In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson tackles a series of work-related and ridiculous questions in a rapid-fire format. He provides insights on email marketing best practices and addresses various everyday life queries.

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Best Moments:

(01:41) Best time to send emails

(02:35) Relationship between email frequency and unsubscribes

(03:33) Importance of email open rates

(04:09) Including offers in every email

(04:44) LinkedIn company pages for small businesses

(05:34) On-demand content vs. live webinars

(07:05) Exclusive offer from Marigold email platform

(08:14) Series of rapid-fire everyday life questions

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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!

Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

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 the do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. All week long, we get in questions, we get in work questions, and we get in ridiculous questions.

And this is the episode where we try to tackle one one of each of those. And if you want to submit questions, you can go to jschwettleson.com and there's a button that says podcast, another one that says Ask us Anything.

And we love getting the questions, but we've done a bad job of keeping up and answering all these questions. So today we gathered up a bunch of the work questions and I'm going to go rapidly through them and try to answer them.

And then we're going to do that on the ridiculous one too to try to catch up and answer as many of these questions as they can. So I'm just going to rip through these questions here that we have on this list and hopefully it's useful.

By the way, this is the worst format for a podcast on Earth because there's no way you're going to be able to capture this information. It's going to be annoying. You're driving, you're walking, you're running like, well, that was not enjoyable to listen to. But, oh well, who cares?

There is no best time. Right. If you think that whatever time that you're sending out your email campaigns is the best time, I am telling you it's not true.

Number one, it's always changing. And number two, different people open up different emails at different times. So yeah, if Tuesday works for you, that's great. But try Sunday.

I don't care if you're a business marketer or consumer marketer, try Friday.

You know, there's this been this myth that's been perpetuated, especially for business marketers, that you don't want to send out your emails on Mondays or Fridays because the start and the end of the week, that was a thing like five years ago. Those days do really, really well, especially Fridays. So definitely don't only relegate yourself to one day and time of the week. That makes no sense.

All right, now, sending more emails mean more unsubscribes. Absolutely not. It is not about the frequency of the emails that you're sending.

It's not how many emails that you're sending that you're getting unsubscribes. You're getting unsubscribes because you're sending out irrelevant stuff, stuff that nobody wants. So you don't. You're.

If you send out less email, you're going to get less business, less sales, less opportunities. So don't think about sending less to get more business. It won't work. You want to send out more. It just has to be more relevant.

And by the way, about unsubscribes, this time of year, November and December are the highest unsubscribe rate period, whether you're a business or a consumer marketer, than any other time of year. Because this is when we're going through our own inboxes with we want to clear it out, have a fresh start for next year.

So don't get freaked out if your unsubscribe rates go up this time of year, these next two months, because that is the period that we're in. It's not because all of a sudden you became a bad marketer. All right, another one. Do open rates even matter anymore? Of course they do.

Anybody that tells you an email open rate is useless is clueless. Okay, when you do ascend on an email campaign and you do an A B test, half the group gets one subject line, half the group gets the other.

Maybe one subject line you make it into a question, and the other one you don't. And the one that's a question gets a 35% open rate. But the one that doesn't have a question, it's a 20% open rate.

The open rate is the metric that's telling you that the subject line you wrote as a question did better. Right. Is a directional metric. When people say open rates are irrelevant, they are clueless. Should every email include an offer? Absolutely not.

If you're a business marketer and don't ask them to register for anything, to download anything, tell them that there's no form to fill out. This is ungated. Here you go, okay, and just provide value to people. Send people an article that you thought was interesting.

Stop always trying to get something sold or bought or downloaded by filling out a form, okay? Are LinkedIn company pages useless for small businesses? 100% the opposite.

Your small business on LinkedIn, you can have a page there and you could build up thousands of followers. Stop treating your LinkedIn company page like a brochure where you put out the most boring posts imaginable, okay?

And you treat it like an extension of your website. Treat it like something where people want to engage with.

Put hero stats on there, put some memes on there, put other content that goes viral on there. Your small business company page or your big business company page can have many thousands of followers.

So when you do have something important to share, okay, you have an avenue to do that. So, no, I think small business pages are so important, they're just being done wrong.

All right, the last one before we get on to the ridiculous questions is on demand content always the best thing to do. No, you cannot make all of your content have total on demand. Always on demand. We have. We've ruined marketing.

We've turned marketing to like Netflix, okay? Where everything is always available all the time. It is ridiculous. And here's the thing, here's the stat that nobody knows about.

And this is from the last six months when you get people to show up live for, let's say, your webinar. It's a game changer. Here's the stat.

People who show up live to webinars convert to pipeline 400% more than those that watch it on demand because they're invested. They're. They care. They want to see what's going on, right?

So here's the secret sauce webinar show up rates to get people to show up are 35% higher when exclusive content is available for live only. What do I mean by that?

When you promote your webinar and after somebody registers, you really want to drill this home, you say only live attendees get the Q4 trends report. Exclusive Q and A session won't be available on demand. Only for live attendees, right? Exclusive resource packs only for live attendees.

Live only discounts are going to be offered. Make being live, being there valuable and get that open, get that show up rate to be higher. And that's how you win.

All right, before we get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast, the ridiculous questions, this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold Now. Marigold is my email sending platform. I talk about all the time because it's amazing.

And I asked them, I said, listen, a lot of people change their platform this time of year because they don't like their email sending platform. I need something from you all. I, I need to hook up the listeners. And they gave us these exclusive offers.

There's these offers@jschweddelson.com save where you can get up to 50% off, okay. Using the Marigold sending platform. And they have brands like Sail through and Campaign Monitor and Cheetah Digital and Emma.

They have some of the best email brands on the planet, and they're giving up to 50% off for our listeners. If you want to take advantage of this, all you got to do is go to jschwettleson.com/save. I have been using Marigold's platforms for years.

If you're not happy with yours, you got to check it out@jschwedelson.com save it's going to run out. That. That is going to expire.

All right, let's get into the ridiculous questions that, you know, we get all these that pour in, and so we gathered up ones that we could do quick yes and nos on that are basically about basic life. Because I love these questions that come in. All right, so here we go. And I've not read these, so I have no idea what's about to come my way.

All right, Jay, what is the actual difference between baking soda and baking powder? I have absolutely no idea. I actually don't know when to use either one, and I have no idea what the difference is. I'm sure I'll get hate for that.

I don't know. Good luck. All right, J, your wife is a dermatologist, so you should know. What does SPF actually measure on sunscreen? Oh, no, I have no idea.

I know it needs to be a high number in my house because my wife's a dermatologist. We use, like, over 50. I don't know what it means. Maybe sun protection, food. I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. All right, what's next? What is the.

Jay, what is the expiration date on spices in your pantry? Oh, is that. I, I, I have no idea. I mean, is that a thing? All right. I don't know. Jay, is brown sugar healthier than white sugar?

I mean, I want to say yes. Isn't that, like, a thing? That brown sugar is better? I feel like that's healthier. I'm gonna go with a brown sugar. I don't know.

Jay, what is the difference between a latte, a cappuccino, And a macchiato. Well, they're spelled differently. I know that. A macchiato, people always get caramel on it. I know that. I have no idea. A cappuccino is really small.

I have no idea. All right, these questions are ridiculous. Jay, when should you actually go to bed to wake up refreshed without an alarm? Who?

I don't know, but I would tell you I don't use an alarm. And. And because I can't sleep anymore, I wake up every day at, like, 5:15, 5:30. Wake without an alarm. I can't sleep.

I don't know what's going on with me. I should probably stop drinking Celsius anyway. What else? Jay, is there a right way to load the dishwasher? Oh, my God. This is a hot topic in my house.

I get drilled on this so many times because I just throw everything in there, and I'm chaos when I do it. And everyone's like, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. Well, so I don't know. All right, only two more.

Jay, what is the difference between iced coffee and cold brew? I have no idea, but I feel like cold brew is very intense. I always get scared to try cold brew. So I'm like, maybe it's going to be too much caffeine.

But actually, I think I've said I don't know to every single one of these questions. All right, last question. Jay, how long should leftovers stay in the fridge before they are a problem? You know what's funny about that? I don't know.

And my problem is my wife. Like, oh, you know, try that. See if it's still good, whatever it is, whatever leftover it is. Because we like leftovers in our house. And I'll try it.

I'm like, oh, it tastes great. Whatever. And then she'll come over and be like, oh, my God, there's, like, mold on that. That's disgusting. I can't believe you ate that.

I'm like, well, it tasted fine. And she goes, how do you not know? How do you not know that that's disgusting? I'm like, I don't know. I don't have that. Whatever. It's in my brain.

I just eat it and it tastes fine. And here I am. So, all right, I don't know. Once again, we've talked about a lot. This episode was really, really ridiculous.

So please submit the questions@jweddleson.com leave this thing review. I don't know if it's good, bad, whatever.

Check out subjectline.com if you've never checked that out, that's our free website where you check your subject lines. We're doing a big update there. And yeah, hopefully you check out the episodes later in the week. Later. You did it. You made it to the end.

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