INSTANT Engagement Boost by Using ‘Seasonal Jump’. It’s all about SUMMER and Q3! 😬 Annnnd my Birthday Plans!! Ask Us ANYTHING❓| Ep. 300

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 the do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. This is our short episode where all week long we get in questions, we get in work questions, we get in ridiculous questions.

We try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit a question, well, you would be very cool.

You go to jweddelson.com there's a button that says podcast, another one that says Ask us anything. And we absolutely love getting your questions. So let's do it. Let's jump into it. What do we got? We got a question from we're gonna do the work one.

First, we got a question from Emma from Gilroy, California. Oh, I know what that is. That is the garlic capital of the world.

I only know that because I recently went to a garlic festival that was near where I lived, and it was disgusting. And they talked about Gilroy. It was disgusting because first of all, I don't even like garlic that much.

Second of all, everybody there was disgusting. I was talking to this one dude who was eating garlic ice cream, which should not exist, and it was as if this guy brushed his teeth with aioli.

Like, I was like, get away from me. You're gross. And it was really hot out because I'm in Florida and everyone's sweating and they're sweating garlic. The whole thing was unacceptable.

So I will never be going back. I mean, they think it's like garlic cotton candy. What are we doing? Stop it. Anyway, what is your question, Emma?

Jay, my team just launched a spring cleaning marketing campaign, and it is not doing well. We had high hopes for this and just don't understand help. Well, Emma, here's the deal.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of, like, oh, it's now spring. Let's do marketing campaigns about spring, whether you're a business marketer or consumer marketer.

But believe it or not, that's not where our minds are. And there's a very easy tactic everybody should try that absolutely crushes it. And it's all about looking ahead.

So using seasonal language but as a jump ahead is what actually works. So when you're at the start of spring or in spring, you want to be talking about summer and it does so incredibly well.

So the seasonal jump, and that's what it's called, seasonal jump. And this from Klaviyo, Seasonal jump content gets a 34% more engagement than when you are marketing in season stuff. All right?

And from subject line.com if you mention the future season instead of the current season in your subject line, it boosts open rates by over 26%. So what you want to be thinking about right now is not talking about spring. You want to be talking about summer.

So you could have campaigns and subject lines and social posts that say things like, your summer starter pack is here and you do that now. Okay? You do that in April. Okay. Or your Q3 toolkit is ready. You're not talking about Q2. Forget about Q2. People are preparing for Q3.

Or you can even do things like only our VIP list gets early dibs on our summer drops. We don't care about what's going on right now. We care about what's going to be happening soon. We care about Q3, we care about summer.

And those are the tactics that works. And that's why your spring cleaning thing didn't really crush it.

Now there's other things you could do with future dates that work so well that I think marketers don't realize. So this one's kind of cool. Let me share this data. Emails mentioning future dates have a 22% higher average open rate than those that don't.

So we're not just talking about seasons. We're not just talking about mentioning summer when you're in spring or mentioning Q3 when you're in Q2. We're just talking about future dates.

So let me give you an exact random this is the most random stat, but this crushes it. This from subject line.com when you put the future month in your subject line two weeks prior to that next month, it increases open rates over 25%.

So what does that actually mean? So starting around April 15, for example, you would start mentioning May, or if it's May 15, you'll start mentioning June.

And you would do things like, you know, sneak peek what's coming this May and you do that mid April or this is coming in May, but you get early access now and you do that mid April. Right? People just get excited about what is coming up. They don't care about the moment that they're in. And we see it in all the data.

So doing this kind of look ahead type marketing, get people excited about what's coming up. That's why, you know, you see around the holiday season, it now starts like in August. We're just excited that it's going to get there.

It gets our mind excited. So if you haven't tested this kind of seasonal jump or future dates, I think it's a cool, easy test.

All right, let's jump into the ridiculous portion of this podcast. Since you didn't ask. What do we got for ridiculous? We got a question from Stephanie from Greenville, Michigan. Stephanie, what do you got?

Jay, my birthday is coming up, and I need some fun ideas to do with my friends. What do you got? Well, I love this question. All my team hooked it up because my team knows my birthday is this week. Who cares? I don't even care.

I'm not very fun, so I can't tell you what to do that's fun for your birthday. I'll tell you about what I will be doing for my birthday. First of all, the good news is none of my friends listen to this podcast.

Amazing, because I lie to all of my friends. Anybody says, oh, your birthday's coming up. What do you want to do? I say, oh, I'm doing stuff with my family, so I'm sorry, I can't do any.

Which is really not necessarily true. I just don't want to do anything with anybody, especially my friends.

So I lie to them and tell them I'm busy and, you know, I'll do something with my family. We'll do a good dinner or whatever. But my kids are busy. They're teenagers.

And there's some sort of Tortuga Festival that's coming up, and they're going to be at that. They're 17, 18. They can care less about going to boring dinners. And I don't blame them. They should be doing that.

So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to go to see the movie Black Bag, which I want to see with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. I said his name wrong. I'm very excited about that. I'm going to go to a dinner now where I'm going to go to dinner.

I am going to make sure that the restaurant does not sing Happy Birthday.

I'm going to go with my wife because it is so awkward every time they come to your table and they're like, all right, the waiters are going to sing you Happy Birthday. First of all, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. The second problem is I never know if I should sing if it's my Birthday. Do I sing to myself?

And then when it gets to the part of my name, do I say my own name or do I just say me? I can't take it. The whole thing stresses me out. And the thing I absolutely will not be doing on my birthday. What a rant.

The thing I will not be doing is, you know, I don't go. I don't. I never post on Facebook, but I go on Facebook on my birthday and say, oh, Jay, happy birthday. Happy birthday. Great. Who cares?

From people I haven't talked to in 400 years. The thing that I think is the most embarrassing thing that people do. And now everyone I'm gonna get so much hate for.

This comes like, well, I do that. Whatever. I don't care. I still think it's embarrassing.

So on your birthday, what people do is at the end of the day, those it's your birthday, you then go on Facebook and you go, you make a post, you go, I just want to thank everybody who wished me happy birthday today. It was so amazing to hear from everybody. I love you all. And people do that post. And to me, it's such a joke.

It's like, listen, you're not that popular. Nobody actually cares, okay? They're just kind of being nice or whatever. And you didn't get 400 messages. You got like 20 or 40 or whatever.

And it wasn't like the entire country stopped and wish you happy birthday. You don't need to make a post for thanking the universe because you don't have enough time to go and thank each person and message them directly.

Are you kidding me? Anyway, you'll never see me make a post like that because that is totally embarrassing.

Well, once again, we've covered a lot of very important information and I sound like I'm the biggest, like, most boring person Watch. I probably am. Who cares? I appreciate you being here. Here's two things. One, leave this thing a review if it's not the worst podcast.

Even if it is the worst podcast, leave it a review. It really does help get this thing out there more. And some odd reason we're number three in the country right now in market blows my mind.

But the other thing is, check out guru conference.com we just opened up reg for our giant free virtual email marketing event. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be wild. Guruconference.com Check it out. You're awesome. And happy birthday to me.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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