In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson calls out five marketing tactics that many marketers still swear by—but are no longer effective. He dives into better alternatives to help you maximize results across social media, email, and lead generation.
=================================================================
Best Moments:
(01:16) Instagram carousel posts are losing engagement
(01:56) Why requiring corporate email addresses on forms is outdated
(03:52) First name personalization in email subject lines is ineffective
(04:46) Cold email outreach: a failing strategy
(05:44) Posting multiple times a day on social media can be effective
(06:46) Mention of Marigold’s 2025 Consumer Trends Index
(07:50) Personal anecdote about honesty in personal appearance changes
=================================================================
Check out our FREE + VIRTUAL EVENTS! ->
=================================================================
MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!
Looking to master consumer engagement in 2025? The 2025 Consumer Trends Index from Marigold reveals how AI, economic pressures, and personalized marketing are shaping consumer expectations. Uncover data-driven insights to foster stronger brand relationships, strike the right balance between personalization and privacy, and turn casual customers into loyal advocates.
Download the 2025 Consumer Trends Index today at meetmarigold.com/guru and stay one step ahead of evolving consumer demands!
Transcript
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. We'll 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 do this, not that, presented by Marigold. And I want to talk about five marketing tactics that everybody thinks still work, but they don't. They stink.
And what happens is markers like, oh, I've been doing this for a while, it's working. I'm going to do it forever.
So I want to share some business and consumer tactics for social media, for email, for all sorts of stuff that just don't work anymore and we have to stop doing them. And that's the thing about marketing. Stuff is always changing. And if you're just relying on what worked in the past, you are going to fail.
All right, so let's jump into it. First off, on Instagram, here's what doesn't work anymore. These carousel tips.
If you're putting together these multi page carousels on Instagram and they have tips, maybe they're health tips.
If you're a consumer brand or you're a business to business brand and there's some other kind of tips and you think people are just going to swipe through them and that's going to get a lot of circulation. On Instagram, it doesn't. The algorithm doesn't care about this form of carousel tips anymore.
We've actually seen a 40% drop in engagement in the last six months. Instagram wants reels, they want videos, they don't want your boring tips that you could swipe through. So no more of that.
Now the other thing is for business marketers, I know what you're doing on your forms. I know you are trying to get people to only give their corporate email address. Stop it. Stop the nonsense with the corporate email address.
What do I mean?
You go to a form, they have some kind of, you know, piece of content that you're supposed to download and when you go to download it, you go to put in your Gmail address and they go, no, no, no, no. You have to put in your work email address or you can't have it. That is garbage for a couple reasons.
First of all, we analyzed 500 websites, okay, over the last 12 months. And what we found was that over the last 12 months, 20% less.
There's 20% less being required in terms of people requiring business domains that you're allowed to actually put in any email address that you want. Why is this dropping so much? A few reasons. Number one, stop telling people what to do. The world that we're in is that people want to be in control.
We want to be in control. We want to give you the address we want to give you. Okay, if they want to give you a throwaway address, so be it.
But the other thing is there's more value in the address that the person decides to give you if they give you their consumer address on a business website. Number one, you can use that for social retargeting.
The match rate is so much better using a consumer based address on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is all based on personal email address.
So you can't even use that corporate email address effectively if you want to retarget people on LinkedIn. So getting the consumer just has more value. But also people change their address a lot.
Their business address, they don't change their personal address that much.
And the other interesting thing that we saw is that C level executives actually like using their personal address more than their corporate address when they download content and information. So if you're still holding on to yeah, but we must have it because of our form and our CMS and our CRM and all this other nonsense garbage.
Let people give you the address that they want to give you. Okay, what other stuff is not working anymore? First name personalization in the email subject line.
a, whatever, you're living in:That said, for the first time ever, putting first name in the subject line as a form of personalization actually depresses open rates. It actually drops open rates.
It's no longer a slight positive that maybe you get a little bit more engagement by using that first name personalization, it's actually bringing it down. And that's a tactic that's a relic from the past. That is not where it's at.
Look, when you get an email and you see your first name in the subject line, are you impressed? Are you like, wow, they're crushing with their personalization. They really know what they're doing. No, everybody does it.
It feels like garbage now, so be done with that, okay? Another tactic is basically cold email in general. If you are using one of these cold outreach email tools, okay?
And you're uploading these databases or you're buying some lists or some garbage like that. And this is your go to market strategy. This is how you're going to build your business. That is trash. You're ruining your brand.
You're ruining your reputation. The leads that you get from that are complete garbage, okay? Cold email as your total strategy is a fail. And it's a relic from the past.
And the only thing that's even worse than that in the cold email category, and I cannot believe people still do the re colon as a fake subject line. The re colon. And then they say blah, blah, blah, and they get you to open it.
Tricking people to open up an email is not going to be a way to grow your business. Stop it. Okay, okay.
The other thing is really not something that you shouldn't do, but it's actually something that you should do that I think people are confused about. Posting on social media is really important, right?
It's important for your brand, it's important for your personal brand, because this is how you're going to grow your network, you're going to grow awareness of your products, your services, whatever.
And there's this belief that you can't post twice on an account, a corporate or a personal account, on any of the platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever, that you can't post twice in one day. That's not true. We've been doing a ton of testing around this and we found is you absolutely can post twice in a day.
You can even post three times in a day as long as the content is really strong. The only reason you don't do well when you post multiple times a day is if your content is not strong.
If you have good content, you absolutely should be posting twice a day. The secret sauce thing is three hours. You need at least three hours in between posts.
If you wait three hours in between posts and you have good content, you will see it perform really, really well on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, on wherever. So don't think you can't post twice a day, because that is something that's just not true.
All right, before we get into, since you didn't ask which is the most ridiculous portion of any podcast that exists on earth, I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now, Marigold is my email signing platform. They are very awesome and you should be using them.
t. And just came out is their:That's a lot of people about what they feel about loyalty, about how they, you know, want to engage with brands. They had, like, a zillion question, and they're putting this content out there for free, ungated, for you to access to it.
.com CTI to get access to the:All right, let's get into. Since you didn't ask. Wow. I'm about to ruin a relationship with some people I know.
So we're out to dinner, me and my wife, the other night, with this couple. And thankfully, at dinner, I was talking. They came up, do you listen to podcasts? They both said, no, they don't listen to podcasts.
So I'm pretty sure they're never going to hear this. But that's not the important thing. So we're out to dinner with this couple. I haven't seen them in a few months, okay?
And we see them, and we show up to the restaurant, and all of a sudden, I see the husband. The guy, he, like, lost a lot of weight, okay? He looked great. And the wife, the girl, she had new teeth. She had new teeth, okay?
So we sit down at dinner, and I haven't seen them in months. And I say to them, I go, you guys look great. What have you been up to? Why do you guys look so great? Because I wanted them to tell me what. That.
What was going on, okay? And. And my wife gives me a stare like, you can't ask that. I'm like, why not? What's going on? It's clear there's something going on here. Whatever.
And so they just said, back to me. The husband says, back to me. You know, we've just been really active. That's it. That's all. This is driving me bonkers. Okay, a couple things.
First off, I think everyone needs to be very upfront. Listen, I'll be up front. I get Botox. All right? Look, I do. My wife happens to be a dermatologist, but I'm not. I don't care.
I've got wrinkles on my forehead. She gets rid of wrinkles on my forehead. Who Cares, by the way, I probably should be on Ozempic. I need to lose some weight. I'm okay with that.
And if I was on it, I would tell you this dude definitely is on one of those things. Ozempic, Wagovi. I don't even know. Whatever. Because I've known him forever.
And there's this dude's been like, me kind of like, you got to lose a few pounds. What is wrong with being upfront and saying, yeah, I'm doing this, Like, I don't understand. And the woman, the new teeth, I mean, that's ridiculous.
If you get new teeth, they're great. Okay? Why can't I be like, listen, I got my teeth done. What do you think? Because it's ridiculous. Yeah, you've been more active.
You're playing pickleball, and that's why your teeth look better. What the hell is going on? It doesn't make any sense. Why can't we all just tell each other what we're doing? What is the big deal?
What am I talking about? I have no idea. Oh, I get so upset because everyone just. Just come on. What is go. Just. Just stop it. Just stop. I think it's a problem. I can.
All the celebrities lie, and then everybody else thinks that they have to lie also, because all the celebrities lie. Everyone just needs to tell each other what they're doing. Enough. All right. Speaking about enough. Enough of this podcast. I appreciate you being here.
You're awesome. Two things. Number one, if you leave this thing a review, I'll be very happy with you because you'll be my best friend. So please.
That would be awesome. Number two, you want to register for a Ventastic. That is our large free virtual conference. We have limited seats. We are going to run out.
Andy Cohen from Bravo speaking there. It's going to be bananas. It is free. It was virtual. It's the world's largest event about all things events.
Webinars, consumer events, business events, in person events, everything. Eventastic.com we're going to run out of virtual seats. Hope you make it there. And you are awesome. 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 marketer.
And hook us up with a five star review. If this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.
Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stevenson Stewart and me, Guruevents. Com. Check it out.