Ep. 149 – My Offer is NOT WORKING. What should I do? 📺 FRIENDS or THE OFFICE? | Ask Us ANYTHING

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 Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for Ask Us Anything from Do this, not that. 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 want to submit a question, it's really easy. You just go to jschwettleson.com and there's a button that says podcast and you click on that and there's another button that says ask us anything.

And please submit whatever you got because we get some wild stuff. All right, let's go do the work question. Before the ridiculous one, we got a question from Dave from Austin, Minnesota.

Now, what I know about Austin, Minnesota, which every good marketer should know, is that that is where spam was born. Yes. Come on. You know that Hormel Foods is based in Austin, Minnesota, and they made spam. Have you ever tried spam? I, of course, have tried spam.

It's not that bad. It gets a bad rap. It really does.

I mean, listen, I'm not going out there and eating a spam burger, but if you've never tried spam, I think you need to. I think as a marketer, every marketer must try spam at some point. I mean, it looks gross, for sure. All right, Dave, what is your question?

Does sponsoring an email newsletter work? We have an offer that is struggling, and we want to try those out. Okay, well, let's back up a second.

Before we get into email newsletters and whether or not you should spend money and sponsor them in general, what will not happen is that if you have an offer that is not doing well, business or consumer, and you're like, you know what? Maybe we should go and spend some money on a social media ad, on an email sponsorship, on whatever, to try to get it to work. Here's the secret.

If your offer's not doing well, going to your own databases, marketing to your own social media following it is not going to do well somewhere else. Right?

Because the data that you have, the audience that you have, these are the people that know you the best, care about your product or service the most, and if they're not responding to it, you're not going to get a better performance somewhere else. There's no sort of magic third party thing that you're going to do that's going to work. So don't even think like that.

Now, if you have an offer that's doing well and you're like, you know what? This is really doing well to your own existing database or to your own social media following, right?

If you have that offer, you're like, we want more, we want more customers, we want more awareness, we want more leads and more pipeline. Maybe we should sponsor a newsletter. And that sponsoring newsletter is great, but there's some things that you need to understand.

First off, when you sponsor a newsletter, there's different formats. Now that you could have your newsletter advertisement, you could have a banner ad in a newsletter, right?

Or you could have a big block of copy that you put in a newsletter.

But there's one style of newsletter advertisement that does exponentially better than any other email newsletter ad, and that is an endorsement style ad in a newsletter will generate a 200% higher average conversion rate than a generic banner ad or block of text ad.

Endorsement style newsletter ad is when whoever the newsletter is coming from is, is saying something like, I use this product or this is an amazing event that you need to check out, or I love this solution, you got to try it too. And it is an endorsement from whoever that newsletter is coming from.

And the reason that it does so well is that many times we sign up for newsletters that we feel very connected to.

So when that newsletter, the organization that's putting it out, or the individual that's putting out says, listen, this thing is good, it does really well. So that's a 200% lift in average conversion rate when you have an endorsement style ad running a newsletter.

The other thing is you need to subscribe to whatever newsletter that you're thinking about sponsoring. You can't just be like, oh, this looks good, I'll give it a try.

Don't you want to, you want to register for it, you want to receive it, you want to read it, you want to think, see if it's on brand for what you're doing. And the other secret sauce thing is look at the sponsors in those newsletters. Look to see if the sponsors repeat, right?

If you see the same sponsor in the newsletter repeat, especially if it's over a long period of time, like over two months, if you see the same sponsor, that's a very good thing. What that tells you is that that sponsor is getting a good performance from, from advertising in there.

And if you don't see repeat sponsors, it's telling you that newsletter may not do well.

And then the last thing to think about for sponsoring a newsletter is you only want to take the top position sometimes in email newsletters there's different ad spots. You could be on the top, you could be in the middle, you could be on the bottom.

If you take the top position, that has a click through rate that's 50% higher than any other position in the newsletter. So those are some of the things I would think about if you're thinking about sponsoring an email newsletter.

All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, I want to let you know that this podcast sponsored by Marigold. What's up, Marigold? Listen, you send email, you don't like the platform you're using, it's annoying. It doesn't have all features you want.

Your deliverability stinks. You want to just give up. Guess what? Not all platforms are terrible and Marigold is awesome. I use Marigold to send my emails.

I am telling you there is a better way. You got to check them out@meet marigold.com and if you want introduction, I will introduce you to the most amazing people there.

You could DM me on LinkedIn. Say, Jay, I give up. Introduce me to somebody@marigold. DM me on LinkedIn. I will hook you up, I promise.

Check them out@meetmaragold.com all right, let's get into the ridiculous question. We got a question in from Rachel from Lake Placid, New York. I have gone on a family trip to Lake Placid, New York.

This is a great place to go whether it's a family trip or not. So they had the Olympics back in Lake Placid. I don't know, in the 80s or whatever it was. Right. And everything in Lake Placid is like stuck in time.

You go there and it's like going to the movie Hot Tub Time Machine. It is all still about the Olympics that happened in the 80s.

And everything going on is there is the 80s, but they still have some cool restaurants and stuff. But you can do everything that happened there. Like I did the toboggan. I think I did a toboggan while I was there.

And then I did all the other Olympic like luge and whatever you want to do. It's all there and you could do it. So Lake Placid, like a commercial for Lake Placid. Love it there. Anyway, what's your question?

Rachel wants to know, Jay, friends or the office, which one are you into? I mean it's not even close. Okay, all day long. It's the Office. All day long. Funny show, possibly ever.

And by the way, you may not know this, but there's a spin off coming out about the Office. A new show, same idea, same ridiculousness. It's actually called the Paper. They're. They're starting to work on this right now. It's called the Paper.

It's exactly like the Office, but it's brand new. And the dude who's going to be in the main role, like the Michael Scott role, is going to be Dom. Dom Nall Gleason. That guy was in Harry Potter.

He was Bill Weasley in Harry Potter and he was also in Star Wars. He was General Armitage Hux in Star Wars. So this is gonna be great. Called the Paper. And you know what else? Maybe you didn't. Maybe you know this.

I don't know, but I love the Office, so I know this. Did you know that Rainn Wilson, who played the amazing Dwight Schrute, he auditioned to play the Michael Scott role? That would have been weird.

The other thing that you may not know, which actually I think would have been great, is that Seth Rogen, the comedian, that dude's funny. Seth Rogen auditioned for the role of Dwight. Dwight Schrute. Come on. That would have been incredible if he got it.

But obviously Rainn Wilson is iconic in that role. Love the Office. Friends is fine. I don't care about the Friends. Whatever. It was fine. I've watched them all. But the Office all day long.

Anyway, listen, I hope you check out our longer episode, the end of the week, our tips episode. Leave this thing a review. Come on, why not? Why won't you leave this review? Help me out. Do me a solid and check out Guru Conference.

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