In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson shares insights from tests conducted during the recent Guru Conference, a large-scale virtual event focused on email marketing. He discusses strategies that succeeded, those that didn't, and how these findings can be applied to enhance overall marketing efforts.

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Best Moments:

(01:12) Experiment with "earned on demand" content access

(04:39) Testing email reminder frequency for event attendance

(06:40) Working with micro-influencers for event promotion

(09:07) Behind-the-scenes look at Guru Conference activities

(10:31) Creative brainstorming process for event ideas

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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 do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. And today we're talking about some tests that we ran. Some work, some didn't work.

So as many of you know, we just put on a conference called Guru Conference. It was a really large scale virtual conference all about email marketing.

And within that conference leading up to that conference, we ran a lot of tests.

I want to share some of the tests that work, some of the tests that didn't work, and also how this ties into some of your overall marketing because maybe it'll give you some ideas that you can try or pitfalls to avoid. So the first thing that I think was super interesting was how we handled On Demand and how that impacted people engaging with our content.

So in the world these days, everyone just makes everything always available. Like we've turned content into Netflix that, oh, you have a webinar, great. It'll be available for you whenever you want to watch it.

It's on demand always. And what do we do? Nobody shows up anymore. Attendance rates and show up rates for webinars and events is way down.

And so we tried to figure out what are things that we could do to get people to show up. So this is our third year running Guru Conference and in year one we allowed for total On Demand like everybody else has for all their events.

And our show up rate was 52% that year three years ago when we had On Demand available as soon as it ended. And we thought that that show up rate was terrible. So we took a step back in year two and we said, okay, what can we do in year two?

Where in year two we had about 20,000 people register that we can get people to show up. So we said, you know what, screw it, let's have no On Demand whatsoever.

And we promoted the fact there was going to be no On Demand and it helped, right? So in year two we had a show up rate of 61%. That was a big jump from 52%.

But along with that we got hundreds of emails from very angry people saying it's just not right. You need to have On Demand. You know, we have a life, we have work, we have things to do. We can't just dedicate all this time to your event.

And I get that. So we did something this year which I think is super interesting that we haven't really seen anywhere.

And so we had 24,000 people register for Guru Conference this year virtual event. And we created something called Earned On Demand.

And we promoted the fact that if you show up for 60 minutes anytime over the two days of the event, you will then get the on demand link. Well, as it turns out, that really worked. We had a 72% show up rate, which for a free event is incredibly high.

And we got a ton of emails of people saying, oh I, I want to make sure I got there for at least 60 minutes so I can get the on demand link. And then they end up staying for even longer. And so we love that.

And in general, okay, what we have found, putting aside our event, there's some really interesting data that we've seen with all of our agency clients. So for our agent clients, we, we promote hundreds and hundreds of webinars all year long.

And we're seeing a new thing that when you promote a webinar, for example, or any event, but when you promote a webinar and you say the on demand, it's only going to be available for 30 days following that webinar as compared to it just being available ongoing in your resource area on your website.

After doing a ton of tests, what we found is that when you make it available for only 30 days and you're telling people over and over again it's only available for those 30 days, it drives a 340% higher average watch rate over those first 30 days, which really matters because whatever you're presenting is usually pretty timely. So it's first 30 days is really when you want that engagement.

So just by creating this kind of FOMO and building this urgency around those first 30 days can really have an impact on all of your marketing. So what were some other tests that we ran that might be interesting to everybody? So we also tested email on the day of.

I know you guys got a ton of email from us on that day of for the event. But we, there were two groups, not everybody. We didn't send everybody the same stuff. We were testing a lot of stuff.

Then we had another population of people that we sent and we said, okay, we had two reminder emails, one that went off at 8am and one that went off at 10am so one group got two emails, one group got one email. The group that got two email reminders, their show up rate was 31% higher than the group that only had one reminder email.

And this really matters because if you're a consumer marketer or a business marketer, you want to think about your day of email promotion. So if you're a consumer marketer, here's the data we have from our agency.

Okay, when you have a consumer sale that ends on a particular day and time, all right, doing two day of sends for that offer, promoting that offer versus just doing one day of send.

So on these consumer offers, when you do two day of sends, as it leads to the end of that sale, it leads to a 39% higher overall conversion rate than just doing one day of send.

And on the business side, okay, when you do two sends versus one send after people have registered for your webinar, very similar to our conference, when you do two day of reminders leading into that, you have a 25% higher overall show up rate than one time send. Now, what's happening out there? People like, yeah, but that annoys people. People are going to unsubscribe, people might complain, who cares?

Those people were never going to buy your product. They were never going to attend your webinar in the first place. If one extra email sets them off, they're not your people.

And increasing things by 20 and 30 and 40% is bananas. All right, so this other test that we ran that I'm going to double down on this year is we worked with a lot of micro influencers.

We had never done this before. We brought on a number of different micro influencers to go out on social media.

And to say that they were excited about Guru conference and in every, every promo they did, these micro influencers, they would say that, you know, they were a partner of ours and whatnot. And it drove a ton of registrations and from really the right people, right, really good quality people that were registering for the event.

What we found, which is really interesting, if you're going to work with micro influencer influencers, and I strongly recommend you do, is one of our most cost effective marketing channels that we did, we thought that the larger, the following that the person had maybe on LinkedIn or Instagram or wherever, that that would yield the best conversion rate, the best registration rate, all of that, that wasn't the case. When you're working With a micro influencer, you really want to not look at how big their audience is, but how engaged their audience is.

You want to look at all their posts. Are they getting a lot of comments and re shares and likes and a lot of it. Right. And really enthusiastic comments.

Because what we found is we were working with influencers that had anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 connections and followers and whatnot. It was the ones with closer to 50,000 with super engaged audiences that really drove the most engagement. So I'm a big fan now of micro influencers.

I think it's something everybody should be thinking about for a consumer B2B. But don't get caught up in the big vanity metric. Look at that engagement.

All right, before we get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast, which is, since you didn't ask, I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. Their roll up of Campaign Monitor and Cheetah Digital and Emma and Sail through and Live Clicker.

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So coming out of Guru conference, we tried some crazy stuff, right?

So if you were there, you may have seen that we had Joey Chestnut, the world's number one eater, at the conference, and we did a contest where we ate spam live against him. And it was wild. And I have to tell you, behind the scenes, Joey Chestnut was the nicest human being.

And originally we were going to do a hot dog eating contest because that's what he's known for. And then one night I'm home and I wake up in the middle of the night and my wife goes, what's wrong? What's wrong?

And I go, I just had the greatest idea. She goes, what? I go, joey Chestnut should eat spam. And she's like, what the hell is actually wrong? With you. I go, no, this is great.

It was like three in the morning. She goes, you're an idiot. Go back to sleep. But the next day, we reach out to Joey's team and we're like, what do you think?

And Joey Chestnut was like an instant yes. He's like, this is a great idea. And we did it. That was wild.

Other ideas we weren't able to pull off this year, but I think I want to do it next year, is we were going to do a virtual 5k for charity where we're going to have this thing where everyone could sign up. And there was going to be a day in a time we were all going to run and walk wherever we were and raise money for charity.

And maybe we're like, 80s gear, because that was our theme. We had this whole plan. We ran out of time. So I want to do that for next year because I think that would be super, super cool.

The other idea that we had, we had so many ridicul. So we have this meeting internally and with a whole group of our team.

And the waiting meeting works is anybody can veto an idea that somebody comes up with. We just need one veto. And the media is called, does this idea suck? And we all throw out the craziest ideas.

And if any one person says that sucks, then we don't do it. It's a fun meeting. It's actually ridiculous. And so one of the ideas that just stuck with me because I think it was.

It was sort of my idea, but two of us had the same idea at the same time. It was, we should play dead or alive and bring up all these 80s people onto the screen, right?

And then everybody in the chat and we'd say, is this person, this celebrity, dead or alive? And everyone in the chat would say, either dead or alive. And it cracked me up. I was like, this is a great idea.

But we got, like, multiple people saying, that sucks. That's a horrible idea. You cannot do that. So we never ended up playing Dead, Dead or Alive, which, by the way, we started putting together a list.

Initially, there was a lot more people dead than alive. It was very, very Sad. But the 80s was a very long time ago anyway, so. Yeah. So Guru Conference was wild and we have more craziness coming.

I know this episode is a little bit different, but just wanted to share with you some behind the scenes on the tests that we ran. And we'll get back to the regular stuff next week and check out. What should you check out? I don't know.

Go to jschwettleson.com Put some feedback in there on the podcast, leave this thing review, you're awesome and go play Dead and Alive at home because it's a fun game. No, it's not. I don't know what's going on. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.

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