How To Maximize Your End of Year | Bathroom Break #86

0:08Welcome 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 Schwettlson, 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. We are back with another episode of The Bathroom Break.

0:46I am here with the Jay Swettelson and I'm Daniel Murray. And I wanted to open this up because it's holiday season and Jay's kind of looking skinny to me, but he's saying he's not looking skinny. And I've been asking him if he's still on Ozempic and if I should go on Ozempic now. But I want to ask you, are you still on the shot? No. So what happened was, and I'll be very transparent with everybody, I was on Wagovi. That's like one of the other ones, whatever. They're all the same. Who cares? And by the way, they're crazy expensive, ripoff, whatever. I know they're going to get cheaper, whatever.

1:22So I started doing it. And the problem was, I thought that it meant if I took the shot, I could just eat whatever I want. I didn't really understand that you have to lean into not eating as much. So I would be like, oh, I took the shot. I'm going to eat everything that I want to eat. And so it didn't work. And my wife's like, it doesn't work that way. It's not like all of a sudden you go to a buffet and you crush it because you took one shot. And so I ate through the shot. I don't know if that's a thing, but I did. And so I was like, this isn't working. So I stopped taking the shot. And now what I decide is to just not be a fat slob and eat less.

2:05So eating less is actually working better for me than eating through the shot. So I'm not on the shot right now, but I'm not against it. Everyone should do what they want to do. I'm just an idiot. Yeah, so usually you wasted all the money that you did to put in the shot. And now you're doing exactly what you were supposed to do on the shot. Okay. That makes a lot of sense to everybody involved. But I want to go into this topic of the day. So holiday season is now coming up. It's been going. And urgency is a big factor right now. People need to close out the year really fast. They need to get deals in the pipeline for B2B and e-commerce.

2:46Um, so I want to start with what are some like urgency tactics people could use to close out the year strong, to get emails, to get sales, to get, um, some sort of urgency on what they have in their, um, repertoire. All right. So I'm going to do a B2B one, a business to business one in a minute here, but I want to flip it back to you because you were telling me the other day about a consumer urgency play that I thought was so cool that can be used in any market, but it was on the direct to consumer side. And then I'm going to rip through the business to business one. So can you break down what that was?

3:21Because I think this is a great playbook. So if you live in a hole somewhere, like what just happened recently in e-commerce was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And Black Friday, Cyber Monday is basically the biggest event in consumer to generate sales, trying to deal everybody shopping during that time. And the goal of that is to spend a lot of money, generate and get a bunch of sales in at that time. But once you do that, you're collecting all these emails from people who aren't purchasing, aren't doing anything. And what and you also have a December goal now because Cyber Monday ended on December 1.

4:00So if you can't hit your December goal, what do you do? So this brand set active, which is a active brand is doing this thing called set miss which i think is super cool and it's an email campaign and what and they have it on their website too but they're not um spending as much as they did on black friday cyber monday on paid social and they do this this drop which i thought is super smart as from 10 to 10 30 you get 25 off so you have to get in the site at 20 to 10 to 10 30 pst to get 25 % off. If you aren't on the site on that time, you don't get that 25 % off. The deal drops from 1030 to 11am to 20 % off.

4:44So like the next 30 minutes, you get 20 % off. And then if you don't get it to that, you get 15 % off until the end of the day. So and they do this whole thing where they lock down the site at that time and you have to sign a waiver. So it makes us feel like so urgent. You have to get this deal. And it's 10 % off than any other deal, but you only can come in that window. And I think it's super smart because it creates, you have to buy. You have no decision not to buy because you'll lose that offer in 30 minutes. So I thought it was such a play. You could do this with any type of industry you are.

5:19I think do windows of urgency. I think it's super smart. It is super smart and it doesn't cost you really anything. If anything, you're going to generate sales you otherwise might not have gotten. And on the business-to-business side, people are like, well, what am I going to do? I'm trying to get my HR guide to new laws in 2026 thing downloaded. How can I do that? But you can in a different way. I think looking at urgency differently. We all know urgency is what drives performance. If it's available forever, nobody wants it. It's really not an offer. If it's available forever, it's just there.

5:56So on the business to business side, one of the things that we've seen working really well this year, and we think it's going to be big in 2026, is this idea of expiring your content for a period of time. What do I mean by that? So let's say you do have a guide, the HR law, the guide to 2026, whatever. What do we all do? We take that guide, we say, download it, download it, download it, and then we shove it in our resources tab, and it sits there until the year of the flood. And that's when nobody cares about it because there's no urgency around it. but if you put a time element on its availability, you can win.

6:28So you say, okay, this is our new HR law guide, whatever. And it's only going to be available for download for the next 30 days. And then you do a whole campaign that last week, oh, it's going away in five days, going away in two days, last chance to download the guide. And you take it off your resources page. You could bring it back 90 days later, but building a campaign around urgency around your content is a great way to get an exponential increase. We do this a lot and we do see a huge lift by expiring content that would otherwise maybe be evergreen and evergreen might as well be ever a loser because it's not going to do anything.

7:04And so looking at urgency, whether it's on the consumer side or business side or nonprofit side is awesome. And I think what you could do too is they do something where it's pretty cool to set active and i think you could do this is play on the holiday stuff like day one what along with like the 25 drop they they're dropping a new skew like a skew line and a product line during that time and you could do the same thing with these guides of like this dude 12 days of christmas and like this is we're going to drop this and it's it expires today and we're going to drop this piece of content and expires today and you could do it of like research from the year you can collect basically curate everything from the year that you have and put it in one place which everybody loves that like curation of all content in one place and say this curation is going to end at this time this is going to end at this time and it has this this this so you could play on these things and b2b to get downloads and it's actually easier in b2b because all they have to do is give an email they don't have to do this whole checkout process spend money put a credit card down so So if you're trying to get emails for the end of the year, this is a good time to do that.

8:14And it sets you up well for the next year because you can have that email address for the rest of the year. A hundred percent. I love, and these are easy tests. These cost you nothing. Come on. So let's go back to the beginning. So over the holidays, Daniel, do you go to like a lot of parties? Is that like your jam? Like is your next few weeks? Are you just like, I want to go to every holiday party I can get invited to because I love them so much? there's no way you're gonna see no first of all i don't even think i get invited to that many holiday parties to be honest um and there's no way i'm spending time dressing up to go to these holiday what is your dress up i've never actually seen you for those of you don't know daniel is the most casual dresser ever like the first time i met him it was at this huge conference i'd never seen him before i think the dude was in sweatpants like i mean probably i'm not gonna i don't think i was it went that far but it's probably like lululemon joggers or something like that but uh i don't like dressing up i will dress up if it's like your wedding or it has a dress code but i'm not gonna just go to your party to dress up do you own pants yeah of course i do i own pants i don't know if they fit me because i haven't worn them for a while but uh i don't but jay is funny because from monday to friday he's like in always in a long sleeve always in jeans or slides and then on saturday he's like in a backwards hat shorts and a regular t-shirt so he's totally opposite on the weekends and i was told by the way by my family i'm no longer allowed to wear my hat backwards oh you're not i'm turning 50 this year they go that's it it's over only front words from now on so that's what i got oh my goodness you've been you've been told late on what do you think about that do you agree you could do it you have such good hair that you could put in the front i mean it kind of will look like you're a little bit um bro-y if you do that yeah yeah a little too frat um of that but i think i think just a forged like running hat for you would be nice oh yeah yeah that's it that's my new move Well, once again, we've really touched on some of the critical topics that are really everyone's thinking about.

10:31Should I wear a hat backwards or not? Everyone go and leave Daniel a review on the Marking Millenials podcast. He loves getting the reviews. He loves the comments. He's a good dude. And we will see you at the next one. Daniel, come on, man. I 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 Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series.

11:07It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject line to any marking tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.