Ep. 112- ‘UNOFFICIAL Holidays’ CRUSH it for Marketing B2B and B2C! l Jay’s Scoop

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. Welcome back to do this, not that.

And today I'm in celebration mode.

Not because I'm celebrating anything, but we're going to talk about the impact of celebrating stuff, the impact of holidays, but more importantly, the impact of unofficial holidays. Now, some of you already have tuned this out. They're like, who cares? I don't care about National Wear Sock Day. I sell accounting software.

That's not important to me. Or you don't need to tell me how to do marketing around Mother's Day or something like that. But here's the thing.

We are living in a world of all this AI garbage, all this generic content garbage.

And what we see from the data from the last six months is that celebrating anything, whether you're a business marketer or, or a consumer marketer, has a massive, massive impact on all of your performance. Because all we want to do is see something different, interact with something different, interact with something that is positive and upbeat.

So I'm really excited to take you through how unofficial holidays can have a massive impact on your marketing, whether you are a business marketer or a consumer marketer. So first, let's break it down. There's really three buckets of holidays and days that matter. The first bucket we're not going to talk about.

If you need my help telling you that you should do marketing around Christmas and Mother's Day and Labor Day, we got issues, okay, so that ain't going to be what we talk about. But then there's two other buckets. Let's first talk about what I call the more boring bucket.

But it does really, really well again for both business and consumer marketers. And that is anniversary based marketing. Anniversary based marketing.

So when you have people in your database that have bought a product from you or that have signed up for your newsletter, sending them anniversary related email messages does incredibly well. Here's an example for you. If you send somebody a one year anniversary for their newsletter subscription, it's been a year since you signed up.

Here's a special piece of content for you just for your one year anniversary of being a subscriber to our newsletter. Annual newsletter subscription anniversary emails have a 35% higher average open rate and a 30% average click through rate than just regular emails.

And what you want to do is not just acknowledge that it's their one year anniversary, but give them some sort of special content and do that every year. Creating these moments in your marketing allows you to have more stuff to say that gives you that boost in performance.

And then also it's related to when they became a customer, whether they just bought a pair of socks from you, right, or they just signed up with your SaaS product. Customer Anniversary emails make people feel seen, they make people feel not forgotten.

And every year you send them out, the average open rate increase for these types of emails is over 25%. Especially when you provide a special thank you and a special piece of content to them.

Now the other what I would put in the boring category before we get to the unofficial holiday category are birthday emails. And some of you business markets like, I'm not sending out birthday email.

Nobody wants a birthday email from, you know, their engineering equipment company that they buy from. But they do, they do. On our birthday. We love people acknowledging us. We love saying, you know, who's calling me, who's texting me.

You like to get angry at people who are not calling you and texting you, which is by the way, the best. All we really care about is seeing who forgot us.

But putting that aside, when you send people their birthday email, special piece of content, an animated gif, whatever it is, okay, on the consumer side, we see average email open rates over 30% higher for birthday emails. And on the business side, yeah, you business marketers stop being so boring and so stuffy. Increases open rates by about 20%.

You have the data, by the way, bonus tip, which almost nobody does, but it does so well. Half birthday emails do great. I know it's ridiculous to celebrate somebody's half birthday, but that's the world that we're in.

It's generic, it's boring. How do you stand out?

You stand out by doing stuff that's a little bit different, that's upbeat, that's not just driving everybody, nothing stressing them out. Half birthday emails. Nobody's getting a half birthday email. So when they get it, they probably didn't even realize it was their half birthday, okay?

And believe it or not, it lifts open rates well over 20% when you send somebody a half birthday email because they're not expecting it and you give them a cool piece of content or maybe you give them 50% off something creative. But the big one, okay, the big one is these unofficial holidays Unofficial holidays are marketing gold and we're not taking advantage of them.

I mean, think about Netflix, right? Netflix celebrates binge Watching day and they go all in and their streaming numbers surge, okay, they surge on it. How about Amazon Prime Day?

They invented the biggest shopping day of the year other than Black Friday. Amazon Prime Day or Spotify, you know, their National Wrap Up Day.

We all get our Spotify wrap and it tells us all the horrible stupid songs and things we've been listening to on Spodcast. These are not, these are not real things. But these unofficial holidays can crush it in performance.

So let me first give you some of the stats and then I'm going to share with you how you can use these unofficial holidays. Whether you're selling a pair of socks or you're selling the most boring accounting software, you can use unofficial holidays and crush it.

So here first are the stats.

In the last six months, when you mention an unofficial holiday in the subject line, email, it lifts open rates by over 35% for business and consumer marketing. Now, in social posts, unofficial holidays are mentioned in social posts, have an engagement rate increase of over 25%.

And if you tie your unofficial holiday to a content offer download, we see that lift download rates by over 40%. This is crazy. All by celebrating things that really don't exist. So all you have to do to figure out what you should be celebrating is simple.

You can go to any of the AI tools, right? Go to Gemini. I love Gemini from Google. It's free. You go to gemini.google.com that's it.

And you put in the search bar, what are marketing holidays for? Blah, blah, blah, Whatever industry you're in, what are marketing holidays for? And here's an example. The accounting industry.

So when I put that in, it brings up things like all these days that already exist.

National Close the Books Day, National Payroll Week, National Small Business Month, National Tax Freedom Day, National Bookkeepers Week, International Fraud Awareness Week. Right? And you could do this for any category. So let's say you go to gemini.google.com, which I don't get paid by them.

I just think it's really cool and it's free, right? And you put in what are marketing holidays for? Companies who sell marketing agency services.

Let's say you're a small marketing agency and then it spits back at you. National Social Media Day, National Marketing Day, National Creativity Day, National Write a Business Plan Day.

Okay, now you can build campaigns around all of these, right? It doesn't mean that like, oh my God, we're Stopping our company and this is all we're celebrating. No, but you can tie your content to it.

It gets people excited, it gets people to open it and we see it in the data. Now, it's easy. If you're a consumer marketer, right? And you want to be silly, that's a no brainer. There's a million of these unofficial holidays.

Now, let's say in general, whether you're a business or a consumer marketer, you wanted to have some fun and be creative and you didn't just want to celebr celebrate things like, you know, national data Privacy day, because that's a little boring. You can celebrate things like, you know, national pun day, which is in July.

You could do a pun in your subject line or whatever, or National Selfie day. Any business or consumer marketer can absolutely do that. Do that with your staff and your team and have them share socially. It's national selfie Day.

We're going to share pictures of our team, right? National emoji day, which is in July 17, national tell a joke day, national wear your flannel day. I mean, there's so many of them.

So you can go to gemini.google.com and ask it to see a list of all the unofficial holidays.

But if you're not thinking about this, which you probably aren't, you're missing out on all these marketing events that take you out of that generic, boring, horrible world that it's just wallpaper.

All right, so before we get to since you didn't ask, which is the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I had to share with you that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. I love Marigold. Why are you not using them? You should be using them. They're my email sending platform. I send out billions of emails with them.

They're incredible. They have incredible customer service. They're just great. They have a new piece of content called the 7 Tips to Reduce spam complaints.

I'm telling you, you need to download this thing. It is free and it has a piece in there that literally tells you the actionable tips that you need to do that. You can change things immediately.

All you have to do to get this content is go to jschwettleson.com marigold that's my full name, jschwettleson.commarigold and you can get access to the seven tips to reduce spam complaints and check out Marigold. All right, let's get into. Since you didn't ask. Oh my God. So this I'm gonna get in so much Trouble for sharing this. My wife's gonna be like, oh, no.

Why'd you do that? So me and my wife, in our neighborhood, we go on walks all the time. That's what we do. We love going on walks. We just go for walks.

And this past weekend, we're on a walk, and all of a sudden my wife goes, oh, no. And a bird pooped on my wife's leg as we were walking. This was. This was epic. And what did I do? She's like, this is disgusting. This is terrible.

I just started laughing. I just started pointing at her like, ahaha. That did not go over well. But then. Then she's like, yeah, but it's good luck.

I'm like, what are you talking about? It's good luck. She's like, a bird pooping on you is good luck. And by the way, I think that is the most ridiculous thing. Oh. Oh.

This wasn't what I was going to say. I have the craziest bird pooping story ever. This happened to me not that long ago. This is wild. I was in New York City. I live in Florida.

I was in New York City, and I was in a taxi, all right? And I was going from one meeting to this other meeting, whatever. And I had my window down. This was wild. I had my window down. I was.

I can't believe this happened. And I was on the phone in the taxi.

I'm on the phone, and I don't know how, but somehow a bird pooped and it went into the taxi and it hit me right, like, below my chin. While I was in the taxi on the phone, I was on the phone with somebody I was doing work with. I go, oh, my God.

I think I just got pooped on inside of a taxi. I'm like, how does that actually happen? Oh, it was such a. It was. It was. I couldn't believe it. I mean, what is that?

So, yeah, they say that's good luck, but I can't stand these things that they say are good luck that are just completely ridiculous, and I'm just not on board with it. Like. Like they say blowing out all the birthday candles in one shot is good luck. First of all, it's disgusting.

We need to stop you blowing out the birthday candles on the cake that everybody's gonna eat. It's gross. Like, it is.

It's like, okay, here's this beautiful cake, and now this person is gonna go and blow it all out, and then we're all supposed to eat the cake. That's gross. Okay, that's. That's bad luck for everybody that's in there that wants a piece of cake. So. So don't do that anymore. Stop it.

You know what else somebody, somebody said to me? They said, do you know what's really good luck? I was like, what? Because we were playing, we were playing like some basketball outside.

They go, if you, if you spit on somebody while you're playing a sport with them, it brings that person good luck. I was like, what? Is that true? If you spit on me?

And I was like, I don't know if this person is just telling me this because they think I'm an idiot and they're going to spit on me and then I'm not going to do anything. I don't know. Is that true? I don't know. All this good luck stuff with stuff that's ridiculous has got to stop. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, thanks for checking this out.

And by the way, if you're interested, if you go to jschwettelson.com we're booking up our podcast stuff for the rest of the year in terms of if anybody wants me on their podcast or something like that, or any ways to partner. So if you Check out J Schweddelson.com There's a lot of info there and really appreciate you checking out this podcast and celebrate something.

Come on. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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