Holiday urgency is real, whether you are trying to squeeze into your jeans or squeeze in those last few deals, and on this Bathroom Break Daniel Murray pulls Jay Schwedelson into a fast, funny riff on how to make that urgency actually pay off. They get into a wild “ate through the shot” Wegovy story, then flip it into simple, budget friendly tactics that push people to buy or opt in without feeling gimmicky. From DTC countdown discounts to B2B content that literally expires, you get plug and play ideas you can steal before the year is over.
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Best Moments:
(01:08) Jay admits he tried Wegovy expecting magic, then laughs about how he “ate through the shot” and ended up just eating less instead.
(02:30) Daniel calls out how much money Jay wasted on the shot before pivoting into the real topic of using urgency to close year end revenue and email goals.
(03:22) Daniel breaks down Set Active’s “Set Miss” promo and why shrinking discount windows instantly force shoppers to make a decision.
(05:26) Jay shares a dead simple B2B play where you put a countdown on how long a guide is available, then actually remove it from your resources page.
(07:11) They brainstorm a “12 days of content” idea where every day a new curated asset drops and then expires to rapidly grow your email list.
(08:23) The chat drifts into holiday party avoidance, sweatpants vs real pants, and Jay getting officially banned from wearing his hat backwards at 50.
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Transcript
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. Jay Schon. And I'm Daniel Murray, and I wanted to open this up because it's holiday season and Jay's kind of looking skinny to me, but he is saying he is not looking skinny.
Daniel Murray: Um, but, and I've been asking him if he's still on Ozempic and if I should go on Ozempic now. Uh, but I wanna ask you, are you still on, on the shot?
Jay Schwedelson: No. So what happened was, and I'll be very transparent with everybody, I was on Wegovy, uh, that's like one of the other ones. Whatever. They're all the same. Who cares?
Jay Schwedelson: And by the way, they're, they're crazy expensive. Rip off whatever. I knew they're gonna get cheaper, whatever. So I started doing it and the problem was I thought that it meant if I took the shot, I could just eat whatever I want. I didn't really. Understand that you have to lean into not eating as much. So I would be like, oh, I took the shot.
Jay Schwedelson: I'm going to eat everything that I want to eat. And so it didn't work. And my wife's like, it doesn't work that way. It's not like all of a sudden you go to a buffet and you crush it because you took one shot. And so I, I ate through the shot. Or I don't know if that's a thing, but I did. And so, um, I was like, this isn't working.
Jay Schwedelson: So I stopped taking the shot and now what I decide is to just not be a fat slob and eat less. So eating less is actually working better for me than eating through the shot. So, I'm not on the shot right now, but I'm not against it. Everyone should do what they wanna do. I'm just an. Yeah,
Daniel Murray: so basic, you wasted all the money that you did to put in the shot and now you're doing exactly what you were supposed to do on the shot.
Daniel Murray: Um, okay. That, that makes a lot of sense to everybody involved. But I wanna go into this topic of the day. Um, so holiday seasons now coming up, um, it's been going and urgency is a, a big factor right now. Um, people need to close out the year really fast. They need to get deals in, in the pipeline for B2B and e-commerce.
Daniel Murray: Um, so I wanna start with what are some like urgency tactics people could use to close out the year strong to get emails, to get sales, to get, um. Some sort of urgency on what they have in their um, repertoire.
Jay Schwedelson: Alright, so I'm gonna do a B2B one, a business to business one in a minute here. But I wanna flip it back to you because you were telling me the other day about a consumer urgency play that I thought was so cool that can be used in any market, but it was on the direct to consumer side.
Jay Schwedelson: And then I'm gonna rip through the business to business one. So can you break down what that was, because I think this is a great playbook.
Daniel Murray: So if you, if you live in a, a, a hole somewhere, like what just happened recently in e-commerce was Black Friday, cyber Monday and Black Friday. Cyber Monday is basically the biggest event in consumer to generate sales, trying to deals everybody's shopping during that time.
Daniel Murray: And the goal of that is to spend a lot of money generate and get a bunch of sales in at that time. But once you do that, you're collecting all these emails from people who aren't. Purchasing aren't doing anything. And what are, and you also have a December goal now. 'cause Cyber Monday ended on December 1st.
Daniel Murray: So if you can't hit your it's December goal, what do you do? So this brand Set Active, which is a, um, active web brand, is doing this thing called Set Miss, which I think is super cool. And it's an email campaign. And what the, and they have it on their website too, but they're not. Um, spending as much as they did on, um, black Friday, cyber Monday on paid social, and they do this, this drop, which I thought is super smart, is from 10 to 10 30.
to:Daniel Murray: So. And they do this whole thing where like they locked down the site at that time and you have to sign a waiver. So it makes us feel like so urgent, like you have to get this deal and it's 10% off than any other deal, but you only can come in that window. And I think it's super smart because it creates.
Daniel Murray: You have to buy, you have no decision not to buy 'cause you'll lose that offer in 30 minutes. So I thought it was such a cool play. You could do this any, with any type of industry you are. I think it do windows of urgency. I think it's super smart.
Jay Schwedelson: It is super smart and it doesn't cost you really anything.
w, my HR guide to new laws in:we think it's gonna be big in:know the HR law, the guide to:Jay Schwedelson: 'cause there's no urgency around it. But if you put a time element on its availability, you can win. So you say, okay. This is our new HR law guide, whatever, and it's only gonna be available for download for the next 30 days. And then you do a whole campaign that last week, oh, it's going away in five days.
Jay Schwedelson: It's going away in two days. Last chance to download the guide and you take it off your resources page. You could bring it back 90 days later. But building a campaign around urgency around your content is a great way to get an exponential increase. And we, we do this a lot and we do see it. Huge lift by expiring content that would otherwise maybe be evergreen and evergreen.
Jay Schwedelson: Might as well be ever a loser 'cause it's not gonna do anything. And so looking at urgency, whether it's on the consumer side or business side or nonprofit side, is awesome. I think what
Daniel Murray: you could do too is they do something where it's pretty cool to set active, and I think you could do this is play on the holiday stuff like day one, what, along with like the thir 25% drop, they, they're dropping a new skew, like a skew line and a product line during that time.
Daniel Murray: And you could do the same thing with these guides of like, let's do 12 days of Christmas and like. This is, we're gonna drop this and it's, it expires today and we're gonna drop this piece of content and expires today. And you could do it of like research from the year you can collect, basically curate everything from the year that you have and put it in one place, which everybody loves that like curation of all content in one place and say.
Daniel Murray: This curation is gonna end at this time. This is gonna end at this time, and it has this, this, this. So you could play on these things and, and B2B to get downloads. And it's actually easier in B2B because all they have to do is give an email. Uh, they don't have to do this whole checkout process, spend money, put a credit card down.
Daniel Murray: So if you're trying to get emails for the end of the year, this is a good time to do that. And it sets you up well for the next year because you can have that email address for the rest of the year. A
Jay Schwedelson: hundred percent. Um, I love, I love, and these are easy tests. These cost you nothing. Come on. So let's go back to the beginning.
Jay Schwedelson: Um, so over the holidays, Daniel, do you, do you go to like a lot of parties? Is that like your, your jam? Like is your next few weeks, are you just like, I want to go to every holiday party I can get invited to because I love them so much. Uh,
Daniel Murray: no. There's no way
Jay Schwedelson: you're gonna see us.
Daniel Murray: No. First of all, I don't even think I get invited to that many holiday parties, to be honest.
Daniel Murray: Um, and there's no way I am spending time dressing up to go to these holiday parties.
Jay Schwedelson: Wait, how, what is your dressup? I've never actually seen you. For those of you who don't know, Daniel is the most casual dresser ever. Like the first time I met him, it was at this huge conference. I'd never seen him before.
Jay Schwedelson: I think the dude was in sweatpants. Like, I mean,
Daniel Murray: probably, probably, I'm not gonna, I don't think I was went that far, but it was probably like Lululemon joggers or something like that. But, um, I don't like dressing up. I will dress up if it's like your wedding or it has a dress code, but I'm not gonna just go to your part party.
Daniel Murray: To dress up. Do you own pants? Yeah, of course I do. I own pants. Don't dunno if they fit me because I haven't worn them for a while. But, uh, I don't, but Jay is funny because from Monday to Friday he's like, and always in a long sleeve, always in jeans or. Slides. And then on Saturday he's like in a backwards hat.
Daniel Murray: Shorts. That's right. And a regular teacher. So he is totally opposite on the weekends. I
Jay Schwedelson: was told, by the way, by my family, I'm no longer over allowed to wear my hat backwards.
Daniel Murray: Oh, you're not. I'm
Jay Schwedelson: turning 50 this year. They go, that's it. It's over. Only frontwards from now on. So. That's what I got.
Daniel Murray: Oh my goodness.
Daniel Murray: You, you've been, you've been told lay down that. What do you
Jay Schwedelson: think
Daniel Murray: about that? Do
Jay Schwedelson: you agree? I
Daniel Murray: think you could do it. You have such good hair that you could put in the front. Uh, I, I mean it kind of would look like you're a little bit, um, broy if you do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Jay Schwedelson: yeah.
Daniel Murray: A little too frat, um, of that.
Daniel Murray: But I think, I think just a forward, like running hat for you would be nice, huh?
Jay Schwedelson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, that's it. That's my new move. Well, once again, we've really touched on some of the critical topics, uh, that are really everyone's thinking about. Should I wear a hat backwards or not? Everyone go and leave Daniel a review on the Marketing Millennials podcast.
Jay Schwedelson: He loves getting the reviews. He loves the comments. He's a good dude, and we will see you at the next one. Daniel, come on man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, 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 hope you give it a try.
Jay Schwedelson: Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out
Daniel Murray: back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Marketing Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out, and it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world.
Daniel Murray: We'll talk about it. Just give us a, a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out later.