Ep. 216 - ELECTION Marketing Tactics that WORK for REGULAR CONSUMER AND BUSINESS MARKETERS?🦃How I prepare to EAT EVERYTHING on Turkey Day! (and YES to STRETCHY PANTS!) 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 this is the super short episode where all week long we're getting questions we're getting work questions we get in ridiculous questions we try to tackle one of each and if you want to submit one it's real easy go to jay swettleson.com you click podcast then you click ask us anything and we love it anything you got let's hit it up all right let's jump right into it let's do our work question first we got a question from sarah from short hills new jersey short hills new jersey has an incredible mall a great great mall very fancy mall i have a nice mall here uh in boca as well where i live in south florida i'll tell you the weirdest thing in the world is going to like a mall that's like on the way out i mean like not doing well in some random town some random city because you go in there and it's like a ghost town and you're scared to even eat in the food court because there's like two random places still open.

1:35And they look like they're serving food from like 35 years ago. And they'll have like, I don't know, like maybe a Claire's, you know, still in the mall and people getting like earrings, piercing, whatever. And then they'll have one other store that's still open. And the whole thing is like falling apart. So I don't know. I don't like malls that are closing down. They freaked me out a little bit. Sarah, what is your question? Jay, has anything useful come out of all these crazy tactics that the political marketing has thrown at us these last few months? Well, that is a great question. And I will tell you, it has been pretty wild.

2:10Political marketing, doesn't matter what party it is, doesn't matter these political action committees, the aggressiveness is bananas, right? I mean, they just, they'll do anything to get our attention. But what does come out of it is the political marketing on both sides, you know, both Republican, Democrat, Independent, doesn't matter. they're so aggressive in their tactics that they're trying things now that will bleed into regular marketing in the next year or so because they're trying so many new and aggressive things that some of those things that work regular marketing is going to try to do those things and we're already starting to see that happen so there's some random tactics that actually are working really well that we're already seeing go from the political world into the regular world One of those, which is so random, is bookend emojis in your email preheader.

3:03What? Okay, so you got your email. You send it out. You got your from address. Then you got your subject line. We all know that. The second subject line, that kind of gray line underneath your subject line, that is your preheader, right? And you could write your preheader text, whatever you want to put in there. Generally speaking, you got to keep it less than 85 characters. But what a lot of the political emails have been doing is they've been not only just putting emojis in their preheader, which a lot of business and consumer marketers don't even realize that you can do, but they're doing bookend emojis.

3:30So they'll start their preheader with an emoji. They'll say whatever it is they want to say, like, you know, six or seven words, and they'll put the same emoji at the end of those six or seven words, and they'll make these bookends within the preheader. And we're now not only seeing in the political emails, we're seeing in regular marketing and bookend emojis are lifting email open rates for both consumer and business to business email marketers. Lifting business emails about 14 % and consumers about 18 % because it stands out and it's very different than putting it in the subject line. So if you've never tested bookend emojis in your preheader, that is a super interesting random test that's working really, really well.

4:12Another tactic that we don't have data on yet, but we're seeing it a lot and we believe it's going to be something that is going to bleed over into regular marketing is using actually emojis in the from name when you're sending out your email. So when you send out your email, okay, if you're sending email addresses, Acme at special offers.com, but the from name that it comes from is, you know, Acme company, right? You could change the from name every time you hit send, you could change it to say, you know, Acme events or Acme sale or Acme, whatever, you're not changing the actual delivery email address.

4:51So in that from name that you could change whenever you want to on any platform doesn't matter. A lot of the political emails are including an emoji in the from name itself, right? Which is very different than putting the subject line or even the preheader, adding an emoji to the from name is a new tactic. And we've already seen Groupon steal this tactic. And in almost all of their promotional emails, Groupon is now putting a green circle in their from name field. And there's not enough data out there yet to say that this is working or not working, but I think it's super interesting and something we are definitely tracking.

5:27The other thing that we're seeing coming out of all this political craziness, and I think this is going to be probably one of the biggest marketing topics as we head into 2025 is the rise of connected TV, CTV, right? You've all seen it. You're watching streaming. You see an ad on, you know, when you're watching on YouTube TV or wherever you're watching, right? Maybe it's on Peacock, whatever. And that ad is hyper targeted right to you, like specific to what you're interested in. That is a connected TV ad. And there's been a massive explosion in the use of this within all the political campaigns.

6:01As a Matter of fact, 13 % of all the political ad budgets for this cycle of campaign have been spent on connected TV, according to the current. That is like a 600 % increase from the last set of elections that took place two years ago. So, and this is both on the business of business and consumer side, we're seeing budgets rise significantly. So for example, 65 % of B2B marketers say their company has increased their sales using connected TV along with their other paid channels. That's according to MadHive and that's super recent data. And you could run these connected TV ads using all the regular platforms you're already running ads on.

6:42YouTube, Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Spotify. They're all allowing you to run connected TV ads now. So you could take the same creative, the same copy, the same whatever and run connected TV ads. And I think CTV is going to be probably one of the biggest growth categories as we end to 2025. All right. Before we get into the ridiculous question, I want to let you know that this podcast is presented by Marigold. Come on. Now listen, if you don't know Marigold, Marigold is my email sending platform. It's my ESP. I've been using it for years. We send out billions of emails, consumer and business.

7:19They're a rollup of Sailthrough and Cheetah Digital and Emma and Live Clicker and Campaign Monitor. All the best platforms on the planet are all part of Marigold, and they have a special offer only for the listeners of this podcast. It's an up to 50 % off offer. Okay. You don't like your ESP. You don't like your platform. You got to at least check out Marigold. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash save jschwedelson.com slash S A V E. And that is where this exclusive offer lives. Fill out the form. Check it out. I'm telling you, there's a better way to get your emails out. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question.

7:55We got a question from Billy from Dallas, Texas. Jay, do you do anything to offset how much you're going to eat at Thanksgiving? Do you do anything now to prepare? So you're basically saying that I'm going to be a disgusting animal Thanksgiving, and I'm probably going to wear stretchy pants, and I'm going to eat a lot, and am I doing anything right now to prepare the fact that I'm disgusting? Oh, first of all, that's a fair assessment, because that probably will happen. Let's see. I'll tell you one thing that my family does, which is super, I'll tell you why it's embarrassing. We do a turkey trot.

8:30So nearby where I live, they have one of these five K's that you could run a few days before Thanksgiving and they call it a turkey trot and a zillion people show up and it's this five K around this park and everyone's wearing like Thanksgiving, like hats and ridiculousnesses and whatever. And everybody I know shows up there. The reason I say it's super, and I do this that way, if I run a 5K, then maybe I'll offset some of the cornbread that I'm going to eat. But then it's embarrassing because first of all, my wife goes and my teenage kids go, whatever. And then everybody I know is there and everybody else is bringing like their little kids and everything.

9:05And then we all line up and they go, go. Now, forget it. My wife absolutely crushes me. She's in incredible shape. She's gone. My two kids destroy me. And they, I mean, they laugh at me like you have no idea, but then I'm running and I run so slow. I mean, basically I'm walking. I look like one of those people that are like running, but you're like, are they walking? Like you're not sure. And I wind up running in the same pack as like, you know, these like 10 year olds and 11 year olds. And I can't even keep up with them. And everybody I know in my neighborhood is passing me by. They're like, what's wrong with you?

9:40Are you ill? Like, like it's so embarrassing. And then what happens is then the final, I get to the finish line. Like I'm going to, I'm going to keel over. It's not going well. And my family's already at the finish line. They're already like have taken a nap and woken back up. They're laughing at me. They're taking pictures of me. Everybody I know in this universe is there saying, ha ha ha, you're a loser. You're like in last place with people that are half dead. And the whole thing is mortifying. I don't know why I go every year. I probably go because I like the free t-shirt, but it's not even free because I paid 25 bucks to get it.

10:12And then I never wear it again. What am I talking about? Like, what am I actually talking about? Do I do anything else related to this to prepare? I mean, I should, I shouldn't be a disgusting animal, but whatever it's coming. It's going to happen. Everybody bring desserts to my house. I want to eat them. Um, and if you don't like a sweet potatoes with marshmallows, then you should stop listening to this podcast because that is a Thanksgiving staple for me. And anybody that says otherwise is just flat out wrong. There you go. We covered a lot of ground. Listen, leave this thing a review. If you don't stink, you'll leave it a review.

10:48You'll be an awesome human being. Go to jschwedelson.com. Give us a question for next week. You are awesome. And don't do a turkey trot. 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.

11:31GuruEvents.com. Check it out.