Ep. 163 – 2024 is OVER! 2025 Trends… Pre-Black Friday?! 🎤 Livin’ on a Prayer? | Jay’s Scoop

Foreign 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 Schedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that.

And if you're just trying to have a relaxing summer and you're like, you know what?

I'm going to get to whatever it is that we're going to be promoting, whether you're a business marketer or consumer marketer in the next few weeks, in the next month or two, you can't do that because as marketers we have to always be ahead of the game. And things are shifting right now.

And we have some really interesting data about what you need to be doing in the next 30 days to make sure that you are ahead of the game. What do I mean by getting ahead of the game? Well, in the last two weeks alone, Halloween email promotions are up 300%.

And in the last two weeks alone, subject lines and emails on the B2B side mentioning Q4 quarter four, we're up 200%.

This is all stuff that's not happening for a while, but we are talking about it now because that is the mindset and we know something very interesting from previous years. September 1st is a magical date on the calendar in terms of how we all think humanity thinks about the rest of the year. And it is coming up.

It doesn't matter that we're in it. It's. It's so last year.

And on the consumer side, September 1st is when you start to see the explosion of pre Black Friday and holiday being mentioned the subject line. And it increases email open rates by over 30% when you mention either holiday or pre Black Friday.

You cannot tell me that after September 1st, if you get an email that says pre Black Friday early Sale, whatever or sneak peek on our holiday, whatever. You're not checking it out. We all want to see it. Look, if you go to Target right now, we're in the summer. You will see Halloween decorations, okay?

If you go to Costco, they've put out a lot of their holiday stuff already. Bath and Body Works, they have begun to promote their holiday scent, which is kind of gross.

I mean, I don't know, there's just too many smells going on there. Too many smells. But anyway, so September 1st is really, really important.

Content offers for business to business that mention the current year after September 1st have a 35% lower overall download rate than those with no year mentioned. What does that actually mean?

They started promoting like, you know, August, September. That's it. And that's what we all have to do also because we have to get into the mind of everybody that we are marketing to. That's how it works.

All right, so before we get into, since you didn't ask, which is the absolutely ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is one of the largest and best email sending platforms on earth. I use them to send out my 6 billion consumer and business emails.

And if you don't know about Marigold, you got to check them out@meetmaragold.com Strong endorsement there. But they have a new piece of content. It's called the Complete Guide to Zero Party. Data.

And if you want this free guide, you go to jschwettleson.com marigold and it is all about how you can collect information from people that they're voluntarily giving you. Okay.

They're telling you about themselves, and then how you can leverage that information for incredible personalization in loyalty programs, for everything. So if you want the complete guide to zero party data, go to jschwettelson.com marigold so what do I got going on in my life?

Well, I'm leaving tomorrow for my annual guys trip. So every year, me and my six buddies from college, we head out our annual guys trip. And it's always a little bit of chaos.

And I really encourage other people to do this. If you don't do this, I always go reluctantly.

But I'm very, very happy that I went because, you know, these are people that I've been buddies with for a really long time. And the way that we do it, which is we had to do it this way because it got annoying.

Every year while we're together, we pick out of a hat who's going to be in charge the next year. So my buddy picked out the hat this year, and he got it.

And it's the worst job you could possibly get because all year long, the person picks the location, the restaurants, the activities, whatever we're doing. And then he'll text our group. And all year long, no matter what he says, we will write him back like, that's the stupidest idea ever.

That's a horrible idea. You're such a loser. And so you don't get picked out of the hat. At least I don't want to.

And then we do crazy things and we always wind up at some sort of, like, piano bar or something. Although I've announced and I need to live up to this, I've announced that I've retired from going on stage at the piano bar and singing a song.

Somehow I would always wind up singing, like, Living on a Prayer or Home Sweet Home or some other ridiculous song. I always wind up on stage with a microphone in my hand. But I announced last year I've retired from this.

I really want to live up to this retirement because it is every time I get off the stage, even though I tell my friends, do not video me, they video it anyway. They send it to me. And I just want to disappear from the earth because it's so embarrassing. So what else do we do? We play golf.

I got one buddy who completely cheats every year. I mean, completely cheats. And we call him out and he still cheats, so that's something to look forward to.

I got another friend who thinks he's all fancy now, now that we're like grown ups and stuff so he like wants to go to like high end places or whatever. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? Stop being such a loser.

So but in general, I cannot strongly encourage everyone to do this annually and you got to do it every year because if you miss one year then you just stop doing it. And it's hard to do. It's so hard to find time in the calendar, but I think it's super worthwhile.

But don't pick the name out of the hat because I mean, it's just the worst job on the planet. Anyway, thanks for being here. Follow this thing, subscribe this thing, leave it a review and you're awesome.

And drop me a note@jschwettleson.com if you have any ideas for the show or anything you want to talk about. And keep it real later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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