Ep. 212 - Best Time to Send Emails? On-Demand is Bad? Email Open Rates Garbage?✔️or ❌RAPID QUESTIONS about NOTHING! Ask Us ANYTHING

0:08Welcome 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. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. All week long, we get in questions. We get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions. And this is the episode where we try to tackle one of each of those. And if you want to submit questions, you can go to jschwedelson.com and there's a button that says podcast, another one that says Ask Us Anything. And we love getting the questions. But we've done a bad job of keeping up and answering all these questions. So today we gathered up a bunch of the work questions and I'm going to go rapidly through them and try to answer them.

1:13And then we're going to do that on the ridiculous one too, to try to catch up and answer as many of these questions as they can. So I'm just going to rip through these questions here that we have on this list and hopefully it's useful. By the way, this is the worst format for a podcast on earth because there's no way you're going to be able to capture this information. It's going to be annoying. You're driving, you're walking, you're running. Like, well, that was not enjoyable to listen to, but oh, well, who cares? We're going to do it anyway. All right, let's get into the questions. All right, Jay, is Tuesday at 10 a.m.

1:44really the best time to send out emails? Absolutely not. There is no best time, right? If you think that whatever time that you're sending out your email campaigns is the best time, I'm telling you it's not true. Number one, it's always changing. And number two, different people open up different emails at different times. So yeah, if Tuesday works for you, that's great. But try Sunday. I don't care if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer. Try Friday. You know, there's been this myth that's been perpetuated, especially for business marketers, that you don't want to send out your emails on Mondays or Fridays because the start and the end of the week, that was a thing like five years ago.

2:21Those days do really, really well, especially Fridays. So definitely don't only relegate yourself to one day and time of the week. That makes no sense. All right. Now, sending more emails mean more unsubscribes. Absolutely not. It is not about the frequency of the emails that you're sending. It's not how many emails that you're sending that you're getting unsubscribes. You're getting unsubscribes because you're sending out irrelevant stuff, stuff that nobody wants. So if you send out less email, you're going to get less business, less sales, less opportunities. So don't think about sending less to get more business.

2:59It won't work. You want to send out more. It just has to be more relevant. And by the way, about unsubscribes, this time of year, November and December are the highest unsubscribe rate period, whether you're a business or a consumer marketer than any other time of year, because this is when we're going through our own inboxes. We want to clear it out, have a fresh start for next year. So don't get freaked out if your unsubscribe rates go up this time of year, these next two months, because that is the period that we're in. It's not because all all of a sudden you became a bad marketer. All right, another one.

3:30Do open rates even matter anymore? Of course they do. Anybody that tells you an email open rate is useless is clueless. Okay. When you do a send on an email campaign and you do an AB test, half the group gets one subject line, half the group gets the other, maybe one subject line, you make it into a question and the other one you don't. And the one that's a question gets a 35 % open rate, but the one that doesn't have a question, it's a 20 % open rate. The open rate is the metric that's telling you that the subject line you wrote as a question did better, right? Is a directional metric. When people say open rates are irrelevant, they are clueless.

4:06Should every email include an offer? Absolutely not. Stop pounding your list to say, buy this, download this, do this. Start to provide some value. Here's the 2025 style guide. If you're a consumer marketer, Here is the 2025 calendar for whatever if you're a business marketer. And don't ask them to register for anything, to download anything. Tell them that there's no form to fill out. This is ungated. Here you go. Okay? And just provide value to people. Send people an article that you thought was interesting. Stop always trying to get something sold or bought or downloaded by filling out a form.

4:43Okay? Are LinkedIn company pages useless for small businesses? 100 % the opposite. Your small business on LinkedIn, you can have a page there and you can build up thousands of followers. Stop treating your LinkedIn company page like a brochure where you put out the most boring posts imaginable, okay? And you treat it like an extension of your website. Treat it like something where people want to engage with. Put hero stats on there. Put some memes on there. Put other content that goes viral on there. Your small business company page or your big business company page can have many thousands of followers.

5:21So when you do have something important to share, okay, you have an avenue to do that. So no, I think small business pages are so important. They're just being done wrong. All right. The last one before we get onto the ridiculous questions is on-demand content always the best thing to do. No, you cannot make all of your content have total on-demand always on demand. We have, we've ruined marketing. We've turn marketing to like Netflix, okay, where everything is always available all the time. It is ridiculous. And here's the thing. Here's the stat that nobody knows about. And this is from the last six months.

5:57When you get people to show up live for, let's say, your webinar, it's a game changer. Here's the stat. People who show up live to webinars convert the pipeline 400 % more than those that watch it on demand because they're invested. They care. They want to see what's going on, right? So here's the secret sauce. Webinar show up rates to get people to show up are 35 % higher when exclusive content is available for live only. What do I mean by that? When you promote your webinar and after somebody registers, you really want to drill this home. You say only live attendees get the Q4 trends report.

6:37Exclusive Q &A session won't be available on demand only for live attendees, right? Exclusive resource packs only for live attendees. Live only discounts are going to be offered. Make being live, being there valuable. Get that open, get that show rate to be higher and that's how you win. All right. Before we get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast, the ridiculous questions, this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now, Marigold is my email sending platform. I talk about it all the time because it's amazing. And I asked them, I said, listen, a lot of people change their platform this time of year because they don't like their email sending platform.

7:17I need something from you all. I need to hook up the listeners. And they gave us these exclusive offers. There's these offers at jschwedelson.com slash save, where you can get up to 50 % off, okay, using the Marigold sending platform. And they have brands like Sailthrough and Campaign Monitor and Cheetah Digital and Emma. They have some of the best email brands on the planet, and they're giving up to 50 % off for our listeners. If you want to take advantage of this, all you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash save. I've been using Marigold's platforms for years. If you're not happy with yours, you got to check it out at jschwedelson.com slash save.

7:58It's going to run out. That is going to expire. All right, let's get into the ridiculous questions that we get all these that pour in. And so we gathered up ones that we could do quick yes and no's on that are basically about basic life because I love these questions that come in. All right. So here we go. And I've not read these. So I have no idea what's about to come my way. All right. Jay, what is the actual difference between baking soda and baking powder? I have absolutely no idea. I actually don't know when to use either one. And I have no idea what the difference is. I'm sure I'll get hate for that.

8:35I don't know. Good luck. All right. Jay, your wife is a dermatologist, so you should know what does SPF actually measure on sunscreen? Oh, no. I have no idea. I know it needs to be a high number. In my house, because my wife is a dermatologist, we use like over 50. I don't know what it means. Maybe sun protection food. I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. All Jay, what is the expiration date on spices in your pantry? Oh, I have no idea. I mean, is that a thing? I don't know. Jay, is brown sugar healthier than white sugar? I mean, I want to say yes. Isn't that like a thing that brown sugar is better?

9:21I feel like that's healthier. I'm going to go with a brown sugar. I don't know. Jay, what is the difference between a latte, a cappuccino, and a macchiato? Well, they're spelled differently. I know that. A macchiato, people always get caramel on it. I know that. I have no idea. A cappuccino is really small. I have no idea. All right. These questions are ridiculous. Jay, when should you actually go to bed to wake up refreshed without an alarm? Who? I don't know. But I'll tell you this. I don't use an alarm because I can't sleep anymore. I wake up every day at like 5, 15, 5, 30 without an alarm.

10:00I can't sleep. I don't know what's going on with me. I should probably stop drinking Celsius. Anyway, what else? Jay, is there a right way to load the dishwasher? Oh my God, this is a hot topic in my house. I get drilled on this so many times because I just throw everything in there and I'm chaos when I do it and everyone's like, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. Well, so I don't know. All right. Only two more. Jay, what is the difference between iced coffee and cold brew? I have no idea, but I feel like cold brew is very intense. I always get scared to try cold brew. because I'm like, maybe it's going to be too much caffeine.

10:33But actually, I think I've said, I don't know to every single one of these questions. All right. Last question. Jay, how long should leftovers stay in the fridge before they are a problem? You know, what's funny about that? I don't know. And my problem is my wife's like, oh, you know, try that. See if it's still good, whatever it is, whatever leftover it is. Cause we like leftovers on the house and I'll try it. I'm like, oh, it tastes great, whatever. And then she'll come over and You're like, oh my God, there's like mold on that. That's disgusting. I can't believe you ate that. I'm like, well, it tasted fine.

11:04And she goes, how do you not know? How do you not know that that's disgusting? I'm like, I don't know. I don't have that. Whatever it's in my brain, I just eat it and it tastes fine. And here I am. So, all right, I don't know. Once again, we've talked about a lot. This episode was really, really ridiculous. So please submit the questions at jschwedelson.com. Leave this thing a review. I don't know if it's good, bad, whatever. Check out subjectline.com if you've never checked that out. That's our free website where you check your subject lines. We're doing a big update there. And yeah, hopefully you check out the episodes later in the week.

11:37Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.