Ask Us ANYTHING!! 🧪How to Convince Your Boss to TEST! ➕Got Pooped on by a Bird 💩 | Ep. 409

0:00Welcome 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 presented by Marigold. This is where all week long we get in work questions, we get in ridiculous questions, we try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit a question, it's real easy. Just go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast. Another one that says Ask Us Anything. We love getting your questions and now we're getting a little fancy.

0:38People have been submitting audio questions. So this week for the first time ever, and we'll see how it all goes, we're going to play some of the audio questions that we've gotten in and we're going to try to answer them. Ooh, very fancy. All right. So let's hear the first question. Hi, Jay. This is Josh. I have a question for you. I attended a session. You gave a lot of really great tips on how to boost my emails and my open rates and a lot of these tips I have pitched to my CEO and she is against all of them and you said something really specific that it's not about what we like or what I like it's about what works and so how do I convince my CEO that these are the tricks that we should be testing and this is what works and we have to move away from what she likes and what she thinks is right.

1:30Thanks. Josh, that is a great question. How do you win over your boss? How do you win over your team when they are totally against trying the new things, the things that you keep hearing that are working? And that can be super, super frustrating. There's two very specific things that you can do. But before we get into the specific things that you can do, you need to have a culture of testing. Whatever it is, it doesn't even matter if it's email-related, social media, marketing related, whatever it is, if there's not a culture of testing and trying to innovate in the business that you're in, that's an overall problem.

2:07Okay. Now that's not going to win the day. If you tell your boss or whoever that they have an overall problem, they're like, uh, later dude. So that's not it. So what are the two things that you could actually do to get people to jump on board with this idea of testing? So the first one is this idea of creating a laboratory environment. And you want to win the day, not just on a singular test. You don't want to go and say, hey, can we test, you know, putting an emoji in the subject line or something ridiculous like that. No, that is very transactional. That's a one-off thing. You want to try to establish a laboratory environment.

2:40And what you want to really do is say, we need a 10 % laboratory. That's the number, a 10 % laboratory where you can take 10 % of your database, okay? Or maybe it's 10 % of the social media posts or 10 % of your email signs, whatever it is, and say with this 10%, this is where we're going to test stuff, always and ongoing, right? And you really don't want to pitch it internally as this is just for testing. What it really is, it's really an insurance policy, okay? Because a lot of times, you know, bosses or whatever, they don't like testing because it sounds like it's a risk. But when you call it your 10 % insurance program, and basically what you're saying is, listen, we're going to dedicate 90 % to what we know works, no doubt about it.

3:26But this 10 % ongoing is our insurance against being left behind. Our competitors are evolving every single week. We need this 10 % insurance environment. And then you really always want to frame it in terms of money. Okay. If we're not testing this, this, and this, then we may have profit leakage. And that's what bosses care about. They care about money. Now, the other big thing is that you always want to make sure that they realize it's kind of risk-free. You're not going to your whole audience. It's only going to 10%. And then if you can show traction at 10%, then you could win. And the showing traction is what's really important.

4:09You need to go into this with a dashboard that you've created to show how you're going to show whether the test was successful or not. And you want to be able to show in your dashboard, you know, what was the hypothesis about why you were doing the test? What was the result? You know, what was the lift? What was the fail? And the reason you want to create this laboratory environment is there's a really good chance that your test doesn't work. And if you do it transactional, we just want to try this one thing and it doesn't go well, then that's it. You're never going to be able to do another test again.

4:37You need to create this environment, this testing laboratory environment. And when you do do the test, make sure it is big enough. That is absolutely critical. It's a giant mistake to be like, okay, let's test a subject line that says, you know, webinar this Thursday versus this Thursday's webinar. You're going to see a nominal difference. You've got to go bigger to make sure there's a test that has a result, good or bad in the test, right? So instead of doing that, you would say something like, let's test free webinar, and you capitalize the word free versus three secrets to boost ROI. Two completely radically different things.

5:15And that way you can actually see if the results happen. Now, what is the second thing that I would do to win over my boss? What is every company in fear of? They're in fear of their competition. So what you wanna do is to be able to show what your competition is doing and saying, listen, we're being left behind, they're doing this. And AI is a great thing to be able to tap into what your competition is doing. So you can go in the free version of ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and you use a prompt like this, okay? You go and you put this prompt in, something like this, and you say this, act as a competitive marketing strategist.

5:53Compare, and then you put your company name in the URL of your company. Compare Acme Company at acmecompany.com, and then you put in your competitor or competitor's names. You can put five of them in their URLs or whatever across key digital marketing channels and email marketing and create a side-by-side table that shows email marketing frequency, subject line, styles, social media posting frequency, engagement levels, content types, data collection, use of pop-ups, gated content, surveys, newsletters, website optimizations, CTAs, above the fold, all this stuff. And then at the end, you say, highlight where our brand is falling behind, where the competitor is aggressive.

6:35And the easy wins we could implement immediately. Keep it simple, visual, and tactical so a non-marketer executive could grasp the gaps in under two minutes. It doesn't have to be this exact prompt, but something like that where you're asking AI to go out there, give it the URLs, give it your competition, okay? And if it's not even your competition, it's who you aspire to be. Have it give you all this stuff. And then you go back and say, listen, we need a laboratory environment because this is what our competition is doing. I just need 10 % ongoing that I can market to. And this is how you win the day.

7:09So, all right, let's get into now the ridiculous question. We always get in ridiculous questions. Again, we're getting fancy because we have an audio question coming in. So let's hear the audio question. Hi, Jay. This is Dana from Long Island. My question is, what is the most unhinged thing you've seen gone down in a parking lot? Bye. Dana, what is up? I appreciate the question. I too am from Long Island. Go Jericho. Moved down to Florida when I was 15. I always say I'm from Florida, but people are like, no, you're not. I'm like, yes, I am. I don't have that whole New York whatever vibe. But Dana, let's get into your question.

7:48Unhinged things that have happened in parking lots. So first off, this happened to me just the other day, which was difficult for me to process. I got out of my car and a bird took a deuce on me. Yeah. Bird, um, dropped, um, I got crapped on by a bird. I don't know how else to say it hit my shoulder. As I got in my car, I looked at my shoulder. I'm like, what, what, what just happened? And I looked around, of course, nobody was near me. Nobody cared. And then I was like, do I go into the supermarket and still buy my stuff with knowing I just got, you know, a bird just went to the bathroom on me.

8:22And so I debated this for 30 seconds. I dug in my car while the stuff was like kind of dripping on my arm. It was so disgusting. And I found an old weird napkin and I wiped it off. And I said, you know what? I'm going in. And I went to the supermarket. I got what I needed to get. And the whole time I was thinking about, I have bird duty on my arm. What do I do about this? And then I got home. It was disgusting. Everything about it was disgusting. But in terms of unhinged things, I did see a few weeks ago and it made me nervous. I saw a woman yelling at this dude because he didn't put his cart back.

8:56You know, like in a supermarket, like after you go food shopping and then you're in the parking area and you have your cart. And then they have those like areas where you bring your cart to like line them up in that little kind of cart area, whatever. So the dude unpacked his car and then he just put the cart next to his car and he was getting into his car. And this woman went crazy. Like you got to bring your cart back. That's not right. You know, all just screaming. And the guy's like, what, what is, what is your deal? Now I, I can relate to both sides. No, I would never scream at somebody for bringing their cart back, but I then debated in my mind.

9:32So I, I, I had a new solution like two years ago. This is so random. It just popped in my head that I was going to be a person that always brought my cart back when I was in the parking lot that I was always going to bring my cart back. I was never not going to do it. And for like, I don't know, six months, I did it. Anytime I went shopping at Target or a supermarket, whatever, I would take my cart. I would find the little area you're supposed to put your cart in. I did it. But then over time, I started to become a non-cart putter backer, if that's an official term. But after I saw this woman screaming at the guy, I go, whoa, I got to get back on the train of putting the cart back because you got to pay it forward or I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but she scared me.

10:15So I am now back on the cart putter backer team. I don't know. Is that like, I wonder what percentage of people are on that team. I'm going to go with just by the sheer volume of carts. I see not in that area. I'm going to go with 50%. Everyone that listened, you got to tell me, do you put your cart back? I don't know. Does everybody, am I just a horrible person. Meanwhile, yeah. So that's what goes on me. What did we just talk about? I don't know. Listen, I appreciate you. I'm being real. We are running out of our free virtual spots at Guru Conference. It's our large email marketing event. It is free.

10:49It is virtual. It is two days. We have Nicole Kidman. We have Anne Hanley. We have Amy Porterfield. We have Donald Miller. It is going to be wild. Okay. GuruConference.com. Grab a free virtual seat before it runs out. You're awesome. and watch out for them birds in the parking lot later. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there.

11:23You can find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.