In this episode of “Ask Us Anything”, host Jay Schwedelson answers a work question about whether to remove non-engaged email addresses from email lists, and a “ridiculous question” about his thoughts on waiters not writing down orders at restaurants.
Key Discussion Points:
– Removing non-engaged email addresses after 2+ years of inactivity to improve metrics and deliverability
– Still using non-engaged emails for targeting on platforms like LinkedIn and Meta
– An anecdote about a frustrating restaurant experience with a waiter not writing down the order
– Jay’s strong belief that it’s not impressive for waiters to memorize orders, it often leads to mistakes, and he will continue requesting written orders
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. Welcome back to Ask Us Anything.
This is the episode where all week long we get in questions and we tackle on this episode one work question and one ridiculous question to short episode. And then at the end of the week we release our 10 minute episodes that are tactics and quick wins. Hope you check that out.
And so let's jump right into it. What is first the work question. This week we got a question in from Alex in Seattle. Love Seattle. I was in an earthquake once. I was.
It was a 7.1 earthquake. It was wild in Seattle. Like really? Yeah, happened. Anyway, hopefully that's not happening right now. Alex, what is up? Here's the question.
Should I completely remove email addresses on my file that have been totally dead for over two years now? The answer is yes. But there's stuff you should be doing at that database.
Let's say you have people on your file, on your email file that literally have not opened, they have not clicked, they've done nothing. Now you're talking about over two years. These people are really not engaging with you.
And let's assume for a second that you have tried, you have tried re engagement programs or what they call wake the dead programs, where you're doing everything you can to get these people to wake back up, but they are just, that's it. They're not interested. It's over. For whatever reason.
Now the reason that you should stop sending to these people, literally stop sending to them, put them off to the side and stop saying to them is a fewfold. Number one, they're destroying your metrics. I mean, that's a no brainer, right?
If you have a portion of your database of people that are never going to open, that are never going to click, and you've established that, then all you're doing is depressing whatever your real engagement metrics are.
You're never going to get to an idea of what is your real opens and clicks and all this stuff and conversions because you just have a portion of your database that's dead and it's doing you no good. But putting aside the vanity part where you make yourself feel good about your metrics is absolutely destroying your deliverability.
Okay, receiving email networks, the Gmails, the different, you know, Outlook infrastructures, all this stuff, they don't like having to receive messages and people not interact with them. They don't like poor engagement.
And your ability to stay in the inbox goes lower and lower and lower when you're sending to people that are just not engaging with you. So they are literally boat anchors on your performance they're the reason you might be going the junk folder because you continually send to them.
So yeah, I would stop sending to these people. I know that's hard to do. I know that, you know, we all get a little bit, you know, we're like, wow, my database is this large.
And when you take people off essentially and your database gets smaller, that doesn't feel good. You like having that big number. But to tell you the truth, that's ridiculous and that's hurting your performance.
Now, what should you do with this data? It's not garbage. The data is not garbage.
There's something super valuable that you should be doing with this boat anchor data and that is using it for targeting on various platforms. I'll give you a great example.
I would say the number one marketing tactic on LinkedIn, if you're going to run a marketing campaign on LinkedIn, the most cost effective, if you're going to spend some dollars there.
And the highest performing type of marketing program you could run on LinkedIn is when you are retargeting to existing contacts of yours and also building lookalike audiences.
So what you can do, for example, you could take your entire database, but certainly you could take your boat anchor database, the database of people that you know are not responding.
And you can upload that file as a targeting file into LinkedIn and then you can run your campaign, say, I only want to run my campaign targeting these people. And then you could also add in a lookalike. I not only want these people, I want to look alike audience.
So it's an audience of people that are, you know, similar company sizes, similar industries, similar job titles, all that stuff. And then on the consumer side, you absolutely could do the same thing on any of the meta platforms. It's a no brainer.
So if you're not leveraging your boat anchor data for targeting purposes, either directly targeting them via retargeting or using them for a lookalike audience, you're really leaving an incredible resource on the table.
So, yeah, they're kind of garbage to you in terms of emailing to them, but they're not garbage to you at all in terms of leveraging who they are to drive your campaign performance. All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, I got to share something. This is really cool.
So this podcast, I know you're going to tune this out. Don't tune this out. Seriously, don't. This podcast is exclusively presented by a company called Marigold. Now, why do I not want to tune this out?
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And I'm telling you, this platform is awesome. Now, why do I tell you not to tune this out? Exclusively for listeners of this podcast, Emma has given us a 50% off offer. It's a limited time offer.
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If you want to get signed up and get all the information on this offer, all you have to do is, is go to jschwetelson.com that's my full name. J A Y shwetleson.com/marigold. So you go to jschwettleson.com Marigold and you will see the form right there.
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But check that out@jschweddelson.com Marigold all right, let's get on to the ridiculous question. It is from Beth in Freehold, New Jersey. Hello, Beth. Now, Freehold. I've been to Freehold. There is an incredible mall in Freehold. I like a good mall.
There's not enough good malls. They have a great mall. Okay, so what's the question? The question is, how do you feel about waiters not writing down your order at a restaurant?
Oh, my goodness. This topic is really near and dear to my heart. I cannot tell you how upset I get.
I want to tell you the most ridiculous story that just happened to be related. This is out of control. And, Beth, I want to thank you for asking this. You go to a restaurant, right?
And they come to your table and the waiter's there. And the waiter's like, hey, what do you want? And he doesn't have a pad or anything like that. And the waiter memorizes it.
And then they come back and they bring your food. Now this bothers me. Like, you have no idea. So the other day, okay, a couple weeks ago, whatever it was, we were at a restaurant.
It was me and my wife and my and kids. And the waiter did this. And then the food came out and it was wrong.
And I was so annoyed because I'm like, if the dude would have just written it down, it Wouldn't have been wrong. So then I said, that's it. I'm never putting up with this again. So this is what just, this just happened was so bad.
So we were just out to dinner with another couple and we're at the table, this Italian restaurant, and the waiter comes by, this guy comes by and nice place, whatever. And he starts doing the thing. He's got no pad, no pen, no nothing.
And everyone starts ordering and he starts memorizing and I stop him and I say to him, because I can't take it, I'm not impressed when you can memorize the thing that I'm paying for for you to give to me, okay? So I stop him. I go, excuse me, sir, I go, would you mind writing down our order?
Because I get a little concerned that it's not going to come out right. I tried so hard to say it as nice as humanly possible.
And the dude looked at me like it might as well have said, excuse me, sir, you smell like garbage and I don't like you. I mean, whatever it is, I could have said rude. See, that's how he interpreted it. So he went and got a pad and pencil, whatever. He wrote it down.
Of course the food came out right, which was sadly, a win. It's like, really, we're at a restaurant, what's going on here? But for the rest of the meal, I got the side eye from the waiter the whole time.
And he was so cold and so not into us. And everybody at the table is like, dude, what'd you do that for? You, like, ruined the night. Because the waiter was like, annoyed with you.
And they're like, why didn't you just shut up and let him do his thing? I'm like, because I'm not, It is not impressive to me that someone memorizes the order of the food of the thing that I'm paying for.
It's, it's, it's not impressive. This is not a game. I'm trying to eat. So I'm going to continue down this path. I don't care if I ruin meals.
Because we need, collectively, as humanity, we need to put an end to, to the waiter memorization game. It is not impressive. It is unnecessary. Oh, that was my rant. So let's talk. Let's wrap this thing up. What do we got going on?
The end of the week, we still have our 10 minute episode. Please check that out. That's going to be really interesting.
Also, if you want our latest 100% free best and worst days to send out email calendar DM me on LinkedIn. Ask me for the calendar, I'll send it to you right back.
Also, we're about to open up registration for Guru Conference, the world's largest free virtual email marketing event. If you go to guruconference.com right now, you can get on the early list. So once we do open up, you'll get all that information.
Hopefully you subscribe and follow the show. And you're awesome and always make sure your waiter writes things down. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.
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