Ep. 214- LOSERS and WINNERS!🧪Tests We TRIED! 🥫SPAM Eating, Dead or Alive? - Jay’s SCOOP

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 do this not that podcast presented by marigold and today we're talking about some tests that we ran some work some didn't work so as many of you know we just put on a conference called guru conference it was a really large scale virtual conference all about email marketing and within that conference leading up to that conference we ran a lot of tests i want to share some of the tests that work, some of the tests that didn't work, and also how this ties into some of your overall marketing, because maybe it'll give you some ideas that you can try or pitfalls to avoid. So the first thing that I think was super interesting was how we handled on-demand and how that impacted people engaging with our content.

1:22So in the world these days, everyone just makes everything always available. Like we've turned content into Netflix that, oh, you have a webinar? Great. It'll be available for you whenever you want to watch it. It's on demand always. And what do we do? Nobody shows up anymore. Attendance rates and show up rates for webinars and events is way down. And so we tried to figure out what are things that we could do to get people to show up. So this is our third year running Guru Conference. And in year one, we allowed for total on demand like everybody else has for all their events. and our show up rate was 52 % that year, three years ago, when we had on demand available as soon as it ended.

2:05And we thought that that show up rate was terrible. So we took a step back in year two and we said, okay, what can we do in year two, where in year two, we had about 20 ,000 people register that we can get people to show up. So we said, you know what, screw it. Let's have no on demand whatsoever. And we promoted the fact there was going to be no on demand and it helped, right? So in year two, we had a show up rate of 61%. That was a big jump for 52%. But along with that, we got hundreds of emails from very angry people saying, it's just not right. You need to have on demand. You know, we have a life, we have work, we have things to do.

2:45We can't just dedicate all this time to your event. And I get that. So we did something this year, which I think is super interesting that we haven't really seen anywhere. And so we had 24 ,000 people register for Guru Conference this year, a virtual event. And we created something called Earned On Demand. And we promoted the fact that if you show up for 60 minutes, anytime over the two days of the event, you will then get the on-demand link. Well, as it turns out, that really worked. We had a 72 % show up rate, which for a free event is incredibly high. And we got a ton of emails of people saying, oh, I wanted to make sure I got there for at least 60 minutes so I can get the on-demand link, and then they end up staying for even longer.

3:29And so we love that. And in general, okay, what we have found, putting aside our event, there's some really interesting data that we've seen with all of our agency clients. So for our agency clients, we promote hundreds and hundreds of webinars all year long. And we're seeing a new thing that when you promote a webinar, for example, or any event, but when you promote a webinar and you say the on-demand, it's only going to be available for 30 days following that webinar as compared to it just being available ongoing in your resource area on your website. After doing a ton of tests, what we found is that when you make it available for only 30 days and you're telling people over and over again, it's only available for those 30 days, it drives a 340 % higher average watch rate over those first 30 days, which really matters because whatever you're presenting is usually pretty timely.

4:23So those first 30 days is really when you want that engagement. So just by creating this kind of FOMO and building this urgency around those first 30 days can really have an impact on all of your marketing. So what were some other tests that we ran that might be interesting to everybody? So we also tested email on the day of. I know you guys got a ton of email from us on that day of for the event. But there were two groups. Not everybody – we didn't send everybody the same stuff. We were testing a lot of stuff. So on the day of our conference, we had two different groups of people. The conference started at 1030 in the morning.

4:59We had one population of people that we sent one reminder email at 10 a.m. saying the event was starting. Then we had another population of people that we sent and we said, okay, we had two reminder emails, one that went off at 8 a.m. and one that went off at 10 a.m. So one group got two emails, one group got one email. The group that got two email reminders, their show up rate was 31 % higher than the group that only had one reminder email. And this really matters because if you're a consumer marketer or a business marketer, you want to think about your day of email promotion. So if you're a consumer marketer, here's the data we have from our agency, okay?

5:37Okay, when you have a consumer sale that ends on a particular day and time, all right, doing two day of sends for that offer, promoting that offer versus just doing one day of send. So on these consumer offers, when you do two day of sends, as it leads to the end of that sale, it leads to a 39 % higher overall conversion rate than just doing one day of send. And on the business side, okay, when you do two sends versus one send after people have registered for your webinar, very similar to our conference, when you do two day of reminders leading into that, you have a 25 % higher overall show up rate than one time send.

6:19Now, what's happening out there, people are like, yeah, but that annoys people. People are going to unsubscribe. People might complain. Who cares? Those people were never going to buy your product. They were never going to attend your webinar in the first place. If one extra email sets them off, they're not your people. And increasing things by 20 and 30 and 40 % is bananas, all right? So this other test that we ran that I'm going to double down on this year is we worked with a lot of micro-influencers. We had never done this before. We brought on a number of different micro-influencers to go out on social media and to say that they were excited about Guru Conference.

6:56And in every promo they did, these micro-influencers, they would say that they were a partner. of ours and whatnot. And it drove a ton of registrations and from really the right people, right? The really good quality people that are registering for the event. What we found, which is really interesting if you're going to work with micro-influencers, and I strongly recommend you do, is one of our most cost-effective marketing channels that we did. We thought that the larger the following that the person had, maybe on LinkedIn or Instagram or wherever, that that would yield the best conversion rate, the best registration rate, all of that.

7:31That wasn't the case. When you're working with a micro-influencer, you really want to not look at how big their audience is, but how engaged their audience is. You want to look at all their posts. Are they getting a lot of comments and reshares and likes and a lot of it, right? And really enthusiastic comments. Because what we found is we were working with influencers that had anywhere from 50 ,000 to 250 ,000 connections and followers and whatnot. It was the ones with closer to 50 ,000 with super engaged audiences that really drove the most engagement. So I'm a big fan now of micro influencers.

8:07I think it's something everybody should be thinking about for a consumer B2B, but don't get caught up in the big vanity metric. Look at that engagement. All right, before we get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast, which is since you didn't ask, I want to let you know this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. Their role of campaign monitor and Cheetah Digital and Emma and Sailthrough and Live Clicker. It is an incredible platform. I know you don't like your platform. I could feel it through the radio, through your earphones. You don't like your sending platform.

8:38I am telling you there's a better way, whether you're B2B, B2C, small, medium, or large. And for listeners of this show only, we have a huge discount if you want to get involved with Marigold. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash save. jschwedelson.com slash save. And there's a discount there of up to 50 % to use their platform. You got to check it out. It is worth a few minutes getting that demo. So check that out. All right. Let's get into since you didn't ask. So coming out of Guru Conference, we tried some crazy. easy stuff, right? So if you were there, you may have seen that we had Joey Chestnut, the world's number one eater at the conference.

9:19And we did a contest where we ate spam live against him. And it was wild. And I have to tell you, behind the scenes, Joey Chestnut was the nicest human being. And originally, we were going to do a hot dog eating contest because that's what he's known for. And then one night, I'm home. And I wake up in the middle of the night. and my wife goes, what's wrong? What's wrong? And I go, I just had the greatest idea. She goes, what? I go, Joey Chestnut should eat spam. And she's like, what the hell is actually wrong with you? I go, no, this is great. It was like three in the morning. She goes, you're an idiot.

9:54Go back to sleep. But the next day we reach out to Joey's team and we're like, what do you think? And Joey Chestnut was like an instant yes. He's like, this is a great idea. And we did it. That was wild. Um, other ideas we weren't able to pull off this year, but I think I want to do it next year is we were going to do a virtual 5k for charity where we're going to have this thing where everyone could sign up and there was going to be a day and a time where we're all going to run and walk wherever we were and raise money for charity. And maybe we're like eighties gear. Cause that was our theme. We had this whole plan.

10:26We ran out of time. So I want to do that for next year because I think that would be super, super cool. The other idea that we had, we had so many ridiculous ideas. So we have this meeting internally and with a whole group of our team. And the way the meeting works is anybody can veto an idea that somebody comes up with. We just need one veto. And the meeting is called, Does This Idea Suck? And we all throw out the craziest ideas. And if any one person says that sucks, then we don't do it. It's a fun meeting. It's actually ridiculous. And so one of the ideas that just stuck with me, because I think it was sort of my idea, but two of us had the same idea at the same time.

11:02It was, we should play dead or alive and bring up all these 80s people onto the screen, right? And then everybody in the chat, and we'd say, is this person, this celebrity, dead or alive? And everyone in the chat would say, they're dead or alive. And it cracked me up. I was like, this is a great idea. But we got like multiple people saying, that sucks. That's a horrible idea. You cannot do that. so we never ended up playing um dead dead or alive which by the way we started putting together the list initially there was a lot more people dead than alive it was very very sad but the 80s was a very long time ago anyway so yeah so guru conference was wild and we have more craziness coming i know this episode was a little bit different but just wanted to share with you some behind the scenes on the tests that we ran and we'll get back to the regular stuff next week and check out, what should you check out?

11:54I don't know, go to jschwedelson.com, put some feedback in there on the podcast, leave this thing a review, you're awesome and go play Dead and Alive at home because it's a fun game. No, it's not. I don't know what's going on. 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.

12:38Guruevents.com. Check it out.