In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson discusses why email database growth is a crucial metric that marketers should prioritize beyond cost per acquisition. During the "Ask Us Anything" segment, he delves into the significance of tracking new email subscribers, understanding database decay rates, and how daily monitoring can enhance marketing strategies. Jay also shares a humorous anecdote about his company's experience with Secret Santa and why he decided to discontinue the tradition.

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Best Moments:

(01:03) Work question from Brian about important metrics beyond cost per acquisition

(01:37) Jay's emphasis on email database growth as a crucial metric

(02:14) Discussion on average email database decay rates

(03:03) Importance of tracking new email addresses from various sources

(04:21) Jay's practice of reviewing new email addresses daily

(06:10) Sponsorship mention for Marigold

(06:59) Ridiculous question about Secret Santa at Jay's company

(07:18) Jay's experience with Secret Santa and why he discontinued it

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MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!

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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. 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 here 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 questions, we get in work questions, we get in super ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each. If you want to submit one, you go to jweddelson.com? click podcast, click Ask Us anything. And we love questions. So let's do the work question first.

We got a question in from Brian from Jericho, New York. No way. That is where I grew up in Long Island. What's up? I moved when I was 15 down to South Florida. So I went to high school in New York.

High school in South Florida. Jericho rocks. Brian, what do you have? Jay, we are all over the place with our metrics.

What do you consider to be the most important metric to track beyond cost per acquisition? Well, I have a hot take on that, which I don't think is gonna be a popular answer. And to me, it's email database growth. Okay.

It's just overlooked in my opinion. So this is not the size of your email database? No, this is. Is your email list growing or is it shrinking?

And this is something that my organization, we look at on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Because if your database isn't growing and shrinking, that's really, really bad.

Now, on an average basis, annually, according to Zero Bounce, the average email list, both business and consumer brands, it decays by about 22.71%, which means on an annual basis, you lose about 20% of the people in your database. Why? People switch email addresses. People change jobs, a hundred other things. And it's not a bad thing that it decays. People think it's bad. It's not.

You want to get off the dead weight. You want to get off the inactive people, Right? You want to get off people that are unsubscribing.

You want to get rid of all the bounces because that's really hurting your deliverability. But what people aren't focused on is how many net new addresses are you getting every day, every week and where are they coming from?

Are you tracking that specifically? Right. And you want to just not only think about, okay, we got 300 new addresses that joined our database this week. That's not even close to enough.

What you want to be doing is looking at all the different ways people come onto your database, right? Maybe they come on your database, you have a field on your homepage.

Maybe come on your database when you're doing paid programs and they're filling out forms. Maybe you're doing some sort of lead gen magnet and they're filling out a form. You have fields, you have forms all over the place.

And what you want to be looking at is how many net new people are coming in from each of those different sources every day, every week, every month.

And then you want to analyze, is there anything that we can do to do a better job on each one of those forms, on each one of those orifices, if you will, of where data can come into your organization? How can we get a little bit more? Because you need to be growing your database. That is essential. I'm a little bit over the top. This is true.

On a average basis, okay, on an average basis, we get in about a thousand net new addresses every single day. Okay, that's a lot, right?

We get about, from all the different things that we're doing from our events, from our promotions, from our websites, about a thousand new addresses every single day. And I actually look at that file, I try to look at it every single day. I look at the actual addresses that are coming in the net new people.

Why do I do that? I do that because I'm a horrible micromanager. But I also do it because what I'm looking for is outliers, right?

Maybe I'll see somebody that I know that switched jobs and I know there's better ways to see all that, but I like to just look at it and eyeball it and, oh, that person switched from this job to this job and they're signing back up for our stuff.

Maybe I'll see 10 people from X, Y and Z company sign up for a webinar, which to me is an outlier, saying, oh, maybe we should be in contact with that company. Maybe I'll see 50 bot email addresses that came in via our homepage.

And I'm like, oh, are all the stuff that we have set up to kind of stop that from happening to mitigate those bots? Something's not working right.

If you're not looking at, on an ongoing weekly basis, all the different, first look at the numbers in aggregate, how many people are joining your list from this form. From this field, from this effort, all of it. And then you're also not eyeballing the actual contacts as they're coming in.

I don't think that you're doing your job as a marketer because you need to be growing your list. If it's not growing, it's shrinking. So to me, the email database growth is the most important metric for a marketer.

And it's not because I talk about email a lot. Right. It's because it's far more valuable than a social media follower growth.

It just is where you own this asset, you can communicate to your database whenever you want.

There is no other channel on earth besides for email that whenever you want to, you can communicate whatever you want to say to your entire population. But you can't do it on search. You can't do it on social. Direct mail is very expensive. You can't do that on tv. Email is the only thing.

So that's why your email database growth is essential and should be priority for you always. All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, which is super ridiculous, I want to let you know that this podcast is sponsored by Marigold.

Listen, you have an esp. You use a company to send out your email. You're using the wrong one.

Marigold's good for business, for consumer, for small, medium and large companies. Their roll up of Sail through my Emma campaign monitor, Live clicker, Cheetah Digital. They're awesome. Okay? I've used them for years.

I sent out billions of emails. All giant brands use them. All right, and we have a special offer. If you go to jschwettleson.com save there's an up to 50% off offer there.

Get a demo, check it out, find out if there's something better than what you're using. That's@jschweddelson.com save. All right, let's get to the ridiculous question. We had a question in from Jamie from Boston. Love Boston.

What's your question, Jamie? Jay, do you do Secret Santa at your company? Oh, my goodness. So we used to do Secret Santa at my company. I know. I'm such a grinch.

Okay, so we used to do. We have about 100 or so people in the company and we used to do Secret Santa and I had to squash it. I had to get rid of it.

So first off, why it's so ridiculous? So we had this like $20 limit, which is fine, right? And. And of always annoyed me.

There'll be people that would, like, go over the top, spend more than $20 that was always annoying, but that was not the problem. The problem was we had, like, people that would get upset. So I'll never forget. So one person got another person, like, emergency underpants.

Like, it's like this thing that you could buy that's like a joke. And they're like, I don't know, giant underpants or whatever. And the person that got it was super offended.

They thought it was inappropriate, which I don't really understand. But it became like an HR thing. And I'm like, what the. What is going on?

And then we had somebody else that got upset because one person got somebody else a mini desk vacuum that you could, like, vacuum your keyboard and stuff.

And the person took it as if, like, one person was saying that the other person was, like, not clean, that didn't keep a clean area, when really, I mean, we're just, like, in a work environment. Get something funny, whatever. And then the one that was like, that was the end of it, where I just was like, I'm done. I'm done.

So somebody got somebody else a trophy. They had a trophy made or they bought it. I don't know where they got it. And the trophy was the world's best procrastinator trophy.

And the person that received it was so pissed. They were like, that's so rude. That's not nice. And it, like, turned into a whole thing. I go, that's it. No more.

I'm not going to have drama because people are buying each other emergency underpants. I cannot handle it. Everyone just say happy Holidays and move on. Send each other a picture. I don't care. I'm not going to oversee this nonsense.

So, no, we no longer have Secret Santa. I know that's terrible, but I'm over it. Who cares? Listen, I hope everybody is going to have an amazing holiday. You all are awesome.

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It is going to be the most amazing email marketing certificate specialist certificate program. We worked really hard on this. Go to certifiedguru.com to come and email with certified email marketing specialist. All right. Appreciate you all.

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

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