you make that the lead element of your promo, not a footnote buried at the bottom.

He said this approach has increased live show-up rates by over 30%. The key is it has to be front and center in your marketing. Not a nice-to-have. The reason to show up.

3. Test the Length: Don't Default to 60 Minutes

Jay is obsessed with 22 minutes as the ideal length for a webinar. Here's why: when you promote something as 22 minutes, people think "I can do that." They put a 30-minute block on their calendar and you give them back 8 minutes. That feels like a gift.

An hour? That's a huge ask. People see 60 minutes on their calendar and immediately start looking for conflicts. But 22 minutes feels manageable. And because it's not a round number, people actually believe it. A "30-minute webinar" feels like marketing speak. "22 minutes" feels like someone actually thought about it.

He applies this to podcasting too. Jay said the shorter he made his podcast episodes, the more downloads he got. His interview with Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot, was 18 minutes. He could have talked to her for three hours, but he kept it tight because he knew more people would actually listen.

And here's the algorithm play: if you chop one long episode into three or four shorter ones, you get more downloads per topic, and the algorithms circulate your show more.

Respect people's time and they'll give you more of it.

4. Fridays and Sundays Are Wide Open

Everyone in B2B has been trained to avoid Fridays. "That's a bad day. People are checked out." Jay says the data tells a completely different story.

Registration rates and show-up rates for Friday webinars have gone up significantly in the last 12 months. His theory is that coming out of the pandemic shift, Fridays have become the day people invest in themselves. Fewer meetings. Fewer fires. More time to actually consume content.

I've seen this at Exit Five too. We do CMO-level events on Fridays and we gave our members a list of dates to choose from. They almost always pick Friday. And the show rates have been great.

The other one is Sundays. Jay is seeing click-through rates for B2B emails sent on Sundays up about 60% year over year.

His logic: Sunday is the one time professionals can actually sit with their email without getting slacked or pinged from every direction. Around 11 AM, people are in cleanup mode, getting ready for the week. That's a window most B2B marketers aren't using.

5. Short Subject Lines + No Preheader = White Space

This one is simple and smart. When you look at your inbox, every email has a subject line and a preheader (that second line of preview text). Jay's move: use a short subject line, three or four words, and remove the preheader entirely. No preview text at all.

What happens? Your email has extreme white space around it in the inbox. And because 98% of emails have a preheader, yours visually stands out just by not having one. Jay said open rates go up significantly with this approach.

The trick is that if you just leave the preheader field blank, most email platforms will pull in the first line of your email body. You need to actively suppress it. Jay's tip: ask ChatGPT how to do it in whatever platform you use (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, etc.) and it'll walk you through it.

6. Start Your Preheader With "And," "But," or "Plus"

If you do use a preheader, Jay has a hack for that too. Start it with one of three words: "and," "but," or "plus."

These are continuation words. When you read the subject line and then your eye catches "and..." or "but..." or "plus..." in the preheader, your brain can't help but keep reading. It's a simple psychological trigger that keeps the chain going from subject line to open.

Jay said this lifts open rates meaningfully. It's one of those things that takes five seconds to implement and you'll wonder why you weren't doing it before.

7. Use "Reply to Get It" Instead of a Landing Page

This is one of my favorites. The standard B2B motion: you have a guide or a report, you send an email, you link to a landing page with a form, and you hope people fill it out. Everyone does this. It works okay.

Jay's alternative: send a short email that says "we have this new guide for [topic]. If you want it, just reply to this email and write the word GUIDE. We'll send it right over."

He said this gets about a 300% increase in response rate compared to the landing page approach. But here's the real unlock: when someone replies to your email, it sends a signal to their email provider that they want to hear from you. That's the single best way to stay in someone's inbox long term. You're not just getting the lead. You're building deliverability for every future email you send that person.

I started thinking about where else you could use this. Your welcome sequence is an obvious one. Get people replying to you early and you're setting yourself up for better inbox placement from day one.

8. Keep Your Content Blocks Under Five Lines

Jay made a great analogy about newsletters. He said: if you got a text from your mom right now and it was one giant block of text, you'd know that was drama you have no desire to deal with. You'd push your phone to the side and come back to it later. Maybe.

The same thing happens when someone opens your newsletter and sees a big wall of text. Anything over five lines in a single block, people subconsciously tune out and stop reading. Click-through rates drop.

His fix: break everything into chunks of three to four lines. That's it. Same content, just more visual breathing room. And if you're linking out to articles or content from the newsletter, add "2 min read" or "3 min read" next to the link. Jay said this increases click-through rates because it manages the time expectation. People think "I've got 180 seconds, sure."

9. Give People a Reason to Scroll to the Bottom

Jay's newsletter is about email marketing tips and tactics. But at the bottom of every single edition, he has a section called "Since You Didn't Ask" where he writes about whatever random thing is on his mind. High School Musical's 20th anniversary. Someone microwaving fish in the office and his subsequent mental breakdown. His love for The Bachelor (every season, every spinoff, he's seen them all).

It has nothing to do with email marketing. That's the point.

It gives people a reason to read all the way to the end instead of bailing after the first section.

It injects personality into a newsletter that could otherwise feel like every other marketing tips email. And it's the one thing AI can't write for you because it's just… you. Your weird interests. Your random stories. The stuff that makes your audience feel like they actually know the person behind the send button.

If your newsletter feels generic, this might be the fix. You don't need a better template. You need a section that's unapologetically you.

That's the list. Nine things from one conversation that you can test this week. You don't need to do all nine. Pick two or three that feel relevant to what you're working on right now and see what happens.

The bigger takeaway for me was this: none of these channels are broken. Email still works. Webinars still work. Podcasts still work. Newsletters still work. They just need someone willing to think about them a little differently than everyone else. And that's the job.

– Dave

P.S. Which of these are you going to try first? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.

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