In this episode, host Jay Schwedelson explores the significant impact of time in the marketing sphere. Discover how the value people place on their time influences their decision-making process and learn key strategies to optimize engagement. Jay shares fascinating studies that reveal the power of time indicators in promotional materials, including webinars, email newsletters, subject lines, and pre-headers. Tune into this episode to boost your marketing efforts and to learn where to have the best steak knife-buying experience!
Key Discussion Points:
– A study found promoting a 30-minute webinar instead of a 60-minute one on the same topic led to a 35% higher registration rate. Telling people something will take less of their time makes them more likely to commit.
– Putting “3 min read” or “4 min read” after blurbs in newsletters vastly improves clickthrough rate, by over 30%. Again, this convinces readers they won’t have to invest much time.
– The trend applies to on-demand videos too. Boldly stating a short length upfront leads to more views.
– This podcast keeps segments short since people are drawn to quick hits of content.
And MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!
Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don’t take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!
Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!
Transcript
Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this.
Not that this episode is going to be really interesting because what we're talking about is time and how to use time when you're promoting your business or consumer offers and how valuable that could be and how it can radically change performance. You know when someone says to me, what's the most valuable thing in your life? My answer is time. It's time with my family.
It's time to grow my business. It's time for me to relax. It's time because you can't get it back.
And you know, when someone's promoting a webinar and it's going to be, you know, a 60 minute webinar, I go, my God, do I really want to give that much time to this? Or I get a newsletter from some consumer brand that I like, it's got all these articles in it. Do I really want to give time to this?
And so when we are interacting with offers of any kind, we may not realize it, but we are considering the amount of time that we are going to be giving to this offer.
So there are things that we could do as marketers that can radically change performance if we leverage this understanding that we all are focused on time. So let me give you an example.
What I mean, we just did this really cool study and we were focused on, in the case of this study, it was for webinars for business to business marketers, it was focused on webinars and we were looking at webinars that were all about the same content but promoted at different lengths. So let's say you were doing a webinar. It was like about HR trends for 20, 24 and same webinar, but you did one version of it, 30 minutes.
You did another version of it, same basic content for 60 minutes, right? One's longer, one shorter. And we did this in all sorts of different industries, all sorts of different categories.
And what we wanted to see if we promoted the webinar saying, this is 30 minutes long, we said that in the subject line, we said that in the body copy, we said it on the landing page versus this is an hour long webinar. We said that in the subject line, in the body copy, on the landing page, on social posts, all of it.
Is there a big impact by letting people know that something is shorter versus longer?
And what we found, and it may sound obvious, but until you test it, you don't realize it we found is that the 30 minute as compared to the 60 minute, same exact content, basically the same title, the same everything. We had a 35% higher overall response rate, overall registration rate for the 30 minute versus the 60 minute.
The critical piece of that was to promote it as it only being 30 minutes. Because why we are like, okay, should I invest time in this? Do you want to put a webinar on your calendar?
Most of the time you're like, no, that sounds terrible. It sounds boring. I don't want to get involved with doing that.
But when you tell the person, listen, this is only going to be 30 minutes, we are much more interested in saying, okay, I can do that for 30 minutes. And it's not just related to business webinars.
All right, let's look at for content overall, one of the biggest trends to get newsletters read right now is this idea of telling people basically, how boring is your newsletter going to be? That is one of the biggest trends in email and in newsletters for business and consumer marketers. What do I mean by that?
When you send out your newsletter in the newsletter, you have different content blocks. It'll be like these short paragraphs and then you have a link to whatever the longer version of that article is going to be.
That's how most newsletters are structured.
For each of these content blocks in your newsletter, when they open it up, your email, after the three or four lines of text describing what the thing's going to be, if you literally put right there at the end of it, three minute read or even three min, three men read or four min read at the end of the paragraph and then you have the link right there.
What you are telling the person is that, listen, when you click on this, this is how long it's going to take for you to read the thing that we're talking about.
We are seeing when you put in that three min read, that four min read, it is increasing click through rates in newsletters for consumer and business marketers by over 30% because you're basically telling the person, listen, I know that this is kind of boring. I know you barely want to read it, but it's really not that much time. It's like 180 seconds. That's all you need in order to get the information.
Google does this all the time with their newsletters and it works phenomenally well. So you're telling the person, listen, we don't need that much time. So this is a massive trend.
We're not only though seeing this in webinar promotion, we're not only seeing it in the body copy of your email newsletters, we're actually seeing this also promoted heavily in the subject line.
So in the subject line if you say something like 2min read 2m I n read colon and then whatever it is that you're going to be promoting, it does incredibly well because instantly you're telling the person, this might stink, but it's only going to stink for two minutes, right? And letting the person know they don't need to invest that much time is everything. Because we are all moving so fast, we have time for nothing.
But we do have two minutes to check out whatever it is that you want us to check out. Now where else can you use this tactic? You could use this tactic in the pre header, right?
So that second subject line, you can put in that second subject line. Let's say your topic of Your newsletter is 7e Commerce Trends, right? Or the 7 Fashion Trends of the summer or winter.
Whatever we're in, in the pre header you could literally write 3min read or 3min read and the person is going to see that back. All right, I can invest in this.
It is the easiest way to get people to consume the content without them feeling like they have to invest too much time or energy. The other place, by the way, which is a no brainer, is if you have any on demand videos on your site of any kind, you want to keep them short.
You don't want them to be long and you want them to have really big very bold on the pages where those videos are, how long they're going to be in. They better be short. You know, we'll say less than five minute video, right? Four minute video, three minute video.
Don't let the person have to click to find out how long it is. Why is this podcast even remotely popular? It probably is not, but even a remotely popular. Why? Because it's short.
If this podcast was an hour long, you would not be listening. You're like, all right, I could put up with that guy Jay for 10, 15 minutes if it was an hour. You're like, forget it, I don't have an hour.
And when we promote the podcast constantly are saying, this is 10 minutes, this is 15 minutes, this is five minutes. Because we're telling you it's not going to be that painful. All right?
So testing this idea of letting people know how short things are and trying to keep them short, that is how you win in marketing today. All right, before we get into. Since you didn't ask.
Which is the portion of this podcast that goes completely off the rails that I don't even know what we talk about.
Before we get to that, I wanted to let you all know that this podcast, this one right here, do this, not that is exclusively presented to you by Marigold. Marigold is a really cool company. Marigold is a platform that my company uses to send out our email. It's not just a platform for sending out email.
They have loyalty marketing programs that are incredible relationship marketing infrastructures and programs that are awesome. They are. Marigold is for small companies, medium sized companies, big companies. We send out billions of emails. I love this platform.
In every industry they work with American Airlines, Notre Dame University. Fantastic. If you're not aware of them, you got to check them out. Go to meet marigold.com. that is meet marigold.com.
i promise they are a great solution, especially for getting your emails out the door. Okay, now let's get on to. Since you didn't ask, I need a haircut. What is going on? That's not what the topic is. Since you didn't ask.
So this is what's going on me right now. This literally happened this weekend. No one's going to care. But this is literally what happened this weekend. This is true story.
So we were going to have some people over my house. We're going to have dinner. And we needed new steak knives. Our steak knives were really old and they were like barely functional.
So my wife's like, go to the mall and get steak knives real quick because we need them. And so she says to me, listen, go to Crate and Barrel in the mall. They're having some kind of a sale when you get there, some sort of holiday sale.
I don't know what. Okay? They go, go get these steak nuts. And I'm.
When I say I'm clueless, I mean I am clueless on many topics, but especially anything like buying knives or plates or things that you basic human needs. I have no idea what's going on. Okay? So I go to the mall and I, by myself, which is a horrible idea. I go to Williams Sonoma. Okay?
I go to Williams Sonoma, which I don't think I've ever been in Williams Sonoma. Maybe I was there once. I don't remember. Okay. And so I go to find this nice person. I'm like, I need Steak knives, whatever.
They go, oh, we're gonna go to the back and bring out what's available to you. Whatever.
So I'm sitting there waiting in Williams Sonoma, and this is the coolest store ever because they have these little cups that they put out with food that you could have of stuff that they want you to buy. And they have this, like, peppermint bark with chocolate stuff in these little cups. And you could sit there and you could try one.
They want you to buy a tin of them. Of which I didn't do. I had like five. Five of these little cups of peppermint bark. People kept walking up to me and saying, hey, is it good?
I go, it's fantastic. I was like a salesperson at William Sonoma. It was so good. But the problem was they bring out the knives.
I find these knives, and I'm like, okay, I want to buy these knives. I say, but wait a minute. I'm not allowed to leave the store until I get the discount. You guys have this special discount thing going on.
And they go, no, we don't. That's not true. I go, no. My wife said, don't leave the store without getting the discount. I got the manager involved.
I. I had every salesperson involved. And it became a whole big problem. So they had no discount. And I called up my wife. I go, there's no discount. William Soman does not have a discount.
She goes, I said to go to Crate and Barrel, you're in the wrong store. I was like, oh, no. Everyone looked at me because I had on speakerphone. Everyone looked at me like, oh, my God, it was so bad. It was so embarrassing.
I'm such a doofus. But I end up getting the knives, which was great. And I ate so much of this peppermint bark.
I have no reason to tell you this story, but that was my weekend. And I hope that you enjoyed this episode and, you know, hit me up on Jay Shwettleson.com, because that's where my whole universe is.
If you want to connect with me or do whatever, go there. I don't know. Give this a five star. Eat peppermint bark. Have a good day. See you later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
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