SPECIAL SERIES ===> JANUARY Marketing Tactics!🔵Saddest Day of The Year? Dry January? and more...!<=== | BATHROOM Break #36 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

0:07Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

0:40We are back for the bathroom break. This is Jay Schwettlson. I'm here with the Marky Millennial, Daniel Murray. And it is a new year, new calendar. Daniel, is it a new year, new you? Do you love that saying or what? Oh, I love when people say new year, new me. It's the best timing. I do think, though, it is a good mentality switch for yourself. Even though it's kind of funny, it's just like another day, but people's heads just switch during this time period. It's very interesting. But when you see motivational posts and stuff like that, does it hype you up? Are you like, oh, come on, this is ridiculous?

1:25I think this is one of the best times to put out inspirational things because people need that inspiration to do things. so i don't get annoyed but i think the best i know this is a little late to say this but the best time to start that habit is probably a month before the year well that would have been helpful a month ago i mean we're gonna do that now well let's let me ask you a question before we get this what did you do over this holiday break i took my family we went on a massive trip to japan and we crushed it. I ate an incredible amount of sushi. I learned to be a samurai. I had a man bun on the top of my head to be a samurai.

2:07I even did this thing with a falcon that landed on my arm. I mean, I did it in Japan. So that was what I did. For people who don't know, Jay's an experienced traveler. He likes to set his vacation just based on the experiences he could do. So he did every experience he could do in Japan. That's true. I did. I like that. I like that experience more than historical stuff, which makes me a horrible, not intellectual person. But we're about to get intellectual right now. We're going to talk about what you can do in the month of January in marketing and overall for your business that maybe you can't do any other month.

2:44I'll kick it off and then we'll see what you got. So one of the things that we always look at is performance metrics, and especially in the world of email. And one of the things that we know is the first two weeks of January stink for regular promotional email performance and even newsletter performance for the most part. But the second two weeks of January do really, really well. And I think marketers get confused by that because they send out stuff in the first two weeks because they're hyped about the new year. It does terrible. And they think that that's because their marketing stinks. It's just the mentality that people are in.

3:17And so what is it about that mentality? How else should we factor that into what we're doing, Daniel? I think so. If you're in that mentality of things are not working, I think the best things to start right now is the low-hanging fruit. And I like to look at middle levers you can pull of converging rates. So that landing page that needed tweaking that you spent all year not doing that or that email sequence that should have been revived. this is the best time to start doing those little tweaks because those little tweaks start adding up. And then you're going to have so many big campaigns going on.

3:53So right now, I would focus on those conversion metrics that were lagging behind in 2024. I would start tackling the low-hanging, big impact tasks that you could do right now. I think that's a really good point because the start of the year, people actually have a little bit more free time than normal. Their inboxes are a little bit more empty than normal. And so this is a time to do the little changes that you've been planning on doing from last year and also do things like letter format emails because they're going to show up more in a person's inbox than they normally would because they will stand out because people's inboxes are particularly low.

4:31We are setting up to do the most random test. You're going to make fun of me about this. So I don't know if you know this, but Blue Monday is the third Monday of every January. That's called Blue Monday. It's supposedly the saddest day of the year. That's what it's called. It's like a thing, the saddest day of the year, because that's when everyone gives up on their New Year's resolutions and all this nonsense. So we are working with our clients to come up with campaigns around the saddest day of the year with subject lines like, you know, saddest day of the year, question mark. Well, don't be sad.

5:01We have this great offer. or, well, this is sad, but you don't have to be sad, blah, blah, blah. So we're doing all these different campaigns around the saddest day of the year. Do you buy into this nonsense? I think as a marketer, we like to use any event. And I think that's a low-hanging fruit event because I didn't know what that was. I think it is a very – I think there's also all these things that you could do where you could update things and say things for 2025. you can tackle into the dry January trend. You can like, there's so many trends that are big right now that you can capitalize on as a marketer.

5:41So people are trying to get better right now. So anything that you could say, help them get through the first month of the year, because that's, they went from vacation mode, a lot of marketers to now I have to go on to full steam until my next break is, it's great to get that type of content out there. Yeah, you know, one of the things I saw that LinkedIn put out is that January is the month where people do more connections than any other month, which makes sense to me. It's like, okay, I'm going to build my personal brand, I'm going to build my network, I'm going to do whatever. So this is actually a great time.

6:17People are more open to receiving those connections than they normally are. They have a little bit more time to look at them. And absolutely, when you do send out more connection requests, Use the custom note because that helps out a lot in terms of increasing your acceptance rate. But this is a great time to build your personal network. It's also a great time to reach out to people that maybe you've lost a little touch with. It's the easiest thing in the world to reach out to somebody and say, Hey, man, happy new year. Just want to check in on you, see what your plans are for the year. Do those things as cheesy as they may seem because this is the time.

6:51This is the month to do it. I also think on that note is a lot of people probably had a lot of leads that went cold over the holidays. And probably some of them weren't on purpose because they were out of office or there was the holiday season, their inbox got swamped. So this is probably one of the best times to do personalized outreach to leads that went cold. Do that offer. You could do that Blue Monday offer. Prepare that Valentine's Day offer that's coming. in the month. It's the best time to reignite these types of people that went cold two weeks, three weeks ago. All right. Before we wrap up, when we last spoke, you told me what your resolution was, which was that you were going to be lifting weights consistently.

7:38Here we are. We're about a week into the year. How are we doing? Are we lifting weights? Are we Arnold Schwarzenegger? What's happening with your resolution? So I've lifted, I lifted twice and everybody wait for this jay's gonna laugh at this one i did my first pilates class oh my god that's embarrassing i want video of that i don't know and i looked you know i feel like pilates instructors likes to make fun of like the big guy in the room like i literally the pilates instructor was like look he's shaking look at him daniel's like six five he's a giant dude dude. I mean, I want to see you on a Pilates reformer.

8:19That's what they call it. Oh my goodness. It was rough. It was rough. It was rough. I give it to all the Pilates people out there. It's a hard exercise, but I lifted into Pilates. So I'm starting off strong. I probably blew Mondays when I'm going to give up, but started strong. What about you? What about your New Year's resolution? Well, my resolution was to not eat the entire world. And unfortunately, Japan no longer exists because I ate it all. So I got a lot of work to do. Well, it's hard when Boca food talk is always in your feed. All the new restaurants popping up. Oh, you got to try them all.

9:02You got to help out your community. Help out the local economy by ordering all new pizza, which is what I do. All right, we've covered a lot, as usual. everybody go and follow Daniel's show The Marketing Millennials it is an incredible podcast leave that guy a review tell him how great he is and we'll see you at the next one and make sure you update your Apple software because if you go into the Apple podcast you'll see in marketing podcast Jay's Do This Not That podcast is in the most popular podcast yeah it's something wrong with Apple that that's happening alright later it. Daniel, come on, man.

9:40I got to get back to work. Get out of there. All right. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

10:14Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.