Ask Us ANYTHING!! 20% INCREASE With Just One Word😳 | Ep. 508

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast. This is our short episode where we answer one word question and one ridiculous question. If you want to submit one, just go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast. Another one says, ask us anything. And that's how we do this wild episode. So let's do the work question first. We got a question in from Benny from San Francisco.

0:40Love San Francisco. What do I love about San Francisco? Not the hills. I like, why do I think about clam chowder? Is that a San Francisco thing? Did I make that up? I don't know. Anyway, Benny, what do you got? Jay, we just announced all these great new features of our product and thought the reaction would be huge. But when we surveyed our database for why they did not care, they said it was complicated to understand. What are we getting wrong? Well, that's a good one. And in general, I'll tell you that nobody wants complicated anything. And there's something that we need to learn from as marketers.

1:18And I have some very specific tactic that I think is going to radically change the performance of your marketing. But before I get to that tactic, how did we get to this simplicity is crushing it in all things? Think about the idea of no code, the no code movement. What happened when Claude came out and all these other AI tools came out and then all these other things came out where you didn't need to know how to code to make an app, to make a website, to do whatever. You didn't need to be a developer or a programmer. And this idea of no code is like, what does it mean to you when you hear something is no code?

1:54It means, oh, this is easy. You know, it removed the fear, the effort, the intimidation. It removed the cognitive load. And that is the secret sauce. If we can take anything from what's going on with the world of AI, we need to take this idea of bringing the no code mentality and the lowering of cognitive load into our marketing. Cognitive load is basically the amount of mental effort your brain needs to understand, decide, or do anything. And when something is difficult, you're like, I don't want to do it. But when something's easy and it has a low cognitive load, you're like, maybe I can actually do this.

2:37Okay, so cognitive load was lowered. When we heard no code, it lowered our cognitive load for things. But now, how do we bring that into marketing? And there's one word, one magic word that works for business-to-business marketing, consumer, nonprofit, and the word is without. Let me give you some stats and I'm gonna tell you exactly how to test this out for yourself. So first on the business-to-business side, subject lines, using without. And this is all of my world data research group from thousands and thousands of campaigns and tests that we're doing all the time. If you put without in your subject line, we're seeing a 19 % higher open rate.

3:18Posts on social like LinkedIn using the word without phrasing drove a 31 % higher engagement rate. On the consumer side, consumer email campaigns framed without in their offer saw a 22 % higher conversion rate. Webinar titles saw a 26 % higher registration rate if the title included without. So what does that all mean? How do you do that? So let's first give some examples on the business-to-business side. If your offer, let's go ahead-to-head. Which one would you rather respond to? Improves onboarding speed, that's the offer, or improves onboarding without rebuilding workflows? Or how about better customer retention or better retention without discounting?

4:03When you hear without, it removes that thing, right? It removes the thing that you're worried about having to include. Or it could be a social media hook. Instead of just better SaaS growth, it's better SaaS growth without growth hacks. Okay, and this also works for your blog titles and on consumer offers. What would you respond faster to? Better sleep or better sleep without melatonin? More energy or more energy without more caffeine? You can bring this into anything. If you're on the nonprofit size, better donor retention or better donor retention without more emails. If you've never tested without in your blog titles, your podcast titles, your offer titles, your email subject lines, your social media posts, your headlines, without instantly lowers that cognitive load.

4:56And we see it from the whole no code thing in AI, the more that we can make things simple, the more that we are going to engage with it, the more it removes that thing that we're nervous about. You know, in general, we need to, and back to the original question, your audience is more beginner than you think. Okay. People always are overestimating your audience sophistication. The truth be told is the people that are, think that they're really smart. They think that they're experts. They're not signing up for stuff. They're not signing up for the webinar. They're not downloading that tip sheet on how to lose weight.

5:34They're not downloading that new guide. They think they know it already. They're know-it-alls. You need to cater to the beginner level because that is who is going to respond and who's going to go to pipeline because you're helping them feel a little bit smarter. All right, before we get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast, and there's ridiculous question as always. I want to let you know this podcast is sponsored by CallRail. Now listen, you're about to ignore this portion. You're like, oh, I'm going to fast forward this. This is boring. It's an ad. But listen, I use CallRail and what they're doing is it's not about phone calls.

6:08They connect everything, every call, every business text, every chat, every form that gets filled out on all my websites, all of our stuff. And then it uses AI to analyze all the leads that we're getting. And I will tell you, if you've never tested this out, there's a free offer, a free trial. You can go to callrail.com slash do this. It is a free trial of the coolest stuff to get all of your attribution going. Make it super simple, right? Lower that cognitive load. Check out callrail at callrail.com slash do this. It is worth your time. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question. We have a question from Liz from Chicago.

6:52I love deep dish pizza. I love it so much. Why can't I have it right now? Anyway, Liz, what's your question? Jay, my neighbors all do these block party things every few weeks and want to be best friends. I really hate this stuff. Is it okay to avoid them? Oh, this is a tough one for me because I'm in a new era. I'm like, I'm like Taylor Swift, my heiress tour. I'm in a new era. So I've been living in the same house for 17 years in my, in my neighborhood, the whole thing. And I would say for the, for the last 16 and a half years, I did everything in my power to avoid everybody in my neighborhood, not talk to anybody so much so that I have four neighbors, one on either side of me and two across the street.

7:38And to be honest, I don't know the The neighbors across the street, I have no idea what their names are. Not their first name, not their last name. I just don't know who they are, which is very, very bad. The neighbors on either side of me, I do know their names. And the reason I say I'm in my era store is that I really, for the first 16 and a half years that I lived there, I did everything I could to avoid them like the plague. I didn't want to have any communication with them. I didn't want to talk to anybody. And then this past year, maybe because I turned 50, I said, you know, this is weird.

8:11I think I need to connect with more human beings. I need to talk to more people. I really don't like doing that, but I decided I'm going to. So now I do interact with my neighbors. I do interact with people in my neighborhood. although this woman came by and she was walking her dog and the dog went to the toilet right on the outside of my house and she didn't pick it up and then I walked outside and she noticed I walked outside and she went back and picked it up and I gave her the stare and I was like you know do I really want to be friends with these people that are literally crapping on my house um so I don't know I even know what I'm saying but back to your original question should you avoid these parties.

8:55The right answer is no, you should go and you should socialize because these are your neighbors. The real answer is if they're horrible people, you should definitely avoid it. If they're good people, I think you got to go to like every other one because if not, they're going to just sit there and talk garbage about you and say how you're a horrible person for not going. So yeah, I think you need to participate a little bit. And I wish I got that advice a while back because I think everybody talks crap about me and maybe they should. Anyway, more importantly than anything I just said, because I didn't really say anything really important.

9:33Eventastic, that is my giant free virtual event. It's the world's largest event about events. We only buy a certain number of virtual seats for everyone to attend. If you want to go to Eventastic, I strongly recommend you register now. You go to Eventastic.com. That's the word event and then ASTIC. That's ridiculous. us. Eventastic.com. It is a crazy two-day event. It's going to be the most fun thing ever. There's no on-demand. We have every big brand speaking. We have Bose from Real Housewives going to be there. We have a live cannonball guy. We have Taylor Swift impersonator who's going to teach us how to do the Fate of Ophelia dance.

10:08You want to go to Eventastic.com. This is going to be bonkers. We're going to run out of our virtual seats. It's a real thing. It's free. See you there. Go talk to your neighbors later. Wait, I have two huge things to share with you. First, I have a book coming out. Stupider people have done it. It's coming out the first week of June and all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. This book might be terrible, but who cares? When you buy this thing on Amazon or anywhere else, you are gonna be helping to kick cancer's butt. Let's do that together. The second thing is you can go to jschwedelson.com.

10:49On the upper right-hand corner, there's a thing that says partner. My agency wants to help you. If you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, it doesn't make a difference. I want to help you drive net new sales, registrations, growth, change the design, all the stuff that you are doing. Hit me up there. Also, if you want to do brand collabs, I want to know about your brand. I want to help you amplify that message. Go to jschwedelson.com. Click on partner. Let's do stuff together. And the last thing is leave this show a review if it wasn't the absolute worst podcast you've ever heard. And you're awesome for being here.

11:23Later.