Ep. 264 - Ask Us ANYTHING❓The Bachelor! + 3X Results: The Content Format No One’s Talking About💡

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 our super short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in totally ridiculous questions. We try to tackle one of each and we love getting questions. You want to submit one, you just go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast and another one that says ask us anything. put anything you got in there because we love it all all right let's do the work question first we got a question from denny from san antonio texas uh i like san antonio i like the riverwalk i like going there not that you asked but i really think whoever runs pr for san antonio we got to stop pushing the alamo i've been to the alamo it's like this one building i know there's a lot of history there it's really boring i'm just saying it so pr people in san antonio focus on other stuff.

1:32Alamo, boring. Sorry, Denny. Super rude. What is your question? Jay, all I read is that personalization does so well in marketing, especially email marketing, and we do all the regular personalization stuff. What are some personalization tests we can run that are less common but still work? Well, this is a fantastic question. Probably the most underutilized personalization tactic for both business and consumer marketers are milestone email sends. Now, when I say milestone email send, you probably instantly like, oh, Jay's going to talk about sending out birthday emails. No, I'm not. That's not exciting.

2:12Who cares that you survived another year on the earth? Great. Send out a birthday email. That's not what we're talking about. Or Jay's going to talk about renewal emails where, oh, a customer signed up with us again. We're going to send them an email. No, those aren't the milestone emails that you should be testing and doing and all of that. But before I give you some specific examples of ones that crush it that you're probably not doing, let me first tell you why milestone-related emails do so well. Here are some stats. So first off, from Litmus, they say that milestone emails can achieve open rates that are two and a half times higher than typical promotional emails.

2:47Or how about Experian on the business-to-business side that click-through rates rise over 25 % for milestone emails. Experian also shared, and this is wild, that for all milestone email campaigns, they see a 300 % higher conversion rate than standard emails. That is wild. All right. So let's get into some of the milestone campaigns that you probably aren't thinking of that do really, really well. The first ones are milestone usage achievements. Okay. You want to recognize when a customer hits a usage milestone, something like this. You've hit a thousand API calls this month. That's amazing. Here's a guide to help you scale even further.

3:33Or you've joined 10 live coaching sessions with coach Jenny. Your engagement is inspiring. Ready for the next one? Or you've made 200 delicious dinners, but you haven't tried this trending recipe. You take their usage, whatever they're doing, and you turn it back at them and you get them fired up. You get them excited about it. You say to them, you've tracked$50 ,000 in spending. How does it feel to be so on top of things? Whatever the thing is that your product or service does, you take a look at, you create some sort of category buckets of achievement, of milestone achievements. Then you turn around and you tell your customers, wow, you've done it.

4:16You've used the thing. It gets them excited because it highlights their progress and how it shows how they're really leveraging your thing. I love this one, right? Your team has generated a thousand reports with our product. Ready to take the insights to the next level? I love this one because it's a team thing. It shows how the entire organization is using your product or service. So whether it's business or consumer, this idea of milestone usage is a great, great milestone one. Another one, this one's pretty no-brainer, but I don't think people do it enough, which is savings milestone campaigns, right?

4:52You want to celebrate when your solution, your product, your service helps a customer achieve a significant financial milestone, a time milestone, an efficiency milestone. They save something. We all like saving stuff, right? And you could do it. You don't have to wait till end of year. You could do things like this, right? Like right now, in just one month, you've saved$22 ,000 for your business here's how you could save even more or wow your team just saved a thousand hours using our product this quarter how here's how you can streamline even further or how about on the consumer side wow you saved six hours by using our app this week or you just had a thousand dollars in savings already in 2025 here's a new trick to save even more.

5:43You take whatever the way that they are saving, their time, their money, the way they're able to be efficient, and you turn it back on them and you tell them they've achieved it and here's how they go even further. This idea of milestones gets people excited, gets them engaged, makes them feel good about what they're investing with your product or service. So on the business or consumer side, milestone campaigns are no-brainer and there's a million other ones. You could do a product adoption milestone, you know, recognize when a customer fully adopts or integrates your product into their workflow or a customer onboarding completion.

6:21They actually went through the entire onboarding process. They completed it and you recognize that, right? There's so many different ones that you can do, but if you're not using milestones beyond the ridiculous birthday milestone to really drive that engagement, I think you're leaving some of the best types of personalization on the table. All right, before we get to the ridiculous question, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now, I've talked about Marigold a lot. Why? Because I send out emails. I send out billions of emails, business and consumer, and the platform I've used for years is Marigold.

6:56Now, they're a roll-up of the best platforms on earth, Sailthrough, Campaign Monitor, Cheetah Digital, Live Clicker, Emma. if you don't love your email sending platform, if you don't have a loyalty program, if you don't have a great overall tool that can do it all, you want to check out Marigold. Listen, you can go to meetmarigold.com. You can find out everything there, or you can DM me on LinkedIn and I will connect you to the people I work with and they are incredible, but check them out at meetmarigold.com. I cannot recommend them enough. All right, let's get to the ridiculous question, which they're always ridiculous.

7:33We got a question in from Callie from Seattle, Washington. Seattle's all right. But I mean, you got to stop pretending that the rain is acceptable. I've been there multiple times. Every time there it is raining, it's no joke. And I can't do it. All right. So it's not like, yeah, it's raining. I can't pretend. I'm sorry. Enough with that. Anyway, sorry, Callie. What is your question? What's wrong with me today? I'm being rude about these cities. I'm so rude. Sorry, Callie. What's up, Jay? The bachelor season has started. Are you watching? Well, for all those of you who are new to this podcast, I watch a lot of very bad TV and well, I watch great TV that some people think are bad.

8:17And the bachelor, of course, is among them. And yes, of course, I'm watching the bachelor season. 29 has started this week. Grant Ellis, he's a 31 year old dude he's like a day trader from new jersey i'm way too deep i know way too much information of course i'm watching but i have to tell you on the uh first episode i'm not ruining it for anybody but this is the episode where um all the like 25 women introduce themselves to the bachelor and he decides okay are any of these people my person right but this one woman did the worst thing i've ever seen on night one of the bachelor and i've watched every season This woman, I think her name was Parissa, Parisha, something like that.

8:59Anyway, she was trying to get Grant to like her. And she's like, hey, I want to show you something. And they went in this area. They sat on this couch. And she had a slide projector set up. And she ran a PowerPoint presentation that she put together. This already sounds horrible. But this is even closer to what the horrible part was. The PowerPoint presentation, they had just met. This is the first time they met. It was she went and used an AI tool to generate images that looked like her and this dude Grant in the future of what their life would be like together. The first few images like them at a park, whatever, on a date.

9:40But then they had images of her being pregnant with his kid. And then she had images of their kids. and and it was so creepy and it was so like oh my god this woman is a stalker weirdo i don't know what the word is it was so bad and then grant grant was so nervous he just started like laughing very nervously and then the only thing he said to her literally the only thing he said to her he goes you really did that and it was amazing and i mean do not ever do that don't make an ai generated image of yourself being pregnant the day you meet the dude that you're interested in. That will freak them out massively.

10:20Now, you should be watching The Bachelor. I don't know what you're doing. This is going to be a great, great season. But beyond that, we just now opened up the free registration. It's only going to be open for one week for CertifiedGuru.com. This is our free email certification program where you can become a certified guru. It's only open for one week. And if you want to check it out, it's at certifiedguru.com. It's 100 % free. This is my company certification program. Check it out and watch The Bachelor. 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.

11:02And 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 guru events.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like damon john martha stewart and me guru events.com check it out