Ep. 215- What’s Up THIS WEEK==> NEW DATA: IMPACT of iOS 18 for EMAIL MARKETING! + Election Hurts SMS! 🎲♟️My Scrabble Rules!

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 what's up this week from the Do This Not That podcast presented by Marigold. This is our super short episode where we break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life. And then we still have our short Ask Us Anything later in the week in our big tips episode at the end of the week. So what's going on this week? Well, you may have heard, but there's an election going on right now. Super fun times. Cannot wait for all this to wrap up. But super interesting things related to the election as it ties in with marketing. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've all been getting inundated with a ton of SMS marketing campaigns.

1:24It has been bananas. And the thing that's interesting tying in this week specifically to SMS marketing, you know, the text-based marketing on our phones and whatnot. Overall, marketing campaigns from non-political parties, non-political action committee messaging, SMS marketing campaigns from regular brands, performance is down about 30 % in the last 30 days, which makes a lot of sense because we're almost like tuning all of the SMS messaging out right now. And RoboKiller just released some data for the month of October 24. They just released it now because we're at the beginning of November. Do you know how many spam text messages were sent down to the United States in the month of October?

2:1119.2 billion spam texts. That's nearly 63 spam texts for every person in the United States. Yeah, so it's going to be really interesting to see how SMS rebounds after this is all over. One of two things is going to happen. Either SMS marketing is going to become an even bigger deal for general marketing because we're all more accustomed to reacting to these promotions because the political text messaging has been wild. Or we're going to be even more turned off to it like we are right now because it was super annoying. So other things going on this week that I think is really fascinating is, so we all know now that Apple released their latest operating system on our phones.

2:58iOS 18 was released one week ago right now. And for those of you who don't realize it, if you have an iPhone, iOS 18 has been a giant update to everything on our phones. Our mail app, how we text. There's a lot of AI features, all sorts of stuff. And we did an analysis of what the impact has been on marketing in the last week since iOS 18 got released. Now, what's interesting is the first question you have to ask yourself, how big of an impact is them releasing this iOS 18 update really have on anything so far? Because it's only been one week. Well, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, came out and said, iPhone users updating to iOS 18, they updated twice as fast than they did for iOS 17.

3:48They're seeing a massive migration really quickly. So we would then be led to believe that it's going to impact marketing in a big way really quickly because one of the biggest changes to iOS 18 is all the changes to the mail app, that blue icon where we check our email on our phones. Now, you may have seen leading into all this that the big change coming to the mail app is it's going to have buckets, very similar to how Gmail has the promotions tab and all these other tabs. iOS 18, the update on our phones, is now going to have all these buckets, has a bucket, a primary tab, an updates tab, a promotions tab where a lot of the email offers are going, and a transactions tab.

4:29So what we did was World Data Research ran a bunch of tests since Thursday, so just a few days ago. And we ran tests to 200 ,000 known iPhone 15 users. Now, what does that mean? iPhone 15 is the physical model of the iPhone. So you might have an iPhone 12, an iPhone 14, an iPhone 15. Only those people with an iPhone 15 or higher, okay, like an iPhone 16, the new iPhone, so you have an iPhone 15 or higher, are able to leverage all the new AI functionality and all the improvements to the mail app where we check our email. So we did a bunch of campaigns to 200 ,000 contacts that we know are iPhone 15 users because we wanted to see the impact on engagement that all of this bucketing of emails is done.

5:25The fact that now AI can bucket emails to go into the promotions tab versus the primary tab and all this different type of stuff. So what did we find out in the last few days from this testing? Well, so far, the good news is that literally there's been no impact. Click-throughs for both business campaigns and consumer campaigns to this audience, we saw no statistically relevant changes in performance. Some campaigns even went up slightly. So what does this all mean? This means that as of right now, and at least for the foreseeable future, I wouldn't spend a lot of energy trying to navigate the different tabs and buckets that iOS 18 is doing within the mail app.

6:06Because as of right now, we've not seen any data that causes us a serious level of concern. Now, as more people migrate to newer phones and this rolls out even more, we're going to continue to check this analysis. but so far so good on the big mail app update on all of our phones so what nonsense is going on this week well i saw oprah came out with her list of her favorite things some people love oprah some people don't love oprah i think oprah's pretty awesome but where there's no doubt about i don't care who you are her list of favorite things that she comes out with every year which is like the the her favorite items to buy for gifts or whatever it's always awesome it is an incredible list.

6:49And she came out with something just this past few days on her list for the 2024 things you should be buying this holiday season. There are these really cool retro style board games, essentially, from this company, WS Game Company. So games like Scrabble, for example, in this retro style, and they only cost about 40 bucks on Amazon from the WS Game Company. I'm not paid by this company. I don't even know who they are. They just look really cool. And I want to buy this retro Scrabble because I think it's awesome. But speaking of that, I'm just curious about Scrabble. Like when I play Scrabble with other people, first of all, I'm an idiot.

7:29I can't spell anything. I don't know a lot of words. But so like in my house, when we play Scrabble, if you say a word, you have to know what it means. You can't just say, you know, Ashma, whatever, and be like, is that a word? And you're like, I think it's a word. if you don't know generally what the definition is in my house, that don't fly. Okay, you have to basically know what it is. And then someone can look it up in the dictionary. If you're wrong, then you can't use that word. I don't understand people that just will allow any words to be used, even if they don't know what it means. Anyway, that's my Scrabble soapbox.

8:07So yeah, what else going on this week? Well, I'm watching Martha on Netflix. It's pretty good. I love Martha Stewart. She's wild. wild. So it's pretty good. I'll tell you what show stinks is disclaimer on Apple TV. Um, it's a seven episode thing with, um, Cate Blanchett, who's great. And I started out, I'm like, Oh, this is going to be great. I was like three episodes in. I'm like, this is great. And then it got really weird. And there's only one more episode left. If I wasn't six episodes deep, I would stop watching. I need to know what happens, but I no longer give this thing a thumbs up. I originally gave it a thumbs up, but disclaimer on Apple, I am now giving a thumbs down.

8:44Okay. This was a very important episode as always. Have fun with the election this week and yeah, check out our other episodes later in the week and drop me a note at jschwedelson.com and see you later. 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.

9:31Guruevents.com. Check it out.