Ep. 262- 😧Work-Life Balance IS A MYTH! (+Weekends CRUSH it NOW for Business & Consumer Offers: New Stats!) 💸AND "girl math" & "bro logic" 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 I'm going to make some people angry at me today, but that's okay. We're going to talk about work-life balance, why I think it's kind of a myth, and then what are the specific tactics, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, that you should be doing on the weekends that maybe you're not doing, and really how this has all changed in the last year or so in terms of what it is that we are consuming, business information, consumer offers on the weekends now. But first, let's talk about why a work-life balance is a little bit of a myth, right?

1:15When you leave work on Friday, do you not think about work again until Monday morning? I do, right? On the weekends, do you consume no content related to your job? I do, right? When you leave work at 5 p.m. Do you not think about anything work-related until 9 a.m. the next day? I do. And you know, a lot of other people do too. And your work-life balance is not something that you achieve, in my opinion, daily. It's not something you just accomplish on the weekends or at night. Your work-life balance is something that you look at in totality over your entire life, right? Are you able to make sure that you made time for your friends and your family and the things that you cared about and you made sure that's a priority in your life, it doesn't mean that you just shut things off at a certain time of day.

2:05And I think that that's a myth. And I think it actually harms us. We think we are failing as people because we are not able to just shut it off. And you know what? I think that's a good thing. And this is where people can get really upset with me. I think people that are able to at 5 p.m. shut it off until 9 a.m. the next day. And on the weekends, you shut it off from Friday until Monday morning. And absolutely, you don't think about work in any capacity. You don't care about it, right? If you're able to do that, I would sort of argue that maybe you're not passionate about the job or the role that you have.

2:39I know that's kind of rude. I do. But if you really are into it, you really want to learn what's going on. You really want to care. You really want to consume. It doesn't always even necessarily feel like work when you're finding out new stuff about what's going on in your industry, your sector, what other people are doing, right? If you're able to turn it off, maybe you're not into it. It's okay. Maybe you need to figure out what you are into. So what does this mean related to actual tactics that we should be thinking about in our marketing? Well, this is really interesting. Media Post shared some really great information the last few weeks.

3:14Let's talk about business marketing first, then we'll get into consumer. So on the weekends, they shared that there's been a 23 % surge in weekend web traffic from CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, and VPs. A 23 % surge in web traffic over the last year. And what do we do on the weekends? Well, we're not getting messages on our Slack. We're not getting those Microsoft Teams messages from people in our company. We have the ability to actually focus in on some of this content. And that's why decision makers are really able to interact with more of this content. And we see it on the email side a lot. So in the last year, from October 2023 to October 2024, click-through rates in emails for business to business email sent out on the weekend, click-through rates have gone up 62 % in that one year, right?

4:08Because this is how we are now consuming content. The other piece of this is that B2B weekend email sending, right? How much email is being sent on the weekends is 88 % lower for business emails on the weekends than during the weekdays, right? So not only are people able to spend more time with whatever you're sending out, there's less clutter in that inbox. And on the consumer side, okay, what's really interesting is that of course, consumer marketers send out their emails on the weekends. We know that, but they're sending it out at interesting times. And this is why we have to always be thinking about differently.

4:46So for example, according to mail charts, Glossier, that's that really cool brand that sends out like this makeup-y type stuff and all this other stuff. Well, 29 % of their emails are sent out on the weekends, but over 60 % of their emails are sent out after midnight, which is pretty wild, right? It's a totally bizarro time. How about Bomba Socks? 34 % of their emails are sent out on the weekends and over 30 % of them are sent out after 11 p.m. What does that all mean? Okay, why does that matter? It matters because we need to be testing things and be looking at things differently. And the biggest mistake that marketers make is they'll be like, oh, we sent out these emails on Sunday and they had a 25 % open rate and a 2 % click-through rate, but the same emails during the week, They get a 40 % open rate and a 4 % click-through rate.

5:37During the week destroys the weekend, and that is stupid. What you really want to be doing is you want to have benchmarks for the weekend and benchmarks for during the week. They're two very different things, and you want to constantly try to better yourself, do better on your weekend emails, do better on your during-the-week emails. Whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, there are different populations of people that are consuming your stuff, your offers, your content in different ways at different times. All right, so if you're not testing the weekends for email, you should be.

6:07Now, the other thing beyond email, okay, is social media, paid social media ads. Gupta Media came out with this really cool recent study that found on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, okay, cost per thousand for paid ads across all of those social networks is 20 % lower on the weekends than during the week. You can siphon out just weekends and run paid ad campaigns. And when you're paying on impressions, that's an ad view, or you're paying on clicks, you're paying on performance. So it being over 20 % lower, if you're not looking at the weekends in a siloed testing environment, you're leaving money on the table, whether it's email, paid social media ads, anything.

6:52All right, before we get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now you're tuning it out. You're like, oh, it's an ad. I don't care. But here's why you should care. Okay, they're my email sending platform, but they're also the best loyalty program tool on the planet. And they have a guide, the Loyalty Program Optimization Guide. And you can get this at jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. Now, why should you care? If you don't have a loyalty program or your loyalty program stinks, you need to spend energy on it. Why?

7:26Because when you send people personalized rewards, you have milestone recognition. You treat your customers like actual VIPs. The revenue you get from those customers, how often they're purchasing from you, it goes up exponentially. And the loyalty program optimization guide shares it all. You can get this at jschwedelson.com slash marigold. It is free. It is awesome. Check it out. All right, let's get into Since You Didn't Ask. So I don't know if this goes on in your home, but there's something going on in my home a lot right now, which is this idea of girl math or bro logic or dude economics, whatever you want to call it.

8:06Okay, it's this idea where we're all justifying like spending money or saving money or doing something that like we're bending logic to make it feel like it makes sense, even though it's the dumbest thing in the world. And I realized it's, it's just, it's nonstop. So in my house, I am the return department. So when my wife or daughter buys something and they want to return it, my teenage daughter, they give it to me. I print out the shipping label. I send out my son, my teenage son, he hasn't bought something. I mean, he, if it was up to him, I think he would wear the same hoodie, the same socks from now until the time he's 112 years old, but that's a whole nother topic.

8:45Anyway, so I'm the return department. So, which is super fun because I'm always like, I need the shipping label, forward me an email. How do we get this thing returned? I don't know what I'm doing anyway. And so I return it and then I'll come home back, hey, the return went through, we're all good. And then my wife or daughter would be like, oh, cool. Well, we're buying this thing. And because you return that thing, it's basically free. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense what do you mean it's basically free yeah because you returned we got the money back so it's free i'm like no that's not how that's not how it works we bought the thing originally like no no no that's how it works and then of course my daughter who's again way smarter than i am she'll bust me and she'll be like yeah but that's very similar to like when you come home sometimes after working you'll be like hey um you i always make these announcements was like, I'm going to eat so much dinner tonight.

9:40I'm so hungry, which is just a weird announcement to make. I don't know why I do that, but I do. And I'll say things like, I didn't eat lunch today, so I'm going to crush dinner. I'm going to eat so much dinner. It's going to be ridiculous. And my daughter would be like, that's the same idea. That doesn't make any sense. Just because you skip lunch doesn't mean that you can go and set a world record for eating whatever. that's dumb and i'm like um and i'm busted and this is what happens and i realize in every area of my life i am doing bro logic or girl math or whatever i'll be like oh we can't go out to dinner because if we go to dinner because i like to uh i don't like to go out dinner so if we go out to dinner with other people i like going out with just my family i don't like going out with other people because they're annoying um if we go out to dinner then i'm gonna get home at like 11 o 'clock and then I'm going to be really tired the next day and that's going to be terrible.

10:31Okay. And it's like, well, that doesn't make any sense. That's not even a valid argument. Everything I say is not valid. I don't even know what I just talked about. Listen, you're awesome. Two things you check out that are free certified guru.com. That's our free email certification course. It's about to close up. We only opened up for a few days. Certified guru.com. If you want to become an email marketing specialist, a free and eventastic, that's our new free virtual event. It's going to be bananas. And hey, leave this thing a review because you are awesome. Thanks for being here. Later. You did it.

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