What’s Up THIS WEEK?! ⚠️ Why ‘URGENCY’ In Marketing Is a Huge Problem Now 📅 Q4 Is Already Being Decided | Ep. 547

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for What's Up This Week from the Do This, Not That podcast. And there is a lot going on this week in business and marketing life, so let's jump into it. What happened this past week with Costco is going to affect every business, consumer, and nonprofit marketer on the planet. Big, small, doesn't matter. Here's the deal. So Costco just agreed to a$14 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit alleging it sent residents in the state of Washington, okay, promotional emails with false or misleading subject lines.

0:49Now, the law that this is all coming around is the Washington State Commercial Electronic Mail Act. And here's the deal. These are a couple of the subject lines that they used that they ended up having to settle for$14 million. So one of the subject lines was, today is the last day to access member-only savings. Another one was, hop buys available for five days only. So here's the deal. The allegation was that Costco promoted offers as ending while also allegedly planning to extend those promotions, which, you know, in the world of urgency, everybody sort of does this. Maybe they don't do this, but a lot of people, a lot of brands do do this where they're like, okay, we're going to have an offer.

1:33It's going to end on Friday, but then we're going to extend it two days later. And you do it on the business side. Say, this thing's going to be downloaded. You could download it by Friday. You got to download it. oh, and then next week you say, actually, it's back. We extended it, whatever. The problem here is, yes, if Costco went all the way and they fought this in court, would they likely have won? I would say they probably would have won the lawsuit because this is kind of like a marketing tactic. Yes, it's misleading a little bit, all that stuff, but this is kind of how urgency has always worked.

2:05But the issue now becomes, because Costco has settled this, right, what do you think all these lawyers that are out there are going to do. They go, whoa, big companies are willing to settle for millions of dollars based on their subject lines and extending offers. We should go and see what's out there that we should be focusing on that are trying to extend offers and all this stuff. So as marketers, what do we need to be thinking about? Of course, you don't want to be misleading. Nobody wants to be misleading. If you're misleading, you stink. Okay, but we have to take a little bit further now because now we can't just be casual about it.

2:41You can't just say the offer ends tonight, whether you're a business market, consumer market, it doesn't matter. You can't invent deadlines, okay, that aren't real. You know, if registration doesn't close on Friday, if early pricing doesn't end on Sunday, if all that's not happening, okay, that's a problem, right? So from now on, what we really got to be thinking about is you can't say this is the final day on Friday and then on Monday that you've extended it. No. You have to actually start out with something that says, okay, this offer ends. And then what you want to do is you want to say, due to demand, we've launched a special weekend bonus offer where it's actually a new offer.

3:23You're still recognizing that, oh, that ended and it did so well. but you can't just say, hey, we extended the original thing. It's now this thing was wild. So we decided to make a new offer and here it is. So we need to say, even on the business side, instead of saying, you know, last chance to download, it says we're retiring this free download, right? And then you come up with a new download or whatever. It seems like semantics. It seems like it's not a big deal, but I am telling you, this is going to open up the floodgates to looking at urgency in a whole different way. And on some level, yes, it's good, but also you cannot have in your content calendar right now, okay, you're an event, and it says, okay, early bird registration ends today.

4:05And then on your content calendar, it can't say, right, oh, by the way, we're gonna then extend that three days later. That is now trouble, and that is something we have to be aware of and something we probably aren't even really thinking about too much. Another thing that we're not thinking about too much is what happens in August. August is when Q4 gets decided. We are sleeping on this. Everybody thinks Q4 starts in October. It doesn't. Okay. Not even a little bit. So first of all, on the consumer side, Gartner has this study that 32 % of consumers start to plan their holiday shopping starting in July, okay?

4:46And if you saw Meta this past week, they just came out with all of their keys to holiday shopping for marketers. They came out with it this week. If you are going to wait until the end of September to get your Q4 stuff going if you're a B2B marketer or your consumer stuff going if you're a consumer marketer, it makes no sense. So here's some stats that are while. On the business-to-business side, companies introducing Q4 messaging in August generate a 24 % more marketing-qualified pipeline than those companies waiting until September, right? So now is when you want to have your offers going out there.

5:24Your Q4 game plan starts here before Q4 gets busy, okay? The last quiet month, this is when people start to think about Q4 right now. Now, the other wild stat, and this is from my world data research group, that we found is that August webinars positioned around planning, okay, generate a 21 % more pipeline than those webinars focused on anything that is generic. So you don't want to just teach trends, all right? You want to actually get people prepared. So instead of coming out with something like Q4 marketing trends, it's build your Q4 pipeline before Labor Day. This is actually what crushes it.

6:09So you've got to be thinking about Q4 right now, whether you're a consumer marketer, B2B marketer. It does not matter. All right, before we get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this one is sponsored by NAC. Here's the deal, K-N-A-K. Here's the deal with NAC. I think we could all agree that building one email should not require six meetings, three designers, and someone who still knows HTML. That is ridiculous. That is why my team loves Knack. Your marketing team can create amazing enterprise quality emails that are fast, that stay on brand, that get approvals, and everything can be synced.

6:43I am telling you, if you've never checked out Knack, just go to knack, K-N-A-K dot com slash demo, knack dot com slash demo. We use it for years now. We love it. check it out all right let's get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast since you didn't ask what am i watching on tv you didn't ask but here it is first off i'm six episodes in uh watching five star weekend on peacock with jennifer garner and regina hall this is excellent okay it's this eight episode thing that's based on ellen uh hildebrand's book uh and it is great i'm giving this two thumbs up everybody should be watching five star weekend i haven't seen Jennifer Garner do anything since 13 going on 30 and Capital One commercials.

7:26She needs to do more stuff because she's very good in this. I saw Odyssey. Okay, how was Odyssey? Odyssey was phenomenal. Fantastic. My butt hurt though. Three hours long. I don't see how they could have made it shorter. I ate all of my popcorn. I would say I literally started to ration. So I looked at my watch and we were one hour in, I was 75 % through my popcorn. And I was like, Jay, you need to eat one piece at a time. Because if you keep at this current pace, you will be out of popcorn with an hour to go. And then what the hell are you going to do? So I literally had to ration my popcorn.

8:07This is what I was thinking about while Matt Damon was trying to do his thing. And the last thing, of course, is Spider-Man came out. I have not seen Spider-Man and I know broke every record. Here's the problem. There's two types of people on Earth. There are people that go to see Spider-Man that just want to see a great movie, and that's why the movie did so well. Then there are nerds, losers, dweebs, dorks, geeks like me who want to see the story moved forward, right, who want to see dramatic steps move forward in the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that things happen in the movie that then push the entire universe forward.

8:45And from everything I understand, this movie doesn't really push things forward. It's just a great movie unto itself. That is frustrating for a nerd like me. So I will see it. I might be seeing it in protest. And everyone should make fun of me because I would make fun of me. And what else is going on? Listen, if you haven't checked out my book, Stupider People Have Done It, all net author proceeds are going to cancer research. If you have read the book, leave it a review on Amazon or anywhere else. It really helps to circulate it. It is doing well. You all rock and have a great week. Later. Wait, don't go anywhere.

9:23There's two really important things I want to tell you. First off, my book is out. Stupider people have done it. And I don't know how, but this book has made it to the USA Today bestseller list, one of the top books in the entire country. Now, all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. And between this book and things that we're doing, we've now donated$130 ,000 in the fight against cancer. If you buy this book, if you buy the Kindle, the audio, on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, anywhere, money is going to fight cancer. We need your help. Please grab a copy of Stupider People Have Done It.

10:00The second thing is I want to work with you. I want to amplify your brand. I want my agency to help you get more customers, more subscribers, more whatever. I want to partner with you in so many different ways. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com. jschwedelson.com. And then there's a button in the upper right-hand corner that says partner. Fill out that form. Let's work together. Let's do stuff. And if this wasn't the worst podcast you've ever heard, it would be amazing if you follow the show, if you leave a comment, if you tell your friends about it. I appreciate you and go out there and crush it.