In this episode of the Do This, NOT That podcast, Jay Schwedelson answers two questions: one work question, and one ridiculous question.
Jay shares valuable tips and advice for email marketers looking to enhance their strategies for the holiday season. From doubling down on promotional emails to leveraging auto-responses for indirect networking opportunities, Jay reveals tactics and quick wins that can make a significant impact on your marketing efforts.
Main discussion points:
– For consumer marketing, send your offer emails twice in one day as you approach offer expiration dates. This can increase response rates by over 20%.
– For B2B, have salespeople send emails right around Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s. This will trigger a flood of auto-reply “out of office” messages that provide contact info for others to reach out to. Follow up with those contacts.
– Jay argues that Mean Girls and Die Hard are absolutely holiday movies, since they have central holiday themes and components.
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
Foreign. Okay, we are here for another short episode of do this.
Not that we still have our long episodes on Fridays, but here is where all week long we receive questions in and we answer one work question and we answer one ridiculous question. So we got a bunch of questions in this week. So I want to read the work question. Let's jump on that and answer it real quick.
So the work question came in from Lionel. Lionel is in Chicago and Lionel says we want to get really aggressive with our holiday season marketing this year.
You have any quick ideas that we can implement that are going to take us to the next level? Okay, good question. Let's do one idea for business and one idea for consumer. First, let's talk consumer.
If you're going to think that this is too much, you're going to think, oh no, Jay's lost it. And that's not the case. A lot of major marketers do this on the consumer side.
And what they do is as the holiday season gears up, you know, we get to mid November, they start sending out their offer related emails twice in the same day. Whoa. Yes, I said it. They send the offer email twice in one day. So send it out in the morning. Okay.
And then they'll send it out towards the end of the day. They'll change the subject line a little bit, but essentially it's the same email.
Now, believe it or not, when you send out your offer related email for your consumer email marketing efforts twice in the same day, as you're approaching that offer expiration versus just sending it once, we actually see over a 20% lift in overall response rate. That's not open rate or click through rate, that is response rate. So holiday time is when we are all accustomed to more marketing, more advertising.
Our inbox are getting filled and it may make you feel uncomfortable to consider doing it, but it works. It's a great test. So think about twice in one day. Whoa, what is he talking about? On the business side, I guarantee you've never thought about this.
Well, I don't guarantee it, but maybe you haven't. And this is secret sauce type stuff. A lot of B2B marketers turn off their brains when it comes to the holiday time, but they shouldn't.
And they should do this one thing, especially when you're sending out emails that look like they're coming from a salesperson, when that salesperson sends out an email to their contact database or their prospect database, believe it or not, send it right around Thanksgiving, send it right around Christmas time or New Year's. Why do you want to do that. It's not because you're going to get a great response rate. But here's what happened.
When that salesperson sends out their email to like their 5,000 contacts or whatever it is, what do they get back? As soon as it gets closer and closer to a big holiday, they get back a ton of what? Auto replies.
Auto replies that say, I'm sorry, I'm not in, I'm on vacation. Call Susie. And they have Susie's information. All these auto replies say the same thing. Call this person, call these people. What? That is gold. Okay?
If you have it set up that somebody's going to go through all those auto replies, you could even do it in a programmatic way.
But if somebody literally goes through all of those auto replies and grabs the people that it says, reach out to this person because I'm not available, and then you hit them up on LinkedIn and you make sure that you are now trying to be in contact with all these other people. Those people are gold to know those contacts.
So the auto replies that you get back are so valuable and marketers, B2B marketers aren't thinking about the gold that's in those auto replies. So think about that and then think about saying twice in one day.
Okay, before we get to the ridiculous question, I'm so excited to share that this podcast overall do this not that is now exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is awesome. Marigold is an email sending platform that I use for the emails that my companies send out.
And I have been using this platform for years and it is tremendous. They don't just do one industry specializing in. Right.
They have clients like Notre Dame University and title boxing and American Airlines, all the sorts of different industries. And it's not just about sending out email. They focus on loyalty marketing. They focus on relationship marketing. It is a great platform.
So Marigold and you could find them@meet marigold.com that is meat marigold.com so check them out. Great solution. All right, now let's get on to the ridiculous question. What is the ridiculous question? I have it right here, so I'm going to read it.
Okay. It is from Cheryl in San Diego. Oh, this is a big question. This is big. Is Mean Girls and Or Die Hard the movies, Are they holiday movies?
Wow, that's a big question. Is Mean Girls and Die Hard holiday movies? And you know what? I have an opinion. 1 billion percent. They are both holiday movies.
What is wrong with everybody?
Here's my rule, okay, about whether something's a holiday movie or not if it within the movie, they have a central component of the movie that is about the holiday. It's a holiday movie. What is wrong with everybody? Mean girls, okay? One of the the all time greatest movies, okay?
The end of the movie is when they do the dance and they're all in the holiday mode, right? Regina's sitting there and she's doing the holiday dance. Lindsay Lohan's doing the holiday dance. It is a holiday movie. And Die Hard is absolute.
The whole thing. He's flying out there, okay, To Nakatomi Plaza to a holiday party. Come on. It's a holiday movie. I don't even want to hear about it.
So anyway, send in your questions. Don't forget our long episodes on Fridays and give us a five star review because why not? Hey, cool. All right. Thanks a lot. You did it.
You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
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