In this engaging episode of Do This, Not That, Jay Schwedelson tackles a wide array of questions in the "Ask Us Anything" segment, blending marketing insights with practical advice on topics ranging from budget optimization to personal queries like dating advice.

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Key Discussion Points:

(01:12) Strategies for trimming marketing budgets effectively while still targeting the right buyers

(01:37) Tips on targeting businesses based on employee size for better campaign efficiency

(02:50) Importance of cleaning email databases by removing "never opened" segments to improve deliverability and engagement

(03:41) The value of profiling the top 20% of your database to identify and target ideal customers

(04:11) Insights on how different types of email addresses can be indicative of consumer credit scores and targeting

(04:42) Promotion of Marigold’s loyalty program optimization guide, enhancing customer retention strategies

(05:49) A light-hearted turn into dating advice, demonstrating the broad range of listener questions Jay addresses

(06:35) Jay’s personal and humorous take on a dating advice question from a listener

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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 here for Ask Us Anything from the do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. 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 we still have our tips episode at the end of the week.

And if you want to submit a question, just go to jelson.com and there's a button that says podcast another one that says ask us anything. And we love getting questions. So let's jump into it. Let's do our work question first. We got a question from Bobby from San Diego.

Bobby, what do you got? All right, Jay, we are trying to trim marketing budgets and focus in on most likely buyers. Any tips to eliminate a waste in our efforts?

All right, well, I'll give you some business to business and consumer ones. First off, one that I think that most business marketers don't realize when they are doing any kind of targeting relates to employee size.

A lot of times when business marketers are doing any kind of a campaign, they'll be like, all right, I'm targeting companies that are 0 to 100 employees. Let's say you're going after the small business market. That's a really big fail if you're doing that. Why?

Because in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, there's 33 million businesses in the country.

And the issue is that over 10 million of those companies are sole proprietorships that have zero employees, meaning they were set up for estate planning trusts or for real estate purchases or for whatever. But these 10 million businesses, for the most part, they, they have nothing to do with actually running real businesses.

They have no employees whatsoever. And that's a big chunk of the businesses that you might be targeting.

So when you're targeting the small business category, you don't want to target 0 to 100 or 1 to 100 in terms of employee size. You always want to target 2. The number 2 to 100 to eliminate those companies that are really not set up to be companies.

Another big waster in marketing, whether you're a business marketer or consumer marketer, is what I call your Never opened segment of your database. So on average, whether you're a business or consumer marketer, your email database, roughly 10% of your database, has never opened an email from you.

And you could check that very easily ever. Now, a lot of people don't want to get rid of people in their database if they haven't opened in a while. And that's a whole other episode to have.

But, but people that have never opened, they're literally boat anchors. They're crushing your deliverability. And the issue is they're not real addresses. They signed up with your list with a throwaway address.

So looking at your database and looking at people who have never opened, I would eliminate those addresses completely because there's no good from them. And it's going to make up roughly 10% of your database.

And the other things I would think about in terms of targeting is if you're going to profile your database, figure out who your customers are to use that for your targeting. Don't profile your whole database.

I would profile your top 20% of your database in terms of revenue, spend or customers or whatever it may be, because that's really your ideal customer. It's not your whole database. It's the top 20%.

I think it's another mistake that marketers made and it takes you down, you know, a rabbit hole of false information for the future. And then the last one is think about everything you know.

If you were promoting an expensive, let's say consumer product, right, your database or who you're marketing to. Email addresses are not all the same.

For example, did you know, according to Credit Karma, that people with a Gmail address have a higher average credit score than people with a Yahoo email address? So little things like that can factor into your targeting tool.

It's not always who's the best person to target, but you want to eliminate segments of people that you're targeting, so that way you're only targeting the best possible prospects and customers.

All right, before we get into the most ridiculous of all ridiculous questions, I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. That is my email sending platform. They are awesome. I send out billions of emails.

Consumer business and it doesn't matter if you're small, medium or large, they're amazing. They're a roll up of Sail through and my Emma and Campaign Monitor and Cheetah Digital, they have a new loyalty guide.

And they have this new Guide, the loyalty program optimization guide, which digs into the fact that 70% of people are willing to pay more for brands that they love. And people love your brand. Right. You just need a loyalty program to download this thing. You go to jschwedelson.com Marigold it is free. It is awesome.

It is new. The loyalty program optimization guide. J schweddelson.com Marigold all right, let's get into the ridiculous question.

You know, something that's very strange is that we get in all sorts of questions and I've never tackled one category of questions is because I have no, I shouldn't be talking about, but here we go. We get in a lot of questions about dating advice. I don't know why anybody wants my advice about dating, but I'll give it to you.

We got a question in today from Kristen from Nashville. Okay. And first of all, my credentials. I've been married for over 20 years, so I'm way out of the game. I know nothing. And my kids think I'm clueless.

I don't know how it works anymore. Like, you know, oh, they opened my snap. They didn't open my snap. I don't understand what they're talking about. But you want my dating advice.

All right, here we go. Kristen, what is your question? Jay, I went on one date with this guy. It was fine, not amazing.

And now he wants me to go to his office holiday party with him. Should I go? I am so not an authority on this. We get so many of these in, by the way, it makes me laugh. All right.

Should you go to the holiday party if you only went on one date with this guy? The answer is no. And I'll tell you why the answer is no. Because he's using you, in my opinion. Right.

He doesn't want to show up to the party alone and look like a loser. Right. If he shows up with you, then, oh, look, he's dating somebody. He has a life outside of work.

He's not the epic loser that everybody thinks he is at work. So he's literally using you. Right? So it's not, in my opinion, a good second date. It's also not fun. Right? You're going to go there.

This is this person. This is that person. You're going to be like, who cares? You're not going to really talk to him. Right.

And it's one thing if your first date was incredible. If you had the greatest first date of all time, that's a different story. Okay?

Because he just wants to then spend time with you, but if the date was just whatever. And now he wants to go to his holiday party, I don't know. I think that's weird. Too much too soon. That's my advice.

And if you want to submit questions, go to jwelson.com clearly we'll talk about anything here. Hey, do me a favor. Leave this podcast a review. It helps, really helps with the algorithm. I would appreciate it. You are awesome.

And check out certifiedguru.com, the world's largest free email certification program we're launching this week. It's only for people on the waitlist. Go to certifiedguru.com you're awesome. See you later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice.

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