In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson answers questions from listeners in the "Ask Us Anything" segment. He addresses both work-related and ridiculous questions, providing insights on marketing tactics and sharing personal anecdotes.

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Best Moments:

(01:34) Marketing tactics that no longer perform well

(02:24) First name personalization in email subject lines becoming ineffective

(03:19) The negative impact of stock photos on engagement

(04:45) The downsides of buying cold email lists

(06:10) Introduction of Marigold, the podcast sponsor

(07:04) Jay's personal experience with holiday cards

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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. And this is our short episode where all week long we get in questions, we get in work questions, we get in totally ridiculous questions.

We try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit one, you just go to jelson.com there's a button that says podcast, another one that says Ask us anything.

And we love getting your questions. So let's jump into it. Let's do the work question first. We got a question in from Danny from Chicago. Oh, it's got to be so cold there.

I'm in South Florida. Is so not cold here. Do people do snowshoeing in Chicago? I have no idea. By the way, snowshoeing is horrendous.

If this is your go to hobby, you need to change that up. I've done snowshoeing a few times. It is boring, it is slow moving, it is bizarre. So very anti snowshoeing. I don't know why I'm talking about that.

All right, Danny, what is your question? Jay, we're seeing some of our marketing tactics that have historically worked really well but now don't generate the same performance.

How often do you sunset a tactic?

This is a great question that I don't think marketers consider enough that you're doing something that works, right, some sort of a tactic, and then that's it. You put it on autopilot, you do it forever. And that's just not the way it is. Things are always changing. Whether you think that or not.

Things are not going to always work forever. And we do see certain tactics.

We just did a kind of a review of a bunch of different random things and we found there are certain tactics now that marketers have in their kind of always do category that are kind of garbage.

So let me give you a few of those that as you head into the new year, you may want to avoid doing, or at least you want to look at your metrics to see if they're tanking for you. One of those very simple ones is first name personalization in the subject line of your emails.

So for years okay, it used to be if you did J comma, whatever in the subject line of your emails and you personalize somebody's first name, it would increase the percentage of people opening up your emails. But like all great subject line tactics, everybody copies each other.

And now first name personalization in subject lines for business and consumer marketers is actually an and negative. It actually pulls down by about 5% according to World Data Research, the percentage of people opening up your emails.

So if you think personalization, the subject line is first name, that ain't it. And I would look at some other tactics.

Another one that is a little bit surprising I think to people, but it shouldn't be is the, is the usage of stock photos forever. In our emails we would buy stock photos from, you know, Shutterstock or Adobe or Getty Images or wherever.

In our social posts we would buy stock photos of the generic pictures of people in an office or a city view or something. And we'd use it everywhere, we'd certainly use it all over our website.

But stock photos now according to a lot of new data, are actually having a massive negative impact on overall engagement. And I feel that, you know, when I see a genuine photo as opposed to a stock photo, I am much more likely to engage in.

And recently Edis Journal came out with some interesting data related to Facebook. For example, Facebook posts, according to them using natural photos had an average engagement rate of 3 times higher than those using stock photos.

And Referral Rock came out with data saying that stock photos can actually decrease social engagement by up to 40%. And in email newsletters, stock photos used instead of natural photos lead to a click through rate that is lower by over 30%.

So in general if your site, if your social posts, if your body of your email is using stock photos, you may not be knowing it, but that's actually what's holding back a lot of your performance. So that's something to consider. Another one is buying of cold lists.

This is very different than doing dedicated email send or even renting an email list that's opt in but the actual just straight up buying of a cold list, I know everybody's had that on there don't do for a long time, but I think a lot of especially B2B marketers will go in and buy some small lists and do some small things.

But in the last year that's really taken a nose dive in terms of the biggest issue is yeah, you get bad email deliverability if you buy a cold list and you just send to it and, and, and you just don't get good performance, and it could hurt your, you know, email infrastructures.

But the biggest issue with cold lists is that it's giving a false perception that you have coverage for the categories and the accounts that you're going after, right?

So if you buy a list and all of a sudden like, well, Great, we have 10 contacts at this company now, and this company, we have four contacts, and it's all from the data you bought that's really giving you a false sense of security about having a good account coverage, because those are very likely the wrong sets of email addresses. And you're not aggressively now going out to get the right contact information.

So we've really seen a downward trend on the buying of cold lists overall. So what else? All right, let's.

Before we get to the ridiculous question, which is a totally ridiculous question, I wanted to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is a roll up of some of the best platforms on the planet. Cheetah Digital, Emma Campaign Monitor, Live Clicker Sail Through.

That's all part of Marigold. And you can check them out@meet marigold.com if you need an email sending platform or a loyalty management platform.

And they just came out with a new piece of content, which is the loyalty program optimization guide. And you can get this thing@jschweddelson.com Marigold and you're probably tuning this out. You're like, oh, great, he's reading a sponsor ad.

No, this is important because loyalty marketing is exploding. And if you don't know how to do it or your program stinks, you want to download this thing, it is free.

Jschwettleson.com Marigold strongly endorse checking that out. All right, let's get to the ridiculous question. We got a question in from Jen from Los Angeles. What's up, Jen?

Jay, do you send out a holiday card each year? You know, we don't, and I'll tell you why. So we did a family photo shoot not too long ago, maybe a few years back, and it was a disaster.

They took us to this weird location, this very strange photographer person. And of course, I'm. I'm juvenile, and I couldn't stop laughing.

They kept making us do these different poses, and I just thought it was completely out of control. And I was just laughing the whole time. Everybody wanted to kill me. I finally stopped laughing, but the poses were so horrendous.

And then we got the photos back, and my entire family's like, there's no chance we could Use those. We look stupid. So we never mailed them out. And the thing in general about holiday cards, hey, you want to send a holly card? That's great.

Whatever you're into, I don't care. But what happens in my home, which is kind of weird, is that we get holiday cards in the mail, okay?

And, you know, pictures of people's families, their dogs, their kids, whatever. But we don't get holiday cards in the mail from, like, our core group of friends.

We get holiday cards in the mail from, like, our secondary or thirdary group of friends or whatever. And then my wife will take the holiday cards we do get.

And during, like, you know, December, maybe into January, she'll put them out prominently somewhere, like in our kitchen area where we could all see them. And the weird part is, these aren't people I really care about. They're like, barely people in my life.

And yet every day I walk by the pictures of them and it's like, to me, like, what are we doing? Like, I don't really care about these. I mean, I care.

I hope they're doing well, but it's like, I don't have pictures of people that are really in my life and yet they're there for like, weeks. And it's. To me, it's the weirdest thing in the world. So I think we need to come up with something better.

Like, listen, if the picture card that we get is not somebody that we really are into, they don't get primary positioning. I think there needs to be like, primary and secondary positioning of holiday cards.

I don't know what I'm talking about in general, but definitely on this topic. Anyway, so we've talked about a lot. I don't know what we said and please. Hey, you want to do something nice for me? Holiday review.

That would be great. Leave this thing review, tell everybody it stinks or it's great. That would be amazing. And go to jayshwaddelson.com, put in some questions. Hit me up.

Let's do something. Let's partner this year. So that's jschwettleson.com. check you later.

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

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