In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson dives into listener questions in the "Ask Us Anything" segment. He shares unique email marketing personalization tactics, highlights the value of milestone campaigns, and sprinkles in fun commentary on the latest season of The Bachelor.

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Best Moments:

(01:37) Uncommon but effective personalization tactics in email marketing

(02:39) Statistics on the effectiveness of milestone emails

(03:14) Examples of milestone usage achievement campaigns

(04:52) Discussion on savings milestone campaigns

(08:01) Question about The Bachelor season 29

(09:04) Anecdote about a contestant's unusual presentation on The Bachelor

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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 Ask Us Anything from the do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. This is our super short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in totally ridiculous questions.

We try to tackle one of each and we love getting questions. You want to submit one, you just go to jweddelson.com there's a button that says podcast and another one that says ask us anything.

Put anything you got in there because we love it all. All right, let's do the work question first. We got a question from Denny from San Antonio, Texas. I like San Antonio. I like the Riverwalk.

I like going there. Not that you asked, but I really think whoever runs PR for San Antonio, we got to stop pushing the Alamo. I've been to the Alamo.

It's like this one building. I know there's a lot of history there. It's really boring. I'm just saying it. So PR people in San Antonio focus on other stuff. Alamo, boring.

Sorry, Danny. Super rude. What is your question, Jay?

All I read is that personalization does so well in marketing, especially email marketing, and we do all the regular personalization stuff. What are some personalization tests we can run that are less common but still work well? This is a fantastic question.

Probably the most underutilized personalization tactic for both business and and consumer marketers are milestone email sends. Now, when I say milestone email send, you probably instantly like, oh, Jay's going to talk about sending out birthday emails. No, I'm not.

That's not exciting. Who cares that you survived another year on the earth? Great. Send out a birthday email. That's not what we're talking about.

Or Jay's going to talk about renewal emails where, oh, a customer signed up with us again. We're going to send them an email. No, those aren't the milestone emails that you should be testing and doing and all of that.

But before I give you some specific examples of ones that crush it that you're probably not doing, let me first tell you why milestone related emails do so well. Here are some stats.

So, first off, from Litmus, they say that milestone emails can achieve Open rates that are two and a half times higher than typical promotional emails. Or how about Experian on the business to business sides that click through, rates rise over 25% for milestone emails.

Experian also shared, and this is wild, that for all milestone email campaigns, they see a 300% higher conversion rate than standard emails. That is wild. All right, so let's get into some of the milestone campaigns that you probably aren't thinking of that do really, really well.

Here's a guide to help you scale even further. Or you've joined 10 live coaching sessions with coach Jenny. Your engagement is inspiring. Ready for the next one?

Or you've made 200 delicious dinners, but you haven't tried this trending recipe. You, you take their usage, whatever they're doing, okay? And you turn it back at them and you get them fired up. You get them excited about it, right?

You say to them you've tracked $50,000 in spending. How does it feel to be so on top of things?

Whatever the thing is that your product or service does, you take a look at, you create some sort of category, buckets of achievement, a milestone, achievements, right? And then you turn around, you tell your customers, wow, you've done it. You've used the thing.

And it gets them excited because it highlights their progress and how it shows how they're really leveraging your thing. I love this one, right? Your team has generated a thousand reports with our product. Ready. Take the insights to the next level.

I love this one because it's a team thing. It shows how the entire organization is using your product or service.

So whether it's business or consumer, this idea of milestone usage is a great, great milestone one. Another one, this one's pretty no brainer, but I don't think people do it enough, which is savings milestone campaigns, right?

You want to celebrate when your solution, your product, your service helps a customer achieve a significant financial milestone, a time milestone, an efficiency milestone. They save something. We all like saving stuff, right? And you could do, you don't have to wait till end of year. You could do things like this, right?

Here's a new trick to save even more. You take whatever the way it that they are saving their time, right?

Their money, the way they're able to be efficient, and you turn it back on them and you tell them they've achieved it. And here's how they go even further.

This idea of milestones gets people excited, gets them engaged, makes them feel good about what they're investing with your product or service. So on the business or consumer side, milestone camp milestone campaigns are no brainer.

And there's a million other ones you could do a product adoption milestone, you know, recognize when a customer fully adopts or integrates your product into their workflow or a customer onboarding completion. They actually went through the entire onboarding process. They completed it. And you recognize that, right?

There's so many different ones that you can do.

But if you're not using milestones beyond the ridiculous birthday milestone to really drive that engagement, I think you're leaving some of the best types of personalization on the table. All right, before we get to the ridiculous question, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold.

Now, I've talked about Marigold a lot. Why? Because I send out emails. I send out billions of emails, business and consumer. And the platform I've used for years is Marigold.

Now, they're a roll up of the best platforms on earth. Sail Through Campaign Monitor, Cheetah Digital Live, Clicker.

Emma, if you don't love your email sending platform, if you don't have a loyalty program, if you don't have a great overall tool that can do it all, you want to check out Marigold?

Listen, you can go to meet marigold.com you can find out everything there or you could DM me on LinkedIn and I will connect you to the people I work with. And they are incredible. But check them out@meetmargle.com I cannot recommend them enough.

All right, let's get to the ridiculous question, which they're always ridiculous. We got a question in from Cali from Seattle, Washington. Seattle's all right. But I mean, you got to stop pretending that the rain is acceptable.

I've been there multiple times. Every time there it is raining. It's no joke and I can't do it. All right, so it's not like, yeah, it's raining. I can't pretend I'm sorry.

Enough with that. Anyway, sorry, Cali. What is your question? What's wrong with me today? I'm being rude about these cities. I'm so rude. Sorry, Cali. What's up, Jay?

The Bachelor season has started. Are you watching? Well, for all those of you who are new to this podcast, I watch a lot of very bad tv.

And, well, I watch great TV that some people think are bad. And the Bachelor, of course, is among them. And yes, of course I'm watching the. The Bachelor season 29 has started this week.

Grant Ellis, he's a 31 year old dude. He's like a day trader from New Jersey. I'm way too deep. I know way too much information. Of course I'm watching.

But I have to tell you, on the first episode, I'm not ruining it for anybody, but this is the episode where all the like 25 women introduce themselves to the Bachelor and he decides, okay, are any of these people my person? Right? But this one woman did the worst thing I've ever seen on night one of the Bachelor.

And I've watched every season this woman, I think her name was Parissa, something like that. Anyway, she was trying to get Grant to. To like her, and he's. She's like, hey, I want to show you something.

And they went in this area and they sat on this couch and she had a. A slide projector set up and she ran a PowerPoint presentation that she put together. Right?

This already sounds horrible, but this is even close to what the horrible part was. The PowerPoint presentation. They just met. This is the first time they met. Okay. It was.

She went and used an AI tool to generate images that looked like her and this dude Grant in the future of what their life would be like together.

The first few images, like them at a park, whatever, on a date, but then they had images of her being pregnant with his kid, and then she had images of their kids. And. And it was so creepy. And it was so like, oh, my God, this woman is a stalker weirdo. I don't know what the word is. It was so bad. And then Grant.

Grant was so nervous, he just started, like laughing very nervously. And then the only thing he said to her, literally the only thing he said to her, he goes, you really did that. And it was amazing.

And I mean, do not ever do that. Don't make an AI generated image of yourself being pregn pregnant the day you meet the dude that you're interested in.

That will freak them out massively. Now you should be watching the Bachelor. I don't know what you're doing. This is going to be a great, great season.

But beyond that, we just now opened up the free registration. It's only going to be open for one week for certified guru.com this is our free email certification program where you can become a certified guru.

It's only open for one week and if you want to check it out, it's@certifiedguru.com it's 100% free. This is my company certification program. Check it out and watch the Bachelor 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 marketers. 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 GuruVents. Com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart and me. Guruvents. Com. Check it out.