In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson tackles two questions in the “Ask Us Anything” segment, providing insights on email marketing and sharing a personal anecdote about Starbucks.
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Best Moments:
(01:09) Work-related question from Becky in Minneapolis
(02:27) Myth about the best times to send email marketing campaigns
(05:48) Explanation of why varying email send times can increase conversions
(07:34) Promotion of Marigold, the email sending platform
(08:21) Ridiculous question about Jay’s Starbucks order
(08:38) Anecdote about a rude customer at Starbucks
(10:09) Jay’s Starbucks order hack: Pike Place coffee
(11:11) Promotion of the Guru Conference, a free virtual email marketing event
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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!
Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.
Transcript
Foreign. We are back for Ask Us Anything from the do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold.
This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each.
And if you're interested in submitting a question that would be amazing, just go to jschwedelson.com you click the button that says podcast and then you click the button that says ask us anything. And we love getting crazy questions. Anything is cool, fun, whatever. So let's jump into it. Let's do the work question this week.
First, we got a question from Becky from Minneapolis. Love Minneapolis. You know what? You know why I love Minneapolis? Because everyone there is nice. Everybody in the Midwest is nice.
People in Wisconsin are nice. People in Minnesota, people in Ohio are nice. Everybody's nice. Everybody on the east coast. I'm from the east Coast. I can tell you this. We're rude.
We're just rude people. We are New York, New Jersey, the whole thing. And you know what?
I moved down to south Florida like 30 years ago and I will tell you, it carries the same thing down here. All the East Coasters move to the east coast of Florida, okay? And everybody that lives near me in like Boca Tone, they're rude. Everybody's rude.
But then all the Midwesterners, they move to the west coast of Florida like Naples and St. Petersburg, and everybody there is very nice. So if you're thinking about moving, you don't want to be my neighbor because everybody here's.
I know that I'm going to make a lot of enemies in saying this, but Midwestern people are nice anyway. Becky, what's your question? Hope it's a nice question, Jay. Here's my question, Jay.
My team keeps falling behind on getting our email marketing emails out at the time we know is best for them to perform.
And then we wind up debating if we should just send it out even though it's later in the day, or should we just wait till the next day when it's going to be at the perfect time? What do you think?
Well, this is a great question because this is going to allow me to expose a myth about the best times to send out your email marketing campaigns. Everyone's like, oh, wow, I hear this all the time. Right?
our emails out at, you know,:And we took 20 different clients from our demand gen marketing agency.
We took 10 consumer clients and 10 business marketing clients that were running campaigns at scale, email marketing campaigns at scale, where they were emailing out promotional offers. So this has nothing to do with your newsletter. Okay? And so these 20 brands are sending out their emails.
And what we did was we split all of their campaigns into an AB test, so 50, 50 splits on the, on the email sends that they were doing.
And for one half of the population, for all these different marketers, we sent out their promotions at the exact same time every day for the offer that they were promoting.
And then for the other half of the people in the database, we change the send time for each send that we did and we made them at least four hours different than the original time.
et's say it was at, you know,:This is for promotional emails when you have an offer, right? Whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, here's what we found.
That any campaign that is doing at least three touches for the same offer, right?
Meaning let's say you have a webinar and you're sending out three emails over, let's say, two weeks at least, maybe you send four, maybe you send five, but at least three over two weeks to promote that webinar.
Or you have a direct consumer, you know, clothing item or something, and you're sending out at least three emails promoting, you know, 30% off on that particular offer over two weeks. Maybe you're sending out more than three, but at least three.
What we found is that by having emails being sent at least four hours apart from each other on, on the opposite days, on the, on, on the different days, it increased conversion rates by over 22%.
Then if sends were at the same time for the entire email marketing promotion of that offer, I know that that's kind of confusing, but basically what we're saying is you send out your email today to promote your webinar, okay, you sent it out at 10am and then two days from now you're going to do, oh, time's running out, you're Going to send out another email to promote it. Instead of sending out at 10am, you'll send out at 3pm okay. And then that third email, you do a totally different time, right?
Maybe you do an 8am right, and you have all these different times. Why though?
Why would it be that if you know 10am is the day that it works out the best and that's when you get your highest opens and clicks, why would you get a higher conversion by not sending it out at that time? And here's the big myth I want to expose. Okay?
When you send out Your email at 10am Certain people that read their email at that time are opening it and clicking on it.
But there's another population of people in your database that read their emails, let's say at 3pm their promotional emails at 3pm at totally different time of the day.
Maybe some read them at 6am and when you send out that email at 3pm instead of 10am, you may actually see a lower open rate and click through rate than what then at the best time, your 10am but what we found is the 3pm people. It is a different population of people. So the myth is, oh, let's send it out. We get our highest opening click through rate. No, you want to mix it up.
So that way you're getting in aggregate, you're getting more people exposed to it. So that's why you have to always look at your conversion performance and not just your highest open rate and click through rate at a given time.
Because when you mix it up, you're going to allow other people who have different habits be exposed to your marketing offers. And you know, back to your original question. Should you send it out if you miss that window of time? 100 billion percent. Here's a rule I live by.
When in doubt, send it out. Who cares? It's one email. Nobody even remembers it. But if you don't send it out, that person's not going to open it.
That person's not going to click on it. That person is not going to get exposed to your offer. So just send it out.
Maybe it won't do as well as you like, but you'll get something benefit out of it. You'll get no benefit if you don't send it. That much I can tell you.
All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, I know that was confusing, I really do. But I'm really just trying to open your eyes to this idea of there being one time is the perfect time. That's garbage. It's just not true.
All right, I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. I send all my emails through Marigold. I send over 6 billion consumer and business emails.
You need to check them out@meet marold.com but they have a new piece of content that is awesome. It is called the Five Steps for Selecting the Right Email Marketing Platform. It's a free guide.
I know you don't even like your platform, so wouldn't it be nice to have a guide? And this thing is not a sell sheet for Marigold. It's for any time you're thinking about what I need to be asking when I'm exploring a new platform.
If you want this thing, you go to jschwettleson.com marigold that is jschweddelson.com/marigold. It is free. It is awesome. Check it out. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question. We got a question in from Ryan from Denver.
Ryan, what is your question? Jay, what is your Starbucks order? All right, well, let me tell you about that. Oh.
Meanwhile, I went to Starbucks the other day, and the weirdest thing happened. The absolute weirdest thing happened. So I'm online behind this dude, okay? And I don't go to Starbucks every day.
I don't once every two weeks, whatever it is. So I'm online behind this dude in the barista that's like, the person that helps you behind the counter says to this guy, what can I get you today?
And the guy says, seriously, you know, I'm here every day. What are you talking about? I get a venti americano or whatever. He said, I get it every day. And he was rude. He's probably an east coaster.
There you go. And he was pissed. And then the barista said, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. And then she said the worst thing. She goes, and what is the name for the order?
I was like, yes, this is gonna be amazing, because this guy's head's gonna pop off his shoulders. And he lost it. And he goes, are you kidding me? I'm here every single day. It's Mike G. Or whatever he said. And he goes, is this a prank or something?
How do you not remember me? And he was so pissed. I was like, dude, you're a loser. Like, you're an actual loser.
You're yelling at this nice person because they didn't know that Mike G orders an Americano. Get a life, you loser. Oh, my goodness. And they screw up my name all the time. I could care Less they'll write, oh, I say it's Jay.
They go, oh, this is for Jerry. They one time they wrote hey instead of J. I don't care. You call me a Mr. Potato Man. I don't give a crap what you say. It's fine with me.
Anyway, back to your question. What is my order? I have a hack. So I always get a Pike Place coffee. And here's why. It actually is not the best thing.
It's not the thing I think tastes the best at all. Not by a long shot. It's like a regular coffee. But the reason I always get a Pike Place is.
And maybe you know this, but the secret hack is the barista. The barista, whatever you call it, the person who takes your order. When you order a Pike Place, they make it for you on the spot.
It doesn't go into, like, the lineup of everything else they're working on. They literally stop what they're doing and they make it and they hand it to you. So you never actually have to wait for them to make it.
So because I'm incredibly lazy and I don't want to wait for anything, I order a Pike Place even though it's not my favorite thing because it's the fastest coffee you can get at Starbucks. There you go. Who knew? Anyway, what did we talk about today? I actually have no idea, but I appreciate you being here. Please, two things.
You're hanging up. You're hanging up. You're not on the phone. You're stopping, listening. Don't stop listening. Number one, leave this review.
If you leave a review get circulated, more people get exposed to my nonsense, and you are then awesome. Number two, Guru Conference is the world's largest email marketing event. It is free and is virtual, and you gotta be there.
It's coming up in a few weeks, October 16th and 17th, and we buy a certain number of virtual seats. I keep saying this. We're about to run out and Sarah Jessica Parker is going to be there. I'm going to be there. That's a failure.
Amy Porterfield, Anne Hanley, all these big brands. Skims is speaking there. Jim Shark, DocuSign, you name it. Guru Conference dot com. It is free. It was virtual. It's going to be fun, I promise.
All right, see you there later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top top marketers. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.
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