Ep. 252 - Ask Us ANYTHING❓ Email Marketing Automation Fails & Scheduled Social Post Fails? ➕ Dating Advice?

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 for the do this not that podcast presented by marigold this is our super short episode we're all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions we try to tackle one of each so let's jump right into it we got our first question the work question from jesse from denver listen i was just in the denver airport. That airport is way too big. That is not okay. Okay. I had a very short time between the connections on my flight and I had to run. Okay. As if I was an Olympic runner to get to where I needed to get to, I was in a full blown sweat. It was out of control.

1:21These large airports are ridiculous. I had no time to get a turkey sandwich, which is my go-to move. We need to make airports smaller, whatever. All right, Jesse, what is your question? Jay, we're trying to get our email marketing automation program to be stronger this year. What are some common mistakes marketers make with their email marketing automation programs? All right, well, I got opinions on this, of course. So first off, what is an email marketing automation program? All right, this is when you are sending emails out automatically to the right people at the right time based on the actions that they're taking or specific rules that you have set up instead of just manually sending to everybody all the time, right?

2:07So if somebody visits the pricing page on your website, that could trigger an email to them specific about the pricing, maybe with a discount, okay? Someone downloads a piece of content on your site. You have an email that automatically goes off to this person. Somebody hasn't opened or clicked on one of your emails in three months. You have an automated email that goes out to them saying, where are you? This is email marketing automation. Now, everybody does email marketing automation to some extent. Fine. I'm not a huge fan. I do it within my company, but very limited way. And the reason I'm not a huge fan is what it does is we all basically do some version of set it and kind of forget it.

2:48And it makes us lazy. Okay. It makes us say, well, we don't need to be reaching out all the time because we have our automation stream doing that. And you really do lose that one-to-one flavor. So the best thing we did within my company is when we basically almost turned it off entirely, all of our sales people and our account people, it forced them to really reach out proactively and write custom notes and do all this stuff. But that's me. That's my soapbox. But some of the things that you want to be thinking about, okay, to make sure that you don't have a mess on your hands, that you actually are generating sales, you are generating pipeline with your business or consumer is to think about how you're setting up your automations.

3:27Okay. Now, when you're setting up your automations, you want to make sure that not everything just triggers off whatever. If someone just visits your website, it doesn't mean they're this hot prospect and all of a sudden they should be getting all of these emails, which is very different. Yeah. If somebody does visit your pricing page, great. They should get something. Okay. If someone opens up an email, does that mean that they're really interested in your product? Absolutely not. When you set up your triggers and you are basically elevating certain contacts based on an activity that they're doing, which is kind of meaningless, such as an email open, you're creating all these false positives of leads.

4:07And that's how your salespeople really think you are terrible. Okay. So some of the biggest mistakes that people make, for example, is treating all forms on their site equally. right? So if somebody comes to your site and they fill up the contact us page versus maybe they fill out the request a demo page, that's not the same thing. That request a demo, that person's really interested right now. Okay. So you need to think about how people are coming into your database before you just start firing off the same thing to everybody. The other giant thing that you need to do, especially now that we're in the start of the year is you must go through and get rid of anything that says last year, 2024.

4:49You want to crush your reputation. You want to crush what people think about you instantly. You include last year, 2024, in any 2025 emails that go out. You look old. You look out of date. You look like you're not paying attention. You need to constantly be going through and auditing your marketing automation programs to make sure that ridiculous things aren't occurring. Okay. What about on the consumer side? You can't have, for example, a post-purchase email go out that's saying, hey, what do you think about this? Can you leave a review before the person gets the product? We see that all the time in marketing automation programs, right?

5:29You're saying, do you love it? And the person hasn't even gotten it yet. You need to look at everything that you're doing so you don't actually ruin your reputation with these people, okay? You want to make sure, for example, if you have some sort of amazing new promo on something that you haven't discounted before, you can't just send that to your entire database. Because if you do, the people that bought that product before, okay, they're going to be like, why am I not getting the discount? I paid full price three weeks ago. So you need to think about the triggers that you're sending out before you just have it go all over the place.

6:03And in general, triggered stuff is a problem. It's a problem. So scheduled social posts is another example of kind of an automated marketing program where you may take a social post and you schedule it on TikTok, you schedule it on X, you schedule on Instagram, on LinkedIn, the problem, and by the way, we all do scheduled social posts. But when you schedule a social post, that doesn't mean that you can't make time to interact with it. It doesn't mean someone on your team shouldn't be ready when that thing posts. And the reason I say that is, according to Sprout Social, algorithms and engagement drop by up to 50 % across all social platforms, if you are not responding to comments that people leave within the first hour, what does that mean?

6:50That when you have a scheduled social post, let's say it goes out at 9 a.m., people start commenting. If you and your company, your brand, if it's an individual post, if you aren't getting back to those comments within the first 60 minutes, the algorithm is like, hey, wait a minute. This is not, nobody's paying attention to this thing. Nobody cares. There's no engagement here. Let's depress the circulation on this post. So marketing automation, scheduling posts, anything that makes you lazy is something that you need to be aware of so that way you stay on top of it. All right, before we get to the ridiculous question, this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold.

7:29Marigold is my email sending platform. They're incredible. Okay, they have great automation stuff, by the way, and they have a new piece of content. The loyalty program optimization guide. In 2025, you should be setting up a loyalty program if you don't have one. Do you know that 70 % of consumers are willing to pay more for brands that they love because they have a loyalty program? You got to download this thing. It is free. You go to jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. That is a loyalty program optimization guide, jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. And if you want to find out more about Marigold, Just go to meetmarigold.com.

8:07I cannot strongly recommend their email sending platform and their loyalty platform enough. So check out jschwedelson.com slash marigold. Let's get to the ridiculous question. We have a question from Stephanie from Detroit. Well, the Dolphins are out of it, by the way. So the Miami Dolphins football. So go Lions. I'm all in on rooting for the Lions because why not? So go Lions. Stephanie, what is your question? Jay, this is a dating advice question. Oh, my God. It's actually funny to me how many dating advice questions we get because I have no idea what's going on. I've been married for a zillion years.

8:41I'm clueless, but I will give it my best shot. Stephanie, what do you got? You mentioned, Jay, that you have teenage kids. I try to give my teenage kids dating advice, and they completely tune me out, and I know they're doing it all wrong. What say you? Stephanie, you are wrong. And I'll tell you why you're wrong. I'll tell you what I've learned. I know nothing about what's going on on the planet anymore, especially about anything related to people dating each other. And you should not try to give your kids dating advice because you too are probably clueless. Why do I say that? What I have learned is that what happens now is things like, okay, two people like each other, then one person snaps them on Snapchat.

9:30If the other person doesn't open the snap within any period of time, you can't just snap that person again because if they didn't open it, that's a sign saying, hey, I'm not interested in you. Because what I've tried to say is, hey, oh, you snapped that person, then they didn't open it. Why don't you just call them? that is the me telling my teenage kids to just call the person who has ignored their snap i cannot tell you i got not just like i they looked at me like i was an idiot it was like i said the the dumbest thing a human has ever had come out of their mouth like call the person who didn't open i snap what's wrong with you you're clueless and so this continually you know comes up, right?

10:19Oh, why don't you put that on your Instagram story? That's such a nice picture. What? No, that would mean this. If I put it on my story, it would mean that we are like, you know, uh, whatever. I'm like, what, what are we doing? What do we, what is going on? So I've come to the conclusion. I, the opposite of whatever I think is probably correct. and I don't know what is going on and neither do you. So just say, cool, you do you because who knows what's going on. Anyway, listen, thanks for checking out this thing. Two things. We just opened up registration today for Eventastic, Eventastic.com. It is free.

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